Ex-Gay Watch

Jose Luis Maccarone lived as an ex-gay for over 10 years. Peterson Toscano met him during his stay at Love in Action, an ex-gay residential program in Memphis, Tennessee. In 2000 Jose Luis moved from his home in Argentina to Madrid to serve as Exodus Interational’s first missionary. After a few years, he left Exodus and came out gay.

Peterson recently traveled to Madrid to meet with Jose Luis. In a series of YouTube videos, Peterson talked to Jose Luis about his experiences with the the ex-gay movement. It’s an enlightening and moving testimony.

Jose Luis shares some of the reasons why he became ex-gay: 

Jose Luis talks about life as an Exodus leader and missionary:

Jose Luis talks about the good and the harm from his ex-gay experience:

Jose Luis talks about his recovery from the ex-gay movement and speaks to the people who he had ministered to as a missionary and ex-gay leader:

[Hat tip: Peterson Toscano]

Note: This is a cross post from Box Turtle Bulletin.

If anyone has paid any attention to gay-rights debates over the past three decades, they would have undoubtedly come across at least a few of Paul Cameron’s many pronouncements. As the head of the tiny Family Research Institute (it appears to consist only of himself, his wife, a daughter, and a son who is also a frequent coauthor), he’s nevertheless made a name for himself by publishing more than three-dozen anti-gay “studies,” mostly in the pay-to-publish vanity journal Psychological Reports.

He has also expressed his virulently anti-gay views in several pamphlets (including his most famous pamphlet, “Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do“) and in his quasi-monthly newsletters. His penchant for distorting social science research has been denounced by the American Psychological Association, the American Sociological Association, and the Nebraska Psychological Association. More recently, he’s been called out by the Eastern Psychological Association and in the latest issue of Anthropology News.

n 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center issued a report saying, “Cameron’s ‘science’ echoes Nazi Germany in that these disparaging descriptions of homosexuals are reminiscent of themes found in the ugly history of anti-Semitism…”. But as we shall see, Cameron does much more than just echo Nazi Germany in his theories on homosexuality. He actually engaged in a bit of holocaust revisionism to advance his cause. And the surprising thing is, this evidence has been right there all along on his web site, largely unnoticed for eight years.

Read more…

Last week, we saw that Exodus was still promoting Paul Cameron’s junk science. Even though this wasn’t the first time an Ex-Gay Watch author raised this issue, last week’s post prompt some remarkably swift corrective actions from Exodus president Alan Chambers. In a commendable act of transparency, Exodus’s FAQ on life expectancy was replaced with this statement: “This article has been removed due to the inaccuracies surrounding the research of Paul Cameron.”

Now it’s time to turn our attention to NARTH.

A quick search of NARTH’s web site reveals that they have been just as willing to promote Cameron’s so-called “research.”

For our first example, NARTH member Ross Olson sent a letter to the Pediatric Annals, a letter that was published on NARTH’s web site (I don’t know if that letter was ever published by Pediatric Annals). In that letter, Olson criticizes an article that described a thirteen-year-old transgender MTF. Because the original article described the teen’s sexual activities, Olson jumped to the conclusion that the teen was being sexually abused, and that allowed him to bring up the familiar charge that ties homosexuality to pedophilia. For support, he cited Cameron’s “research” as though it has been presented in a professional journal. Here’s the screen-shot of that paragraph:

This citation is one of the more amazing ones I’ve ever seen. The Journal of the Family Research Institute? It doesn’t exist, at least not as Olsen implies. The link actually goes to a quasi-monthly newsletter that Cameron published for several years called the Family Research Report (hence the “FRR” in the URL). It’s not a journal by any stretch of the term, let alone a peer-reviewed one. Maybe Dr. Olson aspires to be the Dr. Cameron of pediatrics.

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Since criticizing Drs. Paul and Kirk Cameron’s “Scandinavian Gay Lifespan” study, Dr. Warren Throckmorton has participated in an email exchange over his comments, first with Paul Cameron and then his son, Kirk. That study, you may remember, was presented in a poster session at the Eastern Psychological Association’s convention in Philadelphia last March. Cameron’s subsequent press releases quickly drew a sharp condemnation in an official statement from the EPA’s president, Dr. Phil Hineline.

Dr. Warren Throckmorton has remained on the case. He contacted Danish epidemiologist Dr. Morten Frisch, who responded with a strong rebuke of the Camerons’ methods and conclusion two weeks ago. This prompted Dr. Kirk Cameron, Paul’s son, to mount an unusual defense via a letter he e-mailed to Dr. Throckmorton. (This is, as far as I know, the first time we’ve heard from Kirk directly. His father typically handles such communications.) In that letter, Cameron the younger has the audacity to conclude:

[C]areful examination of our work and of the charges against us reveals that — while no one is perfect, including us — we have performed our work with scientific integrity and honesty.

