Origins of the Gay Agenda with Doug Robinson

I have the special privilege today of talking to someone that I frankly find absolutely fascinating and I wanted to introduce him to you.

His name is Doug Robinson and he joins me all the way from Kansas.

How are you doing, Doug? Good morning. Thank you. And the reason I wanted to have you on,

Doug, is because you have, I think, a perspective that is so unique.

Doug was a freelance journalist in San Francisco following political trends, especially as it relates to the homosexual community,

AIDS, all the way back in the 1970s. And really, you got to see the current,

I don't know what you want to call it, gay agenda. That's the term we were using before I started recording, but whatever you want to call that, you got to see that in its embryonic stage.

And you have such a perspective to share that I think will enlighten

Christians and help us understand and navigate the world we live in better. So welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for coming on and I look forward to hearing your story more. So maybe let's start with how you got into that and when you were involved in that kind of journalism, what motivated you as a

Christian? Yeah, so I was in a public high school in the 70s as a student and our teacher passed out the gay advocate newspaper and wanted us to study the gay culture of San Francisco.

We were in the suburbs at the time. He invited Anton LaVey of the

Church of Satan to come speak to our class. Anton didn't make it himself, but he sent his daughter and his place.

And I was being hit in the face in the American civics class, public high school with gay culture and the

Church of Satan. And I was 15. And so I'd already been a

Christian several years. My dad was a pastor. I led a youth Bible study on campus with a bunch of students every day at lunch hour and so on.

So I started paying attention to things that I didn't know about before. And then we moved to San Francisco in the evangelism ministry.

We actually literally walked on foot to every doorway of every apartment and every house in the county of San Francisco and left a free

New Testament paperback edition. Good News for Modern Man is what we used because most people there, at least in those years, were

English second language and it was a good way to reach people. We talked with people at their doors, led many people to the

Lord. You have people there in a culture that have not seen a Bible in, say, six generations, which is odd if you live in Kansas or Oklahoma, somewhere you think that Americans are informed.

And no, many are not. Many have come from other places, have zero Christian heritage.

In fact, the city of San Francisco has almost zero Christian heritage, has some Catholic heritage with the

Indian tribes there before the gold rush. But the gold rush was all about men leaving their responsibilities, abandoning their families, running to the

West Coast to get rich, and many of them never went home. It was a male town.

There were very few females. And there was Chinese slavery, and there was all kinds of raucous living and irresponsible behavior by men trying to make a buck quick and easy.

A lot of them never did. A lot of them never went home. So, San Francisco has always been a male city, but not necessarily masculine in the better sense.

And what many people don't appreciate, don't understand, is that the nexus of homosexuality in the world, say in the year 1900, 1910, was in Eastern Europe and Germany.

And it wasn't a cultural phenomenon in the U .S.

The English soldiers who went to World War I were surprised at how many

Bulgarians were gay, and they came back and talked about that.

At the end of World War II, there was a lot of migration going on in the world, and part of it was

Europeans coming to America, bringing a gay culture with them from Eastern Europe, from Germany.

The Nazi party was meeting in the gay bar in Munich before they launched their crusade there, and many

Nazis were homosexuals. And there's two categories, the real fems and the real hard -nosed, aggressive, abusive type guys.

And they tend to beat up on each other. And the Nazis put a lot of gay men in concentration camps, but they were the effeminate kind, being abused by the dominant, abusive ones.

In 1949, there was a big push to create a mecca for gay culture in the town of Placerville, in the

Sierra foothills of California. This is under the radar. Most people don't know about it.

Most people think that the modern gay movement starts with some transvestites and cross -dressers at a place called

Stonewall that rebelled against the police, and there's plaques there today, and it's a national monument, and it's the birth of the modern gay movement.

Actually, it's not. It's a narrative imposed on history that doesn't...

It's a blip, but I would say that's all it is. The real movement was post -World

War II migration, and there was a letter -writing campaign all across the country and in Europe of people who were networking and saying, where can we establish a beachheaded community for gay culture in the

United States? They were going to go to Placerville in 1949. They changed their plans.

They ended up on Polk Street in San Francisco and created the Polk Street neighborhood.

The first gay bar in San Francisco was created by the father of our pastor's wife.

He was not a gay man, but he was very compassionate and concerned about gay men living profligate lives and having shallow relationships with each other and so on, so he wanted a place to build community, so he established the first gay bar in San Francisco.

It wasn't the first one in the world. It had been going on for a long time, but in San Francisco, he started that, and I assume there were many, many of them, and San Francisco became a mecca city.

The city itself really wasn't aware that this was going on. It was under the radar. It was still illegal, and there were still occasional interactions with the police and so on, but we're talking 1940s.

Go ahead. No, that actually answered because I was going to ask when this was happening. To clarify and summarize for everyone, is what you're saying that San Francisco was already in a position to accept this alternative lifestyle because of its history, and then when you had this migration, immigrants coming who were homosexual, that was a natural place for them to set up camp?

