Ex-Gay Watch

A right-wing Christian group in Hong Kong has published a 52-page booklet condemning homosexuals and promoting reparative therapy to change sexual orientation.

The Society for Truth and Light has drawn heavily from the anti-gay National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality to produce Acceptance–Caring for Homosexuality.

To support the notion that gays can be turned straight through therapy, the booklet cites the usual flawed studies with their neglible results, including Spitzer (2001), Jones and Yarhouse (2007), and the infamous non-study by James Phelan, Neil Whitehead and Philip Sutton (2009)–a literature review falsely touted by NARTH as a groundbreaking new study.

One of STL’s political goals is to block LGBT equality legislation; the booklet contains two appendixes opposing same-sex marriage and laws to prevent sexual orientation discrimination. This is a reminder that the flawed and often-malicious information disseminated by ex-gay and anti-gay groups such as NARTH not only blocks justice in the West. As we have seen with Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, the myths are now being exported to hinder justice in other parts of the world, too.

Read a translation of the full document here (pdf).

Dr George Rekers has resigned from the board of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), following allegations that he received nude, erotic massages from a male prostitute.

Rekers, who has been an anti-gay activist for decades, took a 10-day European vacation with Jo-Vanni Roman (at first identified only as “Lucien”), a gay escort who says they met through the explicit website Rentboy.com. Rekers faced humiliation in the media after denying the accusations, claiming he he hired Roman to help carry his luggage while he recovered from surgery. He said he only found out Roman was an escort partway through the trip, and responded by evangelizing him and warning him against homosexuality.

Stepping down from NARTH, Rekers wrote:

I am immediately resigning my membership in NARTH to allow myself the time necessary to fight the false media reports that have been made against me. With the assistance of a defamation attorney, I will fight these false reports because I have not engaged in any homosexual behavior whatsoever. I am not gay and never have been.

NARTH responded:

NARTH has accepted Dr. Rekers’ resignation and would hope that the legal process will sufficiently clarify the questions that have arisen in this unfortunate situation. We express our sincere sympathy to all individuals, regardless of their perspective, who have been injured by these events. We also wish to reiterate our traditional position that these personal controversies do not change the scientific data, nor do they detract from the important work of NARTH. NARTH continues to support scientific research, and to value client autonomy, client self-determination and client diversity.

Earlier this week, there were premature reports of some websites and organizations (Focus on the Family’s Family Research Council, for example, which Rekers co-founded) deleting mentions of Rekers from their history. Today, Dr Warren Throckmorton reports that the purge has begun.

The gay escort at the center of the George Rekers scandal says Rekers paid him for nude massages.

On Tuesday, the Miami New Times reported that Dr George Rekers, a long-time anti-gay, ex-gay Religious Right activist and scholar, had taken a vacation with a 20-year-old male prostitute he had met through the sexually explicit website Rentboy.com.

Rekers first claimed “Lucien” was a travel assistant, employed to help him lifting luggage, following recent back surgery. He later added the incredulous story that he was evangelizing Lucien in an attempt to persuade him against homosexuality.

Lucien said there was no sex between them, but he has now admitted there was sexual contact, and told Miami New Times that Rekers paid him for daily body rubs during the European vacation:

Rekers allegedly named his favorite maneuver the “long stroke” – a complicated caress “across his penis, thigh … and his anus over the butt cheeks,” as the escort puts it. “Rekers liked to be rubbed down there,” he says.

Dr George Rekers was co-founder of the Family Research Council, a board member of NARTH, and Distinguished Professor Emeritus Professor at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine. The latter disassociated itself from Rekers today by removing his profile from its website. Expect other organizations to follow suit.

Meanwhile, Exodus International President Alan Chambers has written about the situation, calling out the “gay community” for throwing stones at Rekers and for failing to extend any “compassion or care” to Lucien, whom he invites to call Exodus.

Sure, the coverage has been tacky at times, and frankly, I didn’t see a lot of concern for Lucien in some of the reports I read. But Alan’s own attempt to use Lucien as an opportunity to smear gays for offering “counterfeit” community, promote Exodus and its message, and exalt the virtues of his own compassion is hardly much classier – and very transparent.

