Be careful! If you catch the virus, you might lie to your family that you’re going to die, and write a book about it!
High school senior Gaby Rodriquez got fame, a book, a movie deal and awards, not to mention an A for her school project, by traumatizing her family and friends with an extended pregnancy hoax. It was inevitable that when such blatantly unethical and destructive conduct is hailed as “courageous” by media pundits and pays off in speaking fees and book contracts as well, other ambitious liars would try the same trick. Sure enough, a young straight male Christian decided to hoax his friends and family by telling them he was gay.
It’s worth lying to everyone who cares about you and trusts you for a book deal, right? Timothy Kurek’s experience posing as gay for a year is the basis of his “Jesus In Drag” coming out this fall. The Today show should slobber all over this one, and I’m sure Timothy will become a familiar butt on the couches of Ellen, Dave, Jimmy and others. And, like Gaby Rodriguez, he will be hailed for his “courage” to exploit the trust of his family and to betray his friends so he could use their discomfort as book material.
He’ll have a movie based on his hoax too, probably on the Lifetime Channel. LGTB advocates will champion his scam and praise it to the skies, because, after all, anti-gay bigots like Tim’s family deserve to be tricked and hurt. It exposes their bigotry, and if it causes them pain, good. They deserve it.
Kurek’s stunt, and it is a stunt, is ethically indefensible, just as Gaby Rodriguez’s hoax was. Naturally, he attempts to justify it by writing:
“After an acquaintance came out of the closet, and was kicked out of her home and cut off from her family, something unexpected happened. For the first time in my spiritual life I began to question why I believed what I did about homosexuality. Were the warnings we always got about gays and lesbians based off of theological fact, or conservative, social stereotyping? And the voice inside of me judging my poor friend for coming out, was that “the Spirit” inside of me, or something else entirely? I had to find out for myself. I had to learn empathy because sympathy simply wouldn’t be enough to challenge my years of programming. I needed to see how the label of gay would change how I was viewed by everyone around me, and if people would treat me like a second-class citizen for no other reason than that they believed I was gay. And I needed to feel the isolation and repression of the closet… as much as I would be able.”
The explanation is disingenuous, illogical, self-serving and absurd.
To begin with the most obvious, he wouldn’t and couldn’t be able “to feel the isolation and repression of the closet,” because he knew that he could always stop being “gay” whenever he wanted to. Real gay people can’t, and that is the source of their isolation and repression. Gaby could stop being a pregnant high school student any time she chose as well, except that she would only be alleviating her family’s anguish at the cost of her book deal, which just wouldn’t do. As a result, whatever “empathy” Timothy says he expected to glean from this deception is imaginary. There is no similarity between being ostracized for what you are and being ostracized for what you are pretending to be so others will ostracize you.
As for the rest of this naked rationalization, Kurek’s hoax has no relationship to its supposed motivation. Obviously he already doubted the attitudes of his upbringing regarding gays, and probably had abandoned them. If not, why was he concerned about the cruel fate of his friend at all? Why didn’t he regard it as simply God’s just retribution for a life of mortal sin? His masquerade wasn’t going to teach him anything he didn’t already know—he wasn’t the one who needed empathy; his friends and family were. Did he have the courage and forthrightness to openly challenge them, debate them, reason and persuade them? No. He chose to deceive them, and use their response to his lie as fodder for a book.
This isn’t legitimate research, because it is purely subjective. It isn’t ethical research, because the damage caused by the methodology can’t be justified by the dubious “knowledge” acquired. It isn’t needed research, because there is no dearth of eloquent personal accounts by gays who underwent genuine rejection and suffered real oppression. Their stories are searing and vivid, and since many of the authors are among our greatest artists and intellects, evoke empathy with truth and art. Kurek could have received all the enlightenment he was (supposedly) seeking and more by getting a library card.
“Jesus In Drag” is a nasty mutation of the Gaby Rodriguez virus, a social contagion that affects self-absorbed and ambitious individuals and renders them eager to inflict pain on friends and family for personal gain. The virus is spread by TV ratings, fatuous talk show hosts and book sales, and the next victim could be you or I. Unlike most viruses, you see, the victims aren’t the carriers of the virus, but the people unlucky enough to trust them.
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Pointer: tgt (Thanks!)
Source: Patheos
Graphic: Science and Anger
Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at jamproethics@verizon.net.
Ethics Alarms 
Jack, in this case and in the Gaby Rodriguez case, the perpetrator’s family was also kept uninformed of the truth. Unless I am mistaken (and I know you will tell me if I am!), this is the only important way in which these episodes differ from John Howard Griffin’s “Black Like Me” experiment, although he did not tell folks who knew him who he was unless he needed them to know. Was his experiment also an unethical thing to do?
It isn’t needed research, because there is no dearth of eloquent personal accounts by gays who underwent genuine rejection and suffered real oppression.
No frigging kidding! He personally knew one such case study. It was the entire impetus for his damn publicity stunt. Here’s a question for Kurek: Why not tell her story? Why not give the greater share of attention and media sympathy to the person who actually suffered? Why the hell does it have to be about you?