Exactly. That's my perspective. Yes. Okay. Got it. The wider American culture was not aware of this at the time, and so when the beatniks came along in the 50s in North Beach and when the hippies showed up in the 60s and so on,

I was first there in 68, was my first visit to the city, and it followed naturally.

It was a continuum. These are not separate, desperate things. These are connected. There was an openness to redefining and re -understanding what it meant to be a human being, and there was a rejection of classical

Christian thinking about a creator and being a creature who's accountable to him, and there was no

Christian heritage there, a smattering of Catholic heritage, but no Christian heritage there to resist it.

One more question, because this is absolutely fascinating and I did not know about this history. You had mentioned

Eastern Europe, so these immigrants who came over, is that where they were from? Was it a smattering of people from Eastern Europe?

Was it primarily Germans who were coming from Nazi Germany?

Was it Jewish people? What kind of a group was it that came and started this stuff?

I can't say with great specificity. Okay. It was a cultural...

There were people moving from... There was a discussion, an international discussion via letter writing, there was no email.

Do we make our nexus New York, San Francisco, Chicago, where do we go?

There was this... People were on the move all over the world after the war, and so it was natural that people would seek out each other that had affinity and common cause and went to congregate.

Well, that's my point, is that it sounds like this was a very... This wasn't organic in a sense.

This was like a thought out, organized group of people who knew each other and said, this is where we're going.

I've never heard this before, so I just want to hear you talk. That's fascinating.

The particular guy who bears some responsibility, his name was Harry Hay. And Harry Hay founded a group that sponsored this.

He wasn't the only one, but part of their network was the Radical Fairies. And I ran into Harry when he was probably in his 80s before he died on Market Street, San Francisco.

I've got a picture of him. So, Radical Fairies wasn't about effeminate pixies.

It was about demonic spirits, and calling upon the fairies of the demonic world, the spirit beings, to empower the movement.

So there's an occultic theme that runs throughout it. Doesn't mean everybody who's gay is occultic.

Of course not. But there was that going on in the background as part of the organizing principles of the migration and settlement in Polk Street, San Francisco, which later expanded to Castro Street, which later expanded to Noe Valley, which later became 80 ,000 gay men living there in the 80s.

Is that where the term fairy to describe a homosexual came from, or was he just playing off of that term because it was already in use?

He was actually referring to Native American culture, where fairies were spirit beings.

Wow, okay. And it went in other directions. People used it as a tagline.

Yeah. Well, I know my grandparents' generation, and they lived in California, that was a term that was used at the time.

You didn't use gay, you didn't say homosexual, you said fairies. And I found that out a few years ago, and it was new to me.

I thought, I've never heard that, but that was a common. It was. So anyway, so this community starts in San Francisco in the 40s, and then you come along and decide you want to chronicle,

I guess, the formation and the acts of this community or...

Well, I got a degree in journalism, and an aunt who was a professor in the

Midwest here died and left me some money, and I got some camera gear when I started shooting stuff on the streets.

And then we started a moving company, of all things. And so I got in and out of hundreds of homes, got to sit with people in their living room in their new apartment, new house, pack up their stuff, see what they owned, see what was in their medicine cabinets, see what kind of books they read.

I always tell people, if you want to be a pastor, if you want to be a sociologist, if you want to be a psychiatrist, go work for a moving company for a year or two.

It's like better than grad school. Oh, I agree. I was a furniture repairman for 10 years in people's houses, fixing their stuff, and you are 100 % right.

You get to people watch while they don't, they're just treating you like an hourly labor, not a human being.

And yet you have such a window into their lives. It's incredible. So I sat with a lot of lesbian and gay couples in their houses.

I met with a guy in San Diego, he had some stuff for his daughter in San Francisco.

He was the admiral in charge of the whole Pacific fleet for the U .S. Navy. He said, when you get to my daughter's house, you'll understand.

Okay. He said, I'm not going to say more. Okay. So we loaded up stuff in San Diego that I delivered to her home in Noe Valley, San Francisco.

She wasn't home. But her five wives were, and they lived in fear and terror of her.

They feared for their lives if they left the house without her permission. And at the time, the gay culture in the

San Francisco Examiner newspaper was always running classified ads, slave looking for master, masters looking for slaves.

Nothing hidden about that at all. It was out there all the time. They phrased it that way?

Absolutely. My goodness. So sex slaves was, you know, a thing, and openly so, and publicly so, and nobody apologized for it.

And when the pedophilia group marched in the San Francisco Gay Parade, guess who got the loudest cheers from 80 ,000 adoring fans?

I hesitate to answer that. Well, until a friend of mine shot a video of that, and James Dobson sent a copy to every church in California.

So I was there the next gay parade with my camera crews, when the

North American Man Boy Love Association marched in the parade as they always had, most popular group prior.

Gay community is famous for saying that we have nothing to do with pedophilia. We have nothing to do with children.

Well, read your own history, because you used to publicly, openly. What years are we looking at you describing when these parades happened?

Early 70s? 79, 80, 81. Okay. So... And parades before that and parades after that.