Religious Right scholar, anti-gay activist and NARTH officer Dr George Rekers has responded directly to blogger Joe. My. God following the report that he took a vacation with a male prostitute he’d met through the sexually explicit website Rentboy.com.

Wrote Rekers:

I have spent much time as a mental health professional and as a Christian minister helping and lovingly caring for people identifying themselves as “gay.” My hero is Jesus Christ who loves even the culturally despised people, including sexual sinners and prostitutes. Like Jesus Christ, I deliberately spend time with sinners with the loving goal to try to help them. Mark 2:16-17 reads, “16When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the “sinners” and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and ‘sinners’?” 17On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” In fact, in a dialogue with hypocritical religious leaders, Jesus even stated to them, “I tell you the truth, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you. 32For John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did. And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him. ” (Matthew 21:31).

Like John the Baptist and Jesus, I have a loving Christian ministry to homosexuals and prostitutes in which I share the Good News of Jesus Christ with them (see I Corinthians 6:8-11). Contrary to false gossip, innuendo, and slander about me, I do not in any way “hate” homosexuals, but I seek to lovingly share two types of messages to them, as I did with the young man called “Lucien” in the news story: [1] It is possible to cease homosexual practices to avoid the unacceptable health risks associated with that behavior, and [2] the most important decision one can make is to establish a relationship with God for all eternity by trusting in Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross for the forgiveness of your sins, including homosexual sins. If you talk with my travel assistant that the story called “Lucien,” you will find I spent a great deal of time sharing scientific information on the desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse, and I shared the Gospel of Jesus Christ with him in great detail.

According to the Miami New Times, an anti-gay activist and NARTH officer took a vacation with a rentboy he met through the sexually explicit gay hookup website Rentboy.com.

George Rekers, PhD is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, and has been lurking behind the scenes of the Religious Right and the ex-gay movement for decades. In 1983, he co-founded the vociferously homophobic Family Research Council with Dr James Dobson of Focus on the Family, and – among other political activities – he testified against gay adoption in the state of Florida, in 2008. He has written extensively against LGBT persons, as a search of the NARTH website will show.

But now the academic who has worked tirelessly for discrimination against gays has reportedly vacationed with a gay male prostitute he met through a gay website. The Miami New Times reports:

Rekers said he learned [travel companion] Lucien was a prostitute only midway through their vacation. “I had surgery,” Rekers said, “and I can’t lift luggage. That’s why I hired him.” (Though medical problems didn’t stop him from pushing the tottering baggage cart through MIA.)

Yet Rekers wouldn’t deny he met his slender, blond escort at Rentboy.com — which features homepage images of men in bondage and grainy videos of crotch-rubbing twinks — and Lucien confirmed it.

There would appear little doubt that Rekers met Lucien by deliberately trawling the explicit website. As the article points out, users must manually agree to to enter the site in the knowledge that it contains graphic sexual material.

Dr Rekers is the second NARTH officer this year to be exposed by the media. In February, the pseudo-psychiatric organization’s Executive Secretary Arthur Abba Goldberg was revealed to have been hiding a criminal past. Goldberg, who also co-founded and co-directs the Jewish ex-gay organization JONAH, was found to have been convicted and jailed for his part in a major Wall Street fraud during the 1980s.

Goldberg subsequently resigned from NARTH – but not before blaming the LGBT community for his failings.

We can expect Rekers’s name to be quietly removed from NARTH’s list of officers in the coming days.

The National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) has officially responded to Ex-Gay Watch on the matter of Arthur Abba Goldberg, the former NARTH Executive Secretary.

Goldberg, who is co-founder and co-director of Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality (JONAH), was revealed last month to have been jailed and fined in 1989 for his part in a multimillion-dollar business fraud.

Goldberg responded to the reports by shifting the blame, and was duly followed by NARTH President Julie Harren-Hamilton, who attacked the gay media and bloggers for exposing Goldberg’s criminal past.

Last week, XGW reported that Goldberg was no longer listed as Executive Secretary of NARTH. Now NARTH Vice-President of Operations David C Pruden has spoken on the record about the situation.

