Box Turtle Bulletin

Ghana Regional Minister Orders All Gays Arrested

From the the website of Ghana radio Joy 99.7, it looks like a full-fledged witch-hunt is imminent:

The Western Region Minister Paul Evans Aidoo has ordered the immediate arrest of all homosexuals in the region.

He has tasked the Bureau of National Investigations and all security agencies to smoke out persons suspected to be engaging in same sex. He also enlisted the services of landlords and tenants to provide reliable information which will lead to the arrest of homosexuals.

His directive follows months of campaigns against the practice of homosexuality in the country. Only yesterday, the Christian Council of Ghana capped months of protestations against the practice of homosexuality with a strongly worded message against the practice and courting Ghanaians not to vote for any politician who believes in the rights of homosexuals.

This is worrying, not only for the human rights disaster this roundup would pose, but it would also represent a huge betrayal for those 8,000 who signed up at an HIV/AIDS workshop funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). According to Ghanaian radio, that report sparked a series of religious demonstrations with the Muslim and Christian communities in the Central and Western regions.

The website of AfricanActivist has background on the story. Homosexuality is currently a misdemeanor in Ghana. Ghana’s president John Evans Atta Mills denies reports that he intends to institute a new anti-gay law, after witnesses claimed that he told one religious gathering that he would ” do something about the homosexuality menace in Ghana.” Last June, Ghanaian vice president John Dramani Mahama told delegates at a high level UN meeting on HIV/AIDS that it was essential to include Ghana’s LGBT community in its strategy to fight HIV/AIDS. He also acknowledged that current attitudes toward gay people make that strategy difficult. With the latest calls for mass arrests and the rising prospect of violence, that strategy is now in serious jeopardy, along with the safety and security of thousands of citizens of the West African nation.

 [via Warren Throckmorton]

“In Iowa, You Can’t Smoke A Fag But You Can Marry One”

That’s the punchline to a joke that had Iowa’s The Family Leader’s Bob Vander Plaats laughing and saying, “That’s pretty good! Oh shoot!”

Igor Volsky at ThinkProgress reacts:

Vander Plaats’ reaction is not entirely surprising, since the group has previously compared homosexuality to the cancerous effects of second-hand smoking and links supporters to ex-gay reparative therapy. What’s more telling is the willingness of Republican presidential candidates like Tim Pawlenty and Newt Gingrich to attend the group’s presidential forum and Michele Bachmann’s and Rick Santorum’s eagerness to sign its pledge.

A George Rekers Case History: Where Is “Carl”?

When Kirk Murphy’s sister Maris contacted me last October via this comment, it was the first step on a long road of discovery. Until just a few days earlier, she had no idea that anyone had written about her brother. And while Kirk knew that UCLA researcher Dr. Richard Green had written a book in 1987 which included his treatment, it appears that neither he nor anyone else in his family knew that Rekers written about him — not just that, but had built his career on Kirk’s case history under the pseudonym of “Kraig.”

In one of the epilogues to our original investigation of Kirk Murphy’s treatment by George Rekers, I explored the weakest link in the mental health profession, the point where doctors are entrusted to accurately and truthfully present their case histories in the published literature. The discrepancies between Rekers’s descriptions of “Kraig” and what Kirk was really like as his family remembered him turned out to be pretty wide. Those discrepancies were continuing theme in the conversations that I had with Kirk’s mother, brother and sister.

Rekers wrote several case histories, featuring about a dozen young children in his career. Kirk was Rekers’s most famous and most widely published case history, but he was far from the only one. Today’s case history is that of “Carl”, an eight-year-old boy who Rekers treated at the Gender Identity Clinic at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, about the same time as Kirk’s treatment in 1970. “Carl” appeared in Rekers’s 1972 doctoral dissertation alongside “Kraig,” and he first appeared in the professional literature in the summer of 1974, at about the same time as “Kraig’s” case appeared in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. And like Kirk’s treatment, “Carl’s” treatment was paid for by grants to UCLA from the National Institute of Mental Health.

“Carl’s” case was presented in a paper by Rekers, his mentor Dr. O. Ivar Lovaas, and fellow UCLA researcher Benson Low, titled “The Behavioral Treatment of a ‘Transsexual’ Preadolescent Boy,” published in the June 1974 issue of the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology. Carl was the title’s “transsexual” — the authors put the term in quotes in recognition of the fact that they had no idea whether “Carl” would actually grow up to the transgender, gay or straight. But that wouldn’t stop them from treating him. They introduced “Carl” this way:

Our client, Carl, was referred to us for treatment at the age of 8 years, 8 months. The referring physician had found Carl to be physically normal in terms of currently available methods of biomedical testing. Prior to referral to our clinic, Carl had been evaluated by two separate psychiatric agencies as having a severe cross-gender identity problem. In one clinic, Carl had been treated in family therapy for a period of 8 months in a largely unsuccessful attempt to alleviate his transsexual problem, his low self-esteem, and his major difficulties in peer and family relationships. He came from a broken family in which his mother had had 4 marriages in Carl’s lifetime. Carl had a brother 7 years old and a sister 6 years old, both of whom were without apparent psychiatric difficulties.

Carl reportedly had a “pronounced feminine inflection and content of speech” since the age of four, according to case material they quoted from earlier therapists:

He had several recurring exclamatory feminine remarks, such as “goodness gracious,” and “Oh, dear me.” His feminine gestures were exaggerations of an effeminate swishy gait and arm movements. He would typically sit with his legs crossed very effeminately and his arms folded like a female model. At home, he would frequently use towels after a bath to simulate female garments and long hair. …Not only was Carl labeled by his peers as effeminate, but he referred to himself as a “sissy” and “fag”, and his speech regularly implied that he preferred to be considered a girl.

