Box Turtle Bulletin

NARTH Responds To APA Resolution On Change Therapy

Jim Burroway

August 7th, 2009

The National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) has issued a press release in response to the American Psychological Association’s Resolution on Appropriate Affirmative Responses To Sexual Orientation Distress and Change Efforts. That APA resolution concludes that there is “no evidence” that therapy to change sexual orientation actually works, and calls on therapists to refrain from promising otherwise. NARTH didn’t like that one bit:

NARTH appreciates that the APA stressed the importance of faith and religious diversity. Unfortunately, however, the report reflects a very strong confirmation bias; that is, the task force reflected virtually no ideological diversity. No APA member who offers reorientation therapy was allowed to join the task force. In fact, one can make the case that every member of the task force can be classified as an activist. They selected and interpreted studies that fit within their innate and immutable view. For example, they omitted the Jones and Yarhouse study, the Karten study, and only gave cursory attention to the Spitzer study. Had the task force been more neutral in their approach, they could have arrived at only one conclusion: homosexuality is not invariable fixed in all people, and some people can and do change, not just in terms of behavior and identity but in core features of sexual orientation such as fantasy and attractions.

This is pretty rich. First, NARTH complains that the APA Task Force engaged in “a very strong confirmation bias” and gives a definition for conformation bias that is completely wrong. This is what confirmation bias really is:

In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias (or confirmatory bias) is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions, leading to statistical errors.

Confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias and represents an error of inductive inference toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study.

Confirmation bias is a phenomenon wherein decision makers have been shown to actively seek out and assign more weight to evidence that confirms their hypothesis, and ignore or underweigh evidence that could disconfirm their hypothesis.

NARTH instead offered a definition for confirmation bias that has nothing to do with confirmation bias, and everything to do with launching an ad hominem attack against the APA’s Task Force members.

But the charge that the APA Task Force engaged in confirmation bias is even more laughable considering the wholesale confirmation biases evident in NARTH’s own pre-emptive report on conversion therapy. We have already provided evidence that NARTH carefully selected studies for  their report based on purported successful outcomes, while omitting studies which ran counter to their pre-determined hypothesis. That, of course, is the very definition of confirmation bias. And in trying to find as much evidence to support their position as possible, they hoovered virtually every confirming “study” they could find regardless of scientific merit, including unpublished dissertations, non-peer reviewed books, (specifically, the Jones and Yarhouse book and the Karten dissertation they pointed to in their press release), pop-psychology paperbacks — you name it.

They even referenced the 1979 Masters and Johnson book Homosexuality in Perspective.  This is how NARTH’s report described that book:

In Masters and Johnson’s (1979) treatment of 90 homosexuals, a 28.4 percent failure rate was reported six years after treatment. Masters and Johnson chose to report failure rather than success rates to avoid vague, inaccurate concepts of success; however, by implication, more than 70 percent of their patients achieved some degree of success toward their self-identified goal of diminishing unwanted homosexuality and developing their heterosexual potential.

Of course, the most important thing that we now know about the Masters and Johnson book is that it was faked. There were no records for any of those reported patients and their supposed success stories. Co-author Virginia Johnson was later so embarrassed by it, she referred to it as a “bad book.”

The APA Task Force, in sharp contrast to the NARTH report authors, established a very rigorous criteria to determine what studies they would review before reviewing them. That criteria was this (PDF: 1,092KB/136 pages, see page 9):

Initially, we reviewed our charge and defined necessary bodies of scientific and professional literature to review to meet that charge. In light of our charge to review the 1997 resolution, we concluded that the most important task was to review the existing scientific literature on treatment outcomes of sexual orientation change efforts.

We also concluded that a review of research before 1997 as well as since 1997 was necessary to provide a complete and thorough evaluation of the scientific literature. Thus, we conducted a review of the available empirical research on treatment efficacy and results published in English from 1960 on and also used common databases such as PsycINFO and Medline, as well as other databases such as ATLA Religion Database, LexisNexis, Social Work Abstracts, and Sociological Abstracts, to review evidence regarding harm and benefit from sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE). The literature review for other areas of the report was also drawn from these databases and included lay sources such as GoogleScholar and material found through Internet searches.

…The task force received comments from the public, professionals, and other organizations and read all comments received. We also welcomed submission of material from the interested public, mental health professionals, organizations, and scholarly communities. All nominated individuals who were not selected for the task force were invited to submit suggestions for articles and other material for the task force to review. We reviewed all material received. Finally, APA staff met with interested parties to understand their concerns.

In other words, the APA Task Force defined the criteria before hand and reviewed every study that met that criteria, studies that purported to show change in sexual orientation, and studies which showed failures to change — including many studies that NARTH pretended never existed.

Conversely, there’s no evidence that NARTH’s review was in any way systematic. Given the studies that we know NARTH omitted, we know there was nothing systematic about their approach other than to confirm their predetermined outcome. And given the fraudulent material they did include – as well as the abundance of material that never met the scientific gold standard of having been peer-reviewed — it is clear that NARTH’s report is the very definition of confirmation bias. And their press release is the very definition of irony.

NARTH Cites Aversion Therapy As Evidence That “Change Is Possible”

Jim Burroway

July 30th, 2009

The American Psychological Association will hold its annual convention in Toronto next week, where the Task Force on Appropriate Responses to Sexual Orientation is due to issue its review of the current scientific research on therapies to change sexual orientation. That report is expected to lay the groundwork for a possible update to the APA’s 1997 policy statement on therapeutic responses to homosexuality. A group of anti-gay therapists known as the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) are concerned that the Task Force isn’t sufficiently stacked with anti-gay activists, so NARTH sought to preempt the APA report by releasing a “journal” last June called the Journal of Human Sexuality.

As we said earlier, NARTH’s new journal contains just one 121-page article by James Phelan, Neal Whitehead, and Philip Sutton, titled “What Research Shows: NARTH’s Response to the APA Claims on Homosexuality.” NARTH brags that this article “examines over 100 years of professional and scientific literature as well as over 600 reports from clinicians, researchers, and former clients principally published in professional and peer-reviewed journals.” They described this effort as a new peer-reviewed study even though, as we already observed, it’s not new, not peer-reviewed, and not a study. It’s also unclear whether this “journal” is actually a journal. Instead, the article is a review of past studies, and a highly selective one at that. But even with their selective approach, they nevertheless included more than 700 source citations in their voluminous bibliography going back to the late 1800’s. That mountain of citations is intended to impress the reader with what NARTH considers to be overwhelming evidence that change in sexual orientation is not only possible, but also that it causes no harm in those who try it — a position that the APA appears unlikely to endorse entirely.

To try to make their case, Phelan, Whitehead and Sutton include just about everything but the kitchen sink regardless of its scientific merit. As expected, they dedicate several pages to the Jones and Yarhouse’s 2007 book, Ex-Gays? A Longitudinal Study of Religiously Mediated Change in Sexual Orientation, and they dedicate several more pages to Robert Spitzer’s 2003 study (Ex-Gay Watch examined that study here). But more curiously, PW&S dedicated some 14 pages to reports from various books and journals from 1882 through the 1970’s — a period when homosexuality was illegal and gays were regularly arrested and jailed, when they were prohibited from federal employment, and when they were even committed to psychiatric hospitals because the professional community regarded homosexuality as a serious mental illness. The literature from that period reflects those views, and this is the literature that NARTH believes is relevant to today’s discussion on attempts to change sexual orientation.

