Whether it's Will Smith's freaky near-conversion or Tom Cruise's weird garbled video, it's not a great time to be a Scientologist.

Especially if you happen to be John Travolta. As a minor Scientologist, John Travolta has escaped a lot of the recent backlash against the church, but now his luck appears to have run out. Michael Pattinson, an ex-Scientologist who signed up at the same time as John Travolta, has claimed on video that Travolta joined the church to be 'cured of homosexuality' while adding that he knows one of John's ex-boyfriends.

The video of the interview is after the jump.

There are many reasons to want to join Scientology, be it because you want to be just like your hero Tom Cruise from The Last Samurai, because you know that if you progress far enough your wife will be artificially inseminated with dead man's spoo, because you hate psychiatrists so much that you want to kick all of them in the shins, or because you're gay and Scientology is the only thing that can cure you.

But be warned – if you do become a Scientologist, you'll be beaten and bashed at every turn. Look at Tom Cruise – being a Scientologist got him sacked from Paramount, it got books written about him, it's meant that embarrassing nine-minute videos of Tom Cruise's creepy cackling have been leaked onto the internet and it means that nobody is sure what sort of radiator Tom keep Katie Holmes chained to.

And now there's another book on Scientology about to be released – Hollywood Undercover by Ian Halperin, which chronicles his Scientology-joining adventures posing as a gay actor. While Halperin claims that during these adventures a Scientologist recruiter told him that Barack Obama and Condoleeza Rice "should not be allowed to run for office, they should be sweeping the office,” the real trouble is reserved for John Travolta.

For the book, Halperin interviewed Michael Pattinson, a gay ex-Scientologist who joined the church at the same time as John Travolta. Pattinson claims that they both only joined to try and cure themselves of homosexuality, and adds that he knows John's ex-lover Paul Baressi. Here's the video…

Now, how much of this is true and how much of this is embittered former Scientologist mouthing off is something we don't know. We just wish that Scientology was able to cure John Travolta of wanting to star in Be Cool. That would have been a win-win for everyone.