Obviously he already doubted the attitudes of his upbringing regarding gays, and probably had abandoned them.
Right again. And that being the case, Kurek’s charade was doubly deceitful, because not only did he spend a period of time pretending to be gay, he is now, in all likelihood, starting on the media circuit pretending to be a formerly gay-hating conservative Christian who underwent a sudden transformative experience.
And if that isn’t enough, this kid is also guilty of contributing to the trend of completely reversing the definitions of “sympathy” and “empathy.”
sympathy: the harmony of feeling naturally existing between persons of like tastes or opinion or of congenial dispositions.
empathy: the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.
It’s nonsense for him to say that he intended to learn empathy by pretending to walk around in another person’s shoes. Empathy isn’t something you learn. It’s a skill you develop. Neglecting that skill is a subtle, but perhaps even more poisonous outcome of this kind of story. What is Kurek going to do when he comes up against someone who is discriminated against for other reasons? Will he only be able to see things from their perspective if he adopts a different ethnic identity or set of religious beliefs for a couple of months? What about when he just disagrees with someone? Is pretending to morph into a different person the only means at his disposal for seeing things from a different perspective?
That’s the message that the media seems to be broadcasting by covering stories like this: Don’t try to understand things via information; just play make-believe and see how you feel at the end of it.
Excellent commentary, Ed..it greatly supplements and complements the original post. Thanks.
I’m not interested in this book due to all the very valid reasons given by you and your readers. Now, if SMP were to write a book about posing gay for a year, this might be worth reading.
Now THAT’s a best seller!
Or tgt telling everyone that he’s “born again.”
“It isn’t needed research, because there is no dearth of eloquent personal accounts by gays who underwent genuine rejection and suffered real oppression. ”
I disagree, partly. Such accounts can be, and routinely are, discarded by those who are anti-Gay simply because it’s Gays giving those accounts. They genuinely don’t believe that such prejudice exists, it’s all manufactured propaganda in service of the “Gay Agenda”.
As research on a personal or general level, useless. As an educational tool, possibly valuable. I have issues with the deceit involved, but please don’t deny that it’s “poetic justice”. I just think that justice untempered by mercy is over-rated, especially when it involves compromising personal integrity. Not something I would ever consider doing, no matter how worthy the aim.
For a truly educational similar situation, see Norah Vincent’s book “Self Made Man”. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/books/review/22kamp.html
It certainly changed her views about “Gender Dysphoria”. Having a nervous breakdown will do that.
The ones who would dismiss any life story experiences out of hand because of some prejudicial idea of “bias” are more than likely firmly in the category of unreachable anyway. So even if you try out that logic, his book is still not for them.
Jack, your review of this whole experiment actually falls in line with a lot of things I’ve been reading on different LGBT blogs. While I don’t doubt some folks in the community will fall all over themselves praising him, a lot of us looked it over and saw resources and space taken from people who could be telling real stories.
Zoe, Self Made Man couldn’t have been that educational if you still feel the need to put Gender Dysphoria in quotation marks. It’s a real thing in the world that affects a lot of people. And that’s another book that takes time and space away from trans masculine identified guys who could be telling our stories.
BLACK LIKE ME immediately sprang to my mind also, Patrice. What say you, Jack? Do you put it in the same category?
“Black Like Me” was gutsy undercover work and legitimate investigative journalism, and I think distinguishable from the stunts of Rodriguez and Kurek. First and foremost, he didn’t cause distress to anyone, as he would have, presumably, if he had somehow convinced his friends and loved ones that he had awakened to find himself magically turned Negro, like the hero of “Watermelon Man” or the bigot in “Finian’s Rainbow.” For the purposes of his work, he wasn’t lying: the issue was the difference in how people were treated based on nothing more than the color of their skin—his purpose was to expose the cruelty and the stupidity of racism. He hadn’t changed anything but his skin color, he was the same, yet he could document how differently he was treated. Griffin did not presume to show “how a black man feels,” he was documenting how society treated blacks by legitimate investigation. There were accounts of racism by black writers like Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Richard Wright, but they didn’t have the perspective of a white man suddenly finding himself being treated differently when he knows nothing but his hue had changed, and they didn’t have credibility with most white readers. Who did he hurt? Nobody. Was he lying? No—the experiment was to see what a difference color made in 1960 America. Was the data otherwise available? Not really.
The only thing wrong with “Black Like Me” is that it was the inspiration for self-serving stunts like Kurek’s.
I’m not sure why people think these stunts are research. What were the study criteria? How was it to be measured and evaluated? What new information was gained by this “study”? If the results are “if your parents thought you were a heterosexual christian and you suddenly pretend to be gay they will be shocked” I think this research was needed about as much as research to find out if there is a lot of fat in a double quarter pounder at McDonald’s. This is a cruel practical joke, an extended episode of Punk’d. Quick, if there are any network executives reading, you really need to pick up on this for a new reality TV series “How I Freaked Out My Family”.