But the thing with Nambla was, dates to about 1980. So this is a startling thing, because what this means is not...

So you've already said that basically we have a foreign influence coming in, and the things that we...

Foreign cultural, yeah. Foreign cultural influence, yeah. And the things that we now are discovering are afraid, just normal people in the

United States who maybe don't pay attention to politics are concerned that pedophilia will be normalized and the transgender, or whatever they call it, drag queen story hour, and these kinds of things.

They think that's not part of the gay agenda, or that's a new thing. You're saying that's not new at all.

This has been in the water for decades. Up until the 1970s. That's going to shock a lot of people,

I think. It's true though. And here's something else that's really significant.

Before AIDS hit the gay male community, lesbians were not welcome in San Francisco.

It was a man's town, going back to the 1840s gold rush, and it was a gay man's town in the 1960s and 70s.

Lesbians stayed on the other side of the bay, Berkeley became a lesbian hub. But the ratio of male to female was dramatically, like there would be 10 gay men for every one gay female in the bay area.

AIDS changed that. And we went from discussing the gay lesbian bisexual movement to the lesbian gay bisexual movement.

The letters got reversed very intentionally in the 1980s, because AIDS came along and was wiping out men by the thousands in the bay area.

And lesbians became caregivers for gay men.

They took a traditional female role of caregiver on. And suddenly the lesbians were making all the decisions, the gay men, the gay politician leaders were dying off and they were replaced rapidly by aggressive agenda driven women.

In the 1980s, it didn't exist prior to that. Obviously, they're individual strong willed women in the 1840s that were lesbian.

That's not the point. But as a movement, as the movement, as an organizational structure, women did not take over until about 85.

Does that change the way the movement is presented or the strategy?

OK, now we come to the most important thing that follows from that. If you look at non -Christian, secular, uninformed, religiously people, who tends to want to get married more?

Men or women? Women. Women like the security of a relationship.

And and men are a little hesitant. I mean, stereotypical broad terms here, obviously.

So until the late 1980s, gay marriage was anathema in the gay community.

The very idea was shouted down vociferously because this would be compromised with Western cultural norms.

Wow. Gay marriage was the enemy that the gay community resisted with great vigor.

And where did gay marriage come from then? It did not come from the gay bars. It didn't come from the

S &M movement. It didn't come from it came from women becoming domineering in the gay culture because men were dying off in large numbers from AIDS in the 1980s.

And women's natural proclivity to be more relational and to want bonds and security and so on in a different way than men have needs influenced that discussion.

Now, where did the gay marriage idea come from? It did not come from gay activists ever. They picked it up later.

It came from the United Methodist Church and the Episcopalian Church. And you had liberal theology, people informed by liberal theology in the

United Methodist and Episcopalian circles in Northern California, which are the far left of those groups, saying, how can we help men who are literally having sexual relations with 2 ,000 other men by the time they're 25?

How can we help them settle down and live more stable lives? 2 ,000 was normal.

It was not the extreme. 2 ,000 sexual partners was kind of average in the 70s and early 80s in San Francisco.

I have so many. Go ahead. Sorry. Well, so you could see how AIDS could spread rapidly.

Yes. We had two parks. We had a park in the center of the city.

And I'm taking Christian men from the Midwest on a tour and just kind of creeped them out.

And there was a place down by the beach where they landscaped the park.

So there was these little places in the bushes to have sex, little compartments.

And all day, every day, people were meeting there anonymously and having sexual relations in the bushes or on the beach.

They had little rock walls on the beach to create little partitions for places to do it. Hundreds of people all day, every day kind of thing, unless the weather was really inclement.

And that was paid for with tax dollars. That landscaping to create those sex chambers was done with tax money by the

Public Works Department. So AIDS was hitting.

And the liberal wings of the Episcopal and United Methodist churches were saying, we need you guys to get married so you can have better lives.

We want to improve your relational skills and help you form bonds and not just have anonymous sex with 1 ,000, 2 ,000 other guys within a five -year window.

And so they said, no, no, no. That would be capitulation. By the way, in the 1970s, 1960s, to be a bisexual was to be a pariah.

Because you were compromised. You weren't purely gay. If you were going back and forth in your sexual relations, then you were a traitor to the cause.

And you must be put down. You must be resisted. So this was a true -

The point is that when we abandon any kind of moral absolute structure for being human, then the morals can change just rapidly in terms of what's -

We go from gays, lesbians not welcome, bisexuals a pariah, to we're the

LGB community. And it can turn on a dime.

And nobody cares because there's no moral reference to judge it or say, well, you weren't that way five years ago.

Why are you that way now? Nobody cares. There's no moral frame of reference to judge anything.

So it was a true gay agenda at one point. And then because of the influence of lesbians now leading that movement and -

It was a male movement, yeah. It was a male movement. Yeah, and I guess we think of gay as mostly associated with males.

But I guess I should ask, was that applied to women as well who were in lesbian relationships?

