Smash hit

The first full day requires us to pick our classes. I sign up for “Journey Through Lesbianism”, a workshop addressing possible factors contributing to the development of lesbianism. These include, apparently, “unhealthy relationships with family members and peers, abuse, shame and self-hatred”. Loneliness, the media, and being deprived of affection as a baby in a hospital incubator will later be added to the list.

The lesson starts ominously. “What a bunch of fine-looking ladies we have here today,” the wiry, bespectacled lecturer says to the sullen women squeezed into tight rows of chairs.

“We're dealing with attraction here, and you're bunching us all up together?” snorts one redhead, before being calmed down by the woman sitting next to her. “I'm sorry,” she apologises, “but it has been an intense day.” It is 10.45am.

Next up is “Overcoming Guilt and Shame”, led by a sad, wearied and overweight woman named Bonnie who used to be a probation officer. “I still have same-sex attraction,” she sighs at one point, “but it's like elevator music to me now. I just don't pay attention to it.” A strange practical exercise follows, involving picking derogatory name tags out of a hat. A handsome youth with an American smile sticks “defiled” to his polo shirt. How this helps his internet porn addiction is anyone's guess, although he generously cedes that “we're all sexually broken”.

The timetable is packed. A class on “True Femininity”, which concludes cryptically that true femininity “is the ability to receive”, would probably have reduced Germaine Greer to tears. Another features an Angela Lansbury lookalike who manages to link her gay ex-husband's death from an Aids-related illness to his father's links with the “Serbian mafia”.

Some of my classmates are veteran Exodus followers attending the annual conference for a “willpower top-up”, like recovering alcoholics going to AA meetings; others are boot camp virgins. Everyone has paid $600 (£340) for the privilege. Chatting before his “Breaking the Myth of Masculinity” class, Riccardo, a doctor from Illinois, explains that he has come here for “encouragement and moral support” after tiring of anonymous encounters with other men.

Each evening, a roll-call of “former homosexuals” hold up their husbands and wives like kitemarks of their newfound heterosexuality. We are told repeatedly that marriage is evidence of healing. Stereotypes are the ex-gay currency, and the heterosexual ideal is practically ringed by a white picket fence. Christine Sneeringer, the compere, jokes that her recovery is going so well that she has given up car mechanics (“it trashes my nails”). Exodus vice-president Randy Thomas, on the other hand, delights the crowd with his campness: “Just because I stopped being gay 16 years ago doesn't mean I can't be fabulous,” he says. Clearly, gaydar has yet to be invented on planet Exodus.

It could be comical were it not for the teenager shaking in the corner, and the man sobbing as he prayed. Excusing herself from a session, Michelle goes to her room and cries. “I don't think I want to willpower right through it,” she confides before going to sleep. “Where's the change in that?” Later I find her surfing the website of the protesters who have been picketing the campus. They are led by Wayne Besen, an ex-gay-camp-attendee-turned-campaigner (an ex-ex-gay, so to speak).

In a furtive conversation by the car park, one protester, Sara, tells me: “We just want them to know that you can be gay and happy - and that there is a supportive community out there.”

“I've been through all the arguments, like ‘If it's love, how can it be wrong?'” says Michelle the next day. “And if I'm being honest, I'd love to be openly gay and have a completely satisfying relationship with God. But I don't know how that can be done. All I know is that it makes more sense to listen to the God who created the Universe than to my puny human emotions.”

By day four, my appetite for psychotherapy is waning. I drag myself to a seminar entitled “Walking Away from the Lesbian Mentality”. On finding that the class leader is an aggressively happy woman with a guitar who sings about hating her mother, I want to do just that. Yet, putting aside the draining therapy sessions, it's almost easy to believe that this is simply a happy Christian summer camp. You can even play wargames in the woods - perhaps it's a way of completing that holy trinity of US obsessions: God, guns and gays.

Back in her room, Michelle has had an epiphany. “I've realised that I've been looking for satisfaction in all the wrong places - food, drugs, sex,” she says, firmly. “My homosexuality is just one of many things to come from this place of pain, and all it gave me was a heart full of ache.