It was around [the time of Caitlyn Jenner’s Diane Sawyer interview] that I was put in contact with an NCAA coach who had known Jenner for years. He told me that he had been in contact with his old friend since the separation and that Bruce had confided what finally led to his decision to go public. “I couldn’t be part of the Kardashian circus anymore,” he said. “I have to be real.” It’s similar to the language that he used on the Diane Sawyer special when he said, “This whole thing, the one real, true story in the family was the one I was hiding, and nobody knew about it.”
The coach also told me that Bruce had revealed that Kris had influenced him to suppress his desire to be a woman for all those years. “She told him he should pray,” he reveals, “that church would help heal him.” This sounded to me suspiciously like conversion therapy, though I’m not entirely sure whether the word “heal” was used by Kris or by the coach. Still, the idea of using religion to suppress homosexuality has a troubling history associated with evangelical Christianity, especially during the 80s and 90s, when the idea gained momentum in various Christian ministries throughout the United States.
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In a 2015 article about the practice, the Atlantic Monthly cites the example of a girl named Julie Rodgers to illustrate how such therapy typically works. “After she came out as a lesbian in high school, [Rogers’s] conservative Christian parents urged her to join a ministry in Texas to help make her straight. Ministry leaders promised her that if she continued praying, reading the Bible, attending meetings, and of course, refusing to identify as gay, her sexual orientation would eventually change and she could even marry a man.”
Evangelical Christians were fond of citing the supposed successes in which homosexuals underwent conversion or “reparative” therapy and thereafter labeled themselves “ex-gays.” Kris Jenner was of course an early adherent of evangelical Christianity and attended prayer sessions led by Pat Boone, who has been regularly accused of homophobia. In the 2008 Kentucky election, for example, he recorded a robocall for Senator Ernie Fletcher, who was facing a tough Democratic opponent: “Now, as an American and a Christian I am very conservative about the upcoming governor’s election,” Boone said on the calls. “Ernie Fletcher is a typical Kentuckian; he’s worked long and hard for the state, its people, and its traditions. And, of course, he has come under attack by political opponents and now he faces a man who wants his job, who has consistently supported every homosexual cause: same-sex marriage, gay adoption, special rights to gay, lesbian, bisexual, even transgender individuals.”
Before she founded her own church, Kris was a regular attendee of the Calvary Community Church in Westlake, California. The church has long been associated with homophobic positions. As recently as 2012, the church leadership fired a member of Calvary’s executive team, Kevin McCloskey, when he came out as gay. He later wrote an essay for the Advocate about what happened when he revealed that he was dating a man.
Kris and Bruce Jenner with their two young daughters, Kylie (left) and Kendall (right), in 2000 at a Disney Premiere. Scott Nelson/AFP/Getty Images Reprinted with permission of Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
“They were shocked to learn about my sexual orientation and were genuinely concerned for my family and me and all we were going through,” he wrote. “‘Even if I wanted to keep you,’ my senior pastor said, ‘you know it would never be accepted by the congregation.’ I knew he was right. Our church is located in a very conservative, family-oriented enclave of Southern California, with very few openly gay people.”
When Kris Jenner sought a pastor to run her new church, she chose a former pastor from that same church, Pastor Brad Johnson. Before he served at Calvary, Johnson received his training under another evangelical minister, Rick Warren, when Johnson served as a teaching pastor at Saddleback Church in Orange County. Warren came under fire when he gave the invocation at President Obama’s 2009 inauguration, and it was later revealed that he had posted a YouTube video supporting California’s Proposition 8, the referendum to outlaw gay marriage in that state. More controversially, he was said to have been an early supporter of Uganda’s infamous bill to make homosexuality a capital crime, and in March 2008, he was reported to have traveled to the country and told the Ugandan Church that gay rights is “not a civil rights issue,” because homosexuality is not to be tolerated. “We shall not tolerate this aspect at all,” he allegedly said. While he would maintain that he never supported the Ugandan bill and would call it “un-Christian,” his earlier statements gave a fairly good idea of his views on homosexuality.
Apart from her religious affiliations with a virulently homophobic church, there is no evidence of Kris Jenner herself ever taking a stand on gay rights. A woman who knew her and Bruce for more than twenty years recently told me that she doubts Kris is homophobic. “It’s not so much a question of Kris having a problem with gay people. She knows plenty. But you have to understand the circles that she and Bruce traveled in. Neither of them, let’s face it, are very sophisticated. She was never comfortable with the liberal, secular Hollywood crowd. She had lots of opportunities to hobnob with those people, but she preferred the Giffords [talk show host Kathie Lee and her late broadcaster husband Frank] and the Garveys. Quite conservative, not very well educated. She and Bruce were Republicans, but not the right-wing, fire-breathing, bigot variety. This was California, after all. So I think she just didn’t really understand it, even if she really knew that Bruce had those tendencies way back when. She couldn’t wrap her head around that kind of thing. Gay people, maybe, but transsexuals? They may as well have been aliens. She wouldn’t have been comfortable with it. I really don’t know if her religious views entered into it. Bruce actually went to church more than she did.”
From “Kardashian Dynasty” by Ian Halperin, © 2016 by Ian Halperin. Reprinted with permission of Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
