He Brought Me Out

National Public Radio did a story this weekend on conflicts among evangelicals over "ex-gay" ministries and their pseudoclinical wing, "reparative therapy."  It begins with quotations from a gay man who joined Exodus International but "found after 24 years that the changes that I had hoped for, or that I had prayed for, actually never occurred."  Research even by "evangelical and secular scientists puts ex-gay ministries and conversion therapy on the defensive."  As a result, "Last month, Exodus International made it official: It would no longer associate with or promote therapy that focuses on changing sexual attraction," even though the reactionary Christian theologian Robert Gagnon "says he thinks conversion therapy sometimes works."  Well, if he thinks so, it must be true.

Before my fellow Homo-Americans get too excited about this, they should remember that Exodus lagged only a couple of years behind the secular psychiatric and psychological profession.  Although the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its index of mental illnesses in 1973, it left room for conversion therapy until at least 2000.  The American Psychological Association issued a statement conclusively rejecting conversion therapy in 2008.  (I've noticed that a lot of people conflate the two APAs, like this writer at Jezebel.)

There was no excuse for the APA's waiting such a long time.  It had been established long before 1973 that therapy didn't change people's sexual orientation.  Sigmund Freud himself had written in 1936 to the mother of a homosexual American man that homosexuality "cannot be classified as an illness," and:

By asking me if I can help, you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place. The answer is, in a general way, we cannot promise to achieve it. In a certain number of cases we succeed in developing the blighted germs of heterosexual tendencies which are present in every homosexual, in the majority of cases it is no more possible. It is a question of the quality and the age of the individual. The result of the treatment cannot be predicted.

Most of Freud's American followers thought they knew better, and change therapy flourished in the US in the 1950s and 1960s.  The most optimistic (if that's the word) proponents of change therapy claimed that one-third of their patients who completed therapy were "cured," while another third saw some change and another were unaffected.  It wasn't always clear what constituted success, however, and followup was poor, generally limited to a few months before the therapist fell out of touch with his patient.  "Relapses" were common.  (One gay writer on this subject wondered whether patients would even begin therapy if they knew that soon after completing it "successfully," they'd still be having sex with other men.)  Remember that this was all done in the name of Science, by people who often repudiated religion and sometimes claimed that homosexuality was the result of religious repression.  Opponents of the APA reclassification often declared the the decision was the result not of science but of political correctness, a familiar tactic among scientific apologists to this day.

The ex-gay ministries have long fascinated me because of their reliance on the forms of secular science, generally buying into long-discredited psychiatric theories that have no relevance to "sin" in the first place.  If homosexuality is a "sickness," it's not a "sin."  True, preachers have often spoken metaphorically of sin as a sickness; but even if they were right, it's a sickness without a cure.  Yet it quickly became obvious that repentance and prayer alone wouldn't do the job of changing people's sexual orientation, and a new generation of unscrupulous therapists began preying on frightened and often coerced victims, this time around claiming the prestige of religion.  But as far back as the 1980s I remember seeing statements from the ex-gay ministries admitting that God didn't take homosexuality away, that considerable patience and willpower were required.  (Yes, that's The Onion.  Don't take it literally.)  Fair enough, but the ex-gay ministries continued to market themselves as bringing about miraculous change.  And every so often there were spectacular scandals, where prize ex-gay alumni were discovered visiting gay bars, or worse, the ministers were found to be using their flock sexually.

But it's routine for the news media to "discover" new stories that aren't new at all, isn't it?

There's a significant quotation in the NPR story:

But [Alan] Chambers at Exodus International says conversion therapy does not help. Rather, it damages, because it makes people feel sinful for their natural inclinations. Worse, he says, the church can make people feel like outcasts. ...

Chambers compares same-sex attraction to adultery or pride. But Gagnon says homosexual behavior is worse according to the Bible.

It's interesting that Chambers should refer to homosexual desire as "natural."  But heterosexual desire is no less natural, yet Christianity (like most if not all religions) regulates it very strictly, and transgressors -- fornicators, adulterers -- are expected to "feel sinful for their natural inclinations" and to be cast out (i.e., outcasts) if they refuse to repent and conform.  I was about to ask rhetorically whether Chambers has read the New Testament, but of course he has.  He must know these things as well as I do.

