Let me be clear before I write another word: what Alan Chambers allegedly did is reprehensible. Full stop. No asterisk. A 14-year-old is a child he was willing to exploit. There is no ideological framework, no personal history of pain, no theological complexity that softens that. If the charges are true — and the Orange County Sheriff’s Office has painted a pretty detailed picture — Alan Chambers tried to prey on a child, and he should face the full weight of the law for it.
I say that as someone who has a 31-year history with Alan. We were in the same world. The same circles. The same strange ecosystem of shame and scripture and suppressed identity that called itself a “ministry.” I’ve already written about what his arrest did to my insides. This piece is about something different.
This piece is about the vultures.
Specifically, it’s about Peter LaBarbera.
I know Peter. Not in the casual, vaguely-aware-of-each-other way that people in overlapping cultural universes sometimes “know” each other. I mean I have stood in the same room as this man and argued with him. Face to face. More than once. Peter and I have had the kind of conversations that leave your jaw tight for the rest of the day — the kind where you realize the other person is not confused, not misinformed, not operating from a place of genuine pastoral concern. They are doing a job. And the job requires gay people to be dangerous.
So when Alan’s arrest hit the news cycle, I was not surprised to see Peter’s name attached to it like a barnacle (on X, of course). This is what he does. This is, in some sense, all he does.
Peter runs something called “Americans for Truth about Homosexuality,” which contains approximately zero truth. The Southern Poverty Law Center designated it an anti-LGBT hate group. For decades, Peter has built his entire identity around cataloguing and publicizing gay sexual behavior — attending LGBTQ+ events at Disney World, San Francisco Pride, and taking annual “intelligence-gathering” trips to Chicago’s International Mr. Leather competition, ostensibly for research. He is known to many LGBT activists as “Porno Pete” because he has admitted to keeping a large trove of gay male pornography — for “research” purposes.
I’ll just leave that there and let you sit with it for a moment.
The man who has spent decades warning the world that gay men are a danger to children has a well-documented, publicly acknowledged obsession with gay male sexuality that goes well beyond the requirements of his stated professional mission. I’m not a psychologist. I’m not going to tell you what that means. But I will say: people who live in glass houses should think very carefully before they start throwing rocks at other people’s closets.
And Peter is currently hurling boulders knocked loose by Alan.
Because here’s what he wants you to believe: that Alan Chambers’ arrest is evidence of something true and essential about gay men. That it confirms the story he’s been selling for thirty years. That the real danger to children comes from the community he has made his career vilifying.
This is not only wrong. It is the opposite of what the evidence shows.
Alan Chambers is not an advertisement for gay identity. Alan Chambers is an advertisement for what happens when you spend decades inside the evangelical ex-gay industrial complex and stay firmly entrenched in modern cultural conservatism — a movement Peter LaBarbera championed, promoted, and defended. Alan didn’t come out as a proud gay man and then allegedly do this. Alan spent years as the president of Exodus International, the flagship organization of a movement that told gay people God could make them straight if they just tried hard enough, prayed hard enough, suppressed hard enough.
That movement didn’t cure anyone. What it demonstrably, documentably did was create pressure cookers. It took men already drowning in shame, told them their desires were an abomination, gave them authority and platform and a public identity built entirely on suppression, and then acted shocked when the suppression failed in the worst possible ways.
But here’s the thing Peter really doesn’t want you to notice: this pattern isn’t unique to the ex-gay world. It runs through the entire conservative evangelical institution he calls home.
Nearly 400 Southern Baptist leaders — from youth pastors to top ministers — have pleaded guilty or been convicted of sex crimes against more than 700 victims since 1998, according to an investigation by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News. Seven hundred victims. From one denomination. And when senior leaders were made aware of allegations, too often they chose to hush them up.
In some cases, victims were pressured to forgive their abusers and told that if they spoke of the abuse again, the sin would become their own.
An epidemic of sexual abuse involving evangelical church leaders is hurting victims across the country. Even worse, churches far too often have covered up the abuse and made the worst excuses to sweep it under the church pew.
And yet I do not see Peter LaBarbera posting thread after thread demanding evangelical institutions answer for their documented, catalogued, court-verified pattern of harm to children. I do not see him calling for accountability in the denomination and movement he has spent his life defending.
Because that story doesn’t serve his narrative.
Sexual abuse in churches has long been thought of as a “Catholic disease,” but as recent events have shown, it is unchecked power and authority — not celibacy — that is the root of the problem. Read that again. Unchecked power. Authority. Secrecy. Shame as a management tool. That is the ecosystem that produced Alan Chambers. Not the gay community. Not Pride parades. Not inclusive curriculum or any of the other things Peter has built a career warning you about.
The evangelical church’s own culture of hierarchical authority, suppressed sexuality, institutional image-management, and theological cover for predators — that’s the system that keeps generating these stories.
I am not interested in defending Alan Chambers. The law will do what the law does.
What I am interested in is refusing to let Peter LaBarbera — a man I have looked in the eye and argued with, a man who collects gay pornography “for research” and takes annual trips to leather festivals for “professional purposes,” a man with enough closet to store a fleet of minivans — use Alan’s worst alleged moment to lie about who I am. Who my community is. Who my family is.
What happened — if the charges are true — is a story about what religious shame and unaccountable authority do to human beings over time.
That’s not a gay story, Peter.
That’s yours.
Randy Scobey is the author of WHY: A Memoir and writes Mugwump Ramblings every week at randyscobey.com.
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