Yeah, the nomenclature kept adjusting and changing. But as a result of these lesbians taking a more lead and also from what you're saying, the -

It doesn't shock me, but the Episcopalians and the Methodists saying, hey, let's introduce marriage into this.

It starts changing into the more culturally acceptable LGB community.

They quickly realized that they could get sympathy and federal dollars and all kinds of programs and stuff because of AIDS, that that could be a political wedge issue, health care and so on.

And then they realized, contrary to all their protestations for decades, gay marriage could be a way to win the public over.

Okay, we'll comply. We'll get married. We'll stop being so profligate and promiscuous.

And so simple things like redefining the term monogamy.

Monogamy for a long time has meant primary. A gay man could have sex with five other men during the week in public places with strangers, but he's in a monogamous relationship, sharing an apartment on Castro Street with his lover.

So he's monogamous, even though he's had sex with six men in the same week and every week.

And so marriage. The thing is, there was no rush.

I was - We went through a thing called domestic partnerships first, pre -marriage.

If we can get the public to accept domestic partnerships, same sex domestic partnerships, we won't call it marriage.

But as a stepping stone towards, and we'll do that. So we had a referendum vote in San Francisco, and it was rejected by the voters.

Surprise, surprise. And then it came back and passed. And I was there the first day they did domestic partnerships in the middle of City Hall.

There's this big staircase comes down City Hall. It's been used in lots of feature films. And Harrison Ford walks up and down it and Carrie Fisher and various other people use it on movies.

And here comes these gay couples parading down that staircase as domestic partners.

And the first day, the first ceremonies performed, Harry Britt, supervisor, San Francisco County, gay supervisor says, our greatest problem is now that we have domestic partnerships, we are afraid to enter committed relationships.

That's our big - We are our own worst enemy in this thing. And there were a few that day.

One of the couples was three women that was given legal sanction by the city and county of San Francisco.

The bishop of the Episcopalian Church, Grace Cathedral on Knob Hill, stood next to me in a government hearing and said, love is love.

So as Episcopalians, we are ready to perform marriages, even though gay marriage is not legal yet.

We're going to do it anyway. And we're going to do it between mothers and daughters and fathers and sons because we believe incest is a valid form of marriage for the church to sanction.

Is this the staircase you're talking about right here? Exactly. Okay. I pulled it up because I think

I've seen this too. This is a famous - It's in lots of films. Yeah. Interesting.

Okay. So I have footage from that day of Harry's speech about we're afraid of commitment.

And I have all the couples parading down the staircase. Some people go off and study things academically and read all the right books and listen to the right lectures and then become very well informed.

My education in this sphere is all firsthand on site with people.

So I can't footnote things, but I could have recordings and tapes and you know -

You are the primary source. That's why you don't need to footnote anything. You lived it. Right, right.

When I was studying with Francis Schaeffer in my youth and traveled with him, he got so much criticism for not putting enough footnotes in his books and for not being academic.

And he said, well, wait a minute. You know, I'm paraphrasing him, obviously. But I met with these people.

I talked with these people. I'm writing about our conversations that I had. If you want to quote me, you can footnote me.

But I don't have to, you know. Yeah, yeah. The academic process, they think they're the gatekeepers and all information that passes through them is legitimate.

And if it doesn't, then we got to be suspicious or something. Exactly. So maybe touch on that real quick.

I know you're going somewhere here, but you mentioned Francis Schaeffer. And I think for this audience, many people probably are somewhat familiar if they're evangelical

Christians who have read some of his works. You had mentioned before we started recording, he encouraged you to track some of this stuff as a

Christian. And I think the audience would be very curious to know what the purpose of that was and also just maybe interested in your relationship with Francis Schaeffer.

I started reading him when I was 15. I read The God Who Is There, which was the talks he gave at Wheaton in 68.

I read everything he wrote that he published. I didn't read all his personal letters.

I read some of them later, but before I met him when

I was 21. And we went all over Europe visiting all the sites where they filmed

How Shall We Then Live, his commentary on Western culture. And we stayed up and talked at night and had dinners and restaurants.

And there was a group of about 45, 50 of us together.

So you were on the camera crew for that? No, no, I wasn't on camera. I was just traveling.

After it had been shot, a group of us went with him to all these sites and did live lecture and question and answer on location.

Oh, I see. OK. Wow. And then I helped promote the films.

I traveled and spoke in so many different places after that. Yeah, and he told you.

So what he did for me is he said he, by way of example, his own life, is the

Christian of all people should be the one observing and paying attention to the wider culture. Because we have the biblical tools to understand it.

And so we should. So I didn't go to Liberty University or Biola University or Wheaton or other places

I could have gone. I went to San Francisco State because I wanted to study the student body. I wanted to study their professors.

I wanted to understand people who thought and understood the world totally differently from the way

I see it as a believer. And I'm not saying everyone should do that.