Phelan, Whitehead and Sutton’s historical review covers such broad therapeutic approaches as psychoanalysis, group therapy, hypnosis, sex therapies, pharmacological interventions, religiously-based methods, “spontaneous reorientation”, and cognitive and behavior therapies. That last category — behavior therapies — is especially troubling. PW&S blithely gloss over what that often entailed, but a sharp eye can spot it pretty easily. Hidden in those three pages lies western psychiatry’s darkest stain: aversion therapy.

Dr. Max’s Machine
Phelan, Whitehead and Sutton’s discussion of aversion therapy begins with this innocuous statement:

Behavioral-based therapists successfully treated not only unwanted homosexuality, but also a variety of sexual dysfunctions and paraphilias, including voyeurism, exhibitionism, and transvestic and other fetishism (Rachman, 1961). Aversion therapies aimed at changing the sexual behaviors of homosexuals were used as early as the 1930s (Max, 1935).

1935 is when it all began. Dr. Louis W. Max of New York University published a paper in the March 1935 edition of The Psychological Bulletin describing an apparatus which would become an important part of efforts to change sexual orientation throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and even through 1980s. That notorious apparatus was designed to administer a powerful electric shock to the client whenever the client was experiencing what was considered an inappropriate erotic stimulus (i.e. viewing a picture of someone of the same gender whom the subject found sexually attractive). In later experiments, that shock could be anywhere from 80 to 100 volts for a short period of time (although in some experiments it could be as long as five seconds). Max cautioned in his original paper that the jolt of electricity could be very powerful. “Where possible,” he wrote, “electrodes should be firmly fastened to the subject, especially when intense shocks are contemplated, as the subject’s ’startle’ responses may dislodge an electrode.” Later work by others determined the optimal shape for the electrode to deliver the maximum level of shock to the patient while minimizing burns to the skin.

Later that fall,  Dr. Max gave a talk at a meeting of the American Psychological Association in which he described the “cure” of a homosexual man — even though he also admitted the man was “backsliding.” The November edition of The Psychological Bulletinbriefly describes Dr. Max’s talk, which Phelan, Whitehead and Sutton cited as one of many success stories:

A homosexual neurosis in a young man was found upon analysis to be partially fetishistic, the homosexual behavior usually following upon the fetishistic stimulus. An attempt was made to disconnect the emotional aura from this stimulus by means of electric shock, applied in conjunction with the presentation of the stimulus under laboratory conditions. Low shock intensities had little effect but intensities considerably higher than those usually employed on human subjects in other studies, definitely diminished the emotional value of the stimulus for days after each experimental period. Though the subject reported some backsliding, the “desensitizing” effect over a three month period was cumulative.

Despite that mixed result, a new therapeutic approach was born. Today we are justifiably horrified to imagine the suffering that thousands of gay men and women endured to try to rid themselves of their same-sex attractions (sometimes under court order or while confined to a psychiatric hospital), Phelan, Whitehead and Sutton thinks nothing of trumpeting the “successes” of this barbaric form of therapy in staking out their position.

But PW&S do appear to understand that these reports are disturbing. Curiously absent from their article is any mention of what these forms of therapy entailed — at least not in any language that laymen are likely to understand. (And make no mistake, it’s lay persons who are the target audience for this report, not professionals.) There is one lone mention that “aversion therapies are no longer used for sexual reorientation because of ethical considerations,” but those thirteen words are obscured by the nearly 44,000 words that make up the rest of the article.

No, you have to delve deeply into the professional literature itself, directly, before you can get a sense of the horrors that these clients must have gone through — horrors that PW&S chose to ignore and few others have the resources to discover. My favorite part of a report like this is the bibliography. I guess you could say that looking up references at our local university library is something of a passtime for me. Call me a nerd if you will, but it’s a worthwhile endeavor because it reveals the vast gulf between how PW&S describe these articles and what the articles themselves reveal.

“Success” and Failure
For example, here’s how Phelan, Whitehead and Sutton describe one such report:

Mather (1966) reported that of 36 homosexuals treated with behavioral and aversion techniques, 25 were considered much improved on the Kinsey scale.

Pretty simple. A brief description and a result. Twenty-two words in one sentence is all the space that PW&S give to this study from the October 1966 edition of Medicine, Science and the Law.(Remember, homosexuality was still against the law in most states.)  Already we have one problem: Dr. Northage Mather described the 25 as simply improved, not “much improved” — and there wasn’t much of a definition for what constituted improvement.

But besides that bit of obfuscation, that lone sentence hid a lot. Dr. Northage Mather’s “scientific” paper was replete with the distinctly unscientific stereotypes of the day. Mather justified his need to cure clients of their homosexuality by calling it “responsible for many antisocial acts such as larceny, blackmail, robbery with violence and murder” — hence the legal justification. Of the 36 subjects, 14 were directly or indirectly referred by a court, and six more were patients at a psychiatric hospital. Only sixteen appeared to be there of their own accord. Eight more beyond the 36 dropped out. One of the dropouts was “so frightened of the treatment that he only attended twice.” Another insisted that he receive electric shock therapy under an anesthetic, which of course would have negated the effects of the treatment.

Phelan, Whitehead and Sutton also cited several studies by the renowned team of Malcolm MacCulloch and M.P. Feldman. They were some of the pre-eminent experts in the field of aversion therapy in the 1960’s.  In one citation, PW&S claimed that MacCulloch and Feldman “successfully treated 43 homosexual men.” Five paragraphs later, PW&S cited a 1971 book by Feldman and MacCulloch, Homosexual Behavior: Therapy and Assessment. This time, they wrote that the authors “worked with 36 patients,” and described it as though it were a separate study. One wonders if Phelan, Whitehead or Sutton read either work. If they had (as I did), they would have noticed right away that the two references were reporting on exactly the same study. The 1967 paper was titled “Aversion therapy in management of 43 homosexuals,” but MacColloch and Feldman explained:

Thirty-six patients had the full course of treatment, and seven failed to complete it. Six of the seven terminated treatment after one or two sessions, and one terminated it after six sessions.

That sentence is repeated virtually verbatim in Homosexual Behavior on page 31.

One can only imagine the reaction of those who terminated electric shock treatment “after one or two sessions.” MacCollough and Feldman are characteristically mum about the distress they must have endured. But we do know is that MacCullough and Feldman had some rather odd definitions for success. In the Appendix of Homosexual Behavior, they defended Series Case 2 as “improved,” even though on follow-up he was found to have a regular boyfriend and had no further desire to change. The authors chalked it up to “a weak-willed personality disorder.” It’s unclear whether Series Case 41 was ultimately classified as a success, but the authors were very optimistic about him. He was kicked out of the hospital after he was caught engaging in “some horseplay” with a female patient. They didn’t classify him as a failure and they didn’t include him among those who failed to complete the treatment, even though they immediately lost track of him following his discharge and had no idea where he was. So much for clarity and follow-up. MacCullough and Feldman were considered giants in the field, but this is what passed for science in those days, a standard which is apparently very impressive to PW&S.

