A recent controversy in the Obama national campaign has shed a little light on the phenomenon of recovered gays and lesbians (aka "Ex-Gays" or "Sexual Conversion"), that is, lesbians and gay men who have been "cured" (or recovered from) their homosexuality:
Some reading:
Ex-Gay— Wikipedia (a good place to start)
Obama: Don't Pander to Homophobes
Ex-Gay Watch
Narrative of treatment for Ex-Gays
Commentary on an Ex-Gay Activist
Pro Ex-Gay sites:
Baptists Are Saving Homosexuals
"National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality"
(lots of pro Ex-Gay narratives here, as well as political advocacy for "curing" homosexuality, and not in the Martha Stewart way of curing, say, a salmon)
Culturally speaking, the "recovered gay" movement is a peculiarly American phenomenon, sharing a number of aspects with other spiritual enlightenment movements that have proven to be instrumental in our history (for example, the Great Awakening), through the Protestant promise of recovering perfection before God in this lifetime, a larger socio-cultural theme flowing from Calvinist Protestantism and the Puritans. Conveniently, such discourses also seek, as many contemporary American cultural themes do, not only to recover gays and lesbians for heterosexuality (which, as an aside, hardly seems to need them), but return to a pre-sixties social order of family, work, and nation.
Such fantasies of cultural return (across the political spectrum, I might add) are always, almost without exception, dangerous, mostly because they don't take society from where it is, but where it should be (i.e., utopian). And 'should' here is not only subjective , but highly selective. This would not be, however, the first time, nor certainly the last, when delusion, fantasy, fear, and idealistic Protestant Rigor are the watchwords of an American socio-cultural phenomenon. Of all the nation-states in the developed world, Americans, for myriad reasons, seem particularly prone to such states of anxiety.
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