Ex-Gay Watch

Ex-gay guru Richard Cohen of the International Healing Foundation has published an “apology” to gays and lesbians he has hurt:

“We at IHF wish to offer a sincere, heartfelt apology to everyone in the LGBTQ community,” said IHF founder and director, Richard Cohen. “I apologize and ask forgiveness to those who were hurt by our message.” Cohen, a leading expert in the field of sexual orientation and married father of three, knows first-hand how it feels to be ostracized having lived a gay life.

Beginning today, IHF’s doors are wide open to everyone in the LGBTQ and straight communities. The new mission, “Coming Out Loved,” is the catalyst of true tolerance, real diversity, and equality for all. IHF staff will assist anyone who is conflicted about their sexuality and other challenging issues that arise for many in the gay community.

Could there be a more cynical attempt to jump on the “I’m sorry” bandwagon? If he really understood the gravity of how his message has hurt LGBT people, he certainly wouldn’t be presenting himself as “a leading expert in the field of sexual orientation.” Nor, having said he’s now promoting a message of diversity and tolerance, would Cohen throw in his lot with NARTH, the supposedly professional organization actually made up mostly of anti-gay religionists and activists, not the mental health professionals it says it represents. From Cohen’s press release:

IHF has adopted therapeutic guidelines from the American Psychological Association for members of the lesbian, gay and bisexual communities; American Counseling Association guidelines for the transgender community; and National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality therapeutic guidelines for anyone questioning their sexuality and/or experiencing unwanted SSA.

In 2007, former ex-gay leaders Jeremy Marks, Darlene Bogle and Michael Bussee unambiguously apologized for the harm they had done. Canadian ministry New Direction really did take a new direction when it turned its back on the false promises of Exodus International. More recently, John Smid went further than ever before in acknowledging how badly he had gotten his message wrong, and it was clearly one more important step along a journey he has been making since the events surrounding Love in Action in 2005.

Now Cohen, sensing the tide is against him, emerges from nowhere and rattles off a glib apology, announceing that his organization will embrace everyone, gay and straight. The smell of cold, calculated fakery is nauseatingly potent.

Hat-tip: ThinkProgress.

Two men have accused Alan Downing, a life coach with Richard Cohen’s ex-gay International Healing Foundation, of using sexually inappropriate therapy techniques, according to Truth Wins Out.

On separate occasions, Downing allegedly asked Ben Unger and Chaim Levin to undress in front of a mirror and fondle their genitals while he watched, saying this would help them affirm their masculinity.

Downing is a close associate of JONAH, the Jewish ex-gay organization whose leader Arthur Abba Goldberg was exposed as a convicted Wall Street felon earlier this year. He has also run courses and retreats for the controversial Mankind Project., and worked with the gay-to-straight outreach People Can Change and its affiliate Journey into Manhood.

Downing is ex-gay, but admits he is still attracted to men, according to TWO.

First Goldberg, then George Rekers, and now Downing–they’re falling fast this year.

See also Wayne Besen’s follow-up editorial at Huffington Post: Ex-Gay Therapy Is Scandalous.

The journalist behind an ex-gay exposé in The Independent (London) last week, has launched an all-out campaign against reparative therapy.

Patrick Strudwick’s investigative report revealed startling practices among reparative therapists in the UK. In his latest missive, he reiterates and expands on some of his more disturbing claims, such as that ex-gay psychiatrist Dr Paul Miller encouraged sexual arousal during therapy sessions, and that the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is inadvertently funding reparative therapy. He also reveals that Cohen disciple and NARTH representative Miller, who was promoted by now-disgraced Northern Ireland MP Iris Robinson in 2008, still struggles with gay pornography and masturbation from time to time. (Apparently not uncommon among people claiming to be healed of homosexuality.)

Now Strudwick has formed the Stop Conversion Therapy Taskforce, aka SCOTT. As of writing this, the campaign’s Facebook group has 700 members and counting.

Here is what Strudwick says of the group and the reasons behind it:

The belief system of conversion therapy, that gay people aren’t just ungodly and wrong but are inherently damaged and that they can be “healed” or reprogrammed constitutes a fascistic, fundamentalist ideology. Mental health professionals who harbour such an agenda are a supremely dangerous proposition.

The work of Scott will therefore not stop at disrupting conferences. We want professional bodies such as the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy to add into their code of conduct specific stipulations condemning attempts to alter orientation (currently they have more general ones about not letting personal feelings about sexuality affect treatment).

We will also continue to expose individual therapists and report them to their professional bodies. It won’t be easy. Many operate using euphemisms that cloud what they’re really doing. They also defend their techniques vehemently, claiming: “We offer choice! We only treat those who come looking for it!” It’s like a Venus flytrap blaming the hungry insect that wanders into its gaping mouth. But we are determined to root them out however long it takes. This won’t be a battle. It’s war.

