The American Psychiatric Association stopped calling homosexuality a curable disease in 1973, removing it from its list of mental disorders. Psychologists followed suit in 1975, bucking old assumptions that were based on traditional values rather than reality. After that crucial turning period, therapists in both psychology and psychiatry began to work under the view that a homosexual orientation is uninfluenced by therapy, and that lesbians and gays find healthy, satisfying relationships when they overcome shame and create supportive communities.
Professionals studying the brain and behavior usually operate with pragmatism and a goal of improving their patients’ lives. But there was little reason to embrace the new guidelines among those who did not care for science and observation, instead working for traditional morality, conservative politics and religious fidelity. They developed reparative therapy, designed to turn homosexual patients straight. Homophobic therapists certainly believe the myths about self- destructiveness and drug use in the “gay lifestyle” — conditions that they themselves help cause — but also seem more interested in getting brownie points with their religious communities than helping their patients thrive.
On August 5, the American Psychological Association struck its anti-gay holdouts with a powerful blow, one that seems to repeat itself in a major study every few years. After an extensive two-year review of the facts, a taskforce announced that not only are reparative therapies unlikely to work — they shouldn’t even be suggested to patients at all. The most such therapies could do is help a gay person ignore attractions that continue to exist, and at worst they cause isolation and depression. The APA pointed out that when a patient’s religious views conflict with his or her innate desires, it would be more remedying to change churches than change the orientation.
It’s no surprise that thirty-five years after psychologists and psychiatrists formally brought their institutions out of the closet, some members still try to deter homosexuality. There are holdouts with every ideological shift — especially when a shift critiques religion — and there are medical professionals of every possible view on every issue. The psychiactric and psychological communities know they’re there, and eye them with caution. Ex-gay therapies work under a host of traditional assumptions, among them that even heterosexuality is a learned gender role. Expose the male child to a strong father figure and masculine hobbies, the reasoning goes, and he comes to the realization that he is a man, and therefore wants to put his penis in a woman.
Any high school-aged male who dreads being asked to stand up in class with a spontaneous erection, or grown man who fails to get one with a partner, knows that our bodies don’t always work under rational directives. There is a mysterious element in sex that says our conscious minds only have control within a narrow set of boundaries. To have sex with a gender you’re not attracted to, you can squint hard and imagine you’re with someone else, but anyone who thinks this troubled interaction can magically become organic is living just as much in fantasy land. Similarly, the idea that homosexual adolescents can choose to think or pray away their same-sex attractions is as laughable is it is depressing.
Some adults claim to have drifted from one sexual preference to another through the years — a phenomenon psychologists accept. Those people may have been bisexual all along, emphasizing one gender first and another gender later. Some people going through sex changes become attracted to a different sex than they were before the change, standing as rare testimonials to the complexity of desire. Maybe adults who change orientation simply started out repressing their true desires and overcame that repression — there are certainly more “heterosexual” adults who come to realize they’re gay than homosexual adults who come to realize they’re straight. But we know for certain that this kind of drift is never forced, and has nothing to do with religious or moral compulsion.
Anti-gay therapists have a sick fixation on the politics over the needs of patients they serve. They recommend that patients announce to the world that they have become heterosexual even before it is true, which gives the impression they just want to advertise their services and conceal dismal success rate. Many of the leaders of anti-gay programs are themselves struggling ex-gays, and stories of sexual abuse of adults and minors in ex-gay camps, by the very people telling children that their same-sex desires are sinful, is a disturbing irony.
The Evangelical movement is already dead-set against “secular” psychiatry, and opposes the very concepts of scientific observation and reasoning to determine its truth. It’s unlikely that anything the APA can do would assuage them since they already reject the APA. But anything that strengthens a community’s resolve to shun these alternative therapies will save countless children and young people from the grasp of a destructive and effacing system. Parents need to know. Counselors need to know. Church groups who are on the fence about sexual orientation need to hear again and again that reparative therapies are fradulent and destructive.