MacCullough and Feldman weren’t the only ones with odd definitions of success. PW&S cited a 1969 paper by B.H. Fookes in the British Journal of Psychiatry which defined success this way:

In the homosexuals I also required the unrefuted, and where possible, supported claim to have enjoyed heterosexual coitus on more than one occasion.

I can just imagine an Exodus or NARTH-affiliated therapist demanding that kind of evidence today.

Several PW&S sources revealed the dark side the aversion therapy if you were actually able to get your hands on the material and read it. But good luck trying to discover what that dark side might be in the PW&S article alone. For example, PW&S cited a 1964 paper by Dr. J.G. Thorpe and colleagues, but didn’t give it much discussion. But the paper itself revealed that all the subjects in that study were patients at the Banstead Hospital in Sutton, U.K., and their particular form of aversion therapy involved delivering electric shock through the soles of their feet. Not all of the patients were treated for homosexuality. One, for example, was an Irish girl of 21 — In Britain in those days, it was customary to single out the Irish for special mention in cases like this — who was being treated for compulsive over-eating. Her treatment didn’t go very well:

Depression recurred following the eighth treatment session and was accompanied by violent gastric pains. She claimed she could not face any more treatment, preferring drugs. At this point her diagnosis was changed by the psychiatrist in charge from one of “recurrent depression” to one of “hysteria”. Treatment was discontinued.

Another paper by Dr. Thorpe from 1963 gave a much more vivid example of “therapeutic failure in a case of aversion therapy.” Funny how Phelan, Whitehead and Sutton chose not to mention this one, which, again, involved delivering electric shock through the soles of the subject’s feet through specially-designed shoes:

Three conditioning sessions of 15 min each were given over a period of two days, the picture being changed before each new session. For a period of about 30 min following these sessions the patient was extremely disturbed, and wept bitterly, and he doubted whether he could continue with the treatment. He presented himself for the fourth session, entered the treatment room, put on the shoes, but after a few seconds took them off, burst into tears, came out of the room, put on his own shoes (i.e. there was no generalization), and continued to weep bitterly.

That patient discontinued his therapy at that point.

It Gets Worse
As bad as electric shock aversion therapy was, it was mild when compared to another more extreme form of aversion therapy that was also being developed in the same period. This involved the use of emetics like apomorphine, powerful drugs which produces instantaneous and extreme nausea. Emetics were sometimes combined with other drugs to induce diarrhea. The subject was given the drugs and then shown pictures representing a “homosexual stimulus.” The idea behind this was that the patient would associate the “homosexual stimulus” with a gut-retching nausea.

Phelan, Whitehead and Sutton cited a 1969 study by Nathaniel McConaghyin Sydney, Australia, which employed apomorphine therapy. That brutal treatment program was compounded in a later 1972 study by McConaghy and colleagues when they combined apomorphine with electric shock. And if that wasn’t barbaric enough, they added another humiliation: their patients’ penises were connected to plethysmography devices to measure their erections to determine whether the treatment was successful or not. In another 1973 paper published in the British Journal of Psychiatry– which Phelan, Whitehead and Sutton also publicized as a success story — McConaghy summarized how this all worked:

With aversion-relief the patient read aloud a series of phrases descriptive of homosexual activity and immediately received a painful electric shock. Each patient experienced over 1,000 pairings of phrases and shocks during the course of treatment. With apomorphine therapy the patient was shown slides of males he found attractive on 28 occasions, each occasion being associated with nausea produced by apomorphine injections. With avoidance conditioning the patient was presented 420 times with similar slides of males, with the possibility of rejecting the slide and so avoiding a painful electric shock on two-thirds of the presentations; on the remaining occasions the patient could not avoid the shock.

Let’s just pause here and think about what those patients endured: more than 1,000 shocks, 28 sessions with apomorphine, and a guessing game of whether the he would be shocked 420 more times.

McConaghy’s work with aversion therapy was so notorious that his 1970 talk before the American Psychiatric Association was interrupted by outraged gay activists in what was described by Time magazine as a near-riot. Gay activists weren’t the only ones scandalized by this barbaric approach. When McConaghy’s 1972 study appeared in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, it drew a blistering response from sexologist John Money — who himself was no stranger to controversy; his theories on gender identity had very tragic results. In an accompanying article in that same issue, Money wrote:

McConaghy, Proctor, and Barr could have designed an experiment in which they took ordinary men or women and punished them every time they responded erotically to a heterosexual erotic stimulus but not to a homosexual stimulus. There is no special reason to believe that these men and women would have become homosexual. It is rather more likely that they would have become sexually inhibited, anxious, or sexually apathetic.

Money closed his argument with the observation that “[t]herapeutic zeal in the absence of effective therapeutic technique produces charlatanism.” Nearly forty years later, it’s hard to find a more appropriate description for NARTH today.

Interestingly, McConaghy finally admitted in 1977 that “[a]s a therapist who uses behaviour therapy for homosexuality, I do not believe it is possible to alter a homosexual orientation.” He nevertheless defended aversion therapy in a 1981 paper in the journal Behaviour Research and Therapy, in which he treated twenty subjects “to reduce compulsive homosexual urges.” Phelan, Whitehead and Sutton included that study in their paper as well, while omitting McConaghy’s repeated denial of the possibility of altering sexual orientation. PW&S claimed that McConaghy and colleagues did this simply “to evaluate behavior therapy for homosexuals in response to ethical objections of such treatment” — but they omitted naming McConaghy’s continued practice of aversion therapy which drew those very same ethical objections. As I said, Phelan, Whitehead and Sutton were highly selective in what they presented, and you would have to go to the original source documentation to find out what the authors really said.

Lasting Consequences
Those therapies proved to have lasting negative consequences for many who endured them, although researchers and clinicians at the time were loathe to admit it. Phelan, Whitehead and Sutton at one point reassured their readers that one aversion therapy researcher reported that “no harmful effects of aversion treatments were discernible.” But if there were no harmful effects, why is aversion therapy today considered unethical? A 2004 article in the British Medical Journalprovides several answers. They interviewed 29 people who had undergone therapies to change their sexual orientation, along with two relatives of those who underwent therapy. The brother of one participant died in the hospital due to side effects of apomorphine. As for the others:

With the decriminalisation of certain homosexual acts in 1967 and more tolerant social attitudes, most participants were able to explore their sexuality and several found fulfilling, same sex relationships. However, most never spoke to their partners, friends, or families about their treatment. One man was content to remain celibate when treatment failed to change his orientation, asserting that the main enjoyment in his life had been his hobbies. Three other men also avoided sex altogether but unhappily claimed it was the result of treatment. Other participants married in the hope this would complete their cure. Some marriages lasted many years and resulted in children. All except one—which was essentially a sexless marriage—ended in divorce on the grounds of sexual incompatibility.

This BMJ article is not a survey, but a descriptive oral history. It’s hard to draw statistical conclusions about the efficacy of aversion therapy. But it’s worthy to note that all of those marriages would have been counted as successes in the articles of the day. But besides that, the harms are clear.

History is replete with examples of professionals abusing the trust of patients (and sometimes prisoners) in order to carry out appalling experiments. Aversion therapy is one such example. It’s hard to imagine anyone pointing to that sort of legacy as justification for their own misguided policy aims. But that is exactly what NARTH has done. This example is probably the worst aspect of Phelan, Whitehead and Sutton’s work, but that’s not where the problems end. We’ve only examined four pages of their 121-page work. There’s so much more to delve into. And so we will.

