Christine Bakke (born June 3, 1971) is an American LGBT rights activist. Bakke spent four years in the ex-gay movement attempting to alter her sexual orientation through conversion therapy. In addition to receiving pastoral counseling and discipleship training, she attended ex-gay programs, including Where Grace Abounds in Denver, CO and the Living Waters Program. [1]
In April 2007, along with gay performance activist Peterson Toscano, Bakke co-founded Beyond Ex-Gay. In May 2007, Glamour Magazine featured Bakke's experience as an ex-gay survivor, or ex-ex-gay. [2] She has also appeared on ABC's Good Morning America, [3] [4] and Colorado Public Radio. [5]
Bakke participated in the Ex-Gay Survivor Conference held June 29-July 1, 2007 in Irvine, CA and took part in Survivor Initiative, a series of press conferences sponsored by Soulforce, whereby former ex-gays shared their experiences with the public as a witness and a warning about the dangers of the ex-gay movement. For the Survivor Initiative, Bakke designed original collages for each of the speakers to present. [6]
Denver is a consolidated city and county, the capital, and most populous city of the U.S. state of Colorado. Its population was 715,522 at the 2020 census, a 19.22% increase since 2010. It is the 19th-most populous city in the United States and the fifth most populous state capital. It is the principal city of the Denver–Aurora–Lakewood metropolitan statistical area, the most populous metropolitan statistical area in Colorado and the first city of the Front Range Urban Corridor.
Focus on the Family is a fundamentalist Protestant organization founded in 1977 in Southern California by James Dobson, based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The group is one of a number of evangelical parachurch organizations that rose to prominence in the 1980s. As of the 2017 tax filing year, Focus on the Family declared itself to be a church, "primarily to protect the confidentiality of our donors." Traditionally, entities considered churches have been ones that have regular worship services and congregants.
The ex-gay movement consists of people and organizations that encourage people to refrain from entering or pursuing same-sex relationships, to eliminate homosexual desires and to develop heterosexual desires, or to enter into a heterosexual relationship. Beginning with the founding of Love In Action and Exodus International in the mid-1970s, the movement saw rapid growth in the 1980s and 1990s before declining in the 2000s.
Harry Smith is an American retired television journalist who has worked for NBC News, MSNBC, and CNBC as a senior correspondent. He hosted the CBS News morning programs, The Early Show and its predecessor, CBS This Morning, for seventeen years. In July 2011, Smith left CBS News to become a correspondent for NBC News and the newsmagazine Rock Center with Brian Williams. He also served as an anchor for MSNBC, conducting daytime live coverage of breaking news and events since first appearing in November 2015.
Ted Arthur Haggard is an American Methodist pastor. Haggard is the founder and former pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and is a founder of the Association of Life-Giving Churches. He served as president of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) from 2003 until November 2006.
Beyond Blue is an Australian mental health and wellbeing support organisation. They provide support programs to address issues related to depression, suicide, anxiety disorders and other related mental illnesses.
Patricia A. Stryker is an American billionaire businessperson, philanthropist, and political activist. Stryker is the granddaughter of Homer Stryker, founder of Stryker Corporation, a medical technology company.
Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales was a Mexican-American boxer, poet, political organizer, and activist. He was one of many leaders for the Crusade for Justice in Denver, Colorado. The Crusade for Justice was an urban rights and Chicano cultural urban movement during the 1960s focusing on social, political, and economic justice for Chicanos. Gonzales convened the first-ever Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in 1968, which was poorly attended due to timing and weather conditions. He tried again in March 1969, and established what is commonly known as the First Chicano Youth Liberation Conference. This conference was attended by many future Chicano activists and artists. It also birthed the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, a pro-indigenist manifesto advocating revolutionary Chicano nationalism and self-determination for all Chicanos. Through the Crusade for Justice, Gonzales organized the Mexican American people of Denver to fight for their cultural, political, and economic rights, leaving his mark on history. He was honored with a Google Doodle in continued celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month in the United States on October 1, 2021.