As we learned when we delved into Kirk’s childhood, Rekers’s descriptions may be as far off the mark with Carl in important respects as they were with Kirk. So some caution is in order.

Carl entered a treatment regimen very similar to Kirk’s — the same playrooms in the clinic, and the same red chip/blue chip program in the home. If Kirk’s case is any guide, it is possible that “Carl’s” younger brother and sister may have also been placed on the chip program. There was one element in “Carl’s” treatment program however that different from Kirk’s. Being eight years old and in school, “Carl’s” treatment program was extended to the classroom with his teacher instructed on implementing a “cost-response contingency.” “Carl” was given ten points at the start of each day, and with each act of effeminacy, the teacher would call out “one point!” and deduct a point from the score. At the end of the school day, Carl received two minutes of free time for each point remaining.

The school program extended over three semesters and three classroom teachers (spring, summer, and fall). “Carl” evidently learned to suppress his feminine behaviors with the first teacher, but every time he entered a new classroom and a new teacher, he would express himself naturally again. As each teacher implemented the point system, “Carl” would suppress his effeminate mannerisms, but the process would start over again at square one with the next classroom and teacher. But after fifteen months, the program was ended, and “Carl’s” treatment was proclaimed a success:

Undoubtedly, treatment produced marked changes in Carl’s behavior and his interest patterns. His mother, school teachers, and neighbors all agreed that he changed in a rather basic or comprehensive way from a feminine to a masculine boy. Perhaps due to his late age at the onset of treatment, however, occasional remnants of certain feminine behaviors have been observed. These feminine behaviors have reappeared, in a diminished strength, on occasions when Carl is extremely anxious, angry, or confronting frustrating circumstances. It is possible that Carl has maintained this discriminative behavior because he had not been specifically taught (in treatment) to behave masculinely in all situations in which he becomes emotionally distressed.

“Carl” wasn’t presented as the unqualified success that “Kraig” was, but Rekers and associates concluded that “his sex-role development may have become normalized.” They continued,

Our treatment results for Carl suggest that we may have isolated an effective treatment for boyhood cross-gender identity problems. … Only followup data will allow us to claim a cure for (or prevention of) the severe adult sexual pathologies of transvestism and transsexualism or some forms of homosexuality. At this time, however, we have facilitated Carl’s current social and emotional adjustment, which should have positive effects on his future adult adjustment, independent of the issue of future sexual orientation.

In 1978, Rekers published this brief update of “Carl’s” case in the Journal of the Florida Medical Association:

Case #4 — Treatment Example: Eight-year-old Carl was treated for his severe cross-gender identity by a comprehensive set of treatment procedures including clinic behavior therapy, token economy behavioral management by parent, consultation with school teachers, athletic training, companionship therapy, family counseling, and counseling of the parent. The detailed treatment procedures, published elsewhere, resulted in a normal gender identity, better emotional and social adjustment, and a reversal from depression to reasonable happiness at the one-year and six-year follow-ups. At age 16 years, Carl is now within normal ranges of sexual identity and emotional development.

“Carl’s” case, like Kirk’s, was widely cited in the professional literature, although his case didn’t quite reach the same level of notoriety as Kirk’s. But there was one particular area where “Carl’s” case found an audience: because “Carl’s” treatment was extended into the schools, his case made occasional appearances in books and journals focused on guidance counseling and school behavioral issues. It’s doubtful that “Carl” or his family knows that his case history has been published, let alone published widely. But as with “Joan” whose case history we presented yesterday, the same questions remain: who was “Carl”? Where is he? And most importantly, how is he?

“Carl,” if you think you recognize yourself in these reports, please let us know how you’re doing.

See Also:
“Carl,” age 8½
“Joan,” age 14
“Paul,” age 8
“Wayne,” age 7
And, of course, “Kraig” (Kirk Murphy), age 4

The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, July 19

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Campus Pride’s Camp Pride Begins: Nashville, TN. Campus Pride kicks off its Camp Pride Summer Leadership Camp today at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. The camp will bring together undergraduate LGBT and ally student leaders from colleges and universities all across the United States to share leadership and personal growth experiences, learn strategies and skills for grassroots coalition building, and discuss campus organizing practices and challenges. The camp continues through Sunday, July 24.

ElderServe Luncheon: Louisville, KY. ElderServe, Louisville’s largest non-profit senior services organization, has officially announced a partnership with the Fairness Campaign to provide greater communication and cooperation between the two organizations to serve the metro area’s LGBT senior population. Toward that end, the partnership will hold a noon luncheon today to increase seniors’ knowledge of programs and services available to them, as well as to inform ElderCare of the unique needs of aging LGBT citizens. The luncheon takes place at noon, at the Fairness Campaign office, 2263 Frankfort Avenue. RSVPs to the luncheon are appreciated by calling 502.893.0788 or by e-mailing Laura@Fairness.org.

HISTORY? BIRTHDAYS?
I don’t have anything. How about you? If you know of something, please let us know in the comments.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. PLEASE, don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

Fascinating gay penis facts

It appears that the National Institutes for Health helped fund the analysis of a survey about how penis size effects gay men. And this has the Traditional Values Coalition nearly sputtering with indignation.

