#Oncegay stories: Exploring social conversion through the Changed Movement

ABSTRACT

This paper employs a queer intercultural communication framework to analyze the Changed Movement’s website, an evangelical Christian group which claims individuals can change their sexual and gender identities through faith and testimony. I argue that the Changed Movement is a rhetorical site which makes possible a social conversion—one does not need to see a therapist to begin conversion. Changed naturalizes the white cisheterosexual evangelical subject on sociocultural and legal levels in the US nation-state to produce sexualized others that threaten to take the evangelical subject’s place, while employing Pulse shooting survivor testimony to, albeit ambiguously, support that “changed is possible.” Finally, I argue that queer intercultural scholarship must examine evangelical groups like Changed, which construct queer and trans people as subjects to be expelled from the sociocultural and national bodies. These cultural sites are inherently implicated into deeper intersections of power and oppression like whiteness and cisheterosexism.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer intercultural communication
• queer theory
• evangelical christianity
• ex-gay movement
• conversion therapy

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this manuscript was presented at the National Communication Association (NCA) annual convention in November 2020 in the International and Intercultural Communication Division and received a top student paper award. I would like to thank Dr. Shinsuke Eguchi for their detailed feedback, support, and mentorship, along with Dr. Lisa Hanasono for her constructive comments and encouragement. I would also like to thank the reviewers for their detailed feedback; this manuscript would not be what it is without your care and attention to my work.

Notes

1 Conversion therapy, also known as reparative therapy in religious circles and sexual reorientation therapy (SRT) in clinical contexts, is a broad term that refers to all practices that “attempt to change, or reorient, one’s sexual orientation from same-sex-oriented to opposite-sex-oriented (i.e., heterosexual) or at the very least reduce one’s same-sex thoughts, feelings, or behaviors” (Maccio, 2010, p. 442).

2 Exodus International was originally called Free All Gays, though Erzen (2006) rightly notes that, “The original name … was quickly scrapped after the organizers realized the potential contradictions of its acronym” (p. 33).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Austin W. Miller

Austin W. Miller (M.A., Northern Arizona University) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of New Mexico focusing on critical intercultural communication and rhetoric. He writes about the intersections of queerness and evangelicalism. Direct correspondence to [email protected].