- NASHVILLE -- Drew Sermon's
family drove for seven hours to be here. Here are his father, Randy, and
his mother, Shavon. Drew's uncle and aunt, Rich and Susan, are here, too.
So are his grandparents, Chuck and Carol. Together they have brought Drew
all the way from Indiana to Nashville, Tennessee, because last October
Drew - only 18 years old and the darling of the family - told them he was
gay. They do not know what else to do.
-
- The Love Won Out conference is taking place in a Baptist
church beside a busy freeway. It is a modern building of chocolate brown
brick, closer in style and scale to a convention centre than a place of
worship. A thousand people have gathered inside. Some are here because
of the devastating incompatibility of their religious faith and their sexual
feelings. Others are here because - as one seminar title puts it - "Someone
I Love Is Gay". People have come from as far as New York and California,
and what everyone wants to hear is Love Won Out's magical promise: that
homosexuality can be cured.
-
- They are told that homosexuality is not a sexual identity,
but a developmental disorder. It has a name - same-sex attraction disorder,
or SSAD - and a cure - reparative therapy. Throughout the day, a series
of men and women introduce themselves on stage as "ex-gays" and
tell of their personal journey out of homosexuality into heterosexual happiness,
a transition they attribute to psychological insight and biological truth.
There are five Love Won Out conferences every year in the US and, although
they are church-based, their message is expressed not in scripture but
in the language of science. If you want to be saved, find a therapist.
-
- "There is no such thing as a homosexual," the
chief speaker, a clinical psychologist called Dr Joseph Nicolosi, assures
his audience. "Everyone is heterosexual. Some of you may have a homosexual
problem. But you are still a heterosexual. 'Homosexual' is simply a description
of a psychological disorder, prompted by an inner sense of emptiness. This,"
he reminds them, "by the way, is non-religious, non-political information.
This is scientific information."
-
- Homosexuality has not been classified as a mental illness
in America for more than 30 years. It was removed from the national register
of mental illnesses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM), in 1973, following pressure from gay activists. Nearly 20 years
later, Nicolosi founded an organisation for psychiatrists and psychologists
who still rejected that 1973 decision, and believed homosexuals could and
should be cured. As president of the National Association for Research
and Therapy of Homosexuality (Narth), Nicolosi devised a programme of reparative
therapy - sometimes known as conversion or reorientation therapy - and
built up an international network of therapists who provide this treatment.
-
- It is not an insignificant network. Narth's membership
includes a former president of the American Mental Health Counsellors'
Association and university clinical professors of psychiatry Charles Socarides,
Dean Byrd and Benjamin Kaufman. Along with Drs Jeffrey Satinover, Richard
Fitzgibbons and Irving Bieber, all have published or contributed to books
about reparative therapy, and claim that at least a third of all clients
can be completely cured of their homosexuality.
-
- Their views didn't enjoy a great deal of credibility
in the 1990s. Sexual reorientation had traditionally been an evangelical
idea found in ex-gay ministries, who preached that homosexuality could
be prayed away. Most mental health organisations took the view that reparative
therapy was no more clinically effective, still less appropriate, than
a prayer.
-
- It is not available in the UK, though some therapists
elsewhere in Europe provide it. Since 1998, any client in the US seeking
reparative therapy has been obliged by the American Psychiatric Association
to sign a consent form acknowledging its position: that sexual reorientation
is impossible and that attempting it may cause psychological harm. The
only treatment the APA would condone was gay affirmative therapy, designed
to reconcile clients with their sexuality.
-
- Then something happened that Nicolosi and his associates
could not in their wildest dreams have hoped for. To the gay activists
involved in the 1973 campaign it was unimaginable, but to the families
of boys such as Drew Sermon, it is news to be clung to like a life raft.
The very psychiatrist who led the removal of homosexuality from the DSM
in 1973 announced, in 2000, that he was going to investigate the success
rate of reparative therapy. Dr Robert Spitzer, by then a senior professor
of psychiatry at Columbia University, wanted to know whether it was possible
for homosexuals to change. Could therapy turn gays straight? Late last
year, Spitzer's study was published. And his answer was: yes.
