I Had to Say Something (17 page)

I clicked on another link that my Google search had pulled up, but it was just a blog talking about how Ted Haggard is a jerk. Well, I figured, when you are that well known, someone's bound not to like you. I went back and forth between links, and soon a clearer picture began to emerge.

“This guy is huge,” I said to myself. Again, I was just dumbfounded. Not sure what to make of any of it, I grabbed my wallet and some letters and walked out the door to run some errands. Now I was thinking constantly about a client who I honestly had thought little about before then. In a way, I thought it was cool—I love having celebrities as clients.

Around this time, Marilyn Musgrave, a representative from northern Colorado, was working on a proposal to amend the
U.S. Constitution so that “marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman.” We've all seen this before, and once again, Representative Musgrave from Fort Morgan, Colorado, felt that the entire free world would fall apart if two consenting adults other than a man and a woman had the legal right to get married. The more I read about her, the angrier I got.

“Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman,” read House Joint Resolution 88, formally introduced in June 2006. It was a signature work of Musgrave's.

I hate when something like this gets used for political purposes. I wanted to write every member of Congress and tell them what hypocrites they were if they voted for this. Then I started thinking about Art and all the information I'd seen on his Web site. He hadn't called in over a month.

Sitting at my computer, I looked up
www.tedhaggard.comagain
and also pulled up the Web site for New Life Church.
Let's write to Pastor Ted and see what he thinks about two men or two women having the right to marry.

I sent an e-mail directly to Pastor Ted from an alternative email address, asking for his position on what Representative Musgrave was doing. “Do you support the efforts to rewrite the Constitution to ban gay marriage?” I asked. Sure, I could have worded it in a way to better conceal how I felt, but I was angry. And I had to know.

Two weeks later, I had not gotten a response. According to my e-mail records, I sent another message on May 18 and wrote, “This is my second request for a response. It really is not that hard. What is the church's and your position on the
Marriage Amendment currently before Congress? Support or not support? Thanks, Forest.” Forest is my middle name.

Within less than two hours, I received a response from Ted Haggard's executive assistant, Meg Britton. At 2:04 p.m., she wrote, “Sorry, we've had some changes in our staff with the NAE (National Association of Evangelicals) who would normally answer your question. We are in support of this amendment. Thank you for asking. God Bless You.”

That wasn't good enough for me. I had to know exactly what Pastor Ted thought, so I decided to write again, this time directly to him, to see if I could get a response to my question. This time, though, I added another pointed question: “What are your views on homosexuality?”

A few days later, on May 22, I received an e-mail from Pastor Joseph Winger: “Thank you for your inquiry about New Life Church. We do think that the Federal Marriage Amendment as endorsed by President Bush is a positive step for our nation. Regarding our view of homosexuality, we believe the Bible promotes marriage as a one man, one woman relationship. May God Bless You.”

I sat there reading his response over and over.
How clever
, I thought. Winger didn't say that homos were going to hell, but clearly that's what he was suggesting. I wanted so much to think that Art's answer would be different, but why would it be? These were his spokespeople. I couldn't imagine that they would not be singing off the same song sheet.

My heart started pounding faster. All this time, this man had been coming to me every month to get naked and explore his homosexuality, and now I found out that he was one of the most powerful evangelicals in the world and that he wanted to keep people like me—and people like “Art”—from being treated fairly.

This was really pissing me off. I remember screaming at his picture on the computer. “You son of a bitch! How dare you!” Art and every straight-acting couple in America could get married and divorced as many times as they liked, yet two men or two women cannot get married even once, much less enjoy the legal benefits of marriage.

I thought of the many gay couples I knew. One had been together for fifty years. Yet, legally, my friends couldn't even enjoy second-class citizen status. I was becoming angrier by the minute. I was also becoming more nervous by the minute.

What if this constitutional amendment was ratified? What if more conservative Republicans got elected to Congress? What if someone like Art got a cabinet post?

As I sat in my apartment, I suddenly felt very alone. My anger started turning to frost. Few of even my closest friends knew that I was an escort, though I knew some of them must have seen my ads. No one in my family knew what I did. I remember thinking,
I need to do something about this, but . . . will anyone believe me?

Not one to just sit around and let things fall apart, I grabbed a notebook and a pen. I figured, what the hell, I'll start writing down my options. “What do I do now that I know who he is?” I wrote in big black letters. “Do I not say anything and continue as always? Do I tell him that I know who he is? Do I go to his church and confront him in front of everyone?”

As I wrote, I started to shake. I ripped off that sheet of paper and started writing on a fresh one. My hands were trembling.

“Please don't let them take me,” I could hear my mother saying to me.

“When you are around, you always make me feel welcome,” my grandmother had told me.

“You're a nice kid, Jones.”

“A sin is a sin is a sin.”

“Do you have any friends?”