To be continued…

NARTH Publishes Fake “Study” In A Fake “Journal”

Jim Burroway

July 6th, 2009

Focus On the Family has issued a breathless article claiming that a “new study” has proven that sexual orientation can be changed:

A new report in this month’s issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Human Sexuality finds that sexual orientation can be changed — and that psychological care for individuals with unwanted same-sex attractions is generally beneficial and that research has not found significant risk of harm.

The study, conducted by the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), examined more than 100 years of professional and scientific literature from 600-plus studies and reports from clinicians, researchers and former clients principally published in professional and peer-reviewed journals.

The problem with all that? Well first of all, this isn’t a study at all. It doesn’t consist of an experiment with study participants, methodology,  measurements, analysis or results. Instead, according to this so-called journal — which I have a copy of — NARTH mined nearly 100 years of research on attempts to change sexual orientation. Of course, the vast majority of those studies were done when aversion therapy was commonly practiced, when many people sought therapy because they were convicted of homosexual offenses before Lawrence v. Texas to avoid jail, when few clinicians bothered to do any kind of follow-up, and when the APA still considered homosexuality a mental illness. Much of this paper is an updated regurgitation of several other articles already posted on NARTH’s web site.

Also, the so-called “peer reviewed” journal is not actually a journal. The Journal of Human Sexuality is actually a booklet published by NARTH themselves. In fact, it’s structured more like a book than a journal, with only one article whose title matches the title on the front cover. This journal is billed as “volume 1,” and was, according to its acknowledgment, conceived back when Joseph Nicolosi was still president at NARTH. At this rate, I would expect volume 2 to show up sometime in 2011.

This is very similar to another stunt pulled by George A. Rekers in 1996.  He too created a one-off journal, also called The Journal of Human Sexuality which seems never to have made it to a second volume. It looks like NARTH decided to recycle Rekers old idea.

And as for this new journal’s “peer reviewed” status? Well, I guess when you have a paper written by an anti-gay activist posing as a therapist, and you send that paper off to other anti-gay activists posing as therapists, all of whom are members of your tight little NARTH club with no possibility of an actual independent review taking place, then maybe I would have to concede that the effort was “peer reviewed.” Unfortunately, that’s not the definition accepted by the scientific community.

This publication is not a dispassionate study of changes in sexual orientation. It is a cannon-blast of anti-gay animus in a long 94-page screed, a veritable anti-gay propaganda omnibus touching on all sorts of unrelated subjects including HIV/AIDS, alcohol and drug abuse, violence, psychiatric disorders, and “promiscuity as the new social norm.” As far as anti-gay propaganda goes, there’s little that’s missing here.

Anyone can write a “journal” and select the studies to prove their point as I illustrated in my satire, “The Heterosexual Agenda: Exposing the Myths.” (Hey, I had my partner read it before I published it; that must mean it’s peer-reviewed!) A quick look at NARTH’s “journal” shows that they pulled the same tactics as I did when I wrote my satire. Unfortunately, they didn’t intend for their publication to be read for satirical purposes. They are pushing it as legitimate science, and others are likely to be taken in by it.

Over the next several months — it is, after all, 94 pages of text — we will be going into greater detail to show just what a fraud this so-called journal really is. Stay tuned.

NARTH To Export Ex-Gay Message To London

Jim Burroway

April 21st, 2009

PinkNews is reporting that two American ex-gay proponents will conduct a conference in London this coming weekend. The conference is sponsored by an organization called Anglican Mainstream, which seeks to push the Anglican mainstream to the far right.

Speaking at the conference will be Joseph Nicolosi, a co-founder and past President of the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). He is well-known for his “reparative therapy,” which blames a male child’s homosexuality on the father. He is fond of telling stunned audiences, “Fathers, if you don’t hug your sons another man will” Nicolosi used to be a featured speaker at Love Won Out conferences in the U.S. until he displayed his famous temper on CNN.

Jeffrey Satinover is the author of Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth, in which he contends that homosexuality was improperly declassified by the American Psychiatric Association as a mental illness. He contends that there is no such thing as “sexual orientation,” and therefore there should be no civil rights extended for something that doesn’t exist. This line is now a pervasive theme in ex-gay circles.

The conference is to be held at a thus-far undisclosed location in central London. Anglican Mainstream, despite its name, is a far-right organization which cites the work of discredited “researcher” Paul Cameron, as well as holocaust revisionist Scott Lively.

Scott Lively: Following The Money

Jim Burroway

March 25th, 2009

How is a well-known Holocaust revisionist able to gain so much cooperation among other anti-gay groups? Let’s follow the money.

Lively’s Pro Family Charitable Trust is an arm of his Abiding Truth Ministries, which is one of only twelve anti-gay hate groups listed by the the SPLC. A quick look at the trust’s contributions tell an interesting story:

• NARTH received three grants totalling $2000.
• The Jewish ex-gay group JONAH received a grant for $500.
• Richard Cohen’s International Healing Foundation received a grant for $500.
• Peter LaBarbera received two grants totally $2000.
• Watchmen On the Walls, a group that was co-founded by Lively, received a grant for $500. The Watchmen are also listed among the SPLC’s twelve anti-gay hate groups.
• Paul Cameron’s Family Research Institute received a grant for $300. The FRI is another of the SPLC’s anti-gay hate groups.
• Exodus-Affiliated ministries receiving grants include Living Stones Ministry ($250), HIS Ministry ($500), and PFOX ($750).
• Other notable recipients include San Diego ex-gay gadfly James Hartline ($500), Stephen Bennett ($500) and Linda Harvey’s web site, Mission America ($400).

These must be considered minimum sums. The top grant is described as being the 31st grant on a page which only lists 28 grants, so this is clearly not a complete list.

It also appears not to be an up-to-date one either. Abiding Truth Ministry’s 2007 IRS 990 form (PDF; registration required) from Guidestar.org lists:

• an additional grant of $750 to Linda Harvey’s Mission America,
• an additional grant of $300 to James Hartline
• a grant of $1750 to the Pro Family Law Center in Temecula, California, a project of Lively’s Abiding Truth Ministries.

Some of these values may not look like much, but most of these groups operate on a shoestring budget. Some are little more than volunteer operations much like our own vast conspiracy here at BTB (which consists only of a web site and four volunteers). So to many of these outfits, these contributions can be significant. Maybe that’s why Peter LaBarbera has been carrying Lively’s water the past few weeks.

[Hat tip: Warren Throckmorton]

NARTH Scrubs Lively From Web Site, Cameron Remains

Jim Burroway

March 17th, 2009

Grove City College professor Warren Throckmorton noticed Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively’s letter to the Russian People (where Lively advocated for the criminalization of “the public advocacy of homosexuality”), where Lively recommended “a large association of doctors and therapists in the United States who help homosexuals to recover (see www.narth.com)”. That got Dr. Throckmorton thinking:

Lively’s referral to NARTH made me wonder if NARTH incorporated his views in a similar manner.

Until yesterday, the answer was yes. There were six references to Mr. Lively on the NARTH website. I asked Dave Pruden if NARTH supported the positions Mr. Lively stated above (criminalization, therapy as an option to jail and limits on free speech), and he reacted quickly to remove all but one reference to his past involvement with NARTH.