-
- Spitzer found 274 men and women who claimed to have changed
their orientation from gay to straight, thanks to therapy, and he interviewed
them. In 74 of these subjects, the only change Spitzer could identify was
their decision to call themselves straight, or to stop having sex, and
these he rejected from the study. He found that all of the remainder -
143 men and 57 women - had changed to some degree.
-
- Two-thirds of the men and almost half the women had reached
what Spitzer called "good heterosexual functioning": a sustained,
loving heterosexual relationship within the past year, providing enough
emotional satisfaction to rate at least seven on a 10-point scale. Most
enjoyed satisfying heterosexual sex at least once a month, and never or
rarely thought of someone of the same sex during intercourse. Asked about
unwanted homosexual feelings, 89% of the men and 95% of the women said
they were bothered "not at all" or "only slightly".
Spitzer's questions explored fantasies during masturbation and sex, yearnings
for romantic or emotional involvement, and a range of other indicators
of sexual orientation. "And on most of those variables," he reported,
"most of the subjects made very dramatic changes which lasted many,
many years."
-
- Who were these people? One participant agreed to speak
to me if we used a pseudonym. Ben Newman was a married man from Virginia
who came to reparative therapy seven years ago, after his wife had discovered
yet another gay affair. "I was living a double life," Newman
said. "Happy husband and father, church-goer and successful professional
on the outside, rabid homosexual sex addict on the inside. Suicide was
becoming an increasingly appealing option. But I really resented the suggestion
that the only politically correct solution for me was to abandon my wife
and children, and throw myself into the gay life. That wasn't what I wanted.
-
- "Most psychiatrists will say, your sexual attitude
is immutable - it's a fact - so adjust your beliefs to suit it. But I was
saying, it just doesn't feel right. Being gay doesn't feel like me at my
core. It's not a fact I feel comfortable with. I wanted to change my sexual
attitude instead." He says he now has a happy marriage, although,
like many ex-gays, his opposite-sex attraction has so far been confined
to his wife.
-
- Another spoke to me from Washington DC. When Richard
Cohen first sought help in the 1970s, therapists told him to accept the
fact that he was born gay. "I knew that wasn't true. I just knew it
in my gut." Then a religious group told him to get married. "I
was told, find the right woman and she'll straighten you out. Well, I did,
and she didn't. We were both looking for the same thing - a good man."
But, after therapy, Cohen "came out straight". His marriage prospered,
he had three children, and "my wife certainly isn't the only woman
I'm attracted to!"
-
- How had it happened? Reparative therapy is based on a
theory of a child's early rejection by the same-sex parent. It applies
equally to lesbians, but the literature tends to focus on men and states
that homosexuality begins when a young boy experiences his father as cold
or hostile. To protect himself from the pain of rejection, he develops
"defensive detachment" - he rejects his father in retaliation.
But, in doing so, the boy rejects masculinity, and this leads to a gender
identity disorder. The little boy, having spurned masculinity, finds he
cannot be a real boy.
-
- "Defensive detachment emotionally isolates him from
other males," Nicolosi has written, "and from his own masculinity.
Females are familiar. Males are mysterious." The boy feels excluded
from male bonding activities, identifies with his mother rather than his
father, and inevitably - because opposites attract - becomes sexually attracted
to men. But what he is really searching for in gay sex is his own forsaken
masculinity.
-
- As Cohen describes it: "The desire is connected
to the hurt. When you get to the bottom of the wound and heal it, the desire
leaves you. To deal with my sexual desires for men, I had to heal with
my father. I jumped into his lap. I said, 'Dad, I need to grieve in your
arms now. Just let me cry.' I told him, 'I was not looking for sex with
all those men for all those years. I was looking for you in their arms.'
I healed the wound. So now there's no need for those same-sex attractions
to be in my body or my soul any more."
