Crisis in Masculinity (ISBN 089107337X)

No thank you.:
While Ms. Payne is an icon in the ex-gay community, I have a real problem with the idea of a woman writing about masculinity. The very fact that she is a woman makes her uniquely unqualified to write on this subject just as men are uniquely unqualified to write a similar book about femininity. Instead of this book, there are several books written by men that I could recommend, such as Alan Medinger's Growth Into Manhood and Gene Getz's The Measure of a Man.

Crisis In Psychology:
Read this book if you are seeking to solidify an unhealthy perspective on homosexuality. This book IS NOT FOR ME! Reading this takes me back to a time in my life when Catholic guilt had me caged in. Leanne Payne mixes up her theories with religious passive aggressive judgment as much as possible. As a gay person, repressive interpretations of the Bible have never worked for me. Repression and calling gay sexuality a sin (or coming from "darkness" as she puts it) causes people to feel less than and to be hard on themselves and make decisions about their lives from that place. Acceptance is the healthiest solution towards a healthy lifestyle, which is what we all want. Someone needs to come up with another book that studies the world's "crisis in masculinity", I do believe that it is an important subject to study, especially with how many gay/bisexual people there are these days. Something is happening that we definitely need to pay attention to. But, Leanne Payne is all over the place and her arguments are very simple minded and slanted in a Biblical manor. I think that her book should better be called "Crisis in Psychology", because it is obvious that is what she is experiencing as she straddles the tracks between vast human psychology and that of strict religious belief. Incidentally, for all your gay people out there who are struggling with religious upbringings, you have got to realize that there is more to life than your religion you have been brought up with. A lot of the ideas that you have learned are not exactly correct. God doesn't necessarily want you to go to hell. Anyway, not to go off about it, but, there is an entire world of religion/spiritual methods out there; they are all talking about and trying to translate the same idea of God and spirituality and our place in the world. So, if you don't fit into your Christian/Catholic guilt-oriented religion, try another one (buddhism is really awesome!) You aren't going to go to hell for studying about another religious belief, what do you think Priests do when they are studying at the seminary? After years of growth, my spirituality doesn't relate or agree with Leanne Payne's and I'm a pretty spiritual person (believe it or not, I was an alter boy for the Pope in 1987 in Carmel, CA.) Find your spirituality from a place of no guilt, learn to purely love yourself as a child of the light of God. Don't pay attention to any attempts to hold you down in a cage of interpretation and punishment. Interpret your own spiritual being, but let yourself be free to be who you are, God loves you just as you are, BELIEVE ME. If you question your sexuality, then question it, but don't question because someone told you that God has a problem with it. Homosexuality is as natural as heterosexuality, and don't let anyone tell you differently. Take a step right now towards the freedom to be yourself and to create your own relationship between God and your sexuality. Be real, this book is repressive and unauthentic.

Affirmation of the male role model:
I found this very interesting and got a whole new insight on homosexuality. The male role models were not there during the time that the male children needed to be affirmed by their human father.

A vital book for our generation:
Leanne Payne's book is a vital message for our confused generation. She tells the story of several men whose lives have been affected by their lack of a strong inner sense of masculine identity. By listening to God and coming into His healing presence, each of them was freed to recognise their own manhood, and to accept it. We live in an age where divergent sexual "identities" are promulgated as solutions to people's inner crises. Yet the truth each of us needs is that God is our Father. Everyone of us is feminine in comparison with the strong masculinity of God. Yet also, each man among us derives his identity as a man from God and each woman also derives her sense of femininity from the Father. When God created Adam, he was both male and female, and God drew Eve from within Adam. So God is "the One from whom all Fatherhood derives its name". Homosexuality and lesbianism are conditions men and women find themselves in, but they are not the will of God. They are, like all of us, in urgent need of the healing presence of God. There is no room for judgment of one by another. All of us shrink in one degree or another from healing, and need it so much. I am refreshed by the courage and honesty of Ms Payne in stating, against the potential wrath of the current world system, that heterosexuality is God's true pattern for humanity. To relinquish the fight for truth and to fail to offer a healing alternative to people struggling for freedom is - as Ms Payne writes elsewhere - to abandon people to "the dark demons in the blood". The above is my personal reading of, and reaction to, Crisis in Masculinity.

Could we achieve the same with NLP?:
(Some qualifiers/context: I am male, not gay, ambivalent about religion and otherwise reasonably "normal"). I read the book trying to discount the strong Christian slant. What interested me most about the book is that the author effectively uses (currently) established NLP techniques during her sessions. Note that at the time of writing (1985) NLP was still in its infancy. The methods described use Jesus Christ as the primary resource in resolving issues about self-concept. This should be quite effective with Christians. The question is whether much the same could be achieved by the direct use of the appropriate NLP techniques. This will probably be much more acceptable to people who are less religious.