That remaining reference was to PDF version of a 2005 NARTH conference report in which it was briefly noted that Scott Lively spoke during a luncheon. The PDF version of the report retains Lively’s comments, but a separate HTML web page containing the same article was scrubbed. The original version contained this paragraph:

Also during the luncheon, attorney Scott Lively noted that NARTH’s critics are supported by tens of millions of dollars from foundations on the left, which effectively permits them to “steer the culture through grants.” In an effort to begin reversing that trend, he recently created the Pro-Family Endowment, with one of its initial grants being made to NARTH.

According to Throckmorton, Pruden said that Lively “was not invited by NARTH to speak at the 2005 luncheon but instead asked for time to make the presentation and was granted permission.” Throckmorton also said that Pruden determined that “Mr. Lively’s views are not consistent with the policies and views of NARTH,” and took down the remaining articles in response to the inquiry.

One of those articles was a book review for Lively’s Take Back the Schools, which was touted as “the latest addition to NARTH’s Irving Bieber Memorial Library.” The name of the book reviewer is not listed. I wonder if the book is still in NARTH’s library. One other article, “‘Gay Days’ at Santa Rosa High” by Scott Lively continued on the same theme as the book review, while another article, “Public Schools Face Growing Demands from Gay Activists” featured an extensive quote from Lively.

Two other articles remain active, but were edited to eliminate references to Lively. In addition to the web page on the 2005 NARTH conference report, Joseph Nicolosi’s “Interview with a Parents’ Rights Activist: Brian Camenker” was edited to remove the line indicated in boldface:

BC: …One of the things for which I’ve looked to NARTH, is help in getting the scientific facts together. I really enjoyed a book by one of your Scientific Advisory Board members, Jeffrey Satinover. His Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth has been very important to us. I also liked both of Scott Lively’s books…very good. That’s what I find is very powerful–when you confront people with the truth.

I’m actually somewhat conflicted over this edit. While I’m glad that this endorsement is now gone from NARTH’s web site, having this statement available nevertheless tells me everything I need to know about Brian Camenker’s character and judgment. But in the end, it’s removal is good from the standpoint of NARTH appearance of condoning Lively’s policies or theories.

It’s important to note that NARTH continues to carry multiple links to Paul Cameron’s discredited work on their web site. Cameron, you may recall, has his own unique take on homosexuality in Nazi Germany, one in which he admires how concentration camp commandant Rudolph Höss “dealt with homosexuality.” NARTH’s most recent Cameron citation was in an article printed in NARTH’s 2007 conference report, which isn’t available online.

It’s fascinating to note that one Holocaust revisionist has become an embarrassment to NARTH while another one still remains well linked on NARTH’s web site and publications. I guess another way of looking at it is that Scott Lively is now more of an embarrassment to NARTH than a psychologist who has been denounced by four separate U.S. professional organizations.

Hair You Can Straighten, Gays Not So Much

Daniel Gonzales

November 6th, 2008

Colorado-area and national groups Beyond Ex-Gay, Soulforce, Truth Wins Out, the Colorado Queer Straight Alliance, PFLAG, the GLBT Center of Colorado, Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, the Religious Society of Friends and more have been working the past few months to organize a public response to this weekend’s NARTH conference.

NARTH, the National Association for the Research and Treatment of Homosexuality, is an anti-gay “secular” group that believes that being gay is a sickness that can and should be cured. Wait, have we traveled back in time to the 19th Century???

We have planned a series of events under the banner, “Ex-Gay Exposé: Exploring Practices and Harm in Reparative Therapy.” As former clients of NARTH and NARTH-inspired ex-gay therapy, we speak directly to destructive nature of theories and therapies designed to change and suppress gay and lesbian orientation and gender differences.

In addition to standing up as public witnesses to counter the false and misleading messages of NARTH, we will meet with ex-gay survivors to explore our ex-gay experiences and look at ways in which we have creatively sought to recover from them and integrate our sexuality as part of our healthy development. We will also convene a team of mental health experts for a summit to consider treatment plans and best practices designed to help ex-gay survivors overcome from the harm we have experienced at the hands of anti-gay practitioners.

Lisa M. Diamond, Ph.D., an Associate Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies in the Department of Psychology at the University of Utah, speaks out in this video about how NARTH distorted and misrepresented her work in order to push their anti-gay agenda. (hat tip to Wayne Besen and Truth Wins Out)

Weekend Schedule

Friday, Nov 7th

7pm: Doin’ Time with Peterson Toscano. Well-known ex-gay survivor Peterson Toscano, as seen in The Advocate and LOGO’s “Be Real,” will be on hand to perform excerpts from several plays inspired by his years spent in the ex-gay movement. Location: Our Savior’s Lutheran Church (915 E 9th Ave, Denver. An affirming congregation)

Saturday, Nov 8th

8:45-10am: Rally at NARTH Conference site, Renaissance Hotel (3801 Quebec St, Denver). Meet outside to the south of the hotel.

11-4pm: Ex-Gay Exposé Gathering. Gathering for ex-gay survivors as well as allies who wish to learn more about the ex-gay movement. Location: Moutain View Friends Meeting. (2280 S Columbine St, Denver)

6-8pm: Mental Health Professionals workshop, part 1 (What is the ex-gay movement? What are common needs of ex-gay survivors?). Location: GLBT Community Center. (1050 Broadway, Denver)

Sunday, Nov 9th

9am-12pm: Mental Health Professionals workshop, part 2 (Exploring best practices for treating ex-gay survivors). Location: GLBT Community Center (1050 Broadway, Denver)

7 pm: Transfigurations: Transgressing Gender in the Bible. Written and performed by Peterson Toscano. Location: Our Savior’s Lutheran Church (915 E 9th Ave, Denver. An affirming congregation).

If you’re interested in attending any of these events, please fill out the information on this signup page and we’ll email you as needed.

Nicolosi Makes Cameo At APA Taskforce

Daniel Gonzales

August 21st, 2008

My former therapist Joseph Nicolosi made a somewhat odd appearance on Aug 14th at the APA’s Taskforce report on Gender Identity, Gender Variance, and Intersex Conditions according to BTB reader Matthew Calamia who was also attending. Calamia, a graduate student in clinical psychology, wrote in an email to BTB:

Nicolosi showed up (late) to the APA Task Force on Gender Identity, Gender Variance, and Intersex Conditions session. He asked the panel what they would tell parents who were concerned about their gender variant children, a “70% predictor of homosexuality.” Randall Ehrbar, a member of the task force, acknowledged it was a controversial topic and that the members didn’t all agree. Then Nicolosi said he was able to cure those children and plugged A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. Following the audible groans from the audience, someone mentioned another book that people might find helpful, The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals.Nicolosi left soon afterwards. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen him at any of the other LGBT sessions, but there are two days of the convention left…

Ex-Gay Exposé – Response To NARTH’s Denver Convention Announced

Daniel Gonzales

July 6th, 2008

NARTH is holding it’s annual convention in Denver the weekend of November 7-9. Christine Bakke and I both happen to live here so we’re heading up the response. For details about what we have planned and how you can join the fun watch our promo video and then sign up to help out.

