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How Did A Gay, Married Actor End Up In An Anti-Gay TV Show?
When Dallas-based actor Lloyd Guerrero first auditioned for Recently Straight two years ago, he didn’t fully understand what the television pilot was about. He was offered the lead role, a gay character named Kevin, and he accepted. After reading the full script and realizing it was about individuals who had used harmful, ineffective conversion therapy to de-gay themselves, he felt uneasy about it, but he decided to follow through on his commitment.
The pilot was released in full on YouTube earlier this year, and since then, Guerrero has received pushback from LGBT people about his participation in it. He spoke openly about his experience for the first time with ThinkProgress.
“I’m an actor, and this a role I took on,” he explained. “It was a challenge, because I don’t agree with the view of the project whatsoever. I completely disagree with it, but it was something that I took on as an actor and made a professional choice to take on, and so I completed it.” He reasons that there are actors who play child molesters and murderers, but that doesn’t make them supporters of child molestation and murder.
In hindsight, Guerrero says, it was “a ship I probably should not have sailed.” But it was a journey that impacted the actor on a deep level and created opportunities for him to support LGBT youth. He now debunks the tenets of the show through his own life example as an openly gay, married man.
The premise
Brock and Caelan comfort the heartbroken Kevin.
CREDIT: YouTube/Recently Straight
Recently Straight is a project of Ben Spratling, who identifies as ex-gay and serves on the advisory board for the ex-gay advocacy organization Voice of the Voiceless. Describing the pilot to the conservative site OneNewsNow recently, Spratling explained, “The plot revolves around a support group and the different men in the support group and what their lives are like as they’re trying to work out what it means to be Christian and same-sex attracted and how to heal from that.”
The story primarily follows Guerrero’s character Kevin, who is based on Spratling’s own life experience. Kevin, who is gay, is just going about his life when his ex, Josh, returns to town after several years away — telling Kevin that he is now straight. Josh has dedicated his life to helping other men overcome their same-sex attraction like he has, and he makes a project out of his former boyfriend.
Josh keeps making the case to Kevin that same-sex relationships are always doomed to fail, and Kevin happens to experience just that. He proposes to his boyfriend Kendrick, who not only rejects the idea of marriage but then proceeds to cheat on him. Kevin then starts seeing another boyfriend, but a date “ends in disaster,” and he turns to his friends Caelan and Brock for support. When he overhears the committed couple having a fight and then sees them both on a Grindr-like app, he loses all hope of ever finding someone in the gay community who will truly love him, and he contemplates suicide.
Fortunately, Josh arrives in time to talk Kevin off the ledge and invite him to ex-gay group therapy.
What could have been
Though Spratling now describes Recently Straight as a film, Guerrero explained that the original intent was a television web series that would have followed Kevin, Josh, and Caelan for a full season. Interest in the pilot faded, however, when networks saw the controversial material and chose not to pick it up. Guerrero also said that he would not continue in the role after he saw how the pilot turned out.
That’s not because he had a particularly bad experience on set. “Everybody on the cast and crew knew that I was gay and they knew that I was dating my husband at the time.” His husband John even visited the set during the production and was welcomed by all. But he was alone in that regard; though most of the characters were gay, Guerrero was the only member of the production who was openly gay.
Filming the suicide scene at the end, however, was particularly intense for Guerrero. “When I was younger, I had attempted, myself, to commit suicide,” he shared with ThinkProgress. He actually related a lot to how Kevin felt; Guerrero describes himself as a “very monogamous person” and he had experienced cheating and heartbreak that really crushed his world. He never contemplated ex-gay therapy, but there were still parallels between his own struggles and the character’s.
“With the whole suicide scene, I didn’t like it at all, for one because it brought up some bad memories of when I had tried it. For two, just because, I don’t want this to be seen by people who might think, ‘This is the way out. Yeah, he’s right; I should do this.’”
Guerrero expressed concerns to the production team about how the scene would turn out. “If somebody sees this, say for example, a youth who is gay, lesbian, transgender, or whatever, you don’t want to send out the wrong message to people. And that’s ultimately why I pulled myself from the series after that initial pilot was shot, and I did tell them that if the pilot was to go any further than that, then they’d have to find somebody else to play the character.”
They kept asking him what would bring him back. He told them it would have to be rewritten in important ways, such as no longer framing ex-gay therapy as the only option. He also suggested it would do better as a comedy, something that wasn’t so extreme in the delivery of the message. “They sent me some drafts of scripts, and it turned out to just not be a character that I any longer wanted to play at that point.”