Suppose that Christianity did put same-sex desires and genitality on the same level as heterosexuality.  If gay Christians took the Bible seriously, they'd have to contend with such teachings as plucking out one's eye if it leads one to sin, that even looking lustfully at another person of either sex is the same as committing adultery, that the truly devout will become eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven, that divorce and remarriage will be forbidden, that marriage is second-best to sexual abstinence, and so on.  But who takes the New Testament's teaching on sex seriously nowadays?  Even the most conservative Protestants use the Old Testament as their guide, and carefully evade Jesus and Paul.

The Jezebel article I mentioned above quoted Slate's William Saletan, who argues that change therapy is legitimate in cases of "borderline homosexuality," whatever that is:

Would you tell [...] a patient that her understanding of God is wrong? Are you sure her attraction to women is more fundamental than her religious beliefs? Is peace with the lesbian part of her sexuality worth the destruction of her family or her faith? And most important: Do you think you can answer these questions without knowing more about her?

This remarkable passage shows just how widely the distinct roles of therapists and counselors have been confused.  If I were a therapist, I would tell a patient or client who demanded change therapy that, in the first place, change therapy doesn't work; in the second, that "sin" and mental illness are not the same thing, and that if she wants help resisting temptation she needs to talk to a pastor.  (Heterosexual temptation isn't considered mental illness, after all.)  A religious counselor, by contrast, might very well tell a counselee that "her understanding of God is wrong" on theological grounds; but it's not a therapist's job to do so.

[P.S. A therapist might honestly promise a client to help her or him gain more control over impulse, so as to resist temptation and refrain from committing what Anita Bryant called "the act of homosexuality."  But this wouldn't be a cure.  Great thinkers as diverse as Bryant and Norman Mailer have claimed that if you don't translate desire into action, you aren't really homosexual.  For Christians like Bryant, however, that claim runs afoul of Jesus' admonition that just looking at another person with desire is the same as doing the deed, and will be punished the same.]

"Is peace with the lesbian part of her sexuality worth the destruction of her family or her faith?"  "Peace" is a weasel word, but since it's likely to the point of certainty that "the lesbian part of her sexuality" will not disappear, she needs to make peace with it.  (I think Saletan is blurring the difference between making peace and surrender.)  The same would be true for a married person who has fallen in love with someone other than her spouse: the feelings probably are not going to go away, but one can learn to live with them.  There's a long tradition in Christian teaching that believers are supposed to learn to deal with what God feels like doing to them, not to get him to stop doing it.  Why should he "take the gay away" in the first place?  There are more alternatives than leaving one's spouse on one hand and self-flagellation on the other.  But the ex-gay ministries and the change therapists advertise the elimination of homosexual feelings, at least until you get to the fine print.

In practice, of course, many church-affiliated counselors have training in secular psychology, and some of the skills and approaches are the same whether the setting is secular or religious.  Saletan asks rhetorically, "Do you think you can answer these questions without knowing more about her?"  I don't; that would be a counselor's job -- to learn more about the client.  But change therapists already know the answer, and that's the trouble: they don't have to live with the consequences.

Even if change therapy worked -- and as I've said before many times, I wish it did, since so many GLBT people are miserable even after they come out, and want not to be gay -- no one would (or should) be obliged to choose it.  People can and do change their religious affiliation, but we take a dim view of forcing them to change it; the same would be true of sexual orientation if it were as malleable as the change therapists claim.  One of the most damning things about the evangelists for change therapy is that they choose to ignore the overwhelming evidence, accumulated over more than a century, that it doesn't work.  The other is that, for all their talk of keeping their patients' "options" open, they keep the options strictly limited.

