Even as a 3-year-old, Russ Baker-Gorringe sensed he was different from the other boys he watched playing kick the can in the street.
But, as a Mormon, he grew up believing that faith could heal what he later realized he was feeling: He was gay. He served a mission, married a “beautiful” woman in an LDS temple and had four children.
“I knew I was attracted to men,” Baker-Gorringe says. “My core belief, in every step I took in my church activities, was that there was something wrong with me. … But with God all things are possible, and this could be fixed.”
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Last month, the American Psychological Association passed a resolution advising mental health professionals against telling their clients they can change their sexual orientation through therapy or other treatments. No solid evidence exists that such efforts work, the APA concluded, and some studies suggest the potential for harm.
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“There were others who had felt this way their whole life — just like me,” recalls Baker-Gorringe, who served in an LDS bishopric and a stake presidency. “I had felt so long like I was the only Latter-day Saint that must have to deal with this.”
But even with that support and the help of a “very understanding” wife and children, Baker-Gorringe became severely depressed when his continued efforts to change — including through prayer, scripture study and obedience to LDS teachings — did not work.
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A decade ago, he was hiking with his wife and four kids in Glacier National Park and decided to take his own life. He wanted it to look like an accident to spare his children the sorrow of a suicide.
He stood on a rope bridge, strung above a deep ravine, and swung one leg over. Gazing at the backs of his family, hiking ahead of him, he bid a silent farewell. In that moment, his then-14-year-old daughter, Emily, turned around. She ran to her father and pulled him away from the edge.
“I saw the look on his face, and I knew he was going to do it,” Emily Fuchs, now 24, says. “I told him, ‘Dad, I don’t care that you’re gay. I think you’re exactly how you’re supposed to be. I love you.’ ”
Baker-Gorringe began to question some of his beliefs about homosexuality. Ultimately, he and his wife decided to divorce.
He met his partner, Joe Baker, a few years later. The two married in a religious ceremony at Holladay United Church of Christ — a congregation that Baker-Gorringe left the LDS Church to join — in 2005. Fuchs and her three siblings walked their father down the aisle. They, too, left the LDS Church, Baker-Gorringe says, after feeling like their dad was stigmatized and watching their grandparents disown him.
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“Marriage is not an all-purpose solution,” Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, writes in a 2007 Ensign article. Some “attempts have resulted in broken hearts and broken homes.”
Still, David Melson, executive director of Affirmation, says “there’s no consistency” in the way the guidelines are implemented by lay clergy in LDS congregations. Some still are advising marriage to gay members, he says, or even telling parents to kick their gay kids out of their homes so as not to “contaminate” siblings.
“The church has done tremendous damage to families, to individuals,” Melson says. “The breaking up of families, the homelessness, the suicide has to end. We would like to work with the church to do that, but, with them or without them, we would like to make an effort to end the damage now.”
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“Most accredited psychologists don’t approve of such therapies,” Diamond says. “There’s a lot of concern that people are still being given the message that they can change their orientation through these sorts of techniques when there’s really no evidence that that’s true.”
Behaviors might change, Diamond says, but the “attractions, themselves, don’t appear to go away.”
The “longstanding consensus” of the behavioral and social sciences, the APA reports, is that homosexuality is a “normal and positive variation of human sexual orientation.”
For Fuchs, seeing her father finally fall in love has been the “most healing thing” since she watched him nearly take his own life. For months after the incident, she was like a “leech,” clinging to her father, even checking on him in his sleep to ensure he was OK. She told herself it was her responsibility to keep him alive.
She’s happy her mom has remarried, too.
“They can finally have the love they’re supposed to have,” she says. “My mom and my dad.”
tells the story of Megan, a girl who seems to have it all. She’s young, beautiful, Christian, a cheerleader, and has a hot boyfriend. But there’s something amiss, or so others seem to think. Megan may be…a lesbian! So her parents put her in an “ex-gay” program and that’s where the fun begins. This movie exposes the sheer fatuity and insanity of the techniques used, and the beliefs held, by the people who run these programs. The ultimate message of the movie is beautiful. 
