Part 2: “Love Won Out” — Parents Struggle With “No Exceptions”

Jim Burroway

February 22nd, 2007

Note: In this essay, I will try to talk about the theories of homosexuality that were presented at Love Won Out. For the time being, I will avoid a detailed critique of these theories. That may come later time. Instead, I want to delve a little deeper into the theme I began in Part One of this series by looking at Love Won Out through the eyes and ears of the parents of gay sons and daughters who attended.

As I describe my conversations with Love Won Out participants, I have changed several important details in order to protect the anonymity of those I talked to. The individuals who talked to me have a right to expect that their stories not be made individually recognizable. Nevertheless, the situations I describe are fully accurate in their substance.

I had a lot of preconceived ideas about Love Won Out ex-gay conferences before I finally attended one in Phoenix on February 10. Some of the awful things I thought I would see, I didn’t. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to find some good things to report on, which I promise to tell you about later. There were some moment of thoughtfulness and encouragement which, to me as a gay activist, were surprising.

But there were other things that I didn’t expect to encounter that shook me to my core. And before I can move on to anything, I have to get this out of the way. This is a long essay, but it’s the most important one that I will write about Love Won Out. So, please, I ask for your indulgence on this.

The parents who attended Love Won Out seemed to have a lot of questions. Based on what I heard in the Q&A sessions and in casual conversations, most of these questions revolved around two specific themes: 1) “Why is my child gay?” and 2) “What can I do about it?” The Love Won Out organizers made sure there was plenty of information on hand to answer these questions. This essay will focus on the first question.

The first session of the day was conducted by Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, president of the National Association for Research and Treatment of Homosexuality (NARTH). He was there to provide a non-religious and scientific argument that homosexuality is “a developmental problem.” In his address, entitled “The Condition of Male Homosexuality”, he provided his theory of how gay men come into being, a theory based entirely on family dynamics.

Dr. Nicolosi began his talk this way:

Homosexuality is not a sexual problem, it’s a gender identity problem. And this is the foundation of our understanding. Gender identity is one’s sense of oneself as male or female. Homosexuality is not about sex. And homosexual apologists will say it’s only about sex. But rather, we understand homosexuality to be about a person’s sense of himself, about his relationships, about his past hurts, about childhood wounds, self-image, personal shame, and his belief in his ability to establish and sustain relational intimacy.

Homosexual behavior is always — my wife says when you speak publicly you never speak in absolutes, always and never — I’m telling you homosexuality, homosexual impulse is always prompted by an inner sense of emptiness. It’s not about sex.

He’s barely three minutes into his talk, and already he’s laid out several defining qualities of homosexuality from which he emphatically allows no exceptions. And yet, I knew from my own experience that clearly there were exceptions. He said that “homosexual apologists will say it’s only about sex”, but I had to wonder which “homosexual apologists” he was referring to. While I’m sure somebody somewhere has probably said such a ridiculous thing, I had never heard it. Everyone I’ve heard of speaks it as being about his or her personal sense of self and his relationships. More specifically, it’s about affection, love, and a particular way of caring for and relating with one another.

And when Dr. Nicolosi follows that absolute with another, that the “homosexual impulse is always prompted by an inner sense of emptiness”, I’m afraid this leaves a lot of room for doubt. When I see one absolute being absolutely false, I can’t place too terribly much faith in any other absolutes which immediately follow. I guess he should listen to his wife more often.

But that was my reaction. For the parents who attended, the reaction was very different. He was the expert after all, a man whose psychotherapy clinic in Encino “specialized in the treatment of men with unwanted homosexuality” for more than fifteen years. And because he has treated so many men and speaks with such confidence of his clinical experience, the audience hung onto his every word. He couldn’t have been more convincing if he had channeled Freud himself and spoken with an Austrian accent.