Crazy Lou sent out a press release claiming that

At least $9.4 million for a 10-year study that included a survey of gay men to determine average penis sizes, “…to better understand the real individual-level consequences of living in a penis-centered society.”

Of course that wasn’t true. The funds were apparently but one tiny part of a larger grant and the purpose wasn’t to determine average penis size. Actually the findings included much more, such as: (Fox News)

The study reported, among its findings, that gay men with “below average penises” were more likely to assume a “bottom” sexual position, while those with “above average penises” were more likely to assume a “top” sexual position. Those with average penises identified themselves as “versatile” in the bedroom.

While previous studies have found that for heterosexual men, penis size was significantly related to comfort in a swimsuit, not much study of the penis was focused on gay men. And the researchers figured if anyone knew about penises, it was gay men.

And there was lots of fabulous info: the bigger the penis, the less likely to lie about it; smaller guys wish they were bigger, but no one wishes they were smaller. I have no idea how I missed this study when it ran in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

But, seriously, there were some findings that are important. Those few (7%) who believed that their penis was “below average” fared significantly worse than other men on three measures of psychosocial adjustment. Also, men with above average penises were significantly more likely than men with average size penises to report having ever been infected with gonorrhea/Chlamydia/urinary tract infection.

All in all, what a great way to start the week. Penis fun facts and pissing off Crazy Lou.

And no. It’s none of your business.

A George Rekers Case Study: Where Is “Joan”?

In the wake of George Reker’s “luggage-gate” scandal, the sad case history of his most famous case study, that of four-year-old “Kriag,” once again came to the surface. That started a chain of questions: who was “Kraig,” where was he, and most importantly, how was he? A year later, and as a result of BTB’s original investigation, we now know the tragic answer to those questions.

But Kirk Murphy, the real little boy behind Rekers’s “Kraig” wasn’t Rekers’s only client, not by any means. In a chapter that Rekers contributed to Innovations In Clinical Practice: A Source Book, Volume 16 (1998), Rekers reprised five of those case histories including Kirk’s, with some of those case histories going all the way back to Rekers’s 1972 doctoral dissertation (where Kirk also made his appearance alongside several other children). The same questions apply: who are they, where are they, and most importantly, how are they?

Take for example, fourteen-year-old “Joan”, who Rekers described this way in 1998:

Because of her mother’s two divorces, 14-year-old Joan had experienced very little affection or attention from adult males. When she first appeared in our clinic, she insisted that she had felt like a boy all her life. She bragged that no one could ever get her to wear a dress, and she wore a distinctly masculine shirt, a black leather jacket, faded blue jeans, and cowboy boots. She openly talked about her strong sexual interest in other girls as sexual partners, not as a “homosexual” but as a “male” wanting a girlfriend (Rekers & Mead, 1980).

Joan’s voice inflection was notably artificially low, imitating a man’s gruff voice, and her speech content was stereotypically focused on masculine topics. Her gestures and mannerisms were exaggeratedly masculine, as was her style of walking down the hall. She not only limited most of her social interactions to teenage boys, but she indicated her own cross-gender identification by referring to herself and this male peer group as “we.” She even failed physical education classes at school because she insisted on playing on the boys’ teams and upon using the boys’ locker room, both of which were denied to her by her school.

Joan was quite disgusted by her female pubertal development and tried to hide her breast development by wearing a masculine jacket or an overshirt that concealed her developing breasts. She refused to wear a bra and refused to use feminine hygiene articles. Presenting at our university-affiliated hospital, she requested transplantation of the male genitals of some teenage boy who wanted to be a girl, which was one of many of her repeated requests for sex-reassignment surgery.

Joan insisted that others call her “Paul,” but most of her peers rejected her altogether. Her only associates were a few socially maladjusted teen boys. She frequently suffered severe depressive episodes accompanied by suicidal ideation expressed in terms of wanting to be dead rather than to remain living with a female body.

Based on what we discovered while investigating Kirk Murphy’s childhood, it’s highly possible that Rekers’s description of “Joan” may be accurate in some areas and wildly off-base in others. “Joan” made her first appearance in the literature in 1980, when Rekers and Shasta Mead, a grad student at the University of Florida where Rekers was teaching at the time, published their paper, “Female Sex-Role Deviance: Early Identification and Developmental Intervention” in the Fall 1980 issue of the Journal of Clinical Child Psychology.  Their description of “Joan” contains a few more details, including why she wanted to be called “Paul”:

She preferred to be called “Paul” and strongly identified with Paul Stanley, a male rock star with a group called “Kiss”. She frequently crossdressed so that she resembled Paul Stanley, with white shoe polish on her face, a black star on her right eye, and red lipstick on her lips.

The paper uses “Joan” as an example of the difference between ordinary “tomboyism” (which Rekers and Meade thought was more or less innocuous) and what Rekers called “Gender Identity Disturbance,” the same label Rekers applied to Kirk. But unlike Kirk’s case, Rekers would never describe “Joan’s” treatment program in any of his published material, nor has he ever claimed any success in making “Joan” “normal.” What ultimately happened to “Joan,” Rekers doesn’t say and we don’t know. We have no idea whether “Joan” was gay, transgender, or a rebellious teen. But if you’re out there Joan, we would really like to hear from you.