-
- Nicolosi says he has personally treated more than 1,000
men at his California clinic. Unlike most reparative therapists, he has
never been gay. Middle-aged, married, Nicolosi wears a beige corduroy jacket
and his manner is dry, with a hint of the librarian about it, though on
stage it takes an occasional detour into schlock for laughs. "A pre-homosexual
boy comes home from school and says, 'Mom! I'm in the school play! I got
the role of a dad.' And she's very angry and says, 'You go right back there
now and tell them you want a speaking part!'" When he sits down, legs
crossed, one ankle permanently rotates.
-
- His clients are encouraged to form healthy friendships
with straight men, take vigorous physical exercise and use manly vocabulary
such as "dude". Classic Freudian preoccupations with a client's
mother and his supposed fear of women are largely dispensed with in this
work. If the client can sort out his relationship with men, his feelings
for women are assumed to take care of themselves.
-
- And why do they want to be straight? From Nicolosi's
account of "the gay lifestyle", they would have to be mad not
to. On every indicator of personal contentment, the doctor informs his
audience, homosexuals score badly. "Gays smoke more than straight
men. They have more depression, more group sex, more failed relationships.
Gay couplings are characteristically brief and very volatile, with much
fighting, arguing, making up again, and continual disappointments. We owe
it to young people to tell them that, if they go in that direction, these
are the things they will encounter. More drug abuse. More unhappiness.
And we aren't even talking about Aids. How much is all this about society's
homophobia? Yes, a little bit. But nothing like as much as it is about
the pathology of homosexuality."
-
- Later that morning, I find Drew Sermon alone in the foyer.
He cuts a slight figure and his young face - fine-boned, a faint blush
of acne - is thoughtful.
-
- "I've learned a lot of stuff I wasn't expecting,"
he says. "Dr Nicolosi - when he was speaking about the cause factors,
the mother and father thing? I found that was very true of my life. This
feels way more informative than I expected. You see, I know what the Bible
says. I wanted to hear some other facts."
-
- And does Drew think he is hearing facts? The question
seems to startle him.
-
- "Oh, yes! Of course. I'm definitely hearing the
facts."
-
- The one fact Drew hasn't heard today is that ex-gays
are accused of peddling a pack of lies. An anti-ex-gay movement has been
mobilising across America since the mid-1990s and activists often picket
events such as Love Won Out. The scenes have sometimes been ugly - a placard
at one boasted, "My God fucked your God up the ass." Today, protesters
in Nashville have chosen to hold a "counter seminar" downtown
instead and have invited the movement's leading spokesman, Wayne Besen,
gay activist and author of Anything But Straight: Unmasking The Scandals
And Lies Behind The Ex-Gay Myth.
-
- Besen's book begins with an incident the author was barely
able to believe when it happened. Newsweek magazine ran a cover story in
1998 about John and Anne Paulk, formerly gay but blissfully married. The
Paulks were the poster boy and girl of a national ad campaign splashing
across the American media that summer, funded by Christian ex-gay ministries.
One night two years later, Besen received a call from a friend in a Washington
DC gay bar. Guess who was there, chatting him up? John Paulk. Besen raced
there, photographed Paulk, and has been persecuting the ex-gay movement
ever since. He ticks off the victories on his fingers: of the four male
stars of the 1998 ad campaign thus far, he says, Paulk has been caught,
another outed himself and a third was discovered last summer taking part
in a men-only orgy.
-
- "I have never," says Besen in a slow Florida
drawl, "met a single person I believe has changed. I've met a few
people who've changed their behaviour - but not their orientation. The
founder of every single ex-gay ministry has failed. All of them have failed."
-
- Anything But Straight catalogues an astonishingly long
list of ex-gays who became ex-ex-gays. There are counsellors caught giving
nude massages to the men they are meant to be curing, and founders of ministries
who fall in love and run off with each other. The stories are tragicomic,
and in each the same cycle repeats: a honeymoon period of euphoria - I'm
cured! - followed by the discovery that nothing has changed.
