While taking the course, she left the auto parts store and took a higher-level job doing production at a small ad agency. And she used the opportunity to reinvent herself. She began introducing herself as Christine again, let her short hair grow and tried even harder to walk, talk and act like a "real" woman. "I remember being in a living room prayer meeting and this lady was praying for me, and she said, I swear, Please help Christine know that she can accessorize,'" she recalls. "My mom came to visit, and I'm showing her all these clothes and I'm getting this approval." When Christine grew out her short hair, it came back unexpectedly curly. Her mother loved her new look and told her daughter, "I feel like this is God sending you a message that you're on the right path." Christine agreed.
Her next challenge: finding a man to date. "I started thinking, I'm going to get married, have kids. So I looked around and thought, who do I like at the church I'm going to?" she recalls. "I would look at some of the guys in the program, but they were…well, too gay. I wanted somebody more healed, more manly."
Months later, however, a letter to a friend revealed a tangle of confused feelings: "I'm 30 now, and I really want to be straight, married, and possibly have kids, and I guess I feel like I'm running out of time. I mean, I really really really (!) want to be married to a woman, but again, that's not what…God intended."
Soon after, Christine's faith in her therapy was shaken by a piece of powerful news: Ex-gay poster-husband John Paulk had been seen and photographed at a Washington, D.C., gay bar. Paulk's apparent "slip" created a national uproar. On the Internet, Christine was finding an increasing number of references to ex-ex-gays. "I'm so angry with God that he doesn't change people who want to change!" she wrote to a pastor friend at the time. "I just feel ultimately misled and very betrayed by…those who would promise healing."
She thought she might remain stuck in a sexual and religious limbo forever.
Two years later, Christine stopped going to church. The catalyst was a painful conversation with one of her pastors; after building a close counseling relationship with her, he abruptly announced he was ending their sessions.
"God is telling us our season has ended," she recalls him saying.
"This is like the Christian version of It's not you; it's me,'" she says now. "It's not you, it's him!" The episode made her feel that some of the people promising to heal her "brokenness" were basically "just as messed up as I was."
Christine was ready to admit that ex-gay counseling hadn't worked. That realization was triggered, in part, when she saw Peterson Toscano's well-received one-man show, Doin' Time in the Homo No Mo Halfway House: How I Survived the Ex-gay Movement. His hilarious observations about his experiences in the Love in Action program reinforced her feeling that it was safe to come out of the ex-gay closet. Browsing Christian websites, she found that there was a growing interest in a more traditional form of Christianity that accepted homosexuality. She also began attending a support group at Denver's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in a nondescript downtown building. There she encountered several women she'd first met at Where Grace Abounds—they were ex-ex-gay now too. Bonding with other ex-exes, she finally seemed to have found the one group in which she truly belonged.