Dr. Nicolosi described the “pre-homosexual” child’s development in terms familiar to anyone who has read classic Freudian theory. He began with the first eighteen months of a child’s life, during the “androgynous phase,” in which the child is unaware of differences in gender. During this phase, he is naturally closely bonded with his mother. Then, at about the age of eighteen months to three years of age, the child enters what Nicolosi called the “Gender Identity Phase.” Here, the child acquires language, and with that a greater awareness of the world around him, which includes differences between male and female. At this stage, the child, who already has a close with his mother, is now supposed to recognize that he is a boy and that Dad is a boy, and that Dad is supposed to become the masculine role model for the little boy. When this “dis-identifying” with the mother and the identification with the father takes place, a heterosexual man is the guaranteed result.

But if his father is cold, rejecting, weak, or physically or emotionally unavailable, or conversely, if his mother is overprotective, domineering, or shows disdain for the father, that boy may not detach from his mother and identify with his father. If that happens, if the boy doesn’t identify with his father, he’ll experience what is called a “narcissistic hurt.” And this leads to all sorts of things:

And that’s why we see narcissism in the male homosexual. Narcissism is a preoccupation with oneself. It’s a high sensitivity to being hurt, being rejected, sensitized to people not liking me. It’s a defensive posture, what we call a shame posture. This boy was shamed for his masculine strivings, and so he abandons his masculine strivings.

…And that narcissistic injury produces an adult, a homosexually-oriented adult, who is cautious, fearful, easily hurt, easily slighted, easily offended, self-protective — that is what we call the shame posture. If men get to see me they’re not going to like me. There’s something inferior about me.

All of this is because the father did not bond with his boy. Either that or the mother wouldn’t let him. I began to wonder how the parents in the audience were taking all of this. I didn’t have to wonder very long, because that’s when Dr. Nicolosi let loose with this broadside.

We advise fathers, if you don’t hug your sons, some other man will.

With that, a very painful groan rose from the audience. This was probably the second-most effective line delivered that day (I’ll get to the most effective one in just a little bit). I looked around and saw heads shaking, couples looking at each other, and a general sense of horror filled the room. My cheeks flushed as I wondered how many of those groans came from fathers and mothers themselves who made up a sizeable chunk of the audience.

Nicolosi threw in several more absolutes as he went along. And with each absolute that he conveyed with such clinical certainty, his credibility seemed to grow with this audience. In the end, it would be the absolutes that everyone would remember:

If there is an older brother, Freud said a hundred years ago, if a homosexual has an older brother, it’s a feared, hostile relationship. I have never seen an exception to that. I have never met a client who is dealing with homosexuality who had a salient older brother.

The guy with a homosexual problem does not trust men. When he begins to trust men, his homosexuality disappears.

His cold, clinical descriptions of homosexuality, while alien to much of what I know to be true in my life, seemed to resonate with everyone else in that audience. After all, it matched everything else they had heard from their pastors and moral leaders. What’s more, it matched some of the more personal memories that every parent has about raising their children. What father cannot say he wished he could have spent more quality time with his son? What mother could say she was never overprotective or overly assertive? This is the story of every parent.

As I sat there listening to his lecture, I was reminded of that old joke about person A saying something terrible about person B, when person B speaks up and says, “Hey you do realize I’m in the room, don’t you?” These parents were right there as Nicolosi talked about how their failures produced a “Gender Identity Deficit” in their son, and that drove their son to be hugged by another man.

Later that morning, Melissa Fryrear, a gender issues analyst at Focus on the Family and a regional representative for Exodus International, spoke on the causes of female homosexuality. It’s odd that she would present a talk that was intended to be the female counterpart to Nicolosi’s clinical descriptions of male homosexuality. I say it’s odd because she doesn’t have a degree in psychology or the social sciences. Her degree is in Divinity. But nobody in the audience seemed to mind or even notice. Her credentials as an expert were accepted just as readily as Nicolosi’s, and because her talk was considerably warmer and more sympathetic to the parents, they seemed to take her messages more to heart, according on conversations that I had afterwards.

Her presentation was also somewhat more chaotic than Dr. Nicolosi’s “Maybe because women, we tend to be complex sometimes,” she explained. But her Freudian explanation for lesbianism was similar to Nicolosi’s, except here it was the mother who was cold and distant, while the father was stern, frightening, or even abusive. Unless, of course, the mother was exceptionally close and had a “best friends” relationship with her daughter and the father was distant. Fryrear’s mix of causes for female homosexuality was a Mulligan’s Stew of many different factors: lesbian chic, fashion, peer pressure, feminism, sexual abuse — the list was very long and occasionally contradictory.