In a statement made to XGW, Pruden revealed that NARTH knew nothing of Arthur Abba Goldberg’s conviction for felony prior to last month’s investigative report. He also confirmed that Goldberg had resigned from the board of NARTH. The full statement reads:

In the past two weeks incidents that took place more than twenty years ago in the career and life of Arthur Goldberg first came to our attention. He has never taken the members of the NARTH Board into his confidence concerning these events and this information came as a complete shock to NARTH members and to our organization. Read more…

Arthur Abba Goldberg is no longer listed as a NARTH officer on the organization’s website.

There is no indication whether Goldberg resigned or was forced to leave. Either seems likely after last month’s revelation that the champion of reparative therapy and co-director of Jewish ex-gay ministry JONAH was a convicted felon. In 1989, Arthur Abba Goldberg was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment and fined $100,000 for his part in a mail fraud scam.

He appears to have deliberately concealed his identity since becoming a leader in the ex-gay movement, and when his past finally caught up with him, he tried to blame everyone but himself for his predicament.

NARTH President Julie Harren-Hamilton (who confusingly appears as both Julie Harren and Julie Hamilton on the NARTH website) gave a weak defense of NARTH and its officers following February’s reports, but without naming Goldberg.

Update: 03/03/10: NARTH’s Vice-President of Operations, David Pruden, has confirmed that Arthur Abba Goldberg is no longer a board member of NARTH.

NARTH President Julie Hamilton has responded to this week’s report that NARTH Executive Secretary and JONAH co-founder and co-director Arthur Abba Goldberg is a convicted felon.

On the NARTH website, Hamilton makes a number of assumptions and seems blind to the actual issues raised. She says that activists, “unable to silence NARTH’s message, resort to attacking NARTH’s members.”

I can only speak for Ex-Gay Watch, but when the story broke, it never occurred to me that Goldberg’s exposure was ipso facto a way to discredit NARTH as a whole. It discredited Goldberg, certainly, and by extension JONAH. It is primarily NARTH’s own response that will reflect on the organization – though admittedly, the omens in Hamilton’s article are not good.

Goldberg exposé part of coordinated strategy against NARTH?

Hamilton ties in the Goldberg story with a protest staged against NARTH in Florida last November:

[A] journalism student leading the November protest shouted into a megaphone that they had been unsuccessful in stopping the work of NARTH through counter conventions, so they would instead begin to target the individual members of NARTH. Following these threats, there have indeed been attempts to discredit both NARTH members as well as non-members who do similar work.

Again, I speak only for XGW in saying that we know nothing of the group shown in the video, or the identity of the media student speaking through the megaphone. TWO organized speaking and protesting events at the same conference, but XGW is not aware of a connection to the group in the video. Read more…

Arthur Goldberg’s damage-control campaign has begun. His strategy is to portray himself as an innocent man who made a mistake, and is now the victim of a ruthless personal attack by the purveyors of the much-feared gay agenda.

Arthur A Goldberg, Executive Secretary of NARTH and a co-founder and co-director of Jewish ex-gay group JONAH, was exposed earlier this week as convicted felon Arthur Abba Goldberg, the Wall Street investor fined $100,000 and sentenced to 18 months in 1989 on three counts of mail fraud and one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States of America.

Goldberg has yet to respond publicly to the reports. He appears, however, to have written to his fellow board members at NARTH, in a letter obtained by Ex-Gay Watch.

Goldberg: Allegations exaggerated, false, malicious

Goldberg begins by describing the charges made against him by the Truth Wins Out/South Florida Gay News investigation as “exaggerated and in many parts false and malicious.” He then says he will explain what happened “so that all of you may have some idea of what was involved.”

This suggests that he had not disclosed his criminal past to NARTH. This is further supported by XGW’s conversation with David Pruden, NARTH’s Vice President of Operations. While freely identifying Goldberg as Arthur Abba Goldberg, Pruden denied knowing anything of the charges made in Monday’s article.

