Gay activists protested an ex-gay
conference on Saturday in Sugar Land, a suburb of Houston.
About 70 members of Truth Wins Out were
in the nation's fourth largest city to demonstrate against a Love Won
Conference sponsored by Exodus International, which believes gay
people can – and should – be “cured” of their sexuality.
About 450 people attended the conference held at the Sugar Land
Baptist Church.
Exodus President Alan Chambers told the
Houston
Chronicle that his group wasn't anti-gay.
“The fact of the matter, I was gay,
the people who are leading these ministries were gay,” Chambers
said. “We know what anti-gay felt like. That is something we
could never be. And so for us, because of our faith and because of
our beliefs and because of our experience, decided we wanted
something different.”
Wayne Besen, executive director and
founder of Truth Wins Out, countered: “They present it to be a
miserable life that is either going to end in death or loneliness or
unhappiness and that's not true. You are entitled to your own
opinion, you are not entitled to your own facts.”
In
a blog post about the event, Besen said gay activist Dan Savages'
It Get's Better Project flew a huge banner from an airplane that
read, “You Can't Pray Away the Gay: It Gets Better.” (Video of
the protest is embedded in the right panel of this page.)