Today Dr. Throckmorton responded to Cameron’s letter with a thorough analysis of the Camerons’ paper. In it, he highlights a long stream of unsubstantiated assumptions and glaring weakness, all of which builds toward an unproven conclusion (that registered-partnered gays in Scandinavia die some twenty years younger than their heterosexual counterparts), which Cameron used as the basis for a decidedly unscientific publicity campaign. You can read Dr. Throckmorton’s splendid analysis here.

Dr. Cameron had no sooner posted his analysis when he received a follow-up message from Dr. Frisch, who described Cameron’s work this way:

Although the Camerons’ report has no objective scientific value, the authors should be acknowledged for providing teachers with a humorous example of agenda-driven, pseudo-scientific gobbledygook that will make lessons in elementary study design and scientific inference much more amusing for future epidemiology students.

I don’t think I could have said it better myself.

This is a quick follow-up to my earlier post on Paul Cameron’s “Scandinavian Gay Lifespan” study. Cameron purportedly presented the paper at a recent convention of the Eastern Psychological Association.

Just this morning, Phil Hineline, president of the Eastern Psychological Association sent me an email in response to an inquiry I made last week. It includes a statement which disassociates the EPA from Cameron’s claims and challenges Cameron’s description of his presentation. You can read the statement in its entirety here.

In 1993, Paul Cameron, of the Family Research Institute, began touting a paper he said he presented at the Eastern Psychological Association entitled, “The lifespan of homosexuals.” In this study, he drew on obituaries placed in gay newspapers around the country to claim that the average lifespan for gay men was a mere 42 years. For lesbians, the average was 44. While that study was roundly criticized for its ridiculous methodology, those statistics have persisted among some anti-gay activists.

Well, Cameron’s at it again. Returning to the scene of the original crime, he’s hijacked the Eastern Psychological Association’s reputation once again, this time to claim that gays and lesbians in registered partnerships in Denmark and Norway experience a lifespan up to 24 years shorter than their heterosexual counterparts. His latest claims are already being picked up by anti-gay activists, conservative news organizations, blogs, and pundits.

Cameron’s paper, “Federal Distortion of Homosexual Footprint,” is filled with all the strange and bogus statistics we’ve come to expect from him. I examined his methods and in my latest report, “Paul Cameron’s Footprint,” I show you why the claims he makes based on data from Denmark and Norway are completely worthless. My conclusions:

Yes, Cameron is up to his same old tricks again. You can bet that this won’t be the last time we hear from him. And no matter how ridiculous his methodologies may be, he will continue to provide statistical fodder for the anti-gay lobby. But with his latest paper on the “Homosexual Footprint,” he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. This time, as always, his “footprint” is planted firmly in his mouth.

You can read the whole report at Box Turtle Bulletin.

Who says ex-gays don’t have a sense of humor?

Just a warning: the above clip will probably make you laugh even though it is at the expense of the “ex-gay” movement.

Randy Thomas, vice president of Exodus International, is rightly embarrassed by Richard Cohen’s appearance on the Daily Show:

The guy on the video announces Richard as the foremost expert on “healing the gay” or something like that. Richard is not the foremost of anything except making a spectacle of himself and completely misrepresenting the larger “ex-gay” movement. He is not a part of Exodus and apparently not willing to take our private feedback and accountability to heart.

I have no idea why Richard Cohen does these things. He’s clearly an embarrassment to the “ex-gay” movement. (And by the way, I’ve refrianed from using scare quotes around the term “ex-gay” because I don’t want to offend. Now that Exodus officials are doing it, does that mean I should resume the practice? Okay, never mind. I’ll leave that for another time. Back to Cohen…)

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Karen Booth is the leader of an Exodus member ministry called Transforming Congregations. She was offended recently when Mike Jones, the man who outed Ted Haggard, placed his massage table for auction on eBay. The proceeds of the auction where promised to Project Angel Heart, an established, reputable charity which provides care for AIDS and cancer patients. In response, Karen Booth placed a request on her ministry website for others to join her in contacting eBay to demand that they remove the auction, calling it “reprehensible”:

This item is not only offensive to any person in the eBay community who might be personally connected to Mr. Haggard, but is also highly offensive to Christians, particularly conservative evangelicals. I think it is a violation of eBay’s stated Community Values and I ask you to remove the listing from the eBay website.

I have put an alert on my ministry’s national website and have also informed other national Christian ministries, including the American Family Association. (The auction is also being discussed on several Internet blogs.) If the offensive listing is not removed, I will encourage my supporters to boycott eBay, which I also intend to do.

On March 17, one day before the auction was to end, eBay pulled it. Ex-Gay Watch author David Roberts spoke with Mike Jones on Sunday. Mike said he was given a vague reason having to do with rules regarding charities. He was bewildered by this, since he had received help from eBay staff in listing the item to begin with. Mostly he felt sad because Project Angel Heart was expecting the much needed donation, and as any eBayer can tell you, the last day — the last minutes even — are when the bids really fly.

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