The issue has arisen again lately in Uganda, where the Parliament is currently taking up the draconian Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which would provide for the death sentence for LGBT people under certain circumstances. While the entire bill is wide-ranging and dangerous for straight people as well as gays, the death sentence has garnered particular scrutiny. Now backers of the bill say that they may drop the death penalty and add a clause to provide forced conversion therapy for those convicted. It is unknown whether the forced therapy would be as an alternative to the lifetime prison sentence, or an adjunct to it.

The idea of forced conversions appears to have come from Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, one of three American anti-gay extremists who led a conference in Kampala last March. The other two Americans, Exodus International board member Don Schmierer and International Healing Foundation’s Caleb Lee Brundidge, were there as conversion therapy “experts,” but they remained completely silent as the idea was allowed to fester for the succeeding nine months. NARTH also remained silent, even though Scott Lively touted NARTH as the leading experts on conversion therapy during the conference.

Finally, Warren Throckmorton was able to get a statement from NARTH. The group’s past president, A. Dean Byrd, wrote this reply to Throckmorton:

Dear Dr. Throckmorton,

As you are aware, NARTH’s Governing Board has accepted the Leona Tyler Principle which states that NARTH, as a scientific organization, takes no position on any scientific issue without the requisite science or professional experience.  NARTH members, as individuals, are free to speak on any issue.

NARTH values the inherent worth of all individuals and respects individual right of autonomy and self determination.

NARTH’s position on homosexuality was clearly articulated by Dr. Julie Harren Hamiliton in a recent edition of the APA Monitor: homosexuality is not invariably fixed in all people – some people can and do change.  And psychological care should be available to those who seek such care.

NARTH encourages its members to abide the Code of Ethics of their respective organizations and such codes proscribe the coercive efforts. It goes without saying that NARTH would support the humane treatment of ALL individuals.

We are aware of the situation in Uganda but thank you for bringing this to our attention. I am sure that you are aware that as a scientific organization, NARTH does not take political positions; however, we are happy to provide a summary of what science can and cannot say about homosexuality for those who do.

Dr. Throckmorton, if history is a good indicator, you will likely not be happy with this response. However, I hope such responses will help you understand NARTH’s mission as a scientific organization.

With warm regards,

A. Dean Byrd, PhD, MBA, MPH

The line about NARTH not taking political positions is utterly laughable. You don’t even have to go beyond the front page on NARTH’s web site before you find links decrying the supposed “dangers” of same-sex marriage.

That aside, it was difficult to find the denunciation of forced conversion therapy. If you blinked, you might have missed it. But here it is again, with my emphasis:

NARTH encourages its members to abide the Code of Ethics of their respective organizations and such codes proscribe the coercive efforts.

After further inquiries from Throckmorton, Byrd clarified:

Research tells us that forced therapy is almost always a failure. It is unethical and unworkable.

Scott Lively specifically recommended NARTH to his Ugandan audience, saying, “After my web site, this is the one I consider the most important.” But if Ugandans go to  NARTH, they will not find a single statement anywhere which provides guidance on coercive therapy. Exodus also continues to refrain from placing a statement on their web site as well, although Exodus President Alan Chambers did say in a Facebook posting, “I am NOT for forced therapy for gay and lesbian people.”

It’s good that NARTH and Exodus leadership has now come out against forced therapy. But since this is not the first time this issue has come up — and it certainly won’t be the last time either — isn’t it time these two organizations finally made these statements official and accessible? What reason could they possibly have for keeping them hard to find and off of their own web sites?

Click here to see BTB’s complete coverage of recent anti-gay developments in Uganda.

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.

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).

Dr. Louis Max’s diagram of his electric shock aversion therapy device, as it appeared in March 1935 edition of The Psychological Bulletin.

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.

Photo and diagram of a simple electric shock apparatus connected to a cuff. (British Medical Journal, Jan 18, 1964)

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…

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.

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.

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]

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.

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 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…

Click here to view the embedded video.