At 35, John Paulk has hit prime time. During an interview last week, he notes that he and his wife just got back from a speaking engagement at the University of Notre Dame; before that, they'd been talking with the press and to church groups and conferences practically nonstop.
Paulk speaks soberly and authoritatively about his conversion from what he says was a life of gay sex and "wonderful gay friends" to a key job at Focus on the Family.
Apparently both he and his wife once loved being in the life. John Paulk claims he was enthusiastically gay as a teenager and later established a following as a drag queen named Candi and as a paid escort. Anne Paulk has written that when she was a practicing lesbian, one of her key prayers to God was: "Lord, you know that I really enjoy this lifestyle, but I want you to be my first love."
Paulk blames his "lack of a secure gender identity" for his homosexuality. About twelve years ago, he says, he became a born-again Christian and began the long road to heterosexuality. In his case, he had to try to give up a hatred of women. "I had a lot of animosity toward women," he says. "It was from my relationship with my mother. I thought women were vipers, that they couldn't be trusted, that they would rip you off emotionally. I was exclusively homosexual.
"I was very unhappy. I liked myself too much, actually, and I had good gay friends--I loved my gay friends--but something was missing."
Although Paulk wasn't raised as a Christian, he quickly took to conservative, gay-bashing theology when he was introduced to Jesus a dozen years ago. "Homosexuality," he says, "is not a gift from God. I don't think God blesses it. I wanted my life to line up with Christ. My, how I have changed."
Over the past few years, Focus on the Family has made several shifts in its war on gays: Its political arm in Washington, D.C., the Family Research Council, led by Republican presidential aspirant Gary Bauer, has set up an organization called Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays to counter the pro-gay group Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. It hired Paulk, and it renounced Colin Cook and noted gay-basher Paul Cameron, whose shock-tactic "facts and figures" about "the medical consequences of AIDS," promoted by Focus and CFV, helped fuel the anti-gay-rights Amendment 2 campaign in 1992 (see "Slay It With a Smile," October 3, 1996).
Of Cook, Paulk says, "There are a few bad apples." And of Cameron, he says, "I don't adhere, and Focus doesn't adhere, to Cameron's statistics."
It's somewhat surprising that Dobson would even hire the Paulks, considering that Love in Action, to which the Paulks belonged, acknowledges that there is a "genetic predisposition" to homosexuality. On its Web site, Love in Action cites a study of identical twins raised independently that gay groups often use to argue that gays are born, not made. The Love in Action site notes that, based on the study, if one twin turns out to be gay, then the other had "only a 50 percent chance of doing the same. There is a possibility of genetic predisposition...[but] a predisposition toward something does not mean that it's inevitable or that such a predisposition cannot or should not be resisted or overcome."
Paulk is the first Focus employee known to actually use the word "gay" in public utterances. The huge ministry's founder and leader, James Dobson, has always insisted on using the word "homosexual" and has derided gays for "stealing" the word. Paulk also strays from the company line when he acknowledges, in the interview, that many people engage in sexual experimentation with the same gender when young and that marriage is no sure sign that people are straight. "Lots of gay people are married," he says. "I got married, but my marriage is not a proof of change. It's evidence. I'm against getting married to cure homosexuality."
Paulk admits that the process of change for ex-gays can actually take a lot of time, especially to reach what he calls the "third stage," the development of heterosexual feelings.
Does he still have urges for gay sex? "No, not really." What does "not really" mean?
Paulk explains: "I had over 300 sex partners and a mass quantity of gay porn. That will always be a part of me. It's not like my mind was zapped. I may be lying in bed, and an encounter from the past will pop into my mind. It's not like your memories disappear."
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