Origins of the Gay Agenda with Doug Robinson

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. 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 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. And 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. No, many are not.

Many have come from other places that have zero Christian heritage. In fact, the city of San Francisco has almost zero Christian heritage. It 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 US. 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 beach-headed community for gay culture in the United States?

And they were gonna go to Placerville, 1949. They changed their plans. They ended up on Polk Street in San Francisco and created the Polk Street Neighborhood, and 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.

Wasn't the first one in the world. It'd 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 gonna 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.

And the wider American culture was not aware of this at the time. Okay. 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.

It 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 was accountable to him, and there was no Christian heritage there, a smattering of Catholic heritage, but no Christian heritage there to resist it.

And 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? Or 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. There's a 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 eighties before he died on Market Street, San Francisco. Got a picture of him. 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. It doesn't, 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 eighties.

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 forties and then you come along and decide you want to chronicle, I guess, the formation and the acts of this community.

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 and went out and 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 own, see what was in their medicine cabinet, 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, you know?

Oh, I agree. I was a furniture repairman for 10 years in people's houses, fixing their stuff. And you are a hundred percent 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 US Navy. He said, when you get to my daughter's house, she'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. Five, wow. 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. Oh 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. 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's 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, you describing when these parades happened? Early 70s? 79, 80, 81.

Okay. So Parades before that and parades after that. But the thing with NAMBLA 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, you 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 what do 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 gonna 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 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, there are 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?

Okay, 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 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 and 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 men there, Christian men from the Midwest on a tour and just kind of creeped them out, but where they, 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, you know, we need you guys to get married so you can have better lives.

We wanna 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 are 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 that, 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, 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

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

Harrison Ford walks up and down it, and Carrie Fisher and various other people use it in 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 Nob 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 gonna do it anyway. And we're gonna 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, cause I think I've seen this too. This is a famous scene. It's used in lots of films. Yeah.

Have used it too. 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. It's funny. And I, 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 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 when 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. Right. 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'd 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 in 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'd 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, okay, wow.

And then I helped promote the films. I traveled and spoke and saw in 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 standing with Nancy Pelosi in a crowd of 20 ,000 gay men waving candles at night on World AIDS Day while John 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 wanna be here, I wanna know, I wanna 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 gonna 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 is not welcome.

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 1. 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. It's, 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 and? 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, 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 making fun of. 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 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 a These are not people to be rejected, they're people to be healed. 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 divide is not between morality and immorality, 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 evil is so shallow and pithy and shadows and vapor. 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 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 ring wraiths? Yeah, I mean, that's what that's about. 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 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 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.

Chaffer said, Francis Chaffer 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 were 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, like 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 gonna help people. 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.