Some people get messed up in the process or get waylaid. But when you go to school not to believe what you're taught, but to analyze your teacher,

I was in the classroom with Angela Davis. How many

Christians can say that? Yeah. I was

I was standing with Nancy Pelosi in a crowd of 20 ,000 gay men waving candles at night on World AIDS Day, while Joan Baez sang

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, coming for to carry us all home. And I'm thinking, it's not real biblical here, but I want to be here.

I want to know. I want to understand how people feel and why they do what they do. And we as Christians should never be afraid of that.

We should embrace that. We should be the ones who run to the. Quick story,

I'm going to interrupt myself here. I took some guys from Lawrence, Kansas, to the San Francisco Gay Parade for eight hours.

Little cross -cultural experience for them. Yeah. Okay. As we're leaving, there's a by the way, the police are not there's 100 ,000, 120 ,000 people there and the police department is told, stay away.

You're not welcome. Downtown San Francisco Civic Center. The police have to stay a block away all the way around.

They can't come into the perimeter. So as we're exiting, there's a police officer sitting in a squad car watching the crowd and he has an open

Bible on his steering wheel and his partner is next to him and he's reading aloud at the gay parade in San Francisco in his squad car on duty.

He's reading aloud Romans one and we walk up to the car and my friend

Bill leans over and the guy panics. He realized he's got caught and Bill said, it's okay.

We're believers. God bless you. And we moved on. That's all he did. The guy was weeping and the lesson for me and the message to convey today is take your

Bible. You don't have to be a street preacher. That's not the point. It's probably not very effective.

Take your Bible and go to an Antifa riot. Take your

Bible and go to a gay pride event. It doesn't matter. Pick one.

Something out there. And just watch people thoughtfully, carefully and prayerfully while you read the scriptures and watch them.

And suddenly the Bible is like alive. And you go back and you read it from their pulpit in your nice church and suddenly it feels dead in comparison because the scripture literally speaks to life and what happens and it describes the world accurately.

And colorfully. And it doesn't skip a beat and it doesn't avoid hard topics and it's best read in the middle of warfare, in the middle of cultural conflict and disagreements because the

Lord is the reconciler. The Lord is the one who calls us back home. The Lord is the one who knows how to change hearts.

That's none of our business. We can't handle it. We shouldn't try. That's powerful.

Anyone can do it too. Yeah. Wow. So your motive in tracking some of this stuff.

And by the way, how many years did you live in San Francisco? 20. That's a long time to be studying this.

Yeah. What motivated you? Is it just a concern for that population?

See, I never set out to do this. And then watching Schaeffer and conversations with him, it's like, well, you know, pay attention to where you live.

What's going on? And I quickly realized that other Christians were not and somebody needed to.

And too many Christians were falling into stereotypical insults or criticisms or or making fun of it.

Tell you what, a pastor friend in San Francisco, his church got set on fire and lives threatened, death threats for 14 years continuous.

Sometimes my wife and I would go over and sleep at their house just to be extra bodies and sleep on the floor just in case there was another raid or something or threat.

And he said, when you when you live with this kind of sinful culture.

You never tolerate jokes about gay people, never.

And too many Christians are prone to deal with hard subjects with humor.

When it really is best if we just drop to our knees and wept. I think that's

I'm glad you said that. I really am. Yeah, that's these are not people to be rejected.

They're people to be healed. And and to embrace gay marriage or to embrace.

Lesbians for Jesus and all that kind of nonsense does not help anybody. But to embrace people can.

People can tell our attitudes up front real fast. We don't have to say anything. Yeah, and so my call to the

Christian community was pay attention. Listen before you speak.

Listen to people you don't agree with. Very intentionally, very carefully. Want to understand them.

Doesn't mean agreement. Doesn't mean support. Doesn't mean compromise. But if you criticize or if you take a stand or whatever.

Do it wisely and thoughtfully and deeply. Because the huge device divide is not between morality and immorality.

It's it's between or we might. Well, I would suggest this.

It's between depth and profundity and superficiality and shallowness.

That's the real divide between good and evil. Good is so intrinsically dense with meaning and information.

And and evil is so shallow and pithy and shadows and vapor.

And and we if someone makes choices in a gay lifestyle and stays in that lifestyle.

They will become a shadow of their former self. Their personality will shrink.

And diminish their humanity will be smaller. I believe this 100%.

I was reading Proverbs to my family this morning. Proverbs chapter one. And what you just said rings very true.

Because the entire book is about how Lady Wisdom offers all this experience.

And and not just the experience of a lifetime. But you can tap into the wisdom of the ages. It starts with the fear of the

Lord. But the fool lives hand to mouth. Doesn't process the information before he wants to say something.

It is shallow. You're absolutely right. And I never saw it that way until you just said that.

Tolkien got it right with wraiths. Oh, the ringwraiths? Yeah. I mean, that's what that's that's what that's about.

And and a guy came to me one night at 11 o 'clock.

I was working at a bookstore. And he says, I'm a geneticist.

Well, I'm a programmer. I write the computer code that maps the human genome.

Not by myself with other people. But that's that was his life work. And he said,

I'm not a Christian, by the way. I'm not a Christian. I want you to know that up front. Not a believer. But we thought we would decipher the human genome.