See Also:
“Carl,” age 8½
“Joan,” age 14
“Paul,” age 8
“Wayne,” age 7
And, of course, “Kraig” (Kirk Murphy), age 4

People with unwanted same-sex attractions should be allowed to live according to their values

One of the claims that ex-gay organizations and reorientation counselors indignantly demand is that people with unwanted same-sex attractions should be free to try to live the life they want. And they deserve counselors to help them. They should not be forced to be “gay”.

And we agree.

If someone wants to form a life that appears heterosexual, as long as they are being completely honest with themself and their spouse, then we have no problem. If they want celibacy, that’s fine too. We may have doubts about how wise or ultimately realistic these goals are, but we never oppose freedom of choice.

In our criticism of ex-gay groups, counselors, political activists, slogans, claims and methods, we never seek to limit the rights of the individual. What we do demand is that the individual is told the truth and not fed a false hope or a distorted message (as happened at the Bachmann clinic). Much of the harm done in reorientation therapy is the result of unrealistic expectations and the perversion of faith.

It’s funny. While the groups and counselors claim to be defending the individuals, it is the gay community that is really trying to protect them. Because while they may be unhappy with their attractions and may today want nothing to do with the gay community, they still are ours and we care about them.

Utah Dems Elect First Openly Gay Man As Party Leader

And he wants to assure the state’s Mormons that they are also welcome in the “big tent” party:

“I want to speak directly to the LDS people in our state,” Jim Dabakis said Saturday after being nominated for state party chairman. “I want you LDS people to participate in our party. We want your spirit, we want your contributions and we want to earn your votes. I will do whatever I can as chair to see that our big tent is comfortable to LDS people because it’s the right thing to do.”

Dabakis co-founded Equality Utah and The Utah Pride Center. Shortly after his nomination for the top job, he joked, “This is a historic moment. Utah may elect its first out Greek-American party chair.”

Where Did The Ex-Gay One-Third “Success Rate” Come From?

E. Daniel Blatt, otherwise known as GayPatriotWest, responded to the Marcus Bachmann exposé with his thoughts on ex-gay therapy. He didn’t exactly defend ex-gay therapy per se, defending instead the right of Christian groups to “set up such companies, provided they do not coerce anyone to enter treatment.” He doesn’t go into what constitutes coercion in conservative Christian culture, but that’s not the debate he was entering. He adds “that critics of such outfits continue to have the freedom to question the methods of said companies and should continue to exercise that freedom,” but he doesn’t enter into a debate of their methods either. He merely posits those two statements as a prelude to the debate he does enter, the so-called success rates of ex-gay therapy. Blatt concluded that the reported success rates are likely highly self-selecting and consisting of those whose sexuality is more fluid that those who don’t seek to change.Very reasonable assumptions, both, strongly backed by the evidence itself. But then he says this:

The only objective studies I have read of such programs show they have a “success” rate (as defined by them) no greater than 33% (and even that number is likely inflated).  And that, let me stress, is not 33% of all gay people, but 33% of those who seek counseling in such facilities.

The caveat is taken, but even with that caveat, the numbers are definitely inflated. And it’s the first sentence that gave me pause: “The only objective studies I have read…” Which studies would those be?

Blatt probably did what many people do in the blogosphere. Most who say they looked into studies almost never actually read the studies. Blatt wrote about the “objective studies I have read,” but he likely should have written about the “objective studies I have read of” — the key point being that he probably relied on others whom he trusted to describe those studies on the assumption that they read them — or that they read of them from others who they trusted, who read them or who read of them from others who they trusted, and so on.

You see where this is going. I suspect that about as many people have actually read studies on efforts to change sexual orientation, whether they support ex-gay therapy or oppose it, as those who have actually read Kinsey’s 1948 Sexual Behavior In the Human Male. Everyone quotes from them and are absolutely certain that their quotes are accurate, but almost nobody has actually read the sources that they claim their quotes came from. (The same argument can be made for other important books like, say, the Bible.) And so I’ve learned a long time ago not to rely on other people’s characterizations of whatever they say they’ve read — or what they said they read of someone else who read it, or who read someone else who read it, etc. I actually have those books and studies in my collection (visitors to my home find my library “interesting,” to say the least) and I have not only read them, but I refer to them more often than I care to.

The 33% statistic, in fact, is not based any any systematic objective studies, but is rather an artifact of lore (much like Kinsey’s 10%) which has a ring of credibility for those who believe it (much like Kinsey’s 10%) but which doesn’t have much of a rigorous statistical basis behind it (much like Kinsey’s 10%). Further, the 33% statistic often appeared more as a rule of thumb than as a reliable statistic. Back when homosexuality was still considered a mental disorder, it was generally believed among mental health professions that about a third could be “cured” and induced to enter heterosexual marriages, a third could become either celibate or bisexual, and a third were more or less hopeless. The one-third/one-third/one-third lore — specifics of the lore varied — became more or less accepted fact despite the absence of evidence to support it.

Exodus no longer touts the 33% statistic on their revamped web site, but before that remodel Exodus claimed (via archive.org) that a success rate of between 30% and 50% was “not unusual.” A similar range of success was repeated by NARTH, the National Association for Research and Treatment of Homosexuality, while a 1997 unpublished, non-peer-reviewed NARTH study conveniently arrived at the the 33% figure right on the nose. In 2009, NARTH appeared to have traced the 33% statistic to Edmund Bergler’s 1956 book, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? I’ll let NARTH  describe Bergler’s finding from their “journal.” It’s not online, but I have a copy. On page 20, NARTH writes:

Bergler (1956) reported that in his 30 years of practice, he had successfully used psychoanalysis to help approximately 100 homosexuals change their orientation, and that a real shift toward genuine heterosexuality had indeed occurred. Using psychoanalysis, Bergler and his associates reported a 33 percent cure rate-that is, following treatment these patients were able to function as heterosexuals, whereas before treatment they were exclusively homosexual.