But in very stark contrast to Dr. Nicolosi’s talk, Fryrear’s was much more sensitive to not blaming the parents for their child’s homosexuality. She peppered her talk with reassurances like this:

And I want to visit specifically with Moms and Dads, that if you have a daughter who is struggling with lesbianism, that you’re not to blame for her particular struggle. … Those of you that have children, and have especially more than one child, you know that your children are unique and their perception of the world and how they take the world in, their perception of themselves and you and the family dynamics. You know as parents that one thing you cannot control in your child’s life is his or her perception.

I don’t know what’s worse, parents blaming themselves or blaming their child’s “perceptions”. I later heard both, and it appeared that the parents who internalized the message about perceptions had a calmer sense of “what happened.” They didn’t appear as personally burdened as those who hadn’t internalized the message. In that context at least, her reassurances were a blessing. But as long as these parents are encouraged by self-described experts to look for something that “went wrong,” they will — either in themselves or in their child. There was a lot of that going on throughout the day, an activity that I can’t imagine to be very productive or healthy. I also can’t imagine it contributing very much towards family reconciliation.

But if parents found some comfort in the idea that it wasn’t all their fault, that comfort was rocked by another “cause” of homosexuality that Melissa Fryrear spoke about. Remember when I mentioned Nicolosi’s second-most effective sound-bite of the day? Melissa Fryrear came up with the grand prize:

I can draw anecdotally from having been a part of an Exodus member ministry for almost a decade, and in those years having met hundreds of women with this struggle, I never met one woman who had not been sexually violated or sexually threatened in her life. I never met one woman. And I never met one man either, that had not been sexually violated or sexually seduced in his life. [Emphasis mine.]

The audience sat in stunned silence as Fryrear, her voice shaking, went on to talk about sexual abuse in greater detail. She later described her own sexual abuse as a child, and her talk had just followed a testimony by Mike Haley in which he described having sex with another older man beginning at the age of eleven. As far as this audience knew, there were no exceptions. This went a long way toward reinforcing Nicolosi’s admonition, “if you don’t hug your sons, some other man will.”

So this is the point where I have to stop describing all of the so-called “causes” of homosexuality. Enough is enough. And I’ll save the examination of the social science literature for another day. There’s something much more important here that I need to get out of the way — and off my chest.

I said earlier that parents’ questions could be grouped into two themes: Why, and what do I do? I’ve described just a few of the lectures and breakout sessions which focused on the “why”, on what when wrong in the child’s life and what (and sometimes who) was to blame for that child’s homosexuality. The conference speakers were very clear: there is no biological basis for homosexuality whatsoever. Instead, they offered as a variable this uncontrollable built-in quality in the child called “temperament”, a “temperament” which helped to form the child’s “perceptions.”

This “temperament, when explained in more detail, sounded suspiciously like some sort of an in-born quality or trait that was somehow intrinsic to the child. And even though this can have a biological or an otherwise in-born basis, the conference speakers were clear in repeatedly conveying another absolute: there was no biological basis for homosexuality. (There was one exception. Mike Haley, during a Q&A breakout session attended by about a fifth of the participants, allowed that there may be a combination of biology in the form of “temperament” and developmental forces coming together. But he was otherwise dismissive of biology playing a role.)

So that pretty much left the fathers and mothers at the center of all of these discussions of “what went wrong.” While I heard some parents blame themselves, at least a few were able to “blame” their child’s “false perceptions” of them as a bad mother or a bad father.

But when Melissa Fryrear spoke so forcefully that she had never met a lesbian or a gay man who did not have some sort of experience with sexual abuse, that message would become a much-repeated refrain in conversations later that day.

