Sinclair Rogers II was an American Christian pastor who was part of the ex-gay movement. In the late 1980s, Rogers was a President of Exodus International, and became one of the earliest noted personalities associated with the ex-gay movement during the early 1980s. He wrote a life-story testimony entitled "The Man in the Mirror," which was published in pamphlet form by Last Days Ministries.
Life and career
As a young man, Rogers was involved in the gay community and had physical relationships with men. He later identified as transsexual, living as a woman for a year and a half and beginning the process of arranging to have sex-change surgery. He credited his conversion to Christianity for igniting personal growth and a new-found security in gender identity which enabled a shift in his sexuality to heterosexual. He stated in his personal story, "My goal was not to be straight--it was God". He married a woman he met in a Bible-study group, began to identify as heterosexual, and they had a family together. In 1988, Rogers then 30, a married father, living in Florida, self-describing as a former homosexual and former transsexual, told a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times that the ex-gay movement was not anti-gay, "If you want to stay gay, that's your business,... But the bottom line is, you have a choice to overcome it. You can change." "The goal is God--not going straight. Straight people don't go to Heaven, redeemed people do." During Rogers' involvement in the mid to late 1980s, Exodus International had offices on five continents and declared that "all homosexual relationships are sinful." In conducting a speaking tour in 2008 Rogers’ message included, "Homosexuality is out of tune with religion; it is not what God planned for human sexuality." Writing in The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, gay rights advocateWayne Besen argued that during the AIDS epidemic "some men were literally scared straight - or at least into making the futile attempt," bringing a degree of momentary success to Exodus International. In 2016, The Daily Beast reported that Rogers's ministry had moved away from the ex-gay message many years earlier. Rogers is portrayed in the 1993 documentary One Nation Under God. Rogers and his wife Karen married in 1982 and had children and grandchildren. From 2012, he was a Teaching Pastor with the multi-campus LIFE Church & College in Auckland, New Zealand. Rogers died in Winter Park, Florida on April 19, 2020.