And we would get from layers of complexity to sub layers of simplicity. And there would be some fundamental elements we could isolate.

And that were the building blocks of the whole human genome. And he says, it's not like that at all. We scratch the surface and the layer beneath it is more dense with information, more complex.

We scratch that and the one below that is even denser. It's totally counterintuitive to what we thought we would find.

He said, there is absolutely no way that this could be a random evolutionary process bringing this about.

I'm not a Christian, again. But there has to be a creator.

I think a good question at this point is this approach for 20 years that you took.

And I'm assuming now beyond that, as you live in Lawrence, Kansas, you're seeing that agenda probably start to make its way to your community.

Francis Schaeffer years ago said, I'm from the future when it comes to addressing the American church because I'm in Europe.

Yeah. You know, we had German higher criticism theologically in the 19th century that messed up American institutions in the 1930s because it came across the

Atlantic. So you can say if you lived in San Francisco in the 70s, 80s, 90s, then you know the future of everywhere.

Unfortunately. So this is, I think, one of the big reasons which you have to say is so important. Because you're living in what everyone is going to live in to some extent moving forward.

How did this approach that you had, how did you see it in it? What kind of success,

I suppose, did you see as far as engaging with people who you disagreed with, who disagree with God, obviously on this topic?

And I mean, it amazes me that you could even survive in that community, if you even want to call it a community, but you could go to where they're having these ceremonies for the first time and going there repeatedly.

So people, I'm assuming, know who you are, know your... Well, it's one reason I moved out of the city because eventually people realized what

I was doing. Oh, I see. Okay. So it didn't actually work long term to live amongst them.

They didn't... Maybe, I mean, I bet after 20 years and got five kids married, we thought we'd go somewhere else and let our children experience a different part of the culture.

Yeah, well, it was probably a wise decision, but for those who want to be a missionary, let's just say, or they're forced into it to some extent, they have to work in proximity to people who are very enthusiastic for LGBTQ plus stuff.

You gave some advice earlier. I'm just curious, in your own life, how did you see that shake out? Was there an openness?

So I poured my life into several individual men who were walking a

Christian walk, who came from that background. I think there's a real need for men to do that as mentors, as friends, who have never been there themselves.

You don't have to be a former alcoholic to work at a rescue mission. In fact, maybe it's better that you weren't an alcoholic if you're really going to help people.

And so we saw the birth of the ex -gay movement, and there was some really godly and fine people who, think of Frank Worthen, who created

Love in Action. And I spent time with all these people, and there was some fine testimonies, and courageous people, and godly people, and consistent people, and there's a lot of people who joined that movement to find

AIDS. There was the whole church, I did a 700

Club piece on this, the whole church was ex -gay people. Well, that kind of doesn't work.

It's not the best model. There was a church

I heard about years ago that you could join the church only if you were an Amway distributor, and it was only for Amway people.

It's an Amway denomination, that doesn't make sense. That's not a good model, you know.

So, a lot of the Exodus people burned out, flaked out, gave up, became honest about their lives.

I mean, there's lots of... And a lot of the

Christian world was too ready to put people on a pedestal, put people on camera, and try and...

We got testimonies, you can change, this is the answer. And then those people who got put on camera,

I can name names, I won't right now, but it didn't help them mature in Christ.

There was a gap between the walk and the talk that became problematic in their own personal lives over time, and too many

Christians encouraged the right talk, and so they kept delivering, but they weren't quite living up to it, and they crashed and burned.

So that's not helpful. It's not helpful to exploit people or use people to... People need healing, they need help, they need long -term commitment.

And so it's not an easy road.

And the people who are the strongest ex -gay people I know, never talk about their past life.

It's gone. They don't live there anymore, they don't use it to get attention, they don't dwell on it.

I've noticed that myself. I have a number of, well, a few friends who were in that, and you wouldn't know, you wouldn't know.

And that's probably the healthiest way to be. Yeah. You know,

I had a friend years ago who was living this lifestyle, and one of the things that I...

Just real briefly, I would love to get your take on this. I'm sure this rings true with your experience. One of the things

I noticed was, I met him at a gym, right? And he was just working like the front desk, and I started conversing with him, eventually invited him to church.

And immediately, there was a wall that went up, right? When I told him I was a Christian, and going to church, and this kind of thing.

And he, without missing a beat, he just said, well, I'm gay, and I can never change. I was born this way.

And then it was like a day later, he texted me, and do you really think I can change? And all of a sudden, all these insecurities and desires for a wife and a family started coming out.

And I just thought, this is the guy that 48 hours ago was telling me he was born this way, couldn't change, seemed happy with his life.

And now he's a mess, and wants to know if there's a lifeline I can throw him. And long story short,

I met with him several times, explained the gospel, and the hard sticking point was the grace of God, because he kept thinking he needed to clean up his life somehow.

He needed to stop looking at pornography. He needed to do this or that. And then God would finally accept him.

And I kept saying, you can't do it. You're not gonna be able to do this without the power of the Holy Spirit. And then it may even be, it's a fight.