I have combed through Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? but cannot find the 33% statistic. On page 188, Bergler does write, “In nearly thirty years, I have successfully concluded analysis of one hundred homosexuals (thirty other analyses were interrupted either by myself or by the patient’s leaving)” That’s about as close as I can get to finding a statistical citation. I haven’t found NARTH’s claim for a “33 percent cure rate.” Instead, Bergler actually implies that all of those 100 cases were “successfully concluded” and on the next page he triumphantly states, “The theoretical and therapeutic obstacles to curing homosexuals has been surmounted” — all with nary a statistic or measurement in sight. I’m willing to concede that the statistic may be hidden somewhere else in the 302-page volume. But if it’s in there, Bergler himself doesn’t make much of it, and neither do his contemporary book reviewers.

But while I have Bergler’s books off the shelf and on my desk, an examination of his views are illuminating. Bergler wrote some of the most damning books and essays on homosexuality ever published. In 1959’s 1000 Homosexuals, (again, no mention of cure rates that I can find) Bergler describes gay men as “psychic mascochsts,” as he explains in the very first chapter:

Imagine a man who for some mysterious reasons unconsciously wants to be mistreated by a woman, though consciously unaware of this wish. Imagine, further, that this person inwardly fears his own wish, but instead of giving up the wish itself give sup its alleged or imagined central figure, woman. Since there are only two sexes, this leaves him only one alternative in his frantic flight: man.

In Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life?, Bergler described gay men as acting on utter hatred of women:

The homosexual takes flight to man as an antidote for the woman he fears; the antidote is only secondarily elevated to the status of an attraction. This attraction is mingled with contempt; the hatred and scorn for women shown by the most vilent heterosexual misogynist appears to be benevolence when compared with the contempt shown by the typical homosexual for his sexual partners. This attitude is so marked that frequently the whole personality of the “lover” is obliterated: many homosexual contacts take place in comfort stations, in the obscurity of a park, in Turisk baths, where the sex object is not even seen. This fully impersonal means of achieve “contact” makes even a visit to a heterosexual whorehouse see, like an emotional experience.

In his 1953 book Fashion and the Unconscious, Bergler gave an example of how this so-called hatred of women played out:

It may be surprising but the existence of constrictive and “uncomfortable” fashions can be traced to the paradoxical fact that women are dressed by their bitterest enemies. Male homosexuals, who are inwardly terrified of women, are predominant in designing women’s clothes. Whatever their rationalizations, they hate women, as a defense.

So now that you you know where he’s coming from, let’s leave this digression and get back to the rule of the thirds. If Bergler wasn’t the source, then the next probably source might be Irving Bieber’s 1962 Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study. He touted a 77% “cure” rate, which is at least in the one-third ballpark.  More significantly, Bieber’s tome was wildly influential throughout the mental health profession. Anyone who was even mildly interested in trying to cure homosexuality was aware of Bieber’s book. It cared a weight in the psychological world similar to that which Kinsey’s books caried in popular culture. There were other studies which claimed a 33% success rate, but none of them came close to approaching the reach that Bieber’s 358-page book had. If Bieber wasn’t the source of the 33% statistic, he most certainly was the inspiration for the one-third/one-third/one-third lore. His numbers make a good approximation. After treatment, 27% of his sample of 106 gay and bisexual men became “exclusively heterosexual”, 32% became bisexual or inactive, and 41% remained uncured. And thus, the very rough one-third/one-third/one-third rule of thumb was born.

(It’s interesting to note the role that the 30 bisexuals played in this composite statistic: of them, 50% became “exclusively heterosexual”, while 43% of them remained bisexual and two became “inactive”. Meanwhile, only 19% of “exclusive homosexuals” before the study became “exclusively heterosexual” afterwards. Fifty-seven percent of the “exclusively homosexuals” remained stubbornly “exclusively homosexual” after treatment, with the rest reportedly becoming bisexual.)

Bieber’s anti-gay rhetoric was considerably more restrained than Bergler’s but his views of gay people were nevertheless similar. During the 1973 debate over the APA’s removal of homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, Bieber told a reporter, “a homosexual is a person whose heterosexual function is crippled, like the legs of a polio victim.” Bieber died in 1991, but his wife Toby Bieber, who was one of the book’s nine other co-authors, continued her husband’s legacy and helped to create NARTH, where today she sits on their so-called Scientific Advisory Committee. She also backed Paul Cameron’s abandoned online “journal.”

So what about the ex-gay success rate? Well, the more I look personally at the studies, including Bieber’s and Bergler’s, the less I find that any of them are objective. The few that are, are burdened with poor methodologies, missing or inconsistent definitions of what “success” means, and minimal or absent long-term follow-up — also like Bieber’s and Bergler’s. And it’s not just me saying so. The American Psychological Association agrees. An APA task force in 2009 concluded (PDF: 816KB/138 pages) that “enduring change to an individual’s sexual orientation is uncommon,” and that “there was some evidence to indicate that individuals experienced harm” from such therapies.