Most lesbian and gay people resisted being gay for a time before they came out, and many of us — no doubt including some who will read this article — turned to books, the Internet, our church ministers, counselors or maybe even ex-gay programs, hoping to solve the rubix cube of sexuality and make ourselves straight. We’ve moved on, learning, with time, that not only is there no way to make ourselves change – there’s no reason to.
It’s good to see that the APA gets its information about what a same-sex desire feels like from us, lesbians and gays, rather than straight people so arrogant as to speak for us. Conservatives accuse the LGBT movement of wanting to go beyond just having its rights respected by government, to convince society at large, in hospitals, schools and churches, to change its thinking about sexuality. To believe same-sex attractions are not chosen, but also not dangerous. Yes, that is what we want! Because every possible logical look at the matter says we ought to know ourselves better than they know us.
We want to save even Evangelical Christian gay children from dangerous and destructive indoctrinations, and we make it safe for gay youth in rural communities or suburban schools where “faggot” is still the most oft-spoken insult. We don’t want them to go through fourteen years of torture before finally joining our ranks at the age of 30, still burdened by emotional baggage and trauma. The APA is helping us on that work.
© 2009, Matt P.. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com
I know two things about human sexuality:
(1) It changes throughout each person’s life. Tastes for one gender over another, for body types, personality types, “fetishes”, situations and symbols, types of intercourse – all change with currents of personal experience too subtle to map.
(2) The changes can’t be controlled. Not a single report of “ex-gay therapy” success has stood up to analysis, not a single trumpeted “cure” has been real.
I think you can’t control human sexuality for the same reason you can’t gather up smoke into a ball. You can stir it up, but it’s too nimble and complex for you.
It’s correct that the APA study calls so-called reparative therapy out for the hoax that it is. But that wasn’t very hard since there’s no evidence that anyone can change his sexual orientation, and there’s now plenty of evidence that counseling someone to change causes great psychological damage. Unfortunately, though, this study also says that when counseling someone with homosexual orientation whose religious views conflict with homosexuality, it can be good therapy to help the patient reject his homosexuality. In other words, it’s OK to become the Ted Haggard version 2.0 — “heterosexual with issues”. The religious wingnuts are calling this a huge victory, because it means that people can be counseled to live with themselves without the sin. A good article from the Wall Street Journal about this is here: (link)
But of course what it really means is that the APA is telling therapists that it’s OK to counsel someone to hate himself rather than accept that expressing his sexuality something that all of us need for good emotional health. On that score, this study is a disaster.
The APA pointed out that when a patient’s religious views conflict with his or her innate desires, it would be more remedying to change churches than change the orientation
David, I’m no advocate for reparative therapy, but it seems like some people may be so committed to their religion that they’re always going to feel heaps of guilt if they try to act on it – no? A therapist’s goal is to make the life of each patient better, rather than advocate a political view. Therefore I think it’s necessary to sometimes accommodate a person who doesn’t seem like he/she is ever going to accept him/herself as gay.
In that case, the person may never be completely happy, but why not do as much as is possible by helping him/her be celibate? I’d rather have a trained therapist navigating that murky territory than some religious wingnut.
We here in NL have a priest, mr Antoine Bodar, who makes no secret of his homosexual past. There are photos from his youth (he was breathtakingly gorgeous) taken in Amsterdam gay circles of the early seventies. Later on he became dj at a catholic pop radiostation and from there he moved to more serious cultural radio and tv. In the eighties he decided to stop being sexually active, because he wanted to become a priest. And indeed he was ordained. Since then he says to have refrained from any sexuality and has risen in the ranks of the catholic church in NL and is now their main spokesman on ethics and religious affairs in dutch media. His last function was that of some sort of sub-bisshop (plebaan) at one of the more conservative dioceses (den Bosch, Brabant). As he was too controversial there he is now stationed in Rome. Where he may very well rise further through the ranks.
I’ve been in fierce discussions with him about church policies repeatedly, like on the issue of (not) condoning condoms and homosexuality. His argument these days comes down to this:
According to the scriptures there is just one, most ideal form of sexuality, and that is the one that is for the purpose of producing offspring with just 2 persons staying together their entire life. If we stick to just that we do not need condoms. That said, we are not all chosen to lead this most perfect life. He advocates that the church should have a press office, so we are not always confronted with the infallible
statements of the holy father, who has for his entire life studied holy books and thus lives somewhat ‘with his head in the clouds’, or ‘near god’. So much so that he cannot relate that easy anymore with us, average sinners.
