Ex-Gay Watch

The American Psychological Association has said that there is insufficient evidence for so-called “sexual orientation change efforts,” and has instructed mental health practitioners to avoid offering reparative or “ex-gay” therapy.

In a resolution adopted at its annual conference today, the APA officially rejected treatments that portray homosexuality as a mental disorder, and lauded approaches “that provide accurate information on sexual orientation and sexuality, increase family and school support and reduce rejection of sexual minority youth.”

The accompanying report made short shrift of recent ex-gay studies, saying they were based on “inadequate” research methods. The Chair of the APA’s Task Force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation, Judith M Glassgold, said:

At most, certain studies suggested that some individuals learned how to ignore or not act on their homosexual attractions. Yet, these studies did not indicate for whom this was possible, how long it lasted or its long-term mental health effects.

She called for therapists to be “completely honest” about the likelihood of change, and to acknowledge the “reality of their sexual orientation,” while respecting the client’s religious beliefs.

Ex-Gay Watch has already noted how hardcore supporters of reparative therapy steeled themselves for today’s announcement.

Read full report (PDF)

A survey has found that 17 percent of therapists in the UK have offered a client therapy to “reduce” same-sex attractions. Four percent said they would try to “change” a patient’s sexuality if asked.

The findings are from a study carried out by a team at University College London, whose ongoing research into conversion therapy is being documented online at www.treatmentshomosexuality.org.uk.

The reseachers, led by Dr Graham King, questioned 1,400 mental health professionals. They described the number willing to offer help for gays to become straight as “a significant minority,” and concluded that the lack of evidence for change made such therapy “unwise or even harmful.”

The study was published in the journal BMC Psychiatry, and is available to read online in full.

Filming and Editing by Daniel Gonzales

Mike Jones, the man who exposed Ted Haggard’s extramarital, same-sex encounters in 2006, has just made a video to get a few more things off his chest.  Jones was an escort in the Denver area and Haggard was the Pastor of the huge New Life Church, and President of the National Association of Evangelicals.  Haggard resigned in shame after his relationship with Jones was exposed, and has spent the years since going through various phases of counseling, even claiming that he was no longer gay after the first three weeks.

Recent news has brought out yet another such relationship with a young man who was volunteering at New Life Church during approximately the same time.  In this latest case, the church paid for the young man’s college tuition and counseling on the condition that confidentiality was maintained.

In a phone call early on, Mike Jones relayed to this writer his dismay at the way he had been treated by both sides of the issue, the gay community included.  Some of this spilled over into discussions at XGW, when Karen Booth of the anti-gay Transforming Congregations succeeded in pressuring eBay to remove an auction of Jones message bench (which had obviously gained notoriety at that time).  He had promised the proceeds to Project Angel Heart, a very old and worthwhile charity which provides food and assistance to AIDS and cancer patients.

Jones wrote a book about what happened called “I Had to Say Something: The Art of Ted Haggard’s Fall.”

Warren Throckmorton recently posted excepts from an article by social psychologist Carol Tavris called Mind Games: Psychological Warfare Between Therapists and Scientists (The Chronicle of Higher Education, paid account only). The point was made that, by and large, therapists are not scientists. There is such a “split between the research and practice wings of psychology,” that much of what we came to think of as fact over the past decades — simply because therapists said it was — turned out not to be so. Here are some examples from the original quote:

• Low self-esteem causes aggressiveness, drug use, prejudice, and low achievement.
• Abused children almost inevitably become abusive parents, causing a “cycle of abuse.”
• Therapy is beneficial for most survivors of disasters, especially if intervention is rapid.
• Memory works like a tape recorder, clicking on at the moment of birth; memories can be accurately retrieved through hypnosis, dream analysis, or other therapeutic methods.
• Traumatic experiences, particularly of a sexual nature, are typically “repressed” from memory, or split off from consciousness through “dissociation.”
• The way that parents treat a child in the first five years (three years) (one year) (five minutes) of life is crucial to the child’s later intellectual and emotional success.

Often these types of claims originate as the idea of a therapist or therapists who, while attempting to avoid dissonance between their theory and the evidence, begin to seek out situations which will fit their theory, dismissing all others. They begin to see all situations in light of their theory and act accordingly, sometimes defending it vehemently in what can become a self-serving battle. This is the antithesis of the scientific method.

