Truth Wins Out With Wayne Besen

By Serj Tachyon, October 1, 2012 / Archive / Comments (0)

Wayne Besen is an American gay rights advocate and an outspoken critic of the ex-gay movement. Besen graduated from the University of Florida in 1993 with a Bachelors of Science degree in journalism. Ten years later, he published Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth. The work was inspired by an incident in which Besen photographed ex-gay activist John Paulk hanging out at a Washington D.C. gay bar. At the time, Paulk had been the most famous success story of the Christian ex-gay movement. This exposure ultimately resulted in Paulk's removal as chairman of Exodus International, a major ex-gay organization. Anything But Straight was nominated for two Lambda Literary Awards upon its release.

In 2006, Besen founded Truth Wins Out, an organization whose purpose is to fight what it considers "anti gay, religious extremism." Bensen is also a former spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign- the largest organization supporting LBGT equality in the United States. On September 29, 2012, California became the first state to ban ex-gay therapy for children. The historic bill was signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown.

You can listen to our Sunday, October 7th interview with gay rights advocate Wayne Besen here.

Show Highlights:

"Everybody they put forward that has claimed success later either was scandalized as a fraud or grew up and came out and said they had never changed in the first place. They felt a tremendous amount of pressure from society to say they were something they were not."

"Reparative therapy can only survive in the shadows. The more people that see them the worse off they are. …It's not therapy at all. It's just a bunch of religious people posing as therapists in an effort to push their religious beliefs onto people."

"I've had to pick up the pieces of shattered lives and broken families and people who are just destroyed because they've been sold a world view where they don't fit in. They try to fit in, and they can't because they are who they are… and no amount of therapy or prayer is going to influence it one bit."

"When you have a party that has such backward beliefs that is always close to getting power, or in some cases already held power, it threatens a nation's progress. It threatens our prosperity. It creates a situation where America can fall very far behind from leadership to a nation where we're going backwards. And if you look at the nations that go backwards, they're not good on gay rights."

"Sometimes it doesn't seem like we're getting ahead because our opponents are getting angrier, louder, and more shrill. They can't accept that it IS unraveling. And they've really just gone off the deep end."

"For people who claim to be religious and moral, I have never encountered people who are more immoral, more dishonest, and more adverse to the facts and the truth than these Fundamentalists."

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Truth Wins Out With Wayne Besen