-
- But the author does not find any of it funny. The book's
prosecution case builds angrily, until so much damning evidence has amassed
that no serious scientific organisation could, you would think, conceivably
stand up for the ex-gay movement. Why would Narth defend anything with
so flawed a record?
-
- "Because," claims Besen, "the whole secular,
scientific thing is a front. Dr Nicolosi is a fundamentalist Catholic,
a religious fanatic disguising himself as a secular therapist. The vast
majority of these therapists come from a religious background." Narth,
he says, uses cod psychology to justify Christian homophobia. "Exodus
International, the biggest ex-gay ministry in the world, promotes Nicolosi
as a therapist to go to. He is the religious right! Narth is the religious
right." In other words, sexual reorientation is nothing more than
a fantasy born of Christian wishful thinking.
-
- But if that is the case, how do we account for Dr Robert
Spitzer? A heterosexual atheist humanist, Spitzer undertook his study on
nothing more than a hunch. At the outset, he thought it highly unlikely
that anyone could change their sexual orientation. Yet he came to the conclusion
that homosexuality was a treatable condition. When he announced that, for
certain "highly motivated" homosexuals, change "was possible",
the US media went berserk. "Can gays go straight? Yes - if they really
want to!" exclaimed headlines. The ex-gay movement was jubilant. Gay
activists were stunned. But as details of the study emerged, their incredulity
turned to anger.
-
- It had taken Spitzer more than 18 months to find just
200 or so people willing to describe themselves as successfully converted.
He found his interviewees by advertising through ex-gay organisations.
Almost half were recruited through ex-gay ministries, and nearly a quarter
by Narth. Religion was "extremely" or "very" important
to 93% of them. One in five was a mental health professional (Cohen, for
example, is a high-profile reparative therapist) or director of an ex-gay
ministry, and more than three-quarters had previously lobbied for sexual
reorientation. These are people who get paid to say that therapy works.
-
- For many critics, this alone was enough to discredit
the exercise. An article in the APA's Psychiatric News likened it to testing
a drug on people recruited by the pharmaceutical company. But in addition,
many of the participants appeared to have been not so much altered from
gay to straight, as bisexual all along. Ten per cent of the men had never
had gay sex before therapy, whereas half had already slept with a woman.
Only a third of the women and half the men said that before therapy they
were "extremely" bothered by homosexual feelings. How gay were
they?
-
- As with most statistics, everything depends on how they
are read. The percentage who were "extremely bothered" by homosexual
feelings after undergoing therapy fell to zero. You could say zero was
a sensational turnaround; or you might say they weren't so gay in the first
place. Two New York psychologists carried out another study of reparative
therapy at the same time as Spitzer, and reached the opposite conclusion.
"We interviewed 182 people who tried very hard to change," Dr
Ariel Shidlo told Newsweek. "The stakes were really high for them.
Some really thought that if they didn't change, they would literally find
themselves in hell... And they still failed."
-
- "Spitzer?" Besen says. "I just don't understand
the man. I told him, if there is one thing we know about these people,
it is that when they say they've changed, they haven't." He shrugs,
as though worn out with disbelief. "C'mon. He had John Paulk in his
study, for chrissakes."
-
- Spitzer sounds fairly worn out as well. "If I were
in my 30s," he says drily, "this is not something I would advise
somebody to do. It would not advance their career." He has been condemned
as a bigot, and claimed as a cheerleader by the religious right. Wary of
misrepresentation, he tries to clarify once again the purpose of his study,
and what he believes it proved. It was very straightforward, he sighs.
The received scientific wisdom was that sexual orientation never changed.
He found people who said theirs had. He asked them questions designed to
test their credibility, and found that for a significant number it had
changed to a significant degree.
-
- "Yes, I think change is probably extremely rare,
otherwise it would not have taken so long to find the participants. And,
yes, the change I found was seldom from one extreme to the other. But nevertheless,
there was change. And that seems to me to be a worthwhile discovery, isn't
it?"
-
- No one has ever tested the efficacy of gay affirmative
therapy, Spitzer points out. If clients told a researcher that it had worked
for them, would we disbelieve them? No. When a homosexual says he was emotionally
damaged by reparative therapy, gay activists do not doubt his word.
