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.

Second ex-gay star to fall off wagon?
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.

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.

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.”

Unsafe sex allegations
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 said he had a 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 chat room. They began meeting in the late fall of 2001, and their sexual relationship lasted about six months.

“It wasn’t all the time — he would just appear from time to time,” the man said. “But we were friends for a year and a half.”

“Sean” only revealed his HIV status at the end of the men’s friendship, claiming he had just found out, the man said. He learned Sean’s true identity from a friend who also dated him.

The friend apparently learned that Sean’s real name was Michael Johnston from his driver’s license. An Internet search revealed Johnston’s work with ex-gay ministries.

“I was shocked, and I felt betrayed,” the man said. After seeing photos from the ex-gay Web sites and television ad, “I have absolutely no doubt Sean is Michael Johnston,” he said.

After discussing the issue with friends, the man contacted Michael Hamar, a Virginia attorney.

Virginia law makes it a felony to knowingly expose someone to HIV, but Hamar said his client hasn’t pursued either a civil lawsuit or a criminal complaint against Johnston.

“At this point, he is sort of overwhelmed by it all,” Hamar said. “But he felt at minimum he needed to get the word out, so that if nothing else, others who may have been exposed would go

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