NARTH Goes South Of The Border

Jim Burroway

May 19th, 2008

The National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) took their ex-gay message to Mexico a few weeks ago. Sponsored by the Mexican ex-gay group Renacer (”Rebirth”), an “Understanding Homosexuality” conference featuring at least six prominent American ex-gay activists took place May 1-3 at the Sheraton Centro Histórico in Mexico City.

The Spanish language LGBT web site Anodis reported that conference speakers included:

• NARTH president A. Dean Byrd,
• NARTH past president Joseph Nicolisi,
• NARTH president-elect Julie Harren-Hamilton,
• Desert Hope Ministries founder and director Janelle M. Hallman,
• Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality (JONAH) co-director Arthur Goldberg,
• Venus magazine publisher Charlene Cothran.

According to Anodis, Byrd opened the conference by claiming that he didn’t want to change anyone, and that he respected those who are “defined as openly gay.” He mentioned the 1990 removal of homosexuality from the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD), but then he went on to describe homosexuality using the clinical sounding acronym SSA, or Same-Sex Attraction, which he describes it as “something [that] happens in the development of the individual.” Byrd then went on to decry the state of research into homosexuality today, claiming that half the research is being conducted by gay people. This, by the way, is a most unscientific claim, one that can be easily disproved by a few quick searches of the PubMed databases on virtually any topic related to homosexuality.

Identifying the hallmarks of sound science is clearly not Dr. Byrd’s strong suit. This is the man who, with Nicolosi, co-authored the recent ex-gay “study” in the pay-to-publish vanity journal Psychological Reports, a paper which reads more like ex-gay propaganda than legitimate social science. In 2002, Byrd cited the work of discredited “researcher” Paul Cameron in a paper published by Regent University.

Meanwhile, other shining examples of “science” include Julie Harren-Hamilton focusing on child sexual abuse as being a critical factor in the development of male homosexuality, and Nicolosi claiming to have treated “hundreds of men” to “reorient their SSA.”

According to Anodis, approximately 300 people paid between 900 to 1,200 pesos (US$87 to $115) for the three day conference.

[Hat tip: Andrés Duque at Blabbeando]

Nicolosi: Gays Would Be “Jerking Off In Hamburgers All Over”

Another former patient of Dr. Joseph Nicolosi comes forward

Jim Burroway

May 3rd, 2008

Earlier this week, Daniel Gonzales provided his reaction to the recent Byrd, Nicolosi & Potts paper that appeared in Psychological Reports. Daniel’s comments were based on his own experience as a former patient of Dr. Nicolosi’s:

In my first session of therapy with Dr. Nicolosi he repeatedly pressed myself and my father, who was there with me, asking us if I had been molested as a child — which I hadn’t. In fact, much of that first session was focused on “digging around” for the supposed cause of my homosexuality.

Gabriel Arana, a Cornell University grad student and columnist for the Cornell Daily Sun, has come forward to write about his remarkably similar experience with Dr. Nicolosi in a recent column:

For three years I had weekly sessions with Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, president of the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). Dr. Nicolosi thought that homosexuality was a pathology, a sublimated desire to reconnect with one’s lost masculinity. The theory: under-attentive fathers and over-attentive mothers create gay children. The purpose of therapy was to put me in touch with my masculine identity and thereby change my sexual orientation.

…

Years after I stopped therapy, I requested the case notes, knowing they would be destroyed after seven years. They provided an annotated collection of long-forgotten events. Next to the description of an argument with a male friend, Dr. Nicolosi scribbled “needs to look at the real source.” This was code: whatever the problem, it would be traced back to my lost masculine sense of self; I was angry because my friend had not paid attention to me as my father had not. Much of therapy also involved uncovering the numerous ways in which my parents had cheated me (as a teenager, I was more than happy to blame things on them).

According to Arana, Dr. Nicolosi didn’t try to conceal his utter disgust with gay people:

Disgust with what was termed the “gay lifestyle” was implicit in therapy. I remember Dr. Nicolosi telling me, in response to the question of whether one could easily contract HIV from semen, that if this were the case then gays would be “jerking off in hamburgers all over” to infect people.

That is was passes for ethical professionalism at NARTH. As does this:

…I know Dr. Robert Spitzer’s study well. Dr. Nicolosi asked me to participate in it, but instructed me not to reveal that he had referred me; while he wanted his organization’s views represented, he did not want to bring into question the study’s integrity.

The Spitzer study is the famous ex-gay study that purported to show that people can change their sexual orientation. However, the study was stacked with people who had a vested interest in demonstrating change. According to Dr. Spitzer, “the majority of participants (78 percent) had publicly spoken in favor of efforts to change homosexual orientation, often at their church,” and “nineteen percent of the participants were mental health professionals or directors of ex-gay ministries.” Among that 19% was Alan Chambers and Randy Thomas, Exodus International’s president and vice-president.

By the way, this is not the first time we’ve seen allegations that Nicolosi advised his clients to lie to Spitzer. Daniel Gonzales described a very similar conversation with Nicolosi nearly three years ago:

Nicolosi told me it would be great if I could represent the positive/success side of ex-gays in this study. Joseph Nicolosi asked me to lie to Spitzer when I called in for my study interview by denying Nicolosi had referred me. Turned off by this attempted manipulation, I never went through with taking part in the Spitzer study.

Hat tip: Ex-Gay Watch

NARTH Builds An Echo Chamber

Jim Burroway

May 1st, 2008

The April 2008 edition of the pay-to-publish vanity journal Psychological Reports features a new report from NARTH. Written by NARTH president A. Dean Byrd, past president Joseph Nicolosi, and Richard W. Potts, the report carries the unwieldy but self-descriptive title, “Clients perceptions of how reorientation therapy and self-help can promote changes in sexual orientation.” While the title describes what the authors meant to show — how clients describe the benefits of reparative therapy — the report itself actually illustrates something very different: the ex-gay movement’s ability to instill an almost robot-like parroting of ex-gay rhetoric among their clients.

In ordinary surveys in the real world, there are always respondents whose answers don’t fit the authors’ hypothesis. In Stanton and Jones’ recent ex-gay study for example, there were those who claimed to have changed and those who didn’t (i.e. the “failures”). Both were represented in the paper because that’s just how the real world works. Absolute and total conformity to any hypothesis is virtually impossible.

But NARTH doesn’t operate in the real world. Not one of the 142 responses in the 26-page article deviated even slightly from the NARTH party line. The only responses appearing in this paper fully supported NARTH’s therapeutic framework.

Perfect outcomes like this may be found in the world of politically repressive regimes where dictators win “elections” by near-unanimous votes. But it is absolutely unheard of in scientific literature. Did the authors discard the responses that didn’t fit their preconceived theories? Or was their echo chamber so fully sealed that no dissent could even enter?

You can read more about it in our latest report, “Repeat After Me”: The Reparative Therapy Echo Chamber.

Ex-Gay Therapy: “Like Throwing Spaghetti At A Wall”

A video critique of the latest ex-gay therapy paper by Bryd, Nicolosi & Potts

Daniel Gonzales

May 1st, 2008

A new paper by NARTH president A. Dean Byrd, past president Joseph Nicolosi, and Richard Potts was supposed to show what therapeutic techniques former clients of ex-gay therapy found effective. But what the paper really showed was how effectively those former patients absorbed and accepted the ex-gay movement’s distortions of human sexuality.

Daniel Gonzales, a former patient of Dr. Nicolosi shares his reaction.