-
- "So," Spitzer asks, patiently and deliberately,
"why assume he is lying when he says it helped?"
-
- Spitzer's argument is simple, but quite sophisticated
and persuasive. Even the most limited change would disprove the assumption
that change was never possible - and that would indeed be interesting.
But there is a crucial flaw in all ex-gay representations, and unwittingly
Spitzer exposes it in his final comment. "Some people have suggested
I ought to do a follow-up study." The idea would be to see if anyone
had fallen off the wagon. "But if you were doing an evaluation of
the treatment of cocaine addiction, say, and someone had a relapse, you
wouldn't say that the treatment was of no value, would you?"
-
- You would not. But there is a crucial distinction here,
one that undermines the analogy Nicolosi and others frequently like to
draw between ex-gays and addicts. A recovering alcoholic will always be
an alcoholic; successful treatment can only sustain his willpower. But
to suggest an ex-gay can "relapse" implies that sexual reorientation
is only ever a triumph of willpower, never a conversion of authentic desire.
-
- Ultimately, everything must come down to what we mean
by sexual reorientation. But when I ask Nicolosi to define success, he
seems surprisingly unconcerned, as though this were a rarefied detail.
"Good question," he says airily. "Would you consider success,"
he muses, "a man who, OK, acted out four times a week at the beginning
of therapy and now acts out once a month? Somewhat. Not great. OK, not
great. Not no change, but not great."
-
- Not great at all. And where is his interest in women?
-
- Nicolosi sighs. "You see, sexual reorientation,
half of it is to get rid of same-sex attraction. The other half is hopefully
opposite-sex attraction. Most clients just can't imagine being attracted
to women. A lot of them say, I just want to stop being attracted to guys.
And, hey, that is a workable treatment."
-
- But isn't attraction to women supposed to follow on automatically?
-
- "I believe that, yes. We are sexual beings. If you
shut off one door, you've got to open up another door, right? The trouble
is, often my clients don't believe that." Nicolosi is beginning to
sound glib. It transpires that by the time many clients complete therapy,
attraction to women is still only the therapist's prediction, not the client's
reality. And apparently it doesn't even need to come true.
-
- "Using the general definition of cure," he
continues, "the diminishment of problematic behaviour is a cure. I
would consider that a successful case."
-
- We seem to have travelled a long way from the radical
claims being made so confidently on stage at Love Won Out. And we are about
to depart even farther. "Let's say," Nicolosi suddenly suggests,
"you work with a man for six months. Let's say he acts out once a
week in the beginning, but when he acts out he tortures himself, beats
himself up, thinks he's a pervert. After six months in therapy, he understands
why he acts out. He's still acting out once a week, but it's more like
a hollow ritual. He's not as upset with himself, he's more hopeful of change
in the future. Now, his behaviour is still the same. Would you consider
that a success?"
-
- Would you?
-
- "Yes," Nicolosi replies, "I would consider
that a success." Even the most successful ex-gay, he adds casually,
is always going to have to keep an eye on himself, to make sure he "doesn't
fall".
-
- But surely that is the opposite of inner change? It sounds
closer to a definition of willpower.
-
- "But he has changed! He's changed in the sense that,
instead of living a gay lifestyle, he has a wife that he loves emotionally
and sexually, and he has three kids, and his friends are married men. Isn't
that a change? That's a change. He may still get a little same-sex titillation
from time to time, sure, and he'd better be realistic about that. I mean,
he's setting himself up for a fall if he really believes he won't. OK?"
-
- Is it OK? "Ex-gay" is a wholly unambiguous
expression. The message at Love Won Out is unequivocal: you can be cured.
The discrepancy between these promises and what reparative therapy's own
chief architect has just conceded seems startling - and for the APA it
is not OK at all. The APA warns that reparative therapy can be deeply harmful,
because a client who is fed false promises may experience his own failure
to change as a shameful personal indictment. Guilt, depression and suicide
can be the disastrous consequences of unsuccessful therapy. "Those
who have integrated their sexual orientation into a positive sense of themselves,"
it maintains, "function at a healthier psychological level than those
who have not."