There's evidence that younger evangelicals are less homophobic than older ones, and are either pressuring their churches to change their doctrines or practice, or leaving.  This fits with Mark McCormack's evidence that homophobia is declining in England.  The new admission by Exodus International looks like part of this pattern.  It also reminds me of Bob Jones University, which fought tooth and nail for decades to maintain a racially discriminatory shop, claiming it to be the unchanging will of God -- but gradually loosened its strictures and finally abandoned them altogether, declaring "We can't back it up with a verse from the Bible."  That wasn't what they said in the Sixties!  No doubt the Biblical prohibitions of sex between males will also become incomprehensible as time goes on.  Until they do, however, the change therapists and their apologists need to be kept honest.

O Ye of Too Much Faith

I'm disliking Rachel Maddow more and more. I've had doubts about her for a long time, because of her willful ignorance about the breadth of the political spectrum -- she obviously got off more on having Martha Stewart as a guest than Naomi Klein -- and I pretty much wrote her off when she shilled for President Obama at Netroots Nation in 2010. You can't be a bold independent journalist and an overt partisan for one party and one President.

More recently she published a book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, in which she "traces how U.S. national intelligence agencies have taken over duties that were once assigned to the military, and how this shift has increased the public disconnect from the consequences of war." Band of Thebes kvelled over the book, mentioning Maddow's own close ties to the military -- her father was a Vietnam vet, "and she might have joined up herself, were it not for that LGBT ban." Glenn Greenwald praised it, and David Swanson did a good takedown of it, pointing out among other things that "Missing is the fact that U.S. wars kill people other than U.S. troops." (Glenn Greenwald's interview with Maddow confirms this: she just doesn't want to think about the effects of our invasions on our victims, she refuses to imagine how anyone could want to hurt America.)

Now she's done a story on what she calls "Praying the Gay Away," which is full of factual errors and illogic. Factual errors include her deliberate confusion of religious bigotry and scientific bigotry: you can see her stumble over a transition from praying to therapy, trying to make them equivalent by sheer dogged insistence. She ties what she sees as a "mainstreaming" of ex-gay pseudotherapy to the 2001 publication of Robert L. Spitzer's study purporting to show that some gays can change their sexual orientation through therapy -- a study which Spitzer recently repudiated. This ignores just how mainstream antigay bigotry is, long before Spitzer's study was published. Newsweek did a cover story on the ex-gay movement in 1998, featuring John Paulk, who was caught in a Washington D.C. gay bar two years later. The sex researchers William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson claimed in a 1979 book that they had changed some people's sexual orientation; Time took them seriously; it now appears that these claims were false, even fabricated. (It's worth noticing that Masters wrote repeatedly of heterosexuals being "recruited" to homosexuality.)

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Sure, decades worth of history don't fit easily into a nine-minute segment, but you can often tell whether a commentator actually knows the whole story; listening to Maddow, I don't think she does. But when you know you have the truth, and that you're superior to all those wingnuts, who needs factual accuracy?

(Compare Maddow's tone in the video clip to her characterization of antiwar activists in Drift, quoted by Swanson: "advocates of ending war show up in a brief reference to 'student activists and peaceniks,' and a characterization of publications favoring peace as those advertising 'Oriental herbs, futons, prefab geodesic homes, all-cotton drawstring pants, send-a-crystal-to-a-friend, and the magic of Feldenkrais’s Awareness Through Movement seminars.'" Ironically, Maddow's caricature of opponents of war sounds a lot like certain caricatures of lesbians.)

If there has been a change in "ex-gay" hucksterism over the past few decades, it's that the movement has increasingly stressed therapy over prayer, dusting off discredited psychiatric theories from the 1940s and 1950s such as Close-Binding and Intimate Mother / Distant or Absent Father, and/or Confused Gender Identity. Evidently they don't expect to convince anyone anymore that homosexuality is a sin; they now present it as a sickness.

This leads to certain difficulties, some of which could be exploited by their critics: the mental-illness model is, or at least used to be, denounced by conservative Christians as a denial of human sinfulness, since it rejects judgment of the mentally ill in favor of compassionate medical care. If I'm gay because my mother held me too close, then it's not my fault. In the medical model, homosexuality isn't a "lifestyle choice," or a choice of any kind; it's beyond our control. This suggests to me that many antigay Christians aren't all that comfortable with fulminations against Sodomites, and want to take a different, less hostile tack, if only to make themselves feel better. (On the other hand, doublethink is a treasured Christian tradition, so it's entirely practicable to froth about the sin of Sodom and weep salt tears of compassion for our blighted lives, just as gay people have turned the mental-illness concept of "homophobia" into a moral judgment of tremendous harshness.) People who want to attack the ex-gay movement should try pointing out its abandonment of religion for secular medicine.