It’s not fair to say that the parents and relatives were rife with suspicions, but I was surprised at the number of suspicions that did come up — and the circumstantial nature of the “evidence” which prompted many of them. I heard ex-boyfriends and babysitters suddenly come under suspicion where there had been none before. It seemed as if many of these relatives, taking Melissa Fryrear at her word, turned several possibilities over in their minds — dismissing some, but holding others for future consideration.

Sometimes, these suspicions got the better of them. Before that day, it had never even occurred to one mother that her son might have been molested. Now after Fryrear’s talk, she was momentarily certain of it. “There’s no other explanation!” she exclaimed. But as she thought about it, she remembered that she had no reason to suspect this, and that the only “evidence” she had was Fryrear’s statement. She was finally able to calm herself down after those around her reassured her that it probably didn’t happen.

Besides, she already had so many other reasons to think about for her son being gay. Yet I couldn’t help but feel that this mother’s burden was unnecessarily heavier now. Her long list of things she heard experts describe that “went wrong” in her son’s life — a list that she already blamed herself for as a mother — was now longer because of a hideous crime for which there is no reason to suspect to have happened in the first place.

Child sexual abuse, as we well know, is an all-too-tragic reality in our society. Those who have gone through it know the pain and terrible toll that it exacts on the child, especially in his or her ability to trust another human being. And every parent of a violated son or daughter goes through a period of tremendous guilt and shame over their “failure” to protect their little boy or girl. I cannot even begin to imagine the anguish that these parents must feel.

But I saw at least one parent at Love Won Out feel that same anguish for the first time. And afterwards, I felt as if I was carrying a lead weight around in the pit of my stomach for the rest of the day. I wondered what sort of conversations would be taking place the next time these parents talked to their sons and daughters (those who were on speaking terms, anyway, as most of them were.)

And I wondered whether these parents would even believe their children when they deny having been molested. After all, they had heard the “experts” describe gays and lesbians as having been universally abused. And according to these “experts”, this made them “cautious, fearful, easily hurt, easily slighted, easily offended, self-protective” and incapable of being honest with their feelings. This is a terrible setup for dialogue and familial reconciliation.

And I also wondered how many coaches, teachers, boy scout leaders, and neighbors fell under an unwarranted cloud of suspicion, all because Melissa Fryrear said she never met a lesbian or a gay man who had not been abused or threatened. There was tremendous cruelty in the “nevers” and the “always” that were thrown around with such ease at the conference. It’s a cruelty that these parents didn’t deserve. And what’s more, this cruelty is without merit. I will talk more about that in a later post.

See also:

Prologue: Why I Went To “Love Won Out”
Part 1: What’s Love Got To Do With It?
Part 2: Parents Struggle With “No Exceptions”
Part 3: A Whole New Dialect
Part 4: It Depends On How The Meaning of the Word “Change” Changes
Part 5: A Candid Explanation For “Change”

Joanne

June 14th, 2007

Jim,

I want to thank you for writing your reveiew of the confgerence with a sense og fairness. It is important to see bith sides, and I appreciate your emotional restraint enought to do that.

it is refreshing to find another gay person that is not a left wing muckraker. I feel that bashing a cause of group of people without discussing what the reason for their cohesiveness is would be deceptive and slanted.

Thank you for reporting fairly.

M.E.

July 27th, 2007

Jim,

You “wondered what sort of conversations would be taking place the next time these parents talked to their sons and daughters,” after being told by Melissa Fryrear that their children had undoubtedly been molested.

Although my mom has never been to Love Won Out (as far as I know), I think I have a pretty good idea what those conversations may have consisted of. After all, about six months after I came out to my mother as bisexual – and her first response was, “were you molested?” – I received a disturbing e-mail from her. In it, she revealed that, contrary to my assertions when I came out, I allegedly *had* been molested after all, when I was four.

I was, of course, devastated. I had no memory of this having happened; no idea, even, of who was to blame, since she didn’t reveal any details.

I eventually asked my grandmother what my mom could have been talking about … and she *laughed.* Apparently, I had been caught taking off my clothes in a swimming-pool locker room – for a six-year-old boy. My mother had made a huge stink at the time, insisting the boy had taken advantage of me, but the incident was soon forgotten. Until, that is, my mother’s shame that she had raised a queer daughter, her worry for my future, and the persistent message that same-gender desires *must* be the result of molestation all combined to make her revisit and revise the past.