-
- In a peculiar way, the debate has muddled liberal and
conservative vocabulary, until everyone's role is reversed. Besen was far
and away the most straight-acting man I met in Nashville, though some of
the ex-lesbians at Love Won Out would give him a run for his money in the
butch department. Gay activist groups such as the Human Rights Campaign
want to see reparative therapy banned, but the ex-gay movement appeals
to homosexuals' right to freedom of choice.
-
- "People have a right to choose to live as a homosexual,
or to come out straight," argues Cohen. "It's a matter of choice;
they should have the chance. I'm not anti-anything. I'm pro-possibility,
pro-choice." And ex-gays have appropriated the old gay activists'
perennial plea on behalf of young homosexuals everywhere, for "the
truth".
-
- Mike Haley, Love Won Out's ex-gay leader, echoes it nicely.
He flashes a neon toothpaste smile and jokes that he'd rather work at Starbucks.
"It would be so much easier than this work!" Then he looks grave.
"But you have children basing their life decisions on erroneous information.
I just want the 16-year-old that I once was to be given accurate information.
If you are telling a child that he is born gay, what other choice does
he have but to be a homosexual?"
-
- At Love Won Out, youngsters are listening intently for
information. Drew Sermon has made some friends and they eat lunch together,
a nervy circle of shy smiles. Daniel Nash, from near Cincinnati, is 22
but looks about 15. How would it feel for him to believe he could change,
then discover he couldn't? He bites his lip and speaks quietly. "It
would probably be devastating to me. And to everyone who's helping me.
Right now, I don't want to think about that. I just want to hope I can
carry on and live a heterosexual life."
-
- Travis Wininger, 22, listens closely and nods. "I
find I'm really hopeful. I'm a psychology student, and Dr Nicolosi presented
a psychological model that was really helpful for me. I saw how my life
fitted that model. Right now. I've just entered a heterosexual relationship."
He gives a twitchy smile. "It's scary! I feel self-conscious about
whether I'll be good at it."
-
- Does he try to avoid looking at things like men's fitness
magazines?
-
- "Uh-huh." He drops his gaze. "I say to
myself, just remove the temptation ." Drew half-smiles to himself.
-
- As the day wears on, a chill of imminent catastrophe
seems to leaden Love Won Out's air. Later, Drew introduces me to his father.
Randy is a big, bearded, military man in jeans and boots, but although
his body is so different from the youngsters' edgy frames, it seems choked
by the same weight of frightened grief. At first Randy is reluctant to
talk, then doesn't stop. "When Drew told us, I was devastated. I wanted
to deny it - but I was hearing it come out of his mouth. He said, 'If I
could turn the feelings off, I'd like to. But I don't know how.' So we
decided we needed to come here to find out answers, to figure out what
to do."
-
- Does Randy believe his son will change? He looks ashen,
and for a moment broken. "It's possible he won't," he whispers.
"But I pray every day." Then, louder: "You see, Drew knows
it's wrong! He wants to change it! He said he'd turn it off if he could."
Randy tails off and gazes at the floor. "That's what's so strange
about the whole situation. He knows if he continues in this lifestyle,
he is going to hell. For him to make that choice ? It's mind-boggling.
It's blown me away."
-
- I spot the whole family later that night in a hotel foyer.
They are getting ready to go out and hear some country music, before tomorrow's
long drive home. Drew comes across and says hello. "I'm so glad I
made my mom happy, coming here. Well, I'd do just anything to make my mom
feel better. I thought, why not come, if it makes her happy?"
-
- Has the day affected how he feels?
-
- He smiles sadly and looks a thousand years older than
the rest of his family. "No," he says quietly and shakes his
head. "It hasn't changed anything."
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://WWW.GUARDIAN.CO.UK/weekend/story/0,3605,1183596,00.html
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