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Religious Right Leader George Rekers Has a Rent Boy
Yet another professionally anti-gay Religious Right leader has been exposed as (probably) gay. The Miami New Times reports:
For decades, George Alan Rekers has been a general in the culture wars, though his work has often been behind the scenes. In 1983, he and James Dobson, America's best-known homophobe, formed the Family Research Council, a D.C.-based, rabidly Christian, and vehemently anti-gay lobbying group that has become a standard-bearer of the nation's extreme right wing. Its annual Values Summit is considered a litmus test for Republican presidential hopefuls, and Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter have spoken there. (The Family Research Council would not comment about Rekers's Euro-trip.)
He has also influenced American government, serving in advisory roles with Congress, the White House, and the Department of Health and Human Services and testifying as a state's witness in favor of Florida's gay adoption ban. A former research fellow at Harvard University and a distinguished professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of South Carolina, Rekers has published papers and books by the hundreds, with titles like Who Am I? Lord and Growing Up Straight: What Families Should Know About Homosexuality.
And then Rekers took a "rent boy" with him on a trip to Europe. |
The New Times explains:
The pictures on the Rentboy.com profile show a shirtless young man with delicate features, guileless eyes, and sun-kissed, hairless skin. The profile touts his "smooth, sweet, tight ass" and "perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)" and explains he is "sensual," "wild," and "up for anything" -- as long you ask first. And as long as you pay.
On April 13, the "rent boy" (whom we'll call Lucien) arrived at Miami International Airport on Iberian Airlines Flight 6123, after a ten-day, fully subsidized trip to Europe. He was soon followed out of customs by an old man with an atavistic mustache and a desperate blond comb-over, pushing an overburdened baggage cart.
That man was George Alan Rekers, of North Miami -- the callboy's client and, as it happens, one of America's most prominent anti-gay activists. Rekers, a Baptist minister who is a leading scholar for the Christian right, left the terminal with his gay escort, looking a bit discomfited when a picture of the two was snapped with a hot-pink digital camera.
Reached by New Times before a trip to Bermuda, Rekers said he learned Lucien was a prostitute only midway through their vacation. "I had surgery," Rekers said, "and I can't lift luggage. That's why I hired him." (Medical problems didn't stop him from pushing the tottering baggage cart through MIA.)
Yet Rekers wouldn't deny he met his slender, blond escort at Rentboy.com -- which features homepage images of men in bondage and grainy videos of crotch-rubbing twinks -- and Lucien confirmed it.
The Rekers story is being much-discussed in the blogosphere, for example at Daily Kos and Box Turtle Bulletin. The salacious nature of the scandal will certainly and deservedly, put the pseudo-scientific National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) in the international spotlight. Of course, gay conversion therapy has been exposed many times, including a thorough analysis in 1998, Calculated Compassion: How The Ex-Gay Movement Serves The Right's Attack on Democracy, by Surina Khan.
What is remarkable is not so much the Rekers scandal, but that NARTH and the ex-gay movement have gotten away with so much for so long.
See also: Rekers Rent Boy Scandal Exposes the Underbelly of the Ex-Gay Racket
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