Perkins says he knew he was gay before he knew the words to describe his feelings. As a child growing up in a pious Baptist family in Los Angeles, however, he quickly learned to hide his desire.

In high school during the late 1970s, his peers taught him names for himself: words like "fag" pushed him further into the closet.

At the age of 25, Perkins sought a way out. He wanted to become straight.

"I basically didn't feel like I had any other choice," says Perkins, now 32. "It was either seek help or go to hell."

He turned to Exodus. For four years, Perkins paid a reparative therapist there $70 a week, hoping to be transformed.

"Initially there was a tremendous amount of hope," he says. "Someone is promising you that the thing that you consider the bane of your existence is going to be eradicated or exorcised."

Believing his own struggle to be over, Perkins entered graduate school in psychology, planning to leave his job at a computer software company and become a reparative therapist.

But as he met more and more homosexuals outside Exodus, the foundation began to crumble.

"The thing I feared most I had to confront," he says. "I started to realize that gay and lesbian people are just like everyone else."

He thought about the ex-gays at Exodus. One of them, who was married and "seemed like he had it all together," eventually had a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide.

"You start to look around you and see that the people who are supposedly the exemplars are struggling and doing all sorts of unhealthy things," Perkins says.

So at the age of 29, after years of internal strife, Perkins gave up his fundamentalist religious beliefs, left therapy and came out of the closet.

Yet he says he doesn't hate the reparative therapists and ex-gays who told him he was sinning and tried to make him squelch his desires. Rather, he says he feels pity for them.

"It's easy to cast them as these horrible villain-types," he says. "It's more a reflection of society that people feel they have to go through these means to be accepted."

Repressing Desire