Oh, and it’s not just the APA saying change is extremely rare and much, much lower than 33%. It’s ex-gay proponents themselves, when you take the time to dig into their data and ignore their press releases. In 2007, Stanton Jones and Mark Yarhouse, two proponents of ex-gay ministries, published their study in a book titled, Ex-Gays? A Longitudinal Study of Religiously Mediated Change in Sexual Orientation. (An important caveat to note is that this book was not peer-reviewed. It was also funded and supported by Exodus International.) As I noted then, one of the diffuculties of that study was that, despite Exodus’s boast that they have helped “hundreds of thousands” find “freedom” from homosexuality, Jones and Yarhouse had a very difficult time finding people to study:

The sample size was disappointingly small, too small for an effective retrospective study. They told a reporter from Christianity Today that they had hoped to recruit some three hundred participants, but they found “many Exodus ministries mysteriously uncooperative.” They only wound up with 98 at the beginning of the study (72 men and 26 women), a population they describe as “respectably large.”

Fewer than a hundred is a tiny sample on which to assess the efforts of an entire movement, but let’s press on. In 2009, Stanton and Jones issued a follow-up with updated figures for that study. So overall, here’s what happened:

• Success: Conversion – 14 (14%)
• Success: Chastity – 18 (18%)
• Non-Success – 29 (30%)
• Drop-Outs – 37 (38%)

And what was “Success: conversion?” Stanton and Jones defined it in their book as — and this has to be my favorite definition of all time — “satisfactory, if not uncomplicated, heterosexual adjustment.” Let’s just pause here and let that sink in. It’s not heterosexuality. It’s a close-enough-for-hand-grenades adjustment to heterosexual behavior, with complications.  I’ll bet, because when looking at average changes in Kinsey scores during the study, the prospective sample (a critical subset of the overall study — they were the only ones measured from the beginning of their entry into ex-gay therapy and were thus less self-selecting) reported, on average, virtually no change in attractions and a small increase in homosexual behavior. That’s probably why Jones and Yarhouse gave this caution:

[W]hile we found that part of our research population experienced success to the degree that it might be called (as we have here) “conversion,” our evidence does not indicate that these changes are categorical, resulting in uncomplicated, dichotomous and unequivocal reversal of sexual orientation from utterly homosexual to utterly heterosexual. Most of the individuals who reported that they were heterosexual at T6 did not report themselves to be without experience of homosexual arousal, and they did not report their heterosexual orientation to be unequivocal and uncomplicated.

Somehow, that doesn’t sound like anything close to being a “cure” to me. And as for defining chastity as “success,” well, I’ll let you decide if a lifetime of loneliness is acceptable to you.

The Daily Agenda for Monday, July 18

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Justice Department To Explain Itself to Ninth Circuit Court over DADT: Pasadena, CA. Last week, the Justice Department belatedly decided that they would continue to uphold the constitutionality of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” — even though the discriminatory policy is (supposedly) on its way out the door toward repeal — and asked that the court’s stay blocking a lower court finding that DADT was unconstitutional and unenforceable be put back into place by Friday. The DOJ had earlier refused to address DADT’s constitutionality, and in a confusing filing stated only that the repeal was constitutional. That led the appeals court to decide to lift the stay upholding a law that the DOJ had refused to defend. Except now, to the court’s apparent annoyance, the DOJ has done an about face and defended the constitutionality of DADT after all. So the court only partially re-imposed the stay: the military can refuse to enlist gay servicemembers, but they would remain barred from expelling them.

But in a sign of the court’s annoyance, the order demanded that the Justice Department explain its late motion for reconsideration by 5 p.m. (PDT) today “to address why (it) did not present in (its) May 20, 2011 opposition to lift the stay the detailed information now presented in the motion for reconsideration.” That means the Justice Department lawyers would have to work over the weekend to meet the tight deadline, while the Log Cabin Republicans were given until the close of business on Thursday to respond. I’m sure in law school there are a lot of courtroom tactics covered in the textbooks, but I imagine one of them involves a cardinal rule against pissing off the judge. Oral arguments are set for September 1.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Psychiatrist Denounces Anti-Gay Witchhunt: 1950. A Senate subcommittee under Joseph McCarthy investigating the federal employment of gay Americans was warned that their investigation would have negative consequences on government functioning. “The immediate effect of the probe is to threaten the emotional security and mental health of many government employees, warned Dr. Henry P. Laughlin of the Washington Psychiatric Society. “This is indeed unfortunate, tending to lower the efficiency and work production of those who have some actual or imagined basis for concern, and especially for those people whose homosexual experiences have been isolated or of a token nature or perhaps never occurred.” Laughlin however emphasized that he was only speaking for himself and not the Society, before continuing on a line rarely heard in 1950: “Sexual orientation doesn’t enter into a person’s ability or capacity to do work. I am sure that many persons in government, as well as in industry and other areas of endeavor, have made significant contributions, although their orientation happens to be homosexual.” Laughlin’s testimony would fall on deaf years. Tens of thousands of people would be hounded out of their jobs over the next several decades, whether they were gay, suspected of being gay, or simply accused of being gay for other reasons.

President Clinton Unveils DADT Policy: 1993. “Let me say a few words now about this policy. It is not a perfect solution. It is not identical with some of my own goals. And it certainly will not please everyone, perhaps not anyone, and clearly not those who hold the most adamant opinions on either side of this issue.” With those words, President Bill Clinton unveiled a new “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in compliance with a law that had been passed by Congress earlier that year.

