10 min readLike the dozens of other Christian anti-porn groups that exist, Dangerous Men United, often just referred to as Dangerous Men, treats pornography as if it were as addictive and damaging as heroin, though scientific research has not backed up these claims. The only way to free oneself from the clutches of porn watching, according to the group, is complete abstinence.
To achieve such a state, Dangerous Men members are sometimes encouraged to install a Christian anti-porn software called Covenant Eyes, which monitors a person’s web browsing and computer use. If Covenant Eyes catches a user watching jiggling breasts or thrusting genitalia, a blurred-out image is sent to the user’s “accountability partner.” This software is so widespread in Christian anti-porn circles that even Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is said to use it. His accountability partner is his son, a detail that became scandalous when it was revealed.
In this edition of the Secret Lives of Men, Esquire spoke to Ryan Lee, 27, of Denton, Texas, the former leader of a Dangerous Men chapter. He regrets the amount of time he spent obsessing over, in his words, “jacking off,” because it kept him from discovering who he really was.
Ryan, 27, Texas
It would happen like this: I’d get an email at 4:15 p.m. that said my roommate was looking at porn—along with a pixelated image of penetration.
We were both members of an accountability group at Southwest Baptist University called Dangerous Men. In fact, he’s the one who introduced me to it. If you were in this group, you were not supposed to watch porn. At all. Everyone in the group had an accountability partner, and you’d have to share your masturbation habits with them. Whenever you were tempted, you were supposed to text your accountability partner and be like, Dude, I’m horny right now. I need you to distract me.
My roommate was my accountability partner, and I was his. While I relied on parental controls, he installed a program called Covenant Eyes onto his computer. The program records your screen, and if you ever watch something that the program thinks is porn—even a YouTube video featuring a person showing too much skin—it takes a blurred-out screenshot and sends it to your accountability partner. Even pastors had Covenant Eyes on their work computers, which were often kept in the house of the Lord. Didn’t they have enough self-control not to jack off at work?
On one level, I knew this porn accountability system was bizarre, but I told myself that I was joining Dangerous Men to be closer in my walk with Christ. The school saw pornography as a roadblock; the group would be my way to power on through. I really thought Dangerous Men had my best interests at heart, but I was brainwashed. If anything, talking about porn and masturbation that much backfired; it made us want to watch it and jack off more.
Plus, there was another complication. Ever since I was a kid, I knew that I was gay.
My conservative parents wanted a classically masculine son. They’d casually throw out homophobic and transphobic slurs. They also raised me in an evangelical church with a Righteous Gemstones vibe. The pastor wore skinny jeans, and the church had a rock band.
After I graduated high school, I went to Grand Canyon University in Arizona, but it didn’t feel like the ideal place for me. During the summer after my first year, I worked at a Christian camp in Missouri. That summer camp made me feel like I wasn’t doing Christianity correctly at GCU, as if my group of friends at school weren’t Christian enough. Some of my camp friends went to Southwest Baptist University and suggested that their school might be a better fit for someone like me who was serious about their faith.
I toured SBU, and it just felt right. The college was pretty small, about 1,200 students. Its governing body was the Southwest Baptist Church. The church didn’t allow anyone to be openly gay. You had to sign a moral code of conduct that said you can’t engage in same-sex behavior. If you violated it, you could get kicked off campus.
I was still in the closet; I hadn’t even kissed a boy yet. But I saw being gay as a problem and tried to solve it by going to counseling. Basically, I enrolled myself in conversion therapy. Every two weeks, the counselor would try to rid me of my “same-sex attraction,” as the Baptists called it. It wasn’t very helpful. The counselor was really focused on trying to find a cause for my homosexuality that wasn’t there, probing my background to discover if I was sexually assaulted as a kid.
After my first year at SBU, I worked at a summer camp with my roommate, who was also my best friend. We were talking about what sins we struggled with. Porn and being gay were two of mine, which is kind of a double whammy at a Baptist university. I was more concerned about the “being gay” problem but wanted to work on my porn watching as well. That’s when he told me about Dangerous Men.
There were ten branches on campus, with three to eight members in each one, and we’d hold meetings at our houses, dorm rooms, or unoccupied classrooms. Each branch followed a 12-week program centered on a workbook. Week by week, we’d go through each chapter of the book, all of which seemed to focus on why lust is bad and how we could prevent ourselves from watching porn and masturbating. Then we’d have a confession part of the group where we’d talk about the last time we jacked off and what we could do to prevent that from happening in the future. It was very similar to Bible study—if Bible study were about jacking off.
The group treated porn, masturbation, and same-sex attraction as an addiction. We talked about jacking off as if it were heroin. They were like, “What are your triggers?” And we had to identify them. Some guys couldn’t be alone in a room without masturbating to porn; others couldn’t watch movies with hot people in them.
We were also supposed to avoid being in our dorm rooms alone. I was doing theater, so I would have rehearsals every night. My roommate would have a lot of time to be in the dorm room by himself, and he would always watch porn. So at some point, I was like, “Bro, you just shouldn’t be home alone in the room,” and he was like, “Yeah, 100 percent.” We came up with a solution in which he gave me his room key so he couldn’t access the dorm when I was in rehearsal. He was supposed to go to the student union to study. But instead of following the plan, he made a secret copy of the key.
Since I wasn’t just struggling with porn but also with same-sex attraction, my restrictions went beyond porn. I wasn’t supposed to watch movies or TV shows with hot guys in them. That was one of my major triggers. In the group, I talked about how if I was watching something with a sexy shirtless man in it, I should stop watching it, because I would get too horned up.
