Florida's $120,000 Paycheck to Anti-Gay Leader George Alan Rekers

Here's hoping George Alan Rekers had a good vacation last week, because this week has not been one of his finest. Rekers is a pillar of the anti-gay movement, having co-founded the Family Research Council two dozen years ago, as well as serving on the board of the psychologically dubious organization, the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH).

In other words, Rekers has been one of the loudest champions behind the belief that people can be cured of their homosexuality, and that LGBT people make shoddy parents. He even testified in a Florida lawsuit against the idea of gay parenting, calling gay dads and lesbian moms dangerous.

But alas, Rekers certainly hasn't practiced what he preached, as evidenced this week. First came revelations that he hired a male escort from the (very NSFW) Web site, rentboy.com, to accompany him on vacation. For those who aren't aware, Rentboy.com features lots of naked pictures of men, selling themselves to other men for various services. Not the kind of Web site that an anti-gay leader would usually frequent, unless of course, they were actually into man-on-man contact.

Rekers tried to explain his hiring of a man from Rentboy.com by saying that he needed someone to help him carry his luggage. That sounds a little bit like a far-flung excuse, and sure enough, pictures soon surfaced showing Rekers carrying luggage while his rent boy stood idly by next to him. So much for that excuse.

Then Rekers tried to say that he actually was ministering to his rent boy, trying to show him the power of Jesus Christ. Now that makes a bit more sense, given Rekers past and his religious convictions.

But alas, apparently ministering to rent boys involves having your naked body massaged. Because the rent boy in question, a man named Jo-Vanni Roman, is now speaking out about the situation, and he's saying that without a doubt, Rekers is gay. And the proof is in the fact that Rekers likes to be massaged in the nude by men, and even required Jo-Vanni to do something called the "long stroke," a massage move where the fingers trail "across his penis, thigh ... and his anus over the butt cheeks."

Rekers might be a talented man, but coming up with an excuse for the "long stroke" is going to take a bull-shit artist of epic proportions. It might be time to just come out and say, "Yup, folks. I like dudes."

The damage that Rekers' work has done to LGBT people over the past few years is enough to fill a baseball stadium. Here is a man who has worked hard to promote conversion therapy, and worked hard to make sure laws across the U.S. discriminate against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

That's a fact that's not lost on folks like Equality Florida, who are taking their state's Attorney General, Bill McCollum, to task for paying Rekers a whopping $120,000 to appear as a state "expert witness" in a case challenging Florida's ban on gay adoption several years ago. During that case, Rekers and his $120,000-padded wallet suggested that gay folks were dangerous to children. Rekers even knocked Native Americans, suggesting that they were ill-fit to be parents, too.

Now people are wondering if McCollum's $120,000 payment to Rekers was money well spent on rent boys. Did McCollum seriously give one-tenth of a million dollars to an anti-gay activist, who then spent that money on having a twenty-year-old man touch his anus?

You can send Attorney General McCollum a message here, asking him to explain just how Florida managed to give $120,000 to an anti-gay leader who perhaps isn't so heterosexual after all.

Is there anything other than tragedy surrounding this situation? First, it's hard not to think about all of the LGBT people impacted by Rekers' work over these past few decades. Those folks who were told by Rekers that they had to change their sexual orientation (or that they could), or those that were told they were less than human because of who they loved. And who can forget the LGBT parents who were told by Rekers that they were ill-fit to take care of children. That's some real damage there, and Rekers has to own that.

But on another level, it also seems a little tragic to see Rekers panicking now to maintain some measure of credibility within the anti-gay movement. As the Miami New Times (which originally broke this story) documents, Rekers tried to counsel his rent boy to stop talking to the press, lest the story continue to make the news cycle.

"Tell them you don't want to do interviews," Rekers told Jo-Vanni. "'Cuz if you keep answering, it'll keep the story alive."

Sad. But what's even sadder? That we still live in a world where people like George Alan Rekers decide to live entire adult lives in hiding, outwardly preaching homophobia and misguided science, while in private struggling with their sexuality. And while Rekers is in charge of his own life, it's hard not to pin some of the blame on folks like NARTH and Exodus International and other ex-gay ministries, which continue to support the lie that homosexuality can be cured or treated. Rekers is just another in a long line of folks who prove that these organizations only succeed in creating a generation of individuals completely incapable of loving themselves, or others.

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