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The real Michael Glatze is NO longer a pastor, now lives in San Francisco


Hollywood trailers for the currently-screening I Am Michael movie declare it’s the true story of a gay activist who became an ex-gay evangelical pastor, but in real life the man the movie is based on said he is not ex-gay nor an evangelical pastor. He legally changed his last name and moved back to San Francisco, the gay capital where he used to publish sexy pre-twink teen magazines.

Michael Glatze (played by James Franco) has rejected evangelicalism as fiercely as he once rejected his LGBTQ identity. On his recently defunct blog Glatze hid his identity from his audience by changing his last name to Elliott before he published harsh condemnations of evangelicals as “heretics” and mocked what he calls “the evangelical gospel.”

But the former twink-turned-pastor is not ready to publicly come out either as an ex-evangelical or as queer. He avoids labels, though he said he is comfortable being called bisexual. So far he remains in his (childless) marriage since the camera-friendly wedding in 2013. It’s hard to tell if the picturesque wedding helped sell Hollywood on making his movie, starring Franco and directed by Justin Kelly.

In the movie version of his life, Michael was living his happily ever after in God’s country, rural Wyoming in a single-wide trailer they called the church parsonage. Now he is in his very urban apartment near the intersection of Bush and Stockton streets where you can find a liquor store at the corner and gay bars just a hop, skip and a jump away, as his rural evangelical congregants might have expected in “Sin” Francisco.

He’s happy there, he says, and added he has many gay friends. Michael does not wish to talk about his sexuality. Gay men who wed women rarely do. Though few go so far as to legally change their name. But Michael (Glatze) Elliott, has never been one to follow the usual path. He became a born-again Christian in 2003, then a Buddhist a few years later, left the Buddhists, went back to the Buddhists, became a Mormon, then an evangelical, and now looking into possibly joining the Catholic church. Time will tell.

http://skippingtothepiccolo.com/2017/02/26/james-franco-movies-true-ex-gay-not-ex-gay/

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He seems to be a very spiritually driven person, gotta give him that.

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