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Alpha Dog of the Week - George Rekers | ||||
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Our New Times sister paper in Miami is enjoying a blizzard of national publicity at the moment, thanks to this story by two frequent contributors to New Times, Broward-Palm Beach, Penn Bullock and Brandon K. Thorp. It's been a joke on Jay Leno, the winner of Stephen Colbert's "Alpha Dog of the Week" (see above), and it's even earned its own YouTube country and western ballad.
It's a good bet that "Lift my luggage" will inspire a pickup line in gay bars nationwide, if not a brand of T-shirts that will be all the rage at gay pride parades.
But I'd like to dig beneath the media avalanche to bring some much-deserved attention to a point the story's authors made Tuesday night on the blog of Fort Lauderdale's James Randi Educational Foundation.
From SWIFT blog:
If NARTH's de-gaying treatment works so well, how is it that George Alan Rekers, of all people, should come to this ugly little impasse? (Rekers' answer -- that he didn't know about the lad's line of work, and needed someone to help him carry his luggage -- is not really worth responding to, though we do give the notion a fairly thorough savaging here.) And if the man cannot muster the intestinal fortitude to own up to his proclivities, take Jesus by the hand, and NARTH himself into a frenzy of other-sex attraction, then what does it say about his faith in the treatment he advocates?Clearly, it says that Rekers lacks faith -- probably because he of all people knows that NARTH's methods don't work; after all, they haven't worked for him.
It's time for NARTH and Rekers himself to give up their so-called holy mission and admit that their god can work no miracles when it comes to sexual orientation.
UPDATE: The gay male escort has gone public with Bullock and Thorp, who just posted an update on the Miami New Times staff blog, Riptide 2.0. In it, the 20-year-old Lucien says that he wasn't hired to carry baggage as Rekers has claimed. Rather, he was hired to give sensual massages. To wit:
Rekers allegedly named his favorite maneuver the "long stroke" -- a complicated caress "across his penis, thigh... and his anus over the butt cheeks," as the escort puts it. "Rekers liked to be rubbed down there," he says.I don't have nearly the expertise that Rekers does on the subject, but that doesn't sound to me like a very good way to "cure" homosexuality.