Dr. Joseph Nicolosi of the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) insists that boys can become homosexual (actually, have “homosexual problems” since he doesn’t believe there is any such thing as a homosexual) if they don’t get enough attention from their fathers, or if they were abused as children. Further he insists that they do not trust men, and that upon learning to do so they will no longer have the alleged homosexual problem. Read more…

Growing up in a 1960’s conservative evangelical home, Scott Harrison not only knew homosexuality was a sin, he knew it was “the worst sin a person could do. It was worse than murder.” He described to the Southern Poverty Law Center the exorcism delivered upon him by a minister at Living Waters/Desert Stream [see edit below], a neo-Pentecostal ex-gay ministry. After a “very intense, dramatic” group prayer that lasted three hours, Harrison found himself “drenched in sweat” and “psychologically wounded.” Because of “how it happened and the incorrectness of the theology,” it “felt like a spiritual rape” to him. Harrison was the victim, but says it’s hard not to blame himself, even 20 years after the incident. When asked how he became involved in such a bizarre event, Harrison responds:

When you’re coming from a perspective that you believe God can give messages to people, words of prophecy, then it’s very easy to become prey. This guy got a team of people together. One of the aspects that is pretty strong in Vineyard, still, is that they believe that people can be “demonized.” Not meaning that a person is fully possessed by Satan, but that a person has given him or herself over to Satanic strongholds in his or her life, so that it may take an exorcism to release the various demons that this person has given over their lives to.

He adds that as an ex-gay minister,

I didn’t believe change was an easy process. People would have said, if you asked them in private, [that] the option was one of celibacy, as opposed to accepting oneself as gay and lesbian. When [ex-gay ministers] talked about change at that time, they were talking about behavior modification.

Not much about that has really changed, with Alan Chambers (head of Exodus International) claiming he’s never really met an ex-gay, and declaring that he wakes up every morning denying that part of his being that comes so naturally.
Harrison believes that legally, ex-gay ministries should be allowed to exist, but as faith-based organizations, not state-sponsored ones. Ex-gay ministries have no place in public schools, just like representatives of religious institutions are barred. And he says exposure to the messages of Exodus Youth (Exodus International’s ex-gay youth ministry) are downright dangerous:

I don’t think that’s healthy for anyone, but especially not for high school students. Teenagers are idealistic. They’re going to grab for that, believing they can actually change their sexuality, when we have plenty of evidence showing it’s not possible. What’s going happen when they don’t change? More youth suicides, more youths engaging in risky behaviors, feeling betrayed by the church and by God and giving up on their faith. If I’d heard that message as a teenager, I don’t know if I’d be here today.

Thank G-d he IS here today, to give us his valuable point of view.

Edit 1/3/2008:

Today we received an email from Scott Harrison with the following corrections to this story:

…the original interview had stated that the exorcism or deliverance occurred at the hands of the pastor of my church, the Vineyard San Pedro, not at the hands of leaders of Desert Stream or Living Waters, which were based out of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship congregations in Santa Monica and later in Anaheim, California. I understand that not all of these details appeared in the original interview and that it might have been possible to infer that the San Pedro Vineyard was somehow directly connected to Desert Stream or Living Waters.

The reality is that the San Pedro Vineyard supported the work of Desert Stream, but was not a host for ex-gay ministry. When interviewed, I cited the deliverance session as an example of how demonizing homosexuality (for example, referring to homosexuality as a satanic or demonic perversion of the “one true” sexual orientation of heterosexuality), which is the modus operandi of most ex-gay leaders, can open the door to all sorts of abuses such as what I experienced. I clearly stated this when I was interviewed and wish the SPLC article had been a bit stronger on this point.

In an attempt to turn ex-gays into real men, some in the ex-gay camp recommend a weekend retreat called New Warriors Training Adventure to their clients. An interesting and enlightening discussion of the New Warriors program can be read at Dr. Warren Throckmorton’s blog , where the following retreat activities are described as taken from a recent article in the Houston Press.

