“Twenty years of thrashing around in the swamp....”

by Larry Hallock

On a certain level, anyone with a heart has to feel sorry for a tragic figure. What are we to think of Colin Cook?

After being fired as an SDA minister for his gay behaviors, Colin Cook made a commitment to turn straight and help others do the same. He co-founded Homosexuals Anonymous and opened Quest Learning Center in Reading, Pennsylvania. Young people from across the country pulled up stakes and moved to Reading for the long haul—years, not weeks—chasing Cook's promise that with his and God's help, they could claim their God-given heterosexuality. (He was not a licensed therapist.)

But Cook, who by then claimed to have been “healed” of homosexuality himself, molested some of the young males he was supposed to be rescuing (at least one of whom was allegedly under age), and the SDA Church, which paid his salary, dumped him. Exodus, the umbrella group for so-called "ex-gay ministries," wasn't pleased, either. Cook was giving them a bad name.

But Cook reinvented himself and started up new counseling endeavors—only to be caught in improprieties again. His wife divorced him. He'd always showcased his marriage as evidence of his "deliverance" from homosexuality.

Today Cook has a little radio broadcast in Denver, yet again reincarnated as a healer of homosexuality—and it seems the more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s still about all that lust—to be confused with sexual orientation. "We Christians often find our lust battling against our faith, and the experience brings us to a crisis," he says in his website biography. "Am I really converted? How can this be happening to me? That's certainly been my experience."

Therein lies the sadness. Colin Cook tells it like it was, a sad and tragic lifetime of trying to be what he was not. "In my panic and fear over the years, I used every religious exercise in the book, agonizing prayer, Bible reading, fasting, avoiding this and that...."

But it didn't work. Nevertheless, he told his funding sources—and his paying counselees—that it did work.

In his autobiography, he mentions losing his previous get-out-of-homosexuality ministries "through my own foolishness," and discusses the "immense pain and embarrassment." ... "You can look my name up anywhere else on the web and you'll find a sorry story of defeat, of which I am not proud." (A number of websites document his indiscretions over time.)

"It took twenty years of thrashing around in the swamp," but Colin Cook claims to be redeemed again. All of his remarks about the past are in the context of his now having really found Christ this time—just as he thought he had in the 1980s.

Why does he feel it's finally working now, when it didn't all those years? Skeptics might suggest taming one's sexual urges at age 67 isn’t all that difficult, but as Cook explains it.... Well, see if you can make sense of it: "But I didn't understand how the Cross of Jesus Christ affects sexuality as faith allows sex and God to meet and produces something new." Apparently the trick is to understand that little twist of the phrase. Now he does, so now it works, he says.

Decades of agonizing prayer, Bible reading, fasting, and claiming the promises—but apparently God isn’t that easy. The gospel is much more cryptic than that; you just don't get it until you understand the nuance of “how the cross affects sexuality.”

That's the way it's always been with Cook—the promises work, you just have to think about them right. It's like the old formula the alchemists used for creating gold. It always worked, so long as you didn't think of the little red-faced monkey while performing the last crucial step. Tricky. Not a lot of gold was created.

I know Colin Cook. I visited his Quest Learning Center. I interviewed him at length—five hours, on tape. I read his book. He and all fundamentalist and evangelical Christians like him always manage to find just the right twist-of-a-phrase to explain why it's so hard to turn gays into straights. They ignore the obvious reason, which is direct and simple: what God perhaps CAN do is not necessarily what God chooses to do. Maybe God can instantly re-create limbs lost in battle—but obviously he doesn't. Maybe God can instantly bring back to life innocent little girls raped and strangled to death—but obviously he doesn't. Maybe he could keep bad things from happening in the first place.* But he doesn’t.

For these religious zealots, God's refusal to act couldn't possibly be that he just doesn’t think it’s as important as they do. It couldn’t be that he just doesn't choose to, or that he thinks the whole notion of asking gays to be what they’re not is offensive to his sense of decency. No, the reason it doesn’t work is always the supplicant's fault—for not praying hard enough, not wanting it bad enough or, Cook's favorite, just not thinking about it right. See, you can't "die daily to sin," you have to "live daily in the resurrection." Oh. Sorry.

But I digress. What's sad about the lives of Colin Cook is how wasted they have been. In fantasy, imagine a Colin Cook who might have left the ministry at an early age and accepted himself simply for who he was. Imagine him living an authentic life, meeting a partner and having a blissful, loving home life while devoting all his energy to a real career. Imagine him not obsessing, day after day, month after month, year after year, over his sexuality. Imagine him without all the "panic and fear over the years" that he so painfully laments. Imagine him not bringing so many others down with him.

Yes, others. They are the ones who make the sad lives of Colin Cook plural. Tender young people and their anxious parents believed him. They fell for the lie, the promise of getting out of hell (as he in essence describes it). And they paid dearly in money, anxiety, prayers, tears and years. Person after person left the program more broken than before.

Imagine what an enormous service to humankind these religious fanatics could be if they helped all these people instead of hurting them, instead of derailing them from joyous, authentic living!

But Colin Cook bought into the social stigma from the start—always hated himself as a gay man, and assumed every other gay person did too. (Read his book.) He never knew love, never had a single gay friendship. The only sexual activity he knew was in the backs of porno theaters. Although this is as foreign to gay people as it would be to heterosexuals, Cook defined homosexuality by his own pathological notions and behaviors. He told his counselees that to be healthy, they had to give up their entire sexuality itself—their homosexuality—and then if they tried hard enough and long enough, maybe they could attempt to regain some semblance of sexuality by learning to find eroticism in what naturally repulsed them.

In the days of Colin Cook's youth, little was understood about homosexuality in the public forum and few were around to show young gay people out of the darkness and into the light. So, many floundered in the darkness, and some rode the religion train even deeper into darkness while attempting by faith to redefine that darkness as light. But decades have come and gone. Light came, and now it is everywhere—even as the latest version of Colin Cook chooses to sit in the shadows of his little recording room, once again trying to convince the newest crop of young people that if only they pray hard enough and think about it just right, God might eventually answer their prayers and their years and their counseling dollars with some small measure of "freedom from homosexuality.”

Presumably he means to wish them more of it than he got for himself.

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* I do not mean to imply that a same-gender orientation is a bad thing in the first place; like any sexual orientation, it simply is what it is. But fundamentalists consider it a bad thing, and my point to them is that there are countless "bad things" that God obviously does not care to directly address.

© by Larry Hallock, 2007