Baptist minister 'took ten-day holiday with male prostitute'
A Baptist minister and leading anti-gay activist faced the ruination of his career yesterday after being photographed returning from a European holiday with a male prostitute.
George Rekers, who sits on the board of a national organisation dedicated to changing the sexuality of gay men and lesbians, hired a companion from a website called Rentboy.com that offers clients a wide range of choices, from “rentboy” and “sugar daddy” to “masseur”.
Dr Rekers said he took the prostitute on the ten-day trip last month to London and Madrid as a travel assistant after a stint in hospital. “I had surgery,” he said when approached this week by the Miami New Times. “I can’t lift luggage. That’s why I hired him.” Photographs of the pair emerging from Miami international airport last month show the older man pushing their suitcases on a trolley.
Dr Rekers’s companion has been identified as a 20-year-old Puerto Rican whose entry on the Rentboy.com website gives his name as “Geo”. The site says that he is “sensual”, “wild” and “up for anything”. It also describes him as “versatile”, with a “nice ass”.
Contacted this week by reporters in Miami, he said he was surprised by Dr Rekers’s claim to have realised he was a prostitute only halfway through their holiday.
Geo’s profile on Rentboy.com is a bewildering mix of the banal and the specific. “I’m a college guy, masculine, educated, really easy going,” he says. “Great to get along with, can hold a conversation.” He lists stripping and go-go dancing among his talents. “I will do anything you say as long as you ask,” he promises.
Dr Rekers, who co-founded America’s most powerful Christian lobbying group, has testified as an expert in favour of bans on gay adoption in Florida and Arkansas. He has also written numerous books on homosexuality as a curable condition, including Growing Up Straight: What Families Should Know about Homosexuality.
Gay rights advocates called yesterday for him to step down from the board of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (Narth), for which he lectures across the world. He is also closely linked with the Washington-based Family Research Council, which he founded with Dr James Dobson in 1983.
In an e-mailed response to questions about the European trip, he said: “My hero is Jesus Christ who loves even the culturally despised people, including sexual sinners and prostitutes. Like Jesus Christ, I deliberately spend time with sinners with the loving goal to try to help them.”
Dr Rekers also told a blogger who reached him via Facebook: “If you talk with my travel assistant . . . you will find I spent a great deal of time sharing scientific information on the desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse, and I shared the gospel of Jesus Christ with him in great detail.”
In 2006 Ted Haggard resigned as a leader of the National Association of Evangelicals after a male prostitute claimed to have had sex with him for three years.
Ray Ashburn, a California state senator with a long record of opposing gay rights, was arrested and charged with drunk-driving this year while leaving a gay nightclub in Sacramento. In 1988 Jimmy Swaggart, one of America’s most successful televangelists, was found to have had regular paid sex with prostitutes.
Do as I say ...
• The televangelist Pat Robertson caused outrage when he said that the Haiti earthquake was caused by “a pact to the Devil” sworn by Haitians when they became independent of French rule
• Matt Baker, a Texan minister, was convicted of faking his wife’s suicide in 2009 so that he could have a relationship with a member of his church
• Kent Hovind, a creationist minister with his own dinosaur theme park in Florida, was sentenced to ten years in jail for falsely declaring bankruptcy and threatening investigators in 2006 Hovind paid employees in cash, claiming that they were all workers of God and therefore exempt from taxes
• The TV minister Jim Bakker shocked viewers of his television series when it emerged that he had had an affair with a secretary, paying her off with church funds. He was jailed in 1989 for fraud after paying himself and his wife, Tammy Faye, below, millions of dollars in church funds and concocting a timeshare scam at his theme park in South Carolina
Sources: ABC; AP; BBC; Time; Times archives