It's a fight for life and death. The grace of God is freely given.

It's the merits of Christ, it's not yours. He could never accept that. He always had to stop, and he would go.

He would say, you know what? I went 48 hours with looking at pornography, and then I just fell. And he'd go right back to the dumps again from this mountaintop experience.

And eventually, he just basically cut me off because he didn't think that,

I don't know what it was. It seemed to me like it was, I contrasted too much.

He wanted what I had. He wanted to be married. He wanted a family. And it was too painful because he felt like he couldn't make it.

I'd just love to hear you weigh in on that and maybe give advice for people with similar relationships or who might be listening in that spot.

Well, there was a guy in our home who stayed in our home for a while with our first three kids, my wife and I.

He had been on the cover of People Magazine. He started the first AIDS hospice in Los Angeles County.

And he said, it's hard being in your house.

With a married couple with kids. He said, it's just painful for me. I said, okay,

I don't want to cause you pain, but you're welcome to be here with us. He had renounced his gay activism and come back to the

Lord. And suddenly, he gets death threats from the loving gay community because he's professed to be a

Christian now. And so he had to go hide out in a safe house. This is really simple, but I'm going to say it.

The Christian life is not about the life of the Christian. It's about much more.

It's about the Lord. And the gay life, the rebellious life, the alternative lifestyle, whatever form that rejects

God, is only and totally about the self.

And the path of Christian maturity is about finding those, what does it say?

Those who lose their life for my sake in the gospel will find it, will save it. And it doesn't matter if you're straight or gay, young or old, that's who we really are.

That's where we belong. That's where we need to be going is in Christ. It is no longer

I that liveth, but Christ lives in me. In the life I now live in the flesh,

I live by the grace of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

That's what it says. My life is not my own, neither is yours, your own.

And we don't have to protect ourselves. We just need to bow and submit to the

Lord. And in so doing, we will become the creatures he made us to be in ways that we had no idea what good he had prepared for us.

– That's powerful. Can I ask you, I know we're going almost an hour now, and there's so much we could talk about.

Maybe we should set up some more interviews because you're a bit like, if you've ever seen the movie

Forrest Gump, you've been in certain places at certain times. I know you emailed me and told me about how you were there for the

Democratic nomination. I forget what year you said that was. – Oh, it was 84.

I was at the Democrat convention in 84 with Rush Limbaugh, and neither one of us knew who he was going to become.

– And Jerry Falwell, right? – Jerry Falwell, yeah. – You've just been all over, and there's so many things we could talk about.

But I thought one of the things, I know I wanted to get to this, is what you think

Christians should know about the modern LGBTQ movement.

Maybe things you think Christians are getting wrong in their political approach. Because the thing is, and I know,

I'm glad we explored this dimension of evangelism and personal relationships first, but the reality is you may live in Lawrence, Kansas.

I may live in upstate New York, but I'm sharing a government and a commonwealth with people who have a very different view of the way things ought to be in San Francisco, in New York City, and these other places.

And I'm not sure Christians have handled this politically in the best ways.

I'm just curious if you have wisdom, maybe even a critique and some information to share along those lines moving forward.

– I don't know. – There are elected officials who are Christians who listen to this podcast. I'll put it that way.

So we are literally, if you watch the trajectory, the arc over time, we've moved from it's a man's movement to now women can be part of it.

And then women can take over and lead the men. And then now it has to touch children and gender assignment and that whole discussion.

And what it means is that there are no boundaries.

There's no border philosophically. And the stuff

I read in college says that the goal was to redesign the human body so that we can improve on what we've had and come up with alternatives to biological life.

– Transhumanism. – Absolutely. – That was when you were in college, they were saying this. –

Right, right. I was introduced to that by a professor who smoked

LSD, not smoked, he took LSD.

He was smoking too, but with Otis Huxley in the fifties. And he was,

Bob paid $300 ,000 to have his head severed and flash frozen so it could be stored in Scottsdale, Arizona, awaiting the resurrection with a new non -biological body.

– Wow. – And so he was a real believer.

And we sat and talked about the gospel in a restaurant for hours one day.

I was his student. And he said, Doug, you have explained the gospel in a way I've never heard before.

It makes so much sense. It's very appealing. I want to believe, but I have a philosophical point of view that if I want it, then

I'm going to reject it. We're not just talking about gay marriage.

We're talking about child -adult marriage coming. We're talking about child -child marriage coming.

We're talking about incestuous marriage being legal.

We're talking about within families, mothers, daughters, fathers, sons, uncles.

We're talking about removing, redesigning the human body.

And as the transhumanist said, we need to move the sexual play centers away from the sewer parts of the body and rearrange the structure of the body.

Wow, I never heard that before. And so where this all could go is an unknown.

And people talk about wanting to download their consciousness to the web or somehow preserve it in a database.

People are really serious about this stuff. And it's a rejection of humanity.

It's the... C .S. Lewis wrote... Well, my friend

Michael Ward has written a real important book, Beyond Humanity, an analysis of C .S.

