Overcoming Homosexuality by Ed Hurst with Dave and Neta Jackson (David C. Cook, 1987, 119 pp.) “The Double Life of Finis Crutchfield”, by Emily Yoffe, Texas Monthly, October 1987.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
In his 1983 book, Overdrive, Bill Buckley drove right over the evidence and overdrove credibility in offering ex-congressman Robert Bauman as an example of “the phenomenon of the sometime homosexual wholly cured”. Buckley should have known better. Bauman says Buckley never asked if he was cured. Bauman surmises: “I think he read into the conversation what he wanted to hear”. When pressed about this, Buckley replied through his assistant: “His understanding … is exactly as he published it in the book”. Instead of an example of a “sometime homosexual wholly cured” we have on one hand an example of a man who so failed to integrate his homosexuality into the rest of his life that he resorted to the double life of Right-wing politics by day and sex with hustlers by night and we have on the other hand an example of self-deception in a heterosexual society unable or unwilling to recognize the obvious and to come to realistic and empathic terms with it.
Ed Hurst’s is the latest book from the homo-no-mo’ movement. With its title, simpler folk than Buckley may be pardoned for assuming it will help in overcoming homosexuality, especially as Hurst states flatly: “Homosexuality is curable.” It doesn’t seem to matter to the publisher that Hurst’s own homosexuality is not cured. “Even now”, he confesses, “I find myself tempted. … I have not fallen sexually with another man, although I have had struggles with temptation, fantasy, and pornography”. Hurst cautions others that they can face such temptations “throughout your lifetime” but he doubletalks of “former homosexuals”. In 1978, Christian Life magazine rushed into print with Hurst’s first testimony, “Once Gay, Always Gay?”. Of course, the answer given was a big “no”. But a decade later Hurst is still gay and antigay publishers still try to say he’s not. Even one of his own “experts” says: “A non-practicing homosexual is still a homosexual”. (Elizabeth Moberly)
Hurst, who counsels at the Outpost “ex-gay” program, misreads “the best research”, insisting: “Homosexuality is a learned condition and can therefore be unlearned.” We learn, too, to walk and talk. Does it follow that walking and talking can “therefore be unlearned” along the lines of Hurst’s grasp of the behavioral sciences? If some Christians were not so eager to swallow what they want Hurst to dish out they would gag on some of what he serves up. For example, he admits that his key “expert” in psychology (Robert Kronemeyer – whom he misrepresents as “a medical doctor”) takes “a modified Zen approach”. He doesn’t follow him when Kronemeyer speaks of the etiological significance of the “prenatal life of the fetus” and fails to acknowledge that Kronemeyer teaches that homosexuality can be caused by “bad milk” or by “a slip in the cosmos”. Kronemeyer recommends that in efforts at “overcoming homosexuality” (both books carry the same misleading title), gays should “grow [their] own sprouts in jars”, drink “herbal teas and mineral waters” and engage in “daily exercise”. (Hasn’t he ever heard of gays who eat “health foods”, drink plenty of Perrier at Sunday brunches, and go to the gym every day?)
The degrading, unrealistic “homosexual lifestyle” Hurst says he knew personally could never have brought the “love and fulfillment” for which he says he knows he was searching. But it’s sad he’s never learned to develop a lifestyle that could address his need for such same-sex love and fulfillment. He’s merely traded one unrealistic approach for another.
For years evangelicals rejoiced at Finis Crutchfield’s conservative views and expressions of ecclesiastical power when, as president of the United Methodist Council of Bishops, he rapped less conservative church literature for being “extremely leftist [and] heavily weighted against the capitalist system” and spoke out against the ordination of “self-avowed, practicing homosexuals”. He brought his friend Oral Roberts into the United Methodist Church. He was on the board of antigay evangelist Ed Robb’s Institute for Religion and Democracy in partnership with Carl F. H. Henry and Richard Lovelace. After he died, Texas Monthly bannered: “For Forty Years Methodist Minister Finis Crutchfield Led a Double Life. His Secret Was Safe – Until He Got AIDS”. Inside the magazine are the sad and unsavory details.
His homosexuality was known for more than twenty years but the bishop “understood his church well enough to know that as long as he did not disclose his own secret, church authorities would not want to investigate rumors”. He was not a top-flight CEO without basis! There are, of course, other high-ranking conservatives who lead such double lives and so long as they preach the party line their discreet homosexuality is tolerated at the top (Reps. Jon Hinson and Robert Bauman, G. Harrold Carswell, Roy Cohn, Terry Dolan, Carl Channing and other Right-wingers until an arrest, AIDS or other miscalculation exposes their secret).
Crutchfield was known in gay bars and baths around the world as “Jimbo”. But even on his deathbed he could not bring himself to acknowledge his homosexuality to his son, also a United Methodist minister. When the press learned the cause of death, from public health records, his son said that his father must have contracted AIDS while ministering to persons with AIDS: “It is not in the nature of my father’s character to have lied to me”. That’s probably true – in general. But because of homophobia and hatred, homosexuality is a special case. A family member may deny the obvious if it would hurt too much to do otherwise. But that doesn’t get the Christian community off the hook. Crutchfield’s last copy of this REVIEW was returned with “deceased” scrawled across it. Finis Crutchfield himself is at last beyond the reach of his church’s destructive homophobic hypocrisy. But how many more of our sons and daughte4rs will be offered nothing better than “solutions” of doubletalk or double life?