I forgive her for that now, although when it happened, I was furious that she’d lied to me about such an important fact of my own life. But she wasn’t trying to hurt me, merely trying to make sense of the hurt that this nasty myth and those who spread it had inflicted on her. I really feel sorry for the parents who had to hear that myth all over again, especially packaged as the key to their children’s successful conversions; and I feel sorry for the children who have to sort through the fallout.

Timothy Kincaid

July 27th, 2007

M.E.

How sad. I feel sorry for your mother. No doubt she blamed herself for not watching you closer and keeping you from being “molested” and turning bi.

And if she was able to concoct a molestation story out of a pretty harmless event, imagine how deeply she was delving to find things to fit the “distant mother” theory. I’m sure she’s been punishing herself since.

The purveyors of false “truths” should feel shame for the great damage they do not only to gay and bi people but to their families as well.

Teri Noble

August 6th, 2007

PFLAG Oregon State Council just held a response to Love Won Out here in Portland this past weekend. We chatted briefly with attendees as they left the event. These folks, mostly older couples, were shattered, absolutely shattered and so desperately seeking…. They stopped their cars, rolled down their windows and took our PFLAG material, listened to our brief statements of support. It was heartbreaking. Our deepest desire is that seeds were planted, that they will question what they heard that day,drop into our website, find and learn from parents who celebrate their LGBTQ loved ones and begin to heal their families.

Timothy Kincaid

August 7th, 2007

Teri,

What a wonderful response. They may be able to dismiss the “militant homosexual activist”, but when it is mothers and fathers just like themselves I think it is easier to listen and relate to your stories.

Gene Chase

December 19th, 2007

You say, “The conference speakers were very clear: there is no biological basis for homosexuality whatsoever. Instead, they offered as a variable this uncontrollable built-in quality in the child called ‘temperament’, a ‘temperament’ which helped to form the child’s ‘perceptions.'”

It sounds to me as though the conference speakers you mention are alluding to the meta-study that gayman and Cornell University psychology professor Daryl Bem did, entitled “Exotic Becomes Erotic,” found here
His study is widely respected and cited. Bem finds that temperament plays a role, not biology, in the path analysis that he does. Are you disagreeing with Bem?

I echo what other commentators have said about the sense of even-handedness that you bring to your report of a Love Won Out / Love One Out conference. Thanks! (Check the original logo of the conference to see that both words Won and One are there, intentionally ambiguous.)

–gene chase, director of Free, an Exodus member ministry

Jim Burroway

December 19th, 2007

Hi Gene,

Hey! No fair giving me homework right before Christmas break! ;-)

It’s been a few years since I read Bem. I’ll have to re-read him again to address your specific question about his paper.

Generally speaking however, I am not wedded to any particular theory on the development of homosexuality. After having read so many research papers from such a wide variety of authors from so many different perspectives, I’ve come to the conclusion that we are not likely to find a single theory which is sufficient to explain it for everyone. For some, developmental processes may very well take center stage, for others, other factors. For most, it is probably a combination of many different things that we may never be able to tease out.

The only thing I am suspicious of is when someone only points to one theory and gives that one sole legitimacy. I got into a massive e-mail flame war with a reader who insisted that all homosexuality was genetic. When I pointed out that not only was there no proof of such a theory, but that the scientific evidence in fact failed to explain large numbers of gay men who were part of that study, he consigned me to the ranks of the “self-loathing closet cases” and decided I was as much of an enemy as James Dobson.

Ah, such is life!

Thanks for dropping by.

Jason

December 19th, 2007

I’m reading through the “Exotic Becomes Erotic” stuff and I have only one question.

How?

Perhaps it’s later in the paper, but there’s no explanation as to how the exotic becomes erotic. It is just handed out as if it were an automatic.

grantdale

December 19th, 2007

Good lord, this back again… [*]

1) Bem’s original EBE paper [1] — the one given by Gene Chase — used the Bell, Weinberg, & Hammersmith sample (a sample from the 1970’s, San Francisco, participants largely found via gay bars etc.)