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Giuliani: GOP Should Stay Out of Marriage

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who himself thinks that marriage equality is “wrong,” nevertheless thinks the GOP should stay out of marriage:

I think the Republican Party would be well advised to get the heck out of people’s bedrooms and let these things get decided by states. We’d be a much more successful political party if we stuck to our economic, conservative roots. I think it’s wrong, but there are other things that I think are wrong that get decided by democratic vote. I see more harm, however, by dwelling so much on this subject of gays and lesbians and whether it’s right or wrong in politics.”

By the way, Giuliani is still not gonna preside over the marriage of his gay friends who opened their home to him when he split from his second wife. In gratitude for the gay couple’s hospitality, Giuliani had earlier promised them he would do so if marriage equality were to become legal in New York.

Update 7/18: There had been a video accompanying this post, but I removed it since it doesn’t contain the quote. I’m not sure what happened between the time I first saw the video and posted it and this morning when I learned that it didn’t apply. Sorry for the confusion

The Daily Agenda for Sunday, July 17

TODAY’S AGENDA:
International AIDS Society World Conference: Rome. The IAS kicks off its Sixth Conference on HIV Pathenogenesis, Treatment and Prevention today in Rome. The conference is being held in partnership with the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (Italian National Institute of Health), which is the leading technical and scientific body of the Italian National Health Service. The biennial conference attracts about 5,000 delegates from all over the world, providing an opportunity for the world’s leading scientists, clinicians, public health experts and community leaders to examine the latest developments in HIV-related research, and to explore how scientific advances can inform the global response to HIV/AIDS. The conference will continue through July 20.

AIDS Walks Today: San Francisco, CA.

Pride Celebrations Today: Budapest, Hungary; Charlotte, NC (Black Pride); Colorado Springs, CO; Peel, ON; Portland, OR (Latino Pride); Reading, PA; Rochester, MN; and San Diego, CA.

Also Wrapping Up Today: Bear Week, Provincetown, MA.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
APA Refuses To Meet With Gay Rights Groups: 1963. One of the top goals of the early gay rights movement was to get the mental health professions to remove homosexuality from their list of mental disorders. As long as homosexuality remained listed, governmental agencies and private companies had all the excuse they needed to discriminate against gays and lesbians. In 1957, Psychologist Evelyn Hooker began publishing the results of a series of tests which demonstrated that gays and lesbians who weren’t patients of mental health professionals were indistinguishable from heterosexuals. Before then, the mental health community thought that gays were mentally deficient because all of the prior research had only studied people who were confined to mental hospitals or were seen in clinical settings.

Despite the strength of this new evidence, it would still take many years for it to sink in. In 1963, the American Psychological Association was preparing to meet in Philadelphia for their annual convention. Leading gay activists, under the banner of the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) also planned to meet in Philadelphia at the same time, and proposed a meeting with members of the APA. But the APA convention’s organizing committee declined the invitation. In a very brief letter to leading gay rights activist Frank Kameny and the Washington, D.C., Mattachine Society, the APA simply said, “This problem” — yes, the APA saw the meeting as a problem — “has already been considered by the Convention Committee and it was decided that it was not in the best interests of the APA to meet with you, nor to publicize your meetings.”

Another nine years would pass before Kameny and Daughters of Bilitis New York activist Barbara Gittings would appear with Dr. John E. Fryer (as “Dr. H. Anonymous.”) on a panel discussion on homosexuality with the American Psychiatric Association (the other APA, which is the keeper of the list of mental disorders known as the DSM). That appearance nearly a decade later would wind up being a key moment leading to the elimination of homosexuality as a mental illness.

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The Daily Agenda for Saturday, July 16

TODAY’S AGENDA:

AIDS Walks This Weekend: San Francisco, CA.

Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Budapest, Hungary; Charlotte, NC (Black Pride); Colorado Springs, CO; Kitsap, WA; Peel, ON; Portland, OR (Latino Pride); Reading, PA; Rochester, MN; Rochester, NY; San Diego, CA; and Sheffield, UK.

And Also: Bear Week, Provincetown, MA.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Tony Kushner: 1956. He is most acclaimed for his Pulitzer prize-winning play, Angels In America, the seven-hour epic about the AIDS crises in the Koch- era of New York. Kushner wrote the play for eight actors, but stipulated that each of the actors was to play multiple roles (including multiple genders) throughout the production. When he adapted the play for an HBO miniseries starring Meryl Streep and Al Pacino, the same construct was applied. In addition to the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Kushner one the Tony Awards for Best Play in 1993 and 1994 (Angels In America is actually in two parts, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, each having its own separate Broadway debut.)

After the turn of the new millennium, Kushner began writing for film, co-writing the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s Munich. He is currently reportedly working on another screenplay for Spielberg, this time an adaptation of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln In 2006, a documentary about Kushner, Wrestling With Angels premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. His latest play, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures has opened in New York to somewhat mixed reviews.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. PLEASE, don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

Hardball Confirms Bachmann’s Barbarian Comments Weren’t “Doctored”

Meanwhile, there has been considerable controversy over whether Bachmann called gay kids “barbarians” needing discipline, or if he was talking about children in general. Given the context of the interview — which was about gay kids and not kids generally — I think the transcript speaks for itself. Others see it differently, including Ken Avidor, who posted the audio originally:

Avidor does, however, somewhat defend Bachmann against the accusation that he explicitly called gays “barbarians.” Avidor says he’s listened to “a lot of Marcus Bachmann audio,” and he’s heard him say before that “children are barbarians, and somehow they have this innate desire to do, I think in his point of view, wild and crazy things, very un-Christian things in his point of view,” and these things need to be “civilized out of them.” So Bachmann wasn’t really calling gay children barbarians, necessarily — he was merely calling homosexuality one of the many barbaric traits children sometimes exhibit. Not much better.

