Nation's Largest Gay Newspaper Rejects FOF Ad

Focus on the Family
Wednesday, 23 October 2002

The Washington Blade editors initially accepted full-page ad chronicling the experience of ex-gay John Paulk

The Washington Blade, the nation's largest gay newspaper, has deprived readers an update on a story that made headlines among homosexuals coast to coast two years ago. The paper's parent company overruled editors who wanted to publish an ad about overcoming homosexuality from one of the country's best-known ex-gays.

The ad in question features John Paulk, manager of Focus on the Family's homosexuality and gender department. Paulk's story of how Jesus Christ helped him leave homosexuality was ridiculed by gay activists in 2000, when he was spotted in and photographed leaving a Washington, D.C., gay bar. Critics cited the event as proof he was "living a lie" as a heterosexual husband and father, a contention Paulk refutes in the advertisement prepared for the Blade.

"I don't have the 'perfect' answer to appease my opponents about what happened," Paulk says in the ad. "Some have said I was looking for sex, but that's not true. [The bar] was merely a symbol of something that had been familiar and comfortable to me years before." He goes on to invite readers to attend the Nov. 2 Love Won Out conference that he is returning to D.C. to host, so that they, too, might experience the "journey I and thousands like me will never regret taking."

Blade editors initially agreed to publish the ad, but William Waybourn, president of Window Media, which publishes the Blade and other gay-themed newspapers nationwide, overruled them earlier this week. Waybourn's rationale, related in an e-mailed statement, was that company policy requires the immediate rejection of any ad from "anti-gay" businesses, regardless of content. Yet a few days earlier, in an interview with the Washington Post, Waybourn indicated that the content of the ad, not who paid for it, was the key consideration. "We're looking at it," he said. "I don't want to censor the ad, but at the same time I want to make sure the ad is correct."

The discrepancy in Waybourn's statements has left Paulk perplexed.

"It seems as if they had to go looking for a reason to reject it," Paulk said. "Evidently, when they looked the ad over, they couldn't find any reason to say that my message and my experience wasn't correct. So they had to bring up this policy to justify keeping this message of hope from their readers."

The Nov. 2 Love Won Out is Focus on the Family's 19th such conference. Paulk and other experts in gender identity will discuss the clinical development of homosexuality; the relationship between homosexuality and genetics; homosexual recovery; and the responsibility of Christians to offer an appropriate, compassionate response to homosexuals.

For more information, or to contact Focus on the Family, see their website at: www.family.org