“Why are you still an escort?”

My tears were drowning me, just as they had back in January when I first returned home after Mom died.
Am I home? Is it all just a dream? Is there any chance I'm going to wake up to find that my mother and I are together at a casino in the winner's circle?

I went to the couch to lie down. I was cold, which explains why I curled up in the fetal position.
Maybe if I just focus, my mom will come to me. She'll tell me what to do.
All the while, I kept seeing Pastor Ted's big smiling face from that photo on his Web site.

CHAPTER 8

Like most people, whenever I sit at my computer the first thing I do is check my messages. But after learning the truth about Art, my routine changed. Now I would open my Internet browser and go directly to
www.tedhaggard.com
, where I would spend hours searching.

The Web site, which has since been pulled, was nothing short of an Internet theme park dedicated to the man known affectionately as Pastor Ted. Everything you could think of was there. He came off looking very generous, even though many of his words were not.

I spent hours reading his sermons. One video clip I saw on
www.beliefnet.com
made me want to punch something: “People want to know, how do you have a good family? It is not hard. It is easy. First of all, you find a person of the opposite sex and then you make a life long commitment to them.”

Ted was wearing a white shirt with a white T-shirt underneath in the video. I think he was wearing the same clothes when Matt and I performed for him.

“It is not hard [to have a good marriage]. If you lose your life for the sake of the one you're marrying, if you'll be faithful, and you'll be kind and you'll provide, then it will all work out.”

“If people want to be selfish, if people want to be greedy, if people want all their environment to be set up on their own terms, it really makes marriage and other relationships tough.”

“Homosexual behavior is immoral,” Ted had told Bill Moyers in 1993. “In other words, it's not the best, and that's not my opinion either.” When pressed by Moyers to explain, Ted told him that “The Bible” was his authority on the subject.

As my head filled with his sanctimonious words, a migraine set in. It was apparent to me that I had now been given a new cross to bear, and his name was Ted Haggard.

There was also a part of me that just didn't want to believe any of it. Sure, it was all right there in front of me, but what if it was all nothing but a blogosphere conspiracy?

I spent the next several days tied to my computer. When I typed “Ted Haggard” into any search box, all kinds of items came up. I tried to look at as many of them as I could. In an article from the
Arizona Christian News
, Ted said the following:

Ted became president of the National Association of Evangelicals in March 2003, and came to see me a few months
later. I tried to make something of that timing.
Now that he had power he could go out and get a call boy,
I thought. Or perhaps it was just a coincidence.

“The percentage of people going to heaven and the percentage of people going to hell today is determined by how well you did your job yesterday,” Ted told his followers once
. Is this guy for real?

Ted also wrote several books, including
The Pursuit of the Good Life
and
From This Day Forward: Making Your Vows Last a Lifetime
. He even wrote a diet book,
The Jerusalem Diet
, in which he tells readers, “Don't let any substance determine how you live your day.” I thought of all the meth Ted was doing. In another book called
Confident Parents, Exceptional Teens
, Ted wrote for a teenage audience on the importance of not lying.

I also spent hours at the New Life Church Web site. There was a trailer for a movie,
The Thorn
. It started off with some great visuals and orchestra music and talked about love, betrayal, sacrifice, and redemption; it was all about Jesus Christ and the story of his death. It took me awhile to figure out that the whole thing was a play, a passion play, produced by New Life Church.

I wanted so much to think that maybe Ted was just a frustrated theater lover. Then I found more homophobic stuff.

A long article featuring Ted appeared in the
New Republic
magazine in 1996. “It's Gay Pride week in Colorado Springs,
as it turns out,” reads the article. Ted is then quoted as saying, “I don't understand it . . . It would be like having Murderer's Pride Day.”

Why would anyone say something like that? Is he saying that gay pride is the same as being proud of being a murderer? Is he equating us, as in “Art” and I, with the taking of human life? Was he just trying to be cute?

That comment really hurt me. I've been called a lot of names, but a murderer? I felt like I had been betrayed by a kiss.

 

A friend of mine said that no matter how old you are when you lose a parent, it leaves you feeling like an orphan. That's how I had been feeling since my mom died, and now I had to deal with my discovery about “Art,” which was making me paranoid. I was feeling helpless. I needed to find something to do that would comfort me.

After my father retired, I wondered why he spent so much time sitting on the couch watching television. I wondered why he didn't go out more. You get nothing from sitting on your ass watching reruns and infomercials. It drove my mother nuts that my dad would rather stay at home watching the Hallmark Channel than go out to dinner. It drove me nuts, too. I saw him sinking into depression, and there was nothing I could do to help him.

And now here I was sitting on my couch watching daytime television. Sitting there with my remote, a large snack, and Judge Judy felt safe when feeling safe was what I wanted most. I began to understand my dad a little better.