Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 2, Summer 2005 | Page 103

America’s New McCarthyism 99 featured the smiling face of a boyish young man and a strangely contrived narrative that included the following: I am Randy Thomas and I’m sure my story will prompt a few questions. Good, because the answers are worth the effort. Like a lot of homosexual men, I grew up with an absentee father. He left me desperate for die physical touch only a father can give. I also never heard nor knew his affirmation of me as a m an.. . . I felt vulnerable and rejected, but still I was drawn to their attraction with me. I soon found that all the male attention I’d ached for so long came packaged with a gay identity. So that’s wliat I became, even though I was still conflicted about ^\^lo I really was . . . I began living gay on the outside, but was hurt and broken inside.. . . Today I am an ex-gay. No, w ait. . . I don’t define myself anymore with a sexual identity. I’m ju s t. . . Randy. Because I know that my homosexuality wasn’t really a sex issue . . . but a heart issue. And wiiat once was broken as a child has now been made whole to the point I have hope one day for a wife, and children of my own___(italics mine) The entire narrative was a mosaic of more myths and stereotypes than can be dealt with here. Suffice to say “Randy” began with the myth that “a lot” of gay men are the product of divorce—^which would seem to place the blame for homosexuality on heterosexuals who violate the “sanctity” of marriage—and that gay people are “broken inside”—^which calls up the mental illness myth— coupled with what seems to be a strangely incestuous inversion of the recruiting molester stereotype: “He left me desperate for the physical touch only a father can give.” Perhaps these were meant to complement the puerile to