This is very concerning. Who neglects to disclose criminal convictions – especially a felony of this nature – to organizations for which they work, unless quite deliberately? Most companies, organizations and workplaces require their employees and officers to disclose such matters, not least because it could open an organization like NARTH to liabilities of its own. The protocol applies even more so when an organization is professional, pastoral, financial or charitable in nature. Yet the evidence so far suggests Goldberg said nothing. Read more…

An excellent piece by Patrick Strudwick in today’s Independent (London) details the author’s strange and disturbing experiences in ex-gay therapy in the UK.

It’s a refreshing article in that it focuses exclusively on reparative therapy, and tends not to dilute it with other aspects of the ex-gay movement. Strudwick begins his undercover investigation by attending a conference by Dr Joseph Nicolosi of NARTH. (We covered that conference here.) There he heard the usual Nicolosi myths, including the oft-repeated claim that “If you don’t hug your son, some other man will.”

Strudwick met two reparative therapists at the conference, and later consulted with them privately. His experience was shocking:

“Any Freemasonry in the family?” No, I say, again asking her to elaborate. “Because that often encourages it as well. It has a spiritual effect on males and it often comes out as SSA [same-sex attraction].”

Next, she looks for self-esteem wounds. “I think you have some unhelpful thoughts about yourself, about who you are,” she says. “What do you think about yourself? In the deepest part of you, in your stomach.”

“I think I’m a good person,” I reply. She wants more. “I think I am a determined person.” Still not enough. “I think I’ve a lot to give.”

“But do you like yourself?” she asks, becoming impatient.

“I think I’m a good person,” I repeat.

“Yes that’s different though from ‘do you like yourself?’ Deep underneath this there’s other stuff we need to get to. I think you must have had quite a lot of bullying.” No, I say. “There was no sexual abuse?” she asks, leaning in and squinting again. No, I repeat. “I think it will be there,” she replies, dropping her voice to a concerned tone. “It does need to come to the surface.”

And so, she prays for me again. “Father, we give you permission to bring to the surface some of the things that have happened over the years. Father, enable your love to pour into that place of isolation in that little boy, whatever age, we give you permission to go there, with your healing power and your light, go into those parts, open all the doors, and access each one with your light.”

She looks up. I ask her again about this abuse. “I think there is something there,” she says. “You’ve allowed things to be done to you.” In the next session I ask if she thinks the abuse would have taken place within my family, because I can’t remember it. “Yes, very likely,” she replies.

This session with an accredited psychotherapist and counsellor is a strange mixture of psychological mumbo-jumbo, Christian fundamentalist myths and a bizarre guessing game bearing more resemblance to a psychic reading than professional therapy.

Strudwick’s next session is with a married ex-gay psychiatrist, a follower of Richard Cohen. He says he can help men to “reach their full heterosexual potential.” Here things become even more bizarre. The psychiatrist admits he hasn’t entirely escaped same-sex attraction, and still experiences “unhealthy patterns of porn and masturbation, if I’m feeling a bit flat.” As therapy, he encourages Strudwick to experience sexual arousal:

I say that when men compliment me on my appearance it triggers sexual feelings. He probes again, asking me how I’m feeling as he talks about my body. Aroused, I repeat. But rather than moving away from this apparent sexual trigger, he asks if we can do an “exercise” around it. I agree.

“Close your eyes and focus on that arousal you’re feeling down in your genitals,” he says. “I want you to hear, as a man, as I look at your body, I see strong shoulders and a strong chest, I see a man who has an attractive body and I want you just to notice the arousal you feel as you hear me talking about that. Imagine an energy and picture that energy as a colour, and make the brightness of the colour relate to the intensity of the sexual feeling, so you might be starting to get a bit of a hard on, you might be starting to feel an erection and that sexual energy, but I want you to just picture that as a coloured light. What colour would it be?”

Red, I say.

“I want you to imagine that red colour, that energy and listen to the affirmations that I see you as a strong, confident man, and I want you to move that red light from your genitals up into your chest to join that feeling of affirmation as a man, and as you breathe in that affirmation do you notice now what happens to the arousal?”

I tell him it’s still there.

The piece is very revealing. It can be read in its entirety here.