I watched John Tucker Must Die with a group of friends. And there’s a scene when the guy who’s playing John Tucker is shirtless and in a thong. I remember thinking it was hot, but I didn’t want to say that. So I said to the group, “That’s a trigger for me. Seeing a shirtless dude is a trigger.”
Any time I was going to watch a movie or TV show, I would check this website called Common Sense Media. I’d type in the movie title, and it would tell me exactly what kind of language is in the movie and what kind of nudity. I’d make sure that there were no sex scenes or nudity that would trigger me. If it said that the movie showed a hot dude’s ass or bare chest, I would not watch it, or I’d at least try not to watch it. Naturally, the Aquaman movie was off the table.
But I couldn’t always help myself. I would lie, cheat, steal to watch these movies and gaze at porn. I would go into the cover of night and make sure my roommate wasn’t in the room. And then I would tell the other members of the group about my porn watching afterward, in our next meeting. I’d confess things like “I know that my roommate has a class at three o’clock, so I go in my room and I jack off then.” We talked about when we jacked off, what our mindset was, and what we could have done differently.
It wasn’t just me the program wasn’t working for. Nobody was incredibly successful. Some people managed to refrain from masturbating for ten days, which isn’t that impressive. Whoever had the longest streak without masturbating would get this proverbial golden penis award. It was odd.
After being in a group for six months, I started leading my own group. I like talking to people and being in charge. I recruited two other students majoring in Bible-related fields, and we met in one of our college classrooms.
During group meetings, I would recite an anti same-sex-attraction prayer that was in the Dangerous Men book: “I renounce all homosexual thoughts, urges, or drives, as well as any bondage of Satan, that have perverted my relationships with others. I announce that I am free to relate to the opposite sex and my own sex in the way that You intended. In Jesus’ name. Amen.” I felt incredibly gross and disappointed while chanting, because I felt like I was failing at being straight.
I was eventually invited to a separate meeting of Dangerous Men leaders run by a licensed therapist. The vibe was somewhere between Bible study and group therapy. I talked about how I was struggling with same-sex attraction, and the therapist told me in front of the group that my problem was worse than everybody else’s. I felt like a zoo animal, a freak show. Everyone was just staring at me, like I was this weird being that they’d never heard of before. I didn’t understand why we were ranking each other’s sins.
Soon after that meeting, out of fear, I started dating a woman. We got serious. Clearly I didn’t have the balls to put my discomfort into action.
At the end of the Dangerous Men program, we went to a random retreat center in Missouri, to meet with the writer of the self-help anti-porn book our group was based on.
On the way to the retreat, I ended up in a car with a therapist who started asking me questions like “How do you know when you’re attracted to a dude? And what do you like about guys?” And I remember thinking, Have you never heard of a gay person?
Once we got to the retreat center, we picked our bunk beds and listened to lectures on masturbating and porn by the 50-something man who wrote the book on which the Dangerous Men group was based. He’s the creepiest man I’ve ever met. He told lewd jokes that were kind of gross. He tried to do a form of Christian locker-room talk by saying shit or damn to seem cool and edgy. It was his way of getting a group of straight men to talk about their feelings and make them feel comfortable. Having 75 other guys in a room who also struggled with porn made each of us feel less like outliers. Not that we talked about porn the whole time; sometimes we played football or Ping-Pong.
After the retreat, I started researching what scripture said about being gay, and it seemed like scripture didn’t say it was a sin. That’s when I really started questioning the church’s doctrine. But I remained within the faith. And then I did the thing I thought I was supposed to: I married the woman I was dating. After all, she was my “college sweetheart,” right?
A switch flipped in me when one of my friends came out as nonbinary. I recognized that my friend is a good person, so their life choices can’t be wrong. Being trans or nonbinary cannot be this fucking death sentence of eternal damnation.
I think that helped me realize that I was queer in some way, and it was okay. I really, really tried to convince myself that I was like 95 percent gay and the other 5 percent was only for my wife, like she was the only woman for me. I always told myself in my brain that if she died, I was gonna date a man.
About a year into our marriage, during couples therapy, she came out as a lesbian. Then I came clean. Once we both realized that we were gay and that we should let ourselves be gay, I decided not to pretend to be a Christian. If my ex-wife hadn’t had the guts to come out, we would have both been trapped in that marriage forever, never being fully fulfilled by each other and always being vaguely religious.
We separated three years ago, then I went through a Grindr phase. I was trying to figure out who I was, because during college, when I was supposed to be discovering myself, I was busy being someone I wasn’t.
My divorce was finalized last year. My ex and I are on great terms. I am so happy for her. She has a girlfriend. She’s living in New York City. There are no hard feelings.
I’m still dealing with shame about being gay. I have a really weird relationship to PDA. It’s still not something I’m comfortable with.
But I did meet a guy when I was directing a show at a local theater. One of my actors was like, “Hey, I have this friend. I think you’d get along with him.” We’ve been dating for a while now. But I’m still not fully comfortable. When I’m on a date with him, I feel weird about it. I’m worried we’re being stared at. That’s just something that I never felt when I was with my ex-wife. But I do have a healthier relationship with porn now than I did when I was in college. I no longer talk about it all the time.
What I’ve learned is that nobody should tell you that it’s wrong to be yourself. Christianity is not worth it, and anyway, the queer community is stronger than the community I felt in church. Life gets better, it really does—even though that sounds like a phrase stitched on a fucking throw pillow.