Mark Yarhouse needs to decide between honesty and anti-gay activism

Mark Yarhouse, professor of psychology at Regent University, frustrates me.

On the one hand, he has been willing to conduct research and produce results that have called into question long held presumptions about orientation change efforts. In much of his current writing, Yarhouse has distinguished between experiencing attraction, identity, and behavior and seeks to move away from the affirmation vs. reorientation dichotomy and to focus on reconciling values with a structure of behavior.

But on the other, he has utilized selective language that encourages confusion and has allowed others to mischaracterize his work in ways that he knows to be dishonest. He has allowed, if not encouraged, political positioning that well serves anti-gay activists but which is in direct contradiction with his own endeavors.

And today we have an example of each.

As noted at Dr. Warren Throckmorton’s site, Yarhouse released a study in Edification (aChristian psychology journal published by the American Association of Christian Counselors) that found that same-sex attracted men in heterosexual marriages experienced an increase rather than * do not experience a decrease of such attractions over time. (Actually, the entire journal is fascinating in how it illustrates the way in which some within the most conservative end of Christianity are struggling to make sense of conflicts between doctrine and observation.)

But also today we have Yarhouse speaking to the Christian Broadcasting Network in defense of the Bachmann clinic’s prayer and promise about complete reorientation:

If you’ve watched the mainstream media’s reporting in the last day or so, you’ve seen these tapes which suggest that changing sexual orientation is not possible. In fact, at least one major study shows change is possible.

Psychologist Mark Yarhouse explored the question in a six year work that he presented at the American Psychological Association’s annual conference.

Yarhouse: I think our study raises that question again, says wait a minute, here’s a change effort sustained over time and there’s a pretty significant percentage of people for whom this is helpful.

Let’s stop there. Or, as Mark would say, “Wait a minute!”

There is a world of difference between “this is helpful” and “change is possible.” I don’t doubt for a moment that many people who stay year after year after year in Exodus ministries find the efforts to be “helpful”. If they didn’t, they probably would eventually quit, as more than a third of Yarhouse’s study did.

But did they change their orientation? That is a different question, one the CBN tries to answer through bulletin points.

Yarhouse and coauthor Stan Jones followed 63 people who tried to change with the help of Christian ministry.

Thirty percent were able to reduce their homosexual attraction enough to be celibate without distress. And (smugly) another twenty-three percent were able to convert to opposite-sex attraction. Total the change, fifty-three percent.

Is this a truthful representation of what Stan Jones and Mark Yarhouse discovered? No, not at all. Not even close.

First the numbers: Actually they followed 98 people, of which 37 dropped out of the program. While in testing drug efficacy it might be appropriate to ignore drop-outs, in testing whether one can change orientation, it’s pretty relevant whether they stick around.

After all, if Mark is going to say that “change effort sustained over time” is evidence of efficacy, then surely not sustaining it over time is evidence of inefficacy. Dr. Yarhouse simply cannot have it both ways.

Taking the 37 dropouts into consideration, we come up with a different calculation:

Success: Conversion – 14 (14%)
Success: Chastity – 18 (18%)
Non-Success – 29 (30%)
Drop-Outs – 37 (38%)

But this deception goes beyond numbers. It presents definitions of “success” that are laughable outside of hard-core anti-gay conservative Christian circles.

I don’t know of a secular person or a moderate to liberal Christian who would characterize achieving celibacy as a change in sexual orientation. We all know of a few gay people who have “achieved celibacy” who would much rather than they hadn’t and such an “acheivement” says nothing about their orientation.

But where the CNB report is most dishonest is in their smug announcement that twenty-three percent were able to convert to opposite-sex attraction.

Really? Opposite sex attraction without any caveat, asterisk, or explanation?

Then explain why Jones and Yarhouse’s report said this:

[W]hile we found that part of our research population experienced success to the degree that it might be called (as we have here) “conversion,” our evidence does not indicate that these changes are categorical, resulting in uncomplicated, dichotomous and unequivocal reversal of sexual orientation from utterly homosexual to utterly heterosexual. Most of the individuals who reported that they were heterosexual at T6 did not report themselves to be without experience of homosexual arousal, and they did not report their heterosexual orientation to be unequivocal and uncomplicated.

Or why Jones clarified:

A typical hetero male finds himself attracted to a wide range of females. But among the successful people who reported conversion the typical response was I’m very happy with my sexual responses to my wife, but I don’t experience much hetero attraction to other women. Also, when asked and pressed about whether they still find attraction to men, they will say: ‘Yes, if I let my mind go in that direction.’

Sorry, but that isn’t a heterosexual. It’s just not. And that isn’t the kind of change that is being promised by Bachmann’s clinic.

A dishonest researcher is not just one who misrepresents their own research. A dishonest researcher is one who sees others misuse or misstate his work and does nothing to correct them.

It’s time for Mark Yarhouse to decide which is more important to him, his honesty or anti-gay activism.

UPDATE

* More accurately, the participants expressed increased heterosexual behavior but measures that included both behavior and attractions, fantasies, and emotional attachments illustrated no material change (though a small change in the direction of homosexuality). It is reasonable to conclude that removing the behavior component would likely reveal a moderate shift towards homosexual attractions, but this is not clearly reported by Dr. Yarhouse.