Richard Glover is an Australian talk radio presenter, journalist and author. He is best known as presenter of the drive program on 702 ABC Sydney. His book Flesh Wounds was voted one of the top five books of 2015 by viewers of ABC television's The Book Club and was Readers Choice Award winner as Biography of the Year in the 2016 Australian Book Industry Awards.
Peterson Toscano is a playwright, actor, Bible scholar, blogger, podcaster, advocate against global warming, and gay rights activist. Toscano spent nearly two decades undergoing ex-gay treatment and conversion therapy before accepting his sexual orientation and coming out as a gay man. He has since shared his experiences internationally through various media outlets, especially plays. His talks and performances use comedy and storytelling to explore LGBTQ issues, religion, and climate change.
Ex-ex-gay people are those who formerly participated in the ex-gay movement in an attempt to change their sexual orientation to heterosexual, but who then later went on to publicly state they had a non-heterosexual sexual orientation.
The psychiatric survivors movement is a diverse association of individuals who either currently access mental health services, or who have experienced interventions by psychiatry that were unhelpful, harmful, abusive, or illegal.
Anthony Venn-Brown OAM is a former Australian evangelist in the Assemblies of God now and an author whose book, A Life of Unlearning describes his experience in Australia's first ex-gay program. He is also the Co-founder and previous Convenor of Freedom 2b which is a network for GLBTIQ people from Evangelical backgrounds. He is also the founder and CEO of Ambassadors & Bridge Builders International (ABBI).
Jared Schutz Polis is an American politician, entrepreneur, businessman, and philanthropist serving since 2019 as the 43rd governor of Colorado. He served one term on the Colorado State Board of Education from 2001 to 2007, and five terms as the United States representative from Colorado's 2nd congressional district from 2009 to 2019. He was the only Democratic member of the libertarian conservative Liberty Caucus, and was the third-wealthiest member of Congress, with an estimated net worth of $122.6 million. He was elected governor of Colorado in 2018 and reelected in a landslide in 2022.
The Q Christian Fellowship (QCF) is an ecumenical Christian ministry focused on serving lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, queer, and straight ally Christians. It was founded in 2001 as the Gay Christian Network (GCN) by Justin Lee and is currently administered from Denver, Colorado. It was re-branded in 2018 to better reflect the diversity of the ministry and community they serve. According to the re-branding documents, the 'Q' does not correlate to any particular word. Instead, it is just the letter 'Q' open for interpretation.
The Gill Foundation is an American philanthropic foundation based in Denver, Colorado. It is one of the funders of efforts to secure full equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ) people in the United States. The foundation's mission is "to secure equal opportunities for all Americans, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity and expression."
Michael Peter Fallon is a Colorado physician who was the 2010 Republican nominee to represent Colorado's 1st congressional district.
Homosexuals Anonymous (HA) is an ex-gay group which practices conversion therapy and describes itself as "a fellowship of men and women, who through their common emotional experience, have chosen to help each other live in freedom from homosexuality." HA regards homosexual orientation as "sexual brokeness" that may be "healed" through faith in Jesus Christ. In common with other Christian fundamentalist groups, HA regards heterosexuality as "the universal creation-norm". This approach has been criticized for stressing that a person must renounce homosexuality to be a Christian, and because there is no valid scientific evidence that sexual orientation can be changed.
Metropolitan State University of Denver is a public university in Denver, Colorado. It is located on the Auraria Campus, along with the University of Colorado Denver and the Community College of Denver, in downtown Denver, adjacent to Speer Boulevard and Colfax Avenue. MSU Denver had an enrollment of 16,345 undergraduate students in the fall of 2023.
Genevieve Fiore (1912–2002) was an American women's rights and peace activist, who was the founder, and served as the executive director, of the Colorado Division of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Her UNESCO Club was founded in the year the clubs were first conceived and was the third organization established in the world. In 1967 she was honored as one of the inductees for the Colorado Women of Achievement Award. She was knighted by Italy in 1975 receiving the rank of Cavaliere dell'Ordine della Stella d'Italia. In 1991, she was inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame for her many years of peace activism and work with women's rights issues.