You can read our analysis of the Byrd, Nicolosi & Potts paper in our latest report, “Repeat After Me:” The Reparative Therapy Echo Chamber.

Click here to read the video transcript

Father of Ex-Gay Rants NARTHisms in Utah

Timothy Kincaid

April 3rd, 2008

A while back, Belinda Jensen, the president of the American Fork High School PTSA in Utah became impressed with Standard of Liberty, an LDS-oriented anti-gay organization. So she invited the group to make a presentation.

Standard of Liberty, and it’s co-founder Stephen Graham, are passionate, but not particularly accurate or logical.

Q: You say homosexuality is physically harmful. How?

A: Homosexual sex (sodomy), causes chronic illnesses and life-threatening disease (HIV/AIDS), shortening life by an average of 20 years. The human body is simply not made for this behavior. In addition, adopting the “gay” identity often masks dangerous psychological problems that need attention.

Q: Doesn’t heterosexual sex carry the same physical risks as homosexual sex?

A: No, none, if there is abstinence before marriage, and fidelity and healthy, normal sexual intercourse in marriage.

Because, of course, he thinks fidelity is by definition missing from gay relationships.

And my favorites:

Q: Should even those privately struggling with SSA, who have not “acted out,” be chastened, offered help and correction, and held accountable by the church?

A: Yes. The church should be concerned with the person’s soul. People with this problem have become involved in perverse and sinful lust to the detriment of their eternal salvation.

and

Q: How many really change from unwanted homosexuality?

A: A new study reports a 38% success rate. An additional 29% had made progress and were committed to continuing their efforts. That’s a combined total of 77% experiencing success. (Jones and Yarhouse, 2007) In the mental heath profession, this rate of success is considered very high.

You may recall that the Jones and Yarhouse study revealed little to no statistically measurable change in orientation in the prospective sample. The much touted “successes” were either in recollection (which again were quite small) or were those who had decided to no longer call themselves “gay”. However, they still identified their orientation as homosexual (”I’m not gay but my attractions are”).

In short, the Jones and Yarhouse study was funded and fully supported by Exodus and conducted by two researchers who were avid supporters of ex-gay ministries. They wanted to study 300 participants, but after more than a year, they could only find 57 willing to participate. They then changed the rules for acceptance in order to increase the total to 98. After following this sample for 4 years, 25 dropped out. Of the remainder, only 11 reported “satisfactory, if not uncomplicated, heterosexual adjustment.” Another 17 decided that a lifetime of celibacy was good enough.

But for some reason Jensen thought that Stephen Graham had just the presentation that she wanted for the Parents, Teachers and Students Association. The principle of the High School was not so convinced and canceled Graham’s presentation.

Undeterred, Graham shifted the forum to a local library. In his speech his anti-gay activist motivations became clear.

Standard of Liberty co-founder Stephen Graham began with an account of how his son overcame gay tendencies after counseling, then screened individual film segments detailing the “gay agenda,” “gay demands” and “gay agenda in schools.”

Graham relied heavily on NARTH materials:

Graham presented statistics from www.narth.com, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality. Some of the most common concerns for gay men, he said, include HIV/AIDS, marijuana, Ecstasy, amphetamines, sexually transmitted diseases, suicide, heart disease, anorexia, anal warts and anal cancers.

“These things do occur in normal population, but not nearly at the rate as in people troubled with homosexuality,” he said.

Along with some unidentified 1993 video, Julie Harren-Hamilton’s 2006 DVD, Homosexuality 101, starring Alan Chambers, Julie Harren, Mike Ensley, Christine Sneeringer, and Jack Harren, was featured both on his site and in his speech.

Various representatives from the Utah Pride Center were at the presentation to counter Graham’s propaganda.

The Utah Pride Center will hold another meeting to offer information on resources for parents and youths at the library at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 9.

“Refried Freud” — Psychoanalysis and Ex-Gay Therapy

Jim Burroway

March 30th, 2008

Beyond Ex-Gay co-founder Christine Bakke is truly a delightful woman. I got to spend a little bit of time with her again last February in Memphis during the Beyond Ex-gay Mid-South Regional Gathering. Not nearly enough time though — she was exceptionally busy putting together the art show for the weekend.

Last Friday, Christine posted a very thoughtful essay inspired by Peterson Toscano’s comments that ex-gay ministries are still depend on the developmental theories of Sigmund Freud — “Refried Freud” he called it. Which, when you think of it, means that the ex-gay movement is stuck in a very peculiar time warp. Most of their operating theories are founded on some rather ancient Freudian theories that the rest of psychology has largely abandoned.

Some of us are old enough to remember when Freudian psychoanalysis was all the rage back in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Everyone who was anyone, it seemed, was seeing an analyst. And everyone who was anyone was just as messed up after seeing their analyst as they were before. It’s no wonder that Freudian psychoanalysis has largely fallen by the wayside. As a discipline, they remained too wedded to a narrow set of untested and untestable theories, while the rest of psychology and psychiatry honed their methods and understanding over generations of research and observation, throwing out old theories when they were disproved and adopting new ones as they came along.

Meanwhile, Freudian analysts and their ex-gay therapy counterparts, undeterred by the march of time, continued to press forward with their oft-parodied opening gambit: “So now, tell me about your mother.”

Christine Bakke knows where that leads all too well:

The fishing expeditions (a friend started to believe he didn’t feel his father’s love after being badgered with, “did your father say he loved you? It doesn’t matter if you knew; did he say it? He didn’t say it? Then you didn’t really know it, did you? Of course you didn’t know it; didn’t feel it. How can a child know it if they’re not explicitly told it?” and so on) and leading questions and suggestions (one pastor’s wife suggested I make up abusive things that might have happened to me, so that I could break the curse of satan, just in case I didn’t remember specific things that might have happened to me in my life. I forcefully refused.) I was even told that sometimes women can be gay because they have not been able to grow out of the stage of penis envy.

I knew one women whose therapist gave her assignments to flirt with men. An ex-gay guy who went on several dates to try to learn how to be with a woman (without disclosing that he identified as ex-gay), on the recommendation of his therapist. A woman who was counseled by the leader of the ex-gay group that women should wear makeup (”need to put some paint on the side of the barn”). A man who changed his last name because his ex-gay therapy led him to believe that his parents were to blame for him being gay. A woman who insinuated that she had been abused because she felt like her story didn’t “fit” the ex-gay model without some kind of a root cause. A young man who said that after he got out of the ex-gay movement and was finished with reparative therapy, that’s when the real repairing began. He had to repair the relationships with his family after buying into the belief that they were distant from him and made him gay.

The American Psychological Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1973. In doing so, they relied on non-psychoanalyitic studies like those of Evelyn Hooker. But the American Psychoanalytical Association dismissed non-psychoanalyic studies as “superficial.” This created a strange closed-off echo chamber where evidence that ran counter to a theory was thrown out because it didn’t fit the theory. In fact, the APsyA remained hostile to homosexuality until 1991, when openly gay candidates were for the first time allowed to apply for acceptance by the APsyA.

Since then, the APsyA has begun to consider the implications of research in a whole host of mental disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, which today are regarded as being at least partly physiological disorders. This would have been anathema to psychoanalysts a mere generation ago. Last year, the APsyA issued a statement supporting same-sex marriage. That’s quite an improvement since 1991.