Laying it on thick
Writing under the pen name of Jonathan Bogomolov — which is how Guerrero identified him in his interview with ThinkProgress — Spratling inserted his own ideas about ex-gay therapy throughout the plot. On the Recently Straight website, Spratling shares many of these personal beliefs, asserting that the concept of sexual orientation “lacks foundation as an entity in scientific literature” and that “all individuals are inherently heterosexual and that SSA [same-sex attraction] develops as the result of emotional wounds and unmet love needs.”
Josh serves as the surrogate ex-gay counselor in the pilot, spouting ex-gay jargon at Kevin in almost every scene. In one scene, he tells Kevin a story about someone from his Cub Scout troop who often misbehaved and unknowingly hurt other boys. It turned out he had always been deaf and no one knew, but once he and his mom learned sign language and he learned how to read lips, he could “nearly normally participate in life events.” The story, Josh claims, proves that it doesn’t matter if sexuality is biological.
“It’s an example of a biological problem that can be worked around with mental discipline… If it’s biologically caused, that isn’t proof that it’s healthy and that only biological changes can change it. You have to have a theological reason to decide if it’s healthy or good.”
In the following scene, Josh has Kevin trapped as a passenger in the car and delivers an epic monologue about how he disagrees “that there is such a thing as a ‘gay feeling.’” Men have desires for “affirmation and affection” and erotic desires, he explains, and if a boy doesn’t get enough affection from other men as a kid, “he’s at the risk of getting those desires mixed together.”
Josh explains his own problem as such: “It was more about my perception of women as a consequence of my mother’s failure to provide emotional constancy. Instead of seeing women as nurturing, I saw them as wardens with a leash around my neck. Men I felt were nurturing, so I felt safe with them.”
When Kevin (correctly) rejects this all as sounding “more like brainwashing than healing,” Josh checks in over webcam with his real-world ex-gay counselor Jayson Graves, founder of Healing for the Soul ministry. “It seems like all the things that convinced me, they just really don’t matter to him,” he whines.
In the final scene, Kevin is ready to jump off a cliff, telling Josh of his heartbreaks, “You were right about them all. None of them love me.” Josh admits that he almost committed suicide too, but God sent him a message of hope. “Just give Him your broken heart; He will comfort you. He will bring you healing and He will restore all those years that have been lost.” Josh invites Kevin to his ex-gay group meeting, explaining, “When you get to know them, you’ll find out just how similar you really are. These are men who will love you in your sorrow and who will love you out of it.” Kevin accepts, and the pilot ends with a teaser of him knocking on the door to join the meeting.
Leading by example
Josh talks Kevin off the cliff.
Guerrero is torn by his experience working on Recently Straight. “I don’t regret the decision I made; I made a professional decision to play the character,” he told ThinkProgress. “If it was any different, if it was made in the way I think it should’ve been presented, I honestly don’t know if I would’ve went through with it or not. I really have some feelings toward it. I don’t think I should have been a part of it.”
But being part of it has given him the opportunity to support LGBT young people and correct some of the messages of the show. Since the pilot became available on YouTube earlier this year, Guerrero has heard from LGBT youth who have watched it. “I’ve had younger kids tell me that they didn’t know what they should do,” he said. “Some people have been kicked out of their house because their parents found out, some people were thinking of committing suicide because of the fact it just wasn’t going right for them, and at that point I did open up about the time that I attempted to and that’s when I told them, ‘It’s not worth it. Don’t ever think that by committing suicide, that’s the way out. There’s going to be people that are going to not agree with your lifestyle, but there’s also a lot of people there who will accept and embrace who you are without second thought.’”
“There’s no reason to end your life that’s necessary or right. Just embrace who you are, be happy with who you are.”
Guerrero is proud that people can look to his marriage as an example. “At one point, I thought that it wouldn’t be worth going on because of the fact that I didn’t think that that I would find somebody. I hated the way things were going.” But now, he says, “I’m happily married to someone that I love to no end. I would do anything for this man and vice versa.” His friends joke he and John are a “sickening couple,” comparing them to the Brady Bunch because of how well they get along. “I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.”
He wants to give young people some of that same hope. Whereas Recently Straight communicates that people should give up on being gay because same-sex relationships don’t work out, Guerrero is proving the opposite. “I’m married. I’m happy. I’m a gay man. I fully embrace who I am,” he said. With regards to Recently Straight, “I can’t personally apologize for the way that it came out, because I wasn’t the one who wrote it, but I do apologize for the way that it presented it.”
“It doesn’t matter that a character in a series portrayed this. Don’t let it make you have a second thought. Be happy with you.”
The post How Did A Gay, Married Actor End Up In An Anti-Gay TV Show? appeared first on ThinkProgress.
Zack Ford
thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2015/10/21/3714495/ex-gay-movie-actor-suicide/
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