On the other hand, the idea that gay people suffer from gender identity confusion is compatible with current allegedly pro-gay theories which hold that we are biologically feminized males and masculinized women. Except that when we say it, it's a good thing -- or rather, it's supposed to be, but many gay people still adopt the tactic of wailing that no one would choose a lifestyle that causes us to be hated, discriminated against, etc., which sounds like it's not such a good thing after all. This, I've argued before, is why so many gay people become infuriated at the claim that homosexuality is a Choice: they hate being gay, they hate being different, and can only come to an uneasy accommodation with their condition by blaming it on their genes. They really agree with the bigots: If we weren't born gay, we can change, and if we can change, we must change.

Maddow argues that Spitzer's 2001 study gave the ex-gay movement support for their agenda. This only makes sense if you're unaware, as she evidently is, that the ex-gay movement is decades older than that, dating back to the 70s at least. She knows that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used to list homosexuality as a disorder, but she blames that on religion, without any evidence. But antigay Christians didn't need Spitzer, or Masters and Johnson, or Freud for that matter: they just latched onto anything that might make their case look respectable, just as many gay people seize on scientifically invalid research that can be used to support the claim that we are born this way. What matters is the conclusion, not the evidence.

It never seems to occur to people like Maddow to question whether the status of gay people should be decided by psychiatrists or other mental health professionals. After all, the DSM is subject to regular review and change. How did homosexuality change overnight from a dread illness to a neutral condition? Even though the American Psychiatric Association no longer considered homosexuality to be a disease, it still considered it valid for therapists to treat us and even try to change us, until the past few years. Why should gay people -- or anyone -- trust the APA at all? The Gay Liberation movement rejected any claims to authority over us by professionals, and I still think that was the right attitude.

Even if sexual orientation could be changed, no one would be obligated to do so. One's religious affiliation can be changed, after all, yet people are allowed to remain in the sect they choose, or to change to another one if they wish. Whenever I hear the rhetoric of people "struggling with same-sex attractions," I always want to ask, "What if I'm not struggling with those attractions? What if I embrace them?"

Maddow's performance in the video clip is more of a rant than a reasoned exposition; as she says at the beginning, "I've been looking forward to doing this story for a long time." If that were so, she should have prepared better. But lack of preparation combined with pomposity and truculence seems to be her style, rather like the unlamented Keith Olbermann. In the end she interviews Gabriel Arana, an ex-ex-gay who reported Robert Spitzer's retraction of his study. In an article at The American Prospect, Arana writes that when Spitzer's study was published,

With few voices to challenge the testimonials, reporters transmitted them as revelation. Newsweek ran a sympathetic cover story on change therapy, and national and regional papers published ex-gays’ accounts. My mother might not have so easily found information about ex-gay therapy had the Christian right not planted this stake in the culture war.

This is highly misleading, and a typical distortion of our history. In 2001 there were many voices that could have "challenged the testimonials." The straight media simply weren't interested in listening to them, let alone reporting them.  That's not surprising; what is surprising is that most gay people weren't interested in listening to them. The ineffectiveness of change therapy had been known for decades at that time, and the sex scandals that plagued the ex-gay ministries had been reported all along, mainly in the gay press because the straight media weren't interested. Arana's whole article is equally disingenuous, and while I sympathize with his struggle and suffering, he really needs to inform himself -- and his readers -- better. When he was in "therapy" with a change therapist, from 1998, he blamed his parents for his homosexuality; now he blames his therapist. When do we start taking responsibility for our own lives?