I myself have left the RC church, but do somewhat respect his approach, and it would be nice if he climbed up furher in church ranks and possibly make it to their highest office one day, and set up that press office.
He certainly does not strike me as a person who is unhappy or mentally unstable because he left behind his active (homo) sexuality.
I would never take those drastic steps, but did for 20 years refrain from fucking,
because of the risks and not being able to enjoy it with condoms. Although I missed it and regretted the necessity of the choice, I was not altogether unhappy for those 20 years, and I think I survived them without major psycho trauma.
Nevertheless, since the start of this millennium I’ve gradually returned to anal intercourse, and don’t think that is insane nor criminal or sinful either.
It seems to be a pretty common experience that gay guys go through periods of abstinence or celibacy when religion is concerned, even if they eventually come around and leave their church. I did when I was young.
What I find far MORE CONSISTENT though, is inconsistency in ex-religious gay guys. As in: you know that guy who scrutinizes and wrinkles his nose at other guys who “hook up” because for some unnamable reason, he sees something wrong with it? That’s the guy who points out the “slutty guys” we should all avoid, or gives snide responses to anything vaguely flirtatious towards him.
Then you find his Manhunt profile, and learn that he does hook up, pretty much all the time. Alcohol is his excuse.
He does that out of a sense of lingering guilt, which tells him he needs to police general sexual attitudes in his peers for the sake of morality and inform people when they are just corrupt. I know someone who went around this gay networking website called Connexion and emailed the owners of the shirtless profiles telling them the images were inappropriate. (Then he caved and got a shirtless picture himself.)
Ironically, he’s more likely than his peers to get something like HIV, because his approach to sex is so unhealthy. He only does it when drunk (meaning that he’s less likely to use condoms), is absolutely TERRIFIED of things like testing, and his judgmental attitude means that any potential partners who have HIV are less likely to disclose their status.
It reminds me of the attempted ex-gay who claims to be pure and clean but gets caught cruising in a public restroom – something that he could have avoided if he was just openly out and sex-positive.
I would love to see secular psychologists – who DON’T share those conflicted issues with sex – help the patient negotiate a way to manage the guilt and build a set of sexual principles based on healthy criteria – about keeping safe, about being respectful to partners, about being open-minded and honest – rather than about judging people for their number of partners and practicing hypocritical and dangerous behavior.
Agree with Matt.
Maybe contrary to what I wrote earlier, I would very much like to draw this issue away from religion.
Almost all homos have gone through, or are still deeply troubled by a guilt trip.
They have been raised by heterosexual parents (mostly) and it takes more then
your average puberty to get to grips with your own personality, that does not (necessarily) agree with monogamy, or vanilla practices.
Why then do we need so much drama and mostly a second and third coming out, to
just recognise we are promiscuous, hunters, fetishists, turned on by unsafe sex?
Sure, we use alcohol to cross certain thresholds, if not other substances.
(Yep, in my country alcohol is considered by most as far more dangerous and inducing risky behavior then a lot of substances that are illegal in the USA)
I don’t have the answers, but boy, would I like to see routes that can ease away
a lot of the unneeded drama that comes with recognising our “pervert” self.
That would help so many to stay away from activities that I think we all agree are better left illegal, like using violence, peer pressure, intoxication or money to get others to agree to sexual activities they would not choose voluntarily.
I fucking love my therapist.
How many of us out there DIDN’T get a rush of releif sometime in our lives when someone affiliated, in some way, with the counseling profession told us we have nothing to be ashamed of, case closed?
Oh Matt P, you usually write these challenging and controversial articles, but we’re all on the same side on anti-gay therapists being fucked up. Maybe if you were writing this article to the mayor of a town in Oklahoma, or my grandparents, you’d be telling them stuff they don’t already know.
Come back and give me something to chew on! Get me out of my comfort zone and make me think about my own assumptions, which you usually do.