• Blindfolded walking tours in the nude;

• People blowing sage smoke in his face while 50 or so naked men danced around candles;

• Men sitting naked in a circle discussing their sexual histories while passing a wooden dildo called “The Cock”;

• Naked men beating cooked chickens with a hammer.

As Throckmorton notes in a follow-up post, there was a rift a few years ago amongst the New Warriors when a local branch hosted a talk by NARTH founder, Joseph Nicolosi.

The New Warriors Training Adventures are put on by The Mankind Project (MKP) and are described eloquently at their website as an invitation to step forward and look in the mirror. However, red flags are raised soon after by a barrage of yes or no questions phrased in such a way as to make one feel wimpy who dares to answer “no”.

• Do you have the courage to face your own fears and insecurities and discover the tremendous power and beauty that lies within you?
• Are you willing to step into the fullness of who you really are?
• Are you willing to discover the real joy and terror of being a man?

From the descriptions given by the Houston article as well as commenters at Throckmorton’s site, it appears the New Warriors Training focuses more on terrorizing than discovering joy. Participants are literally stripped down, physically and emotionally. In the article, one woman retells her husband’s description of an activity.

…everyone was sitting Indian-style in a big circle in the lodge when the man leading the group said, ‘If you wish, you may reach over and grab your brother’s dick. If your brother doesn’t want your hand there, he can remove it.’ Well, my husband told me he just froze. And from that point on, he just wanted out. Read more…

A recent study conducted by Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health has found, among other things, that younger (age 18-44) gay, lesbian and bisexual men and women experience fewer mental disorders and are less likely to have attempted suicide than their counterparts in the 45-59 age group.  As Dr. Ilan Meyer, Associate Professor of Clinical Sociomedical Sciences and principal investigator of the study notes,

The finding regarding younger cohorts of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals is consistent with social stress theories that predicted that the liberalization of social attitudes toward homosexuality over the past few decades can lead to a decline in stress and related mental disorders and suicide among lesbians, gay men, and bisexual individuals.

While no single study is likely to present the final world on any given topic, this latest survey appears to hammer yet another nail in the coffin of the myth (common in evangelical and ex-gay circles) that same-sex attractions are, in and of themselves, a major contributor to mental illness even among openly gay individuals.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan

Mike Airhart made a great point in the comments of the article about Dr. Austin.

XGW did not decide Austin was guilty; a Texas jury did…

David Roberts made another interesting observation.

I continue to be amazed at the Svengali like ability Mr. Austin seems to have over some people.

As a former client, I have some thoughts I would like to present regarding Dr. Austin’s conviction. First, I’ve had nothing but wonderful experiences with therapy under his care. People are consistently amazed by the perseverance and grace I’ve demonstrated during and after my marriage to Tdub. I say this not to boast, but as a direct compliment to Dr. Austin, who was instrumental in bringing me to such a place. He helped me maintain that demeanor over the course of several years; he is a gifted therapist.

However, I’ve come to realize that Dr. Austin is a very confused man, and I wonder privately if there may be more going on there. I’ll not make any wild claims about his state of mind, but I’ve seen the “Svengali” at work over a long period of time, and I’ve been friends or acquainted with many of his ex-gay clients. Our home was once a popular location for the ex-gay barbecues we sometimes joke about here at XGW. Because of those sorts of relationships, formed outside the realm of the counseling center, I was privy to a bit more of the inner-workings and dynamics of the group. I believe Dr. Austin is a master manipulator; gifted therapist, most definitely – master manipulator, unfortunately so.

It’s taken me quite some time to believe it, but the final “nail in the coffin” came after the break-up of my marriage to Tdub. One of our first concerns was appropriate therapy for our sons. We initially believed that Dr. Austin would be a good choice to help the boys through the transition of our family break-up as well as Tdub’s coming out. This is when we began to learn just how manipulative he had been. For reasons I won’t detail, and by people I won’t name, we were strongly cautioned against allowing our boys to enter therapy with him. We received this information from individuals with first-hand experience, and telling us placed them at great personal risk by also divulging their dalliances with Dr. Austin. To my knowledge, none of these particular indiscretions have been part of any of the trials or investigations to date.