Letting the PFOX into the PHenhouse

Irony, anyone? This post at Change.org (not to be confused with Change.gov) complains about fliers being handed out at a public school near Washington DC by a group called Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays, or PFOX (is there a corporate tie-in? if not, there should be). The poster claims that the fliers were handed out "officially", quoting a Washington Post article:

The schools are required to distribute literature that isn't deemed hate speech from any registered nonprofit organization four times a year, the result of a 2006 lawsuit, said Dana Tofig, a spokesman for the Montgomery County Public Schools.

Fair enough. Are gay non-profits distributing handouts at these schools? How about atheist or secularist groups? Are there gay-straight alliances in those schools? If not, why not?

The Change.org writer provides a quotation from the ex-gay flier.

"Every year thousands of people with unwanted same-sex attractions make the personal decision to leave a gay identity through gender affirming programs, including therapy, faith based ministries, and other non-judgmental environments," the PFOX flier stated. "No 'gay gene' or gay center of the brain has been found. No medical test exists to determine if a person is homosexual. Sexual orientation is based on feelings and is a matter of self-affirmation and public declaration."

This, of course, rouses the ire of the Change.com writer: "Huh, maybe next week the Montgomery County Public Schools would like to hand out fliers suggesting that the world is flat? Because that carries about as much scientific fact as what PFOX is saying."

Well, no, actually. It happens to be true that no "gay gene" or "gay center of the brain" has been found, and that no medical or other test exists to determine a person's sexual orientation. I don't even see what is wrong with saying that sexual orientation is based on feelings (what else could it be based on?) and is a matter of self-affirmation and public declaration (okay, that one's iffy, but just about everybody conflates sexual orientation and sexual identity). "Sexual orientation" is a pseudo-scientific term intended to give the impression that some physical mechanism has been identified which directs people's erotic and romantic interests, but the actual research being done shows that the researchers don't know what they're looking for, and the term has no coherent scientific basis.

The trouble with the quoted material is that, while many people do "decide to leave a gay identity", there is no evidence that they succeed. (By the way, remember what I said about confusing "sexual orientation" and "sexual identity"?) The history of the "ex-gay" movement is a litany of failure and scandal, including sexual exploitation of its clients by the people who run it. Back when it was a secular phenomenon run by psychiatric and other mental health professionals, the most it could claim was to change people's sexual behavior, and it didn't even succeed at that. Oh, and of course the claim that faith-based ministries and therapy are "non-judgmental environments" is absurd.

The ex-gay hustlers like to claim that they just want to give a choice to people who are beset by "unwanted same-sex attractions", and to tell the truth I'm sympathetic to that idea in principle. I've known many gay people over the years who hate being gay and do their best to make gay society unliveable for everyone else as a result with self-pity, self-destructive behavior, passive-aggressive acting out, and general tediousness. And of course there are those who marry heterosexually in hopes that it will normalize them, at great emotional cost to their spouses and children. If it were possible for those who want to change to do so, I'd be all in favor of their changing.

Plus, of course, gay laypeople who buy into the pseudo-science of "sexual orientation" accept the anti-gays' assumption that people have no right to make choices about their sexual lives: if we can change, they agree, we must change. But that doesn't follow, any more than people must change their religious "orientation", even though religion is a lifestyle choice, not an inborn condition.

But to repeat, there is overwhelming evidence that people don't change from gay to straight. This is actually rather odd, given the much vaunted "fluidity" of sexuality, which people who claim to believe in the biological fixity of sexual orientation often proclaim out of the other side of their mouths. The failure of change "therapy" doesn't mean, however, that homosexuality (or heterosexuality for that matter) is inborn or otherwise biologically fixed. Many acquired conditions are permanent. But no one knows why people are drawn to persons of one sex or the other, or to both. A case against the ex-gay movement can be made without relying on bogus science.

I agree that the false claims in PFOX's literature need to be countered, but so do the false claims on which the Change.com writer bases his article. The ex-gays should be challenged, especially on the issue of "choice": do they also support the choice of other gay people with wanted same-sex attractions to live our lives happily and openly, and do they oppose religious bigots who want to silence us? The Montgomery County school officials should be given pro-gay material (not compromised by bad biology) to distribute with the next batch of report cards. Surely the Human Rights Campaign or the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force could work on such a worthy project?