[7] Christopher Melilo, Colin Cook and Douglas McIntyre, who all claimed to have struggled with same-sex attractions,[8] founded HA in 1980 with financial support from the Seventh-day Adventist denomination.

[2] HA was founded in 1980 by Colin Cook (a Seventh-day Adventist pastor who was defrocked in 1974 for having sex with a man in his church)[9][12] and ex-gay Douglas McIntyre.

[1] Cook founded the Quest Learning Center in Reading, Pennsylvania, as a ministry of the Seventh-day Adventist Church to "help people find freedom from homosexuality."

[13] McIntyre (who, when growing up, identified as gay) said he founded HA based on his belief that "homosexuality is not something you're born with, that it's a spin-off of a trauma that occurs during childhood.

Counseling sessions with Cook included giving his clients nude massages, ostensibly to desensitize them to male–male contact[16] and homosexual desires;[15] however, this was counter-productive since counselees began having sexual encounters with each other.

[13] Cook admitted in a 1987 interview that he "fell into the delusion" that such actions were a legitimate part of his HA counseling activities, stating: "I allowed myself to hug and hold my counselees thinking I was helping them...

Blair reports a host of problems with such counselors, including the sexual abuse of clients;[2] Haldeman describes Cook as "the most notable of such ministers".

In 1993 he moved to Colorado and returned to counseling, which ended in 1995 when The Denver Post reported Cook was engaging in phone sex and asking "patients to bring homosexual pornography to sessions so that he could help desensitize them against it".

[11] One analysis of the 14 steps commented on the "alleged generosity" of the HA approach, noting that while both approaches emphasize avoidance of undesired behaviors, "AA groups accept the person along with their problems, [whereas] Homosexuals Anonymous stresses that the person is guilty of the sin of homosexuality, must admit it, renounce it, and then accept heterosexuality as a necessary condition to becoming a Christian.

"[28] One critic of HA is Cindi Love, the executive director of Soulforce, who states that "the message that homosexuality can be 'repaired' doesn't just ruin lives – it ends them".

[21] Wayne Besen, former spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign and founder of Truth Wins Out, has argued that the GLBT community needs to challenge the propaganda presented at ex-gay events including those run by HA.

[17] In Julie Scott Jones' study of Christian fundamentalism, Being the Chosen, HA, Exodus International and NARTH are described as organizations that "particularly target teenagers' burgeoning sexuality, and feed into a wider fundamentalist view that all forms of 'sexual immorality' are destroying the moral fabric of the nation".