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After his September 19th visit to Mr. P's, a gay bar in Washington, D.C., John Paulk, 37, was suspended as board chairman of Exodus International, the worldwide network of ex-gay ministries. His activities as manager of the "Homosexuality and Gender Division" at Rev. James Dobson's Focus on the Family were also curtailed.

Paulk, who was recognized at Mr. P's by patrons with ties to the Human Rights Campaign, initially told the press he had just dropped in to use the bathroom, not realizing that it was a gay bar. (Perhaps he was responding to the name.) When witnesses swore he had been at the bar for over 40 minutes, time enough for them to have summoned a photographer who caught the ex-gay poster boy on film, Paulk admitted he had deliberately entered a gay bar. The former drag queen may, in fact, have been returning to his sequined roots.

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Mr. P's, which bills itself as "Dupont's 1st and Friendliest," is located on P Street, not far from the Dupont Circle Metro station. An online guide to gay clubs featuring drag entertainment describes Mr. P's as an intimate, "very sleazy" bar with a small dance floor and a stage where, on Sundays, a cavalcade of professional female impersonators camps it up. On Tuesday evenings, local cross-dressing talent takes the spotlight. "It gets pretty wild," says manager Rick Levin.

John Paulk slipped into Mr. P's on a Tuesday night. It seems unlikely that he chose this club at random out of all the gay establishments near Dupont Circle.

Paulk's first foray into a gay bar, at age 18, made a lasting impression on him. (In Not Afraid to Change, his autobiography, he says he felt plunged into "a giant, surrealistic pinball machine.") In the 1980s, after a period of working as an $80-an-hour call boy for Dulcet Escort Services, the Ohio State dropout developed a champagne-blond, zaftig alter ego he called "Candi."

Paulk/Candi launched her three-year showbiz career at a Columbus, Ohio, drag bar called the Ruby Slipper. "I was worshipped by people in the lifestyle," he says wistfully in the notorious 1992 propaganda video The Gay Agenda. While making public appearances as Candi, Paulk developed a drinking problem and became a devoted user of LSD.

After God spoke to him one night on a disco dance floor, Paulk joined the Pentecostal ex-gay ministry Love in Action (LIA) and moved into one of its halfway houses. Soon after his July 1992 marriage to a self-designated former lesbian, Paulk appeared memorably in The Gay Agenda as one of its key talking heads.

This 20-minute chunk of agitprop, commissioned by the Oregon Citizens Alliance with the aid of a grant from the Christian Coalition, was produced by The Report, a Pentecostal anti-gay media project, with the advice and participation of Pentecostal ex-gays. Paulk and LIA director John Smid spoke on behalf of their supposedly reformed, newly heterosexual brethren. In the video, Paulk's tales of the horrors of bathhouse and tearoom sex are intercut with John Birch Society "expert" Stanley Monteith's clinical descriptions of such purportedly commonplace gay activities as rolling in shit.

Distributed nationwide by right-wing political activists, The Gay Agenda was used to panic voters against gay rights initiatives. It provided Paulk with his first taste of national notoriety, and his first taste of public scrutiny. In a piece that appeared in the April 21, 1993 Wall Street Journal, reporter Michael J. Ybarra elicited from Paulk an admission that "To say that we've arrived at this place of total heterosexuality-- that we're totally healed-- is misleading."

Totally healed or not, John and Anne Paulk crossed over from appearances on Christian Right talk shows to stints on Oprah and 60 Minutes. In the aftermath of a much-reviled ex-gay ad campaign in major newspapers ("Toward Hope and Healing for Homosexuals"), the Paulks appeared on the July 28, 1998 cover of Newsweek and were profiled in Time.

John Paulk's escapade at Mr. P's was in the tradition of Exodus International cofounders Michael Bussee and the late Gary Cooper, who in 1979 left their wives for each other. It occurred less than a month after Love in Action spokesperson Wade Richards announced his decision to embrace homosexuality, and two weeks before it was revealed that Matthew J. Glavin, CEO of the anti-gay Southeastern Legal Foundation, had recently been arrested for fondling the crotch of a plainclothes federal officer at the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area.

If Paulk decides to make a comeback as Candi, would Mr. P's hire him as a performer? "I don't pick the entertainers," says Rick Levin, "but I kind of doubt it."