Lewis's stuff. And it's the destruction of humanity is the...

Well, where does this come from? But the pit of hell, you know, it's... Yeah, that's what I'm gathering.

And I think that's what makes it disturbing. It sounds like Christians and just traditionalists in general should have in the 1970s seen this is bigger than just homosexuality.

This, the transhumanism stuff is coming and we need to create some strong walls.

Because what you see conservatives, quote unquote, conservatives doing now is they want to let gay marriage, they give it a pass, maybe even celebrate and sanction it.

I know a lot of Republican governors have, like Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, held a whole LGBT thing and...

But they'll draw a line and say, well, no transgender sports though. And it just seems...

Just wait, wait five years. Right, right. That's the whole point is there's no stopping this.

There's no border. There's no boundaries. Unless you have a biblical frame of reference that's bigger than yourself that says, wait a minute, this is what it means to be human.

Pro -human, that'll... That sounds pretty broad, but that's really... We're pro -human.

We're pro the way God designed humans to be. Right, right. Yeah. Well, I know we've been going over an hour and I would love to talk more at some point because you have a lot of wisdom and a lot of interesting experiences.

And let me ask you this. Where can people contact you if they... I don't know if you want people contacting you, but if you do, if they have questions, where would you send them?

Yeah, I don't have a website. You don't have a lot of means of modern communication.

I don't have... I don't carry a cell phone very intentionally. Well, how is this? If they reached out to me, if they really wanted to get in touch with you,

I can put them in touch with you. Sure. Is that okay? Sure, of course. And I'll screen it for you because I do think there are people listening, whether elected officials or even people that might be struggling with homosexuality and so forth.

I think they could benefit maybe from what you've learned. And you also have a documentary and I wanted to plug it even though it's not online at this point, hopefully it will be, called

Ditter Sisters Suffering Sons. Can you tell me a little bit about that? If someone's able to get a VHS copy from a library or something, what that is?

So it's a... I spent five years interviewing people and recording stuff on the streets of San Francisco.

So there's gay activists and there's guys with AIDS who are dying and there's people who have already died and there's evangelical pastors and several different ethnic groups and denominations.

And it's a discussion of what it means to what's going on.

It's dated, it's from the 80s and early 90s. But it's still,

I think it becomes more timely over time. My title,

Bitter Sisters, the heart of lesbianism is unforgiveness. It's not sex, it's unforgiveness, it's bitterness, it's resentments against the guy you used to be married to and how this woman will be your co -belligerent.

You can complain together over a beer, you know, and she won't ever challenge you to stop your unforgiveness.

She is unforgiving as well toward her ex, women or men, doesn't matter. And so that's the nature of the relationship.

That's the bond, it's the shared anger. Shared enemy, shared anger, common cause.

And it's not about love. Sometimes it's about sympathy, but that's not love.

People can do loving things and, you know, anybody can at any time if they want to, but it really isn't about that.

And Suffering Sons is about men estranged from their masculinity, estranged from God, their father, estranged from their family members, and basically estranged from each other in relationships.

It's about isolationism. The word community tends to get used where there's a lack of it.

So whenever I hear that word, I don't want to go there. I got myself earlier in the interview. So what we need is profoundly deep, personal connections with each other.

And it really isn't about sex.

Gayness is not about sex. That's the pretext. It's about redefining what it means to be human, and it's about disconnection and unforgiveness.

And the cure isn't sexual therapy. The cure is repentance. The cure is really forgiveness.

And you can't forgive unless you know profoundly that you have been forgiven. And our

Lord, that's what he does. You know,

I was thinking about, we haven't even gotten into this, and I don't know what you think or how familiar you are, but the whole same -sex attraction normalization movement in Christianity to say that, well, as long as you're celibate, if you have these attractions, it's fine.

There's a guy named Greg Coles who wrote a book called Single Gay Christian. I read it a few years ago.

And he talks about praying about this and wanting to be relieved of these desires and saying that he's only known these desires.

He's never had heterosexual desires. But one of the things that he tries is heterosexual pornography.

And when you just said, it's not really, it's not a sexual thing. It's not. It's not.

That is often how it's looked at. It's like, I just have a sexual disorder. And if I could, I guess, engage in another sin, oh my goodness, right?

If I could try to start the engine towards liking the opposite sex in a sexual way, then moving out of this.

In a gay man, it's a tremendous need for affirmation from other men.

It's not a need to be sexually used by another man, but that's what happens.

And that's why so often there's a broken relationship with a father figure, something along those lines.

Well, I just keep wanting to talk to you, Doug, but I have a feeling if we keep going, it'll be a little too long for the listeners because I generally try to keep the podcasts around this time limit.

But I'd love to have you on again to talk more about this. I think you have a lot of wisdom to share. And yeah, thank you.

Thank you so much for sharing your experience, your wisdom, and your knowledge of even just biblical principles here today.

I think it's been very useful. And I expect it to bear some fruit. Thank you. So my pleasure.