US ‘clinical psychologist’ Dr George Alan Rekers hired a rent boy ‘to lift his baggage’.
Rekers is a Southern Baptist minister who founded the right-wing Family Research Council and has nearly 30 years of virulently anti-gay writings to his – umm – credit.
According to this report, the doddering old quack has written such books as The Christian in an Age of Sexual Eclipse (1981), Growing Up Straight: What Families Should Know About Homosexuality (1982) and Shaping Your Child’s Sexual Identity (1982).
In the latter, Rekers writes that “gay liberationists” are plotting to “legalize pedophilia.” In Growing Up Straight, he writes:
Homosexual activists seek to lure our children into a deceptive and [destructive] fantasy world that ignores the obvious physical, social and moral boundaries of sexual oppression.
Also:
When scholars disregard divine law, they deliberately suppress truth and result in foolish and futile speculations.
Given his not-very-friendly attitude towards gays, why was Rekers recently spotted arriving from Europe at Miami International Airport with a male escort called “Lucien”, whose profile on Rentboy.com profile shows a shirtless young man with delicate features, guileless eyes, and sun-kissed, hairless skin?
The profile touts his “smooth, sweet, tight ass” and “perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)” and explains he is “sensual,” “wild,” and “up for anything”.
The Miami New Times takes up the story: on April 13, the “rent boy” arrived in Miami after a ten-day, fully subsidised trip to Europe. He was soon followed out of customs:
By an old man with an atavistic mustache and a desperate blond comb-over, pushing an overburdened baggage cart.
That man was George Alan Rekers, of North Miami – the callboy’s client and, as it happens, one of America’s most prominent anti-gay activists. Rekers, a Baptist minister who is a leading scholar for the Christian right, left the terminal with his gay escort, looking a bit discomfited when a picture of the two was snapped with a hot-pink digital camera.
Reached by New Times before a trip to Bermuda, Rekers said he learned Lucien was a prostitute only midway through their vacation.
I had surgery, and I can’t lift luggage. That’s why I hired him.
But his medical problems didn’t stop him from pushing his tottering baggage cart through MIA.
Rekers wouldn’t deny he met his slender, blond escort at Rentboy.com – which features homepage images of men in bondage and grainy videos of crotch-rubbing twinks – and Lucien confirmed it.
At the small western Miami town home he shares with a roommate, a nervous Lucien expressed surprise when we told him that Rekers denied knowing about his line of work from the beginning. “He should’ve been able to tell you that,” he said, fidgeting and fixing his eyes on his knees. “But that’s up to him.”
For decades, George Alan Rekers has been a general in the “culture wars”, though his work has often been behind the scenes. In 1983, he and James Dobson, America’s best-known homophobe, formed the Family Research Council, a DC-based, rabidly Christian, and vehemently anti-gay lobbying group that has become a standard-bearer of the nation’s extreme right wing.
Says Wayne Besen, a gay rights advocate in New York City and the executive director of Truth Wins Out, which investigates the anti-gay movement:
While he keeps a low public profile, his fingerprints are on almost every anti-gay effort to demean and dehumanize LGBT people. His work is ubiquitously cited by lobby groups that work to deny equality to LGBT Americans. Rekers has caused a great deal of harm to gay and lesbian individuals.
Rekers is a board member of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), an organization that systematically attempts to turn gay people straight. And the Huffington Post recently singled out Rekers as a member of the American College of Pediatricians — an official-sounding outfit in Gainesville that purveys lurid, youth-directed literature accusing gays of en masse coprophilia.
Rekers lectures worldwide, from Europe to the Middle East, on teen sexuality. Yet during his ten-day sojourn with Lucien to London and Madrid, he had no lectures scheduled. Both men deny having sex on the trip, and emails exchanged between the two before their jaunt are cautiously worded.
Rekers wrote in an email dated March 21 obtained by New Times.
I’d like to propose another trip to Rome, Italy, for a week or more. This is so exciting to have a nice Travel Assistant and traveling companion! Wow! I’m so glad I met you.
And on March 26 he wrote:
I called and talked to the reservation guy in London and reserved a room with two twin beds.
In his interview with New Times, “Lucien” didn’t want to impugn his client, but he made it clear they met through Rentboy.com, which is the only website on which he advertises his services. Neither Google nor any other search engine picks up individual Rentboy.com profiles, any more than they pick up individual profiles on eHarmony or Match.com. You cannot just happen upon one.
Update: Rekers, according to this report, now claims that he sought out “Lucien” in order to “save him”.
Blogger Joe Jervis (Joe.My.God) sent a Facebook message to Rekers and he answered back “with a mixture of piety and phony amusement”. But his answer to Jervis’s email only raises more questions because Rekers contradicted his earlier explanation as to why he and “Lucien” were together.
However, he told Jervis that he seeks out folks like “Lucien” in order to “minister” to them:
I have spent much time as a mental health professional and as a Christian minister helping and lovingly caring for people identifying themselves as “gay.” My hero is Jesus Christ who loves even the culturally despised people, including sexual sinners and prostitutes. Like Jesus Christ, I deliberately spend time with sinners with the loving goal to try to help them …
Further update: Rekers’ name has mysteriously disappeared from The Family Research Council’s website.