My So-Called Ex-Gay Life
A deep look at the fringe movement that just lost its only shred of scientific support.
TW: Mentions of suicide, severe depression, and abuse.
Early in my freshman year of high school, I came home to find my mom sitting on her bed, crying. She had snooped through my e-mail and discovered a message in which I confessed to having a crush on a male classmate.
“Are you gay?” she asked. I blurted out that I was.
“I knew it, ever since you were a little boy.”
Her resignation didn’t last long. My mom is a problem solver, and the next day she handed me a stack of papers she had printed out from the Internet about reorientation, or “ex-gay,” therapy. I threw them away. I said I didn’t see how talking about myself in a therapist’s office was going to make me stop liking guys. My mother responded by asking whether I wanted a family, then posed a hypothetical: “If there were a pill you could take that would make you straight, would you take it?”
I admitted that life would be easier if such a pill existed. I hadn’t thought about how my infatuation with boys would play out over the course of my life. In fact, I had always imagined myself middle-aged, married to a woman, and having a son and daughter-didn’t everyone want some version of that?
“The gay lifestyle is very lonely,” she said.
She told me about Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, a clinical psychologist in California who was then president of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), the country’s largest organization for practitioners of ex-gay therapy. She said Nicolosi had treated hundreds of people who were now able to live “normal” lives.
I read through the papers my mom had salvaged from the trash. They were interviews with Nicolosi’s patients, who talked about how therapy helped them overcome depression and feel “comfortable in their masculinity.” The testimonials seemed genuine, and the patients, grateful. I agreed to fly with my father to Los Angeles from our small town on the Arizona-Mexico border for an initial consultation...
Source has the entire article.
To provide a quick timeline for the TL;DR crowd:
In 1973, Dr. Robert Spitzer led the charge to remove homosexuality from the DSMV, thus declassifying it as a mental illness.
In 2001, the same Dr. Robert Spitzer published a study that said certain highly-motivated individuals can change their sexual orientation.
From 2001 to now, anti-gay groups have used this study as scientific evidence that being gay is a choice and can be fixed with conversion therapy. This idea has become a cornerstone of the anti-gay movement, and conversion therapy has moved from the crazy fringes to the mainstream, so much so that Bush II once invited conversion therapy groups to the White House for a publicity op.
A few weeks ago, Gabriel Arana--the author of this article, who himself went through conversion therapy--went to visit Dr. Spitzer to interview him. Spitzer admitted that the 2001 study was based entirely on the anecdotal evidence of nine patients sent to him by ex-gay therapy groups. He said he did it because he was "attracted to controversy" and now deeply regrets publishing the study and is worried it will "tarnish his legacy." He asked Arana to publish a retraction so he won't "have to worry about it anymore."
The article is awesome, Arana talks about his journey through conversion therapy to eventually accepting his sexuality and his happy marriage to another man.
Spitzer, on the other hand...well, I can't side-eye him enough.
TW: Mentions of suicide, severe depression, and abuse.
Early in my freshman year of high school, I came home to find my mom sitting on her bed, crying. She had snooped through my e-mail and discovered a message in which I confessed to having a crush on a male classmate.
“Are you gay?” she asked. I blurted out that I was.
“I knew it, ever since you were a little boy.”
Her resignation didn’t last long. My mom is a problem solver, and the next day she handed me a stack of papers she had printed out from the Internet about reorientation, or “ex-gay,” therapy. I threw them away. I said I didn’t see how talking about myself in a therapist’s office was going to make me stop liking guys. My mother responded by asking whether I wanted a family, then posed a hypothetical: “If there were a pill you could take that would make you straight, would you take it?”
I admitted that life would be easier if such a pill existed. I hadn’t thought about how my infatuation with boys would play out over the course of my life. In fact, I had always imagined myself middle-aged, married to a woman, and having a son and daughter-didn’t everyone want some version of that?
“The gay lifestyle is very lonely,” she said.
She told me about Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, a clinical psychologist in California who was then president of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), the country’s largest organization for practitioners of ex-gay therapy. She said Nicolosi had treated hundreds of people who were now able to live “normal” lives.
I read through the papers my mom had salvaged from the trash. They were interviews with Nicolosi’s patients, who talked about how therapy helped them overcome depression and feel “comfortable in their masculinity.” The testimonials seemed genuine, and the patients, grateful. I agreed to fly with my father to Los Angeles from our small town on the Arizona-Mexico border for an initial consultation...
Source has the entire article.
To provide a quick timeline for the TL;DR crowd:
In 1973, Dr. Robert Spitzer led the charge to remove homosexuality from the DSMV, thus declassifying it as a mental illness.
In 2001, the same Dr. Robert Spitzer published a study that said certain highly-motivated individuals can change their sexual orientation.
From 2001 to now, anti-gay groups have used this study as scientific evidence that being gay is a choice and can be fixed with conversion therapy. This idea has become a cornerstone of the anti-gay movement, and conversion therapy has moved from the crazy fringes to the mainstream, so much so that Bush II once invited conversion therapy groups to the White House for a publicity op.
A few weeks ago, Gabriel Arana--the author of this article, who himself went through conversion therapy--went to visit Dr. Spitzer to interview him. Spitzer admitted that the 2001 study was based entirely on the anecdotal evidence of nine patients sent to him by ex-gay therapy groups. He said he did it because he was "attracted to controversy" and now deeply regrets publishing the study and is worried it will "tarnish his legacy." He asked Arana to publish a retraction so he won't "have to worry about it anymore."
The article is awesome, Arana talks about his journey through conversion therapy to eventually accepting his sexuality and his happy marriage to another man.
Spitzer, on the other hand...well, I can't side-eye him enough.