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| Michael Johnston appeared with his mother, Frances Johnston, in a controversial 1998 television ad claiming he ‘walked away from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ,’ but not before contracting AIDS. |
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HOME > NEWS > BREAKING NEWS
By: LAURA DOUGLAS-BROWN
COMMENTS |
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Five years after starring in a national advertising campaign claiming gays can
change their sexual orientation, Michael Johnston experienced a “moral
fall” and left behind his ministries, two conservative Christian groups
that worked with Johnston confirmed this week.
“I received a call from [Johnston] asking forgiveness as a Christian
brother and asking for our prayers, indicating that he was working with his
pastor and his church to try to find some restoration in his relationship with
God,” said Buddy Smith, American Family Association administrator.
The Mississippi-based AFA partnered with Johnston to promote ex-gay programs,
including Johnston’s National Coming Out of Homosexuality Day.
The annual event is unlikely to continue following Johnston’s “moral
fall,” but Smith said the AFA won’t abandon its claims that gays
can change.
“I don’t think the message is changed at all, though of course
the messenger is certainly harmed,” Smith said. “I don’t
foresee he would ever be back in a place of public ministry, especially in
an outreach to homosexuals like the ministry he had.”
Johnston founded Kerusso Ministries, based in Newport News, Va. The ministry’s
published phone number is now disconnected and the Web site is no longer operational.
“He obviously had a moral failing, that’s true,” said Peter
LaBarbera, president of Americans for Truth, which had been affiliated with
Kerusso before a “professional parting of ways” prior to Johnston’s
fall.
“Many people are still behind him, and we think he did the responsible
thing by closing the ministry down,” LaBarbera added.
In 1998, a coalition of conservative religious groups — including Kerusso,
Americans for Truth and AFA — launched a high-profile national print
and television ad campaign preaching that gays can change.
Johnston appeared with his mother, Frances Johnston, in a controversial print
ad under the headline “From innocence to AIDS.” A similar television
commercial also appeared in 1998, dubbed “Mom.”
“My son Michael found out the truth — he could walk away from
homosexuality. But he found out too late — he has AIDS,” Frances
Johnston says in the television commercial.
In the ad, Michael Johnston praises his mother for telling him “the
truth that set me free.”
“A decade ago, I walked away from homosexuality through the power of
Jesus Christ,” he claims.
Johnston now apparently becomes the second star of the campaign known to have
failed in maintaining his "ex-gay" status, and the scandal surrounding
both ex-gay leaders was uncovered by the same enterprising gay activist.
John Paulk, who appeared in the 1998 ex-gay ads and on the cover of Newsweek
with his “ex-lesbian” wife Anne Paulk, was spotted in a popular
gay bar in Washington, D.C., in September 2000.
Wayne Besen, a former communications staffer with the Human Rights Campaign,
photographed Paulk in the bar, Mr. P's.
Johnston’s “fall” should be a final blow to discredit ex-gay
ministries, said Besen, author of “Anything But Straight,” a book
aimed at debunking ex-gay ministries due for release in October by Harrington
Park Press.
“This was their knockout punch, and now it is the punch line,” he
said.
Besen contacted this newspaper after interviewing two men who Besen said claimed
to have had sex with Johnston in the last year after meeting him online.
“There has got to be a point where you can no longer say this is the
exception,” Besen said. “If you have exception after exception,
you have to at some point say it is the rule.”
In his speeches as an ex-gay, Johnston acknowledged having sex with men without
disclosing his HIV status.
“I continued to live as a homosexual for two years after I knew I was
HIV-positive,” Johnston said in a 1998 speech to a California church,
reported in POZ magazine. “And I am ashamed to say that in those two
years not once did I ever tell any of my partners that I was carrying this
deadly disease.”
Johnston allegedly continued that behavior during his recent “moral
fall,” according to a Virginia man who says he had an ongoing sexual
relationship with Johnston that included Johnston using drugs and having multiple
male sex partners.
“What we did was unsafe,” said the man, who spoke only on condition
of anonymity over fears that he would lose his job because of his sexual orientation
or HIV status.
“I brought it up all the time, but [Johnston] didn’t seem to think
it mattered," the man said. "He would have these parties, get a hotel
room, get online and invite tons of people — he just wouldn’t care.”
The man said he met Johnston, who he said called himself Sean, in a gay Internet
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