But ex-gay therapies continue to rely on the same outdated theories that once threatened to make psychoanalysis a historical footnote. While the APsyA are allowing nonpsychoanalytic research to inform their work, ex-gay ministries remain stuck firmly in the past. But the problem with relying on untested and untestable theories is that they are no more scientific than any other folk remedies or superstitions. And some of these remedies may be damaging. Christine Bakke contrasts her experience with therapists and misguided religious-based lay leaders, and concludes:

Of course, like in my case, even licensed therapists who have an ex-gay mindset and agenda can be just as damaging as the lay leaders. Sometimes I can’t decide which is worse. Counseling by a therapist we think should know the best because we think they’re the experts and we trust them more, or lay leaders who we think love us more because we are not paying them. No matter what, ex-gay counseling done by therapists or lay leaders, many poorly equipped through books, Exodus conferences, Living Waters training programs (one week long), Love Won Out day-long conferences, on-the-job training, or for some, nothing more than being ex-gay themselves, mixed with refried Freud, is a recipe for disaster.

I highly recommend you read her entire essay.

Exodus and NARTH Review “For the Bible Tells Me So”

Timothy Kincaid

March 15th, 2008

Daniel Karslake observed that much of the debate over homosexuality and Scripture was conducted by shouting at each other. He set out to create a documentary that would argue his position without vilifying those who disagree with him.

He succeeded admirably. The movie received positive reviews from over 90% of critics and was rumored to be on the Oscar short list.

A number of religious leaders were invited to participate in a panel discussion at Stetson University in Florida on March 10th. Among them were representatives from Exodus and NARTH as well as liberal and conservative local ministers. The Daytona Beach News-Journal reports the response.

Overall, the movie won praise from both the conservative and liberal panel members.

“I loved that the core of it was families’ stories,” said Mike Ensley, a counselor with Exodus Ministries, which helps youth wanting to overcome homosexuality.

Not all response was in the form of praise

Dissenting about some of the movie’s science was Julie Harren Hamilton, a Palm Beach psychologist and president-elect of the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, which helps clients change their sexual orientation.

She disputed the suggestion that homosexuality is simply genetic, arguing that the causes are more complicated.

Karslake, the filmmaker, defended his research but agreed with Hamilton that everyone should study the issues for themselves and draw their own conclusions.

The movie is now available on DVD. While this is hardly a perfect documentary or the final word on the subject, it is undoubtedly a powerful and effective message. As the New York Times critic put it

But there is no denying that the film, however inelegant, fills a need. The inevitable DVD should be packaged in a plain cardboard sleeve, so that viewers can carry it in their pockets and, if confronted by a homophobe, hand it over and say, “Watch this, then get back to me.”

Sadly, I doubt it was at all able to change the views of Ensley or Harren-Hamilton.

The Grey Zone

Jim Burroway

January 31st, 2008

Last week, we reported on the videos posted online by the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) which were plastered with warnings about content ownership and permissions. We described their paranoid attempt to circumvent free debate under the copyright law’s “fair use” provision.

Now Ex-Gay Watch was tipped to a video on YouTube which challenges NARTH’s attempt to curb free debate. And in doing so, the video provides an brilliant illustration of how feeble many of NARTH’s theories really are. Enjoy!

Open Debate and NARTH’s Paranoia

Jim Burroway

January 22nd, 2008

Ex-Gay Watch’s David Roberts noticed that the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) has posted six videos from their 2007 conference on their web site. I haven’t had a chance to look at their videos yet, but you don’t have to look far to see something very odd — like this red-lettered warning at the top of the page:

Video on this web site cannot be copied, reproduced, downloaded or used in any way other than for viewing on the NARTH web site. Any violation thereof will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

That same message appears on each video’s opening screen. And in each video, there’s a permanent subtitle, “Property of NARTH.com,” which remains at the bottom of the screen throughout the video.

Aside from the technical difficulties of complying with this warning (most media players silently download an copy of the video while playing it — is my mother in trouble because she doesn’t know how to clear her cache?), a much bigger question looms: what is NARTH afraid of?

Copyright law already holds that nobody can copy someone else’s work — even with attribution — without obtaining prior permission from the owner of that work. NARTH’s property is already protected by law just as Box Turtle Bulletin’s is, so it can’t be that.

Companies and nonprofits routinely generate material which they consider “proprietary” and are strictly controlled according to who has access to the information and how it is handled. This kind of information, which typically includes competition-sensitive data, is further protected by law beyond the normal copyright restrictions. But putting “proprietary information” on the World Wide Web for free and without any sort of firewall removes the sensitive nature of the information, and such protections become moot. Clearly, NARTH isn’t afraid of the information “falling into the wrong hands,” so it can’t be that either.

Copyright law also holds that very brief quotations from someone else’s work can be copied when offering a critical examination of that work or the ideas behind it. Those brief copies are protected under a legal principle known “Fair Use.” NARTH’s attempt to run around copyright law notwithstanding, it’s a critically important part of free debate and examination. It’s the principle that allows writers to write book reviews without having to obtain prior permission for brief quotes. It’s also the principle that allows theologians, theoreticians, scientists and other academics to debate and critique each other’s work, free from the stifling strictures of prior permission. In sort, it also allows for the free discussion of differing worldviews, values and philosophies which make informed debate possible. And since NARTH claims they’ve consistently called for “an openness to differing worldviews, values and philosophies,” surely their objection isn’t that, is it?

So what is NARTH worried about?

Are they worried that a critical watchdog group might — oh, I don’t know — use a very small snippet from their own statements in order to examine and critically discuss some of those “differing worldviews, values and philosophies” — and how they impact real people, real families, and real sons and daughters?

If that’s what NARTH is afraid of, then their latest attempt to infringe upon the legal principles of “fair use” is simply laughable in the face of their claims of wanting open debate for “differing worldviews, values, and philosophies.” David Roberts observes:

It’s hard not to find some humor in a character like [past NARTH president Joseph] Nicolosi, but this truly is a silly thing to do. Like the process by which reparative therapists form their claims, hording information and discussion like this is really the antithesis of what scientific thought is all about. If they truly believe their claims will hold up under scrutiny, well then let others scrutinize freely.

Hat tip: Ex-Gay Watch.

Video: Inside “Love Won Out”

In this multi-part series of videos Box Turtle Bulletin editor Jim Burroway discusses attending Love Won Out.

Daniel Gonzales

January 14th, 2008

Today’s videos focus on Joseph Nicolosi, who until recently always delivered Love Won Out’s opening session on “The Condition of Male Homosexuality.” In the first video Jim recalls an encounter with a greiving father attending LWO. Jim believes the message of LWO is serving to keep a relational wedge between the father and his son. In the second video Jim discusses Joseph Nicolosi’s acknowledgment that one of his former patients, Daniel Gonzales, is outside the church conference protesting.

Driving A Wedge Between Father And Son

Nicolosi Acknowledges Former Patient Now Protesting

Daniel Gonzales Interviewed on Strictly Confidential

Jim Burroway

November 29th, 2007

BTB Contributing author Daniel Gonzales appeared on Peter Godbold’s Strictly Confidential Radio program last night. Daniel talked about his experiences as a former patient of Joseph Nicolosi, past president of NARTH. The audio is a little choppy at first, but it clears up as the interview progresses. You can listen to the interview here.