Bell, Weinberg, & Hammersmith were at pains to state that the sample was not suitable for such purposes as Bem put it to. It was all that Bem had at the time, but that does not alter the problem with base data he used.

2) later work was done using the Australian Twin Registry (eg by Bailey, Dunne, & Martin, and by Kirk, Bailey, Dunne, & Martin [2] [3]).

The first found heritability, but could not identify from what cause. The authors said they could not find, but also could not preclude, genetics as causation.

The second — using more complex mulitvariant analysis — did find statistical support for genetics as causation.

3) Bem’s EBE has found no support, elsewhere. In fact the basic concept has come under strong criticism, with Bem largely refusing to even respond.

Think about it: if “Exotic becomes Erotic” as Bem suggests … why aren’t inter-racial relationships the norm, rather than the exception?

(There you go Jim — your homework is now made easier!)

Timothy Kincaid

December 20th, 2007

grantdale,

link [1] isn’t working for me

grantdale

December 20th, 2007

Hmm, odd. Sorry about that, what ever it is.

http://dbem.ws/Exotic%20Becomes%20Erotic.pdf

all his pubs are at http://dbem.ws/pubs.html

(The EBE paper is from 1996, orig publ in Psychological Review, 103, 320-335.)

anon

March 28th, 2008

Thank you so much for this post. My parents have been to several Love Won Out conferences over the last 10 years, have been in personal contact with Melissa Fryear and other ex-lesbians to try to understand me and their role, and financially support ex-gay ministries. When I came out, every man in my life was put under suspicion of sexually abusing me. My brother. My ex-boyfriends. Even my dad. The ex-gay ministries destroy more than the gay person’s life, they destroy entire families because they are premised on needing to find someone to blame for homosexuality. How about “blaming” God? He seems like the most likely culprit for “causing” my homosexuality.

Also, if every woman who has been sexually abused was a lesbian, there would be a whole heck of a lot more lesbians. 38% of girls in America are sexually abused before the age of 18: http://www.womenofsubstance.org/sexabuse.htm.

How about spending resources on this horrific social problem instead of picking on innocent gay people!

Karen

December 26th, 2008

I am the mother of a gay son. Why can’t parents just accept that their son/daughter is gay?

My son (who is the youngest of 5 sons) is still the same person he was before I knew he was gay.

I don’t feel guilty in the slightest and my son was NEVER molested as a child!

It really makes me angry that parents need to find a reason for their childs sexuality – as long as your son/daughter is HAPPY – who cares about the ‘WHY’?

Timothy Kincaid

December 27th, 2008

Karen,

Bless you. You are a holiday treat.

brian dean

June 8th, 2009

Hi, I listened to Mellissa Fryrears testimony on the tv, and I found it to be a beautiful thing. I came through a war situation,and was very tough emotionally, culdnt really express my emotions because of this, and my marriage suffered.I couldnt really emotionally connect with my wife, and she formed an unhealthy relationship with another woman because of it. Mellissas testimony really brought it home to me that instead of blameng my wife for everything, i should have also looked at my own fault. Yes she was srong to do what she did, but I was srong as well. Id really love to tell mellissa that I love Jesus Christ dearly, and she has brought real healing to my life, of course I dont condone practising gay activity in church, but I know that Jesus wants a loving relationship with everyone, I understand that now, and instead of judging my wife I should have won her over with love and kindness. It ruined my marriage, but it has all worked for the good of me, because I really love Jesus Christ, and he knows my heart. So Mellissa, I wnat you to know that your testimony was the bravest testimony I have ever heard, I wept real tears and wept along with you, I know that you are sincere in your walk, and Im very sorry that I mistrusted ex gay people for years, but I dont mistrust you, by the way Im ginger , 5 10 good looking, and would date you anytime girl, because you are beautiful on the outside, but more importantly, because of Jesus Christ you are beautiful on the inside as well,
Gods love sister, I couldnt find you on the web, so I hope you can get this, keep up the good work sister, and know that you have healed me of something and brought me closer to Jesus Christ.

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