I think it important to realize that one’s experience and level of trust with a man like Dr. Austin can only be used to evaluate one’s own relationship with him. It says nothing about his overall capability for damaging the lives of others. I personally have nothing against him. Even Dr. Austin’s extremely unorthodox practices, detailed in Part II of my series on ex-gay therapy, weren’t harmful to me. On the other hand, the fact that he pushed the boundaries of whatever guidelines may exist, either written or unwritten, among ex-gay therapists, certainly doesn’t improve my view of him at this point. The bottom line is this; I’m not going to abandon common sense and sound reason just because I wasn’t victimized by him myself.

If by some incredible long shot Dr. Austin was wrongly convicted, I feel confident he’ll be fine. He did, after all, instruct me in all sorts of Biblical truth which continues to sustain me during desperate times. I wish him Godspeed, either way.

Researchers Kenneth J. Zucker and Susan J. Bradley are names that every gay man and lesbian woman should know, especially if they were treated to become “straight” at a camp or a ex-gay affirming psychologist’s office — but almost no one knows who Zucker and Bradley are.

The National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuals (NARTH) quotes Zucker and Bradley often in defense of treating children diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder (GID) — described as a “pre-homosexual condition” by Joseph Nicolosi in his book A Parents Guide To Preventing Homosexuality. (Update – See Further Reading‘s GID Reform Advocates: DSM-IV-TR: Gender Identity Disorder in Children, 302.6 for how the Childhood GID applies to LGB people.)

Kenneth Zucker and Susan Bradley are from the Clark Institute (CAMH), specifically the institution’s Gender Identity Clinic.

In Gene Chase’s review of Zucker & Bradley’s Gender Identity Disorder and Psychosexual Problems in Children and Adolescents, Chase states of Zucker and Bradley:

They are specialists in Gender Identity Disorder (GID), which is the last vestige of the characterization of homosexuality as a disorder in the old APA DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual].

Recall that GID is the feeling of conflict in one’s gender. It is not being transsexual (ts), since no biology is a part of the diagnosis. It is not being transgendered (tg) alone, since that may not be conflicting. It is not cross-dressing, since that is a behavior not a feeling.

Here’s what has been said about Zucker and Bradley’s work, some of it in their own words:

Read more…

Focus on the Family recently claimed gay activists (NGLTF and PFLAG) have “pressured” the APA to re-examine it’s position on allowing members to practice gay conversion or reparative therapy. Given Focus’ recent history of distorting science and reality to fit their worldview, I contacted the NGLTF, PFLAG, and the APA myself and spoke respectivly with Jason Cianciotto, Ron Schlittler, and Clinton Anderson. What I learned was that in an informal meeting Schlittler (PFLAG) expressed concerns to Anderson (APA) over: (in Schlittler’s words)

“aggressive promotion of “reparative therapy” by right wing groups.”

Given that the APA’s position statement on reparative therapy is 8-years old Anderson issued a formal memo in September of 2005 to NGLTF and PFLAG seeking formal opinions from both organizations. To be clear, NGLTF never even gave their opinion to the APA until asked for it. I hardly consider that “pressure.”

Focus did not report the primary reason for the formation of the investigative task-force, which is because: (in Cianciotto’s words)

[since 1997 a] “growing body of new research has been published on conversion therapy and a number of other medical and mental health professional associations have released new statements and policies on the issue.”

All three sources I spoke with, the APA, NGLTF, and PFLAG indicated this was the primary reason for the formation of a task-force. Focus neglected to report this.

Focus on the Family took in 143 million dollars in revenue in 2005.

Focus has contributed nothing to the body of research on conversion therapy but rather spent vast sums of money erecting billboards asking people to “question homosexuality.” The only evidence of “successful” conversion therapy Focus has offered is a troupe of career professional ex-gays, and and even Focus would have to agree that for the APA to base their professional scientific standards and methods on that would be akin to malpractice.

It’s no wonder Focus doesn’t want to report the primary reason the APA is reevaluating its position. They could have contacted these same people for the facts but apparently did not. Either this is incredibly sloppy journalism or they were trying to spin a story that wasn’t there.

Anderson (APA) also reported the formation of a task-force has been authorized and nominations will be accepted in March.