Strong words indeed.

I approach this with caution. It is great to see reparative therapy being highlighted in the UK media like this, and its dangers exposed. The practices investigated by Strudwick are shocking and disgusting. The world of gay-to-straight conversion must be held up to scrutiny, and abusive forms of therapy must be curtailed.

On the other hand, the ex-gay movement encompasses a wide variety of approaches. There have always been at least two distinct responses by the LGBT community. One response has been to “wage war” on the ex-gay movement and do all in its power to destroy it. This has never been the aim of Ex-Gay Watch. We live in a free society, and groups for people who hate, wish to change, are uncomfortable with, or simply wish not to act on their sexual orientation are free to gather and encourage each other in whatever way in their aims. Ex-Gay Watch will do all it can to denounce deception and oppression by the ex-gay movement, but one thing it does not have the right to do is to destroy it by force.

The reason for my caution is that it is very easy to throw all the aspects of the ex-gay movement together and treat them all as issues that can or should be addressed by, for example, legal force. There are many clear instances of abuse that should be addressed by legal means, such as those brought up by Strudwick’s initial article. Then there are ideas that should be addressed by exercising our right to free speech and arguing against them. We should not mistake one category for the other. For example, a Christian therapist who works with legitimate psychiatric or psychological methods to help a patient to achieve congruence (living with both the demands of one’s faith and the reality of sexual orientation) easily falls under the guise of “reparative therapy” in the popular mind – but we have no right to dismantle such attempts by force.

What needs to be clear is what we are fighting and why, and what our aims are. I am pleased to see the rotten underbelly of the ex-gay movement in the UK exposed, but any declaration of battle must be made with wisdom and discernment.

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.

Building on David Robert’s post on the Richard Cohen portion of The Rachel Maddow Show, Randy Thomas, Vice President of Exodus International, had some things to say about the exchange.

Randy Thomas: I am going to share a review of the actual interview and then move into how I believe she, and some other militant gay activists, are missing the point with regard to Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill.

Transcript, edited for brevity, emphases mine:

MADDOW: But you have told them, particularly in your book, “Coming Out Straight,” which I understand you donated multiple copies of to this organization that‘s promoting this bill. You‘re telling them exactly what they need to hear in order to justify the kill-the-gays bill. I mean, your book portrays gay people as predators who must be stopped to protect the innocent.

COHEN: Oh, no, no, no.

MADDOW: Let me ask – I‘ll just read from your book, OK? Page 49, “Homosexuals are at least 12 times more likely to molest children than heterosexuals. Homosexual teachers are at least seven times more likely to molest a pupil. Homosexual teachers are estimated to have committed at least 25 percent of pupil molestation; 40 percent of molestation assaults were made by those who engage in homosexuality.”

This is the claim that you make in your book that exactly feeds these folks who want to execute people for being gay, what they need in order to justify that. Do you stand by what you said in your book?

COHEN: Actually, you know, that one particular quote, when I do republish it, reprint it, we will extract that from it, because we don‘t want such things to be used against homosexual persons.

MADDOW: That quote is cited – you cite somebody named Paul Cameron as the source of that book.

COHEN: I see that they‘re using it, but you took that one little quote out of a 300-page book.

“you took that one little quote out of a 300-page book”

That “one little quote” may be edited out of Cohen’s next revision, but it’s a paltry excision in light of the other “little” quotes in his book.
Read more…

At the same meeting in Uganda described here, Family Life Network (FLN) leader Stephen Langa continues his discussion with the group on the evil, clever “gay agenda.”  In doing so, he turns to Richard Cohen’s book, Coming Out Straight : Understanding and Healing Homosexuality.

Cohen has been a bombastic embarrassment for ex-gay groups over the years, appearing about anywhere that would have him.  His demonstration of “bioenergetics” on CNN has him beating a pillow with a tennis racket while yelling at the top of his lungs.  The same appearance includes a session of “holding” or “touch” therapy where Cohen cradles his client in his arms while on a sofa.  He has repeated this and other stunts in multiple venues.

An XGW exclusive in 2007 revealed another account of Cohen’s bizarre behavior at an Exodus Annual Freedom Conference in 2000.  Cohen had been invited to speak and also demonstrated one of his therapy techniques.  As Exodus president Alan Chambers later recounted in an email to their parents group:

During that class, which I attended, he asked for a volunteer to demonstrate on. His volunteer was a seasoned Exodus leader. This leader was instructed by Mr. Cohen to lay on the floor and spread his legs wide open. Dr. Cohen then laid down on top of this other man face to face and embraced him.

Mr. Cohen made the comment, “This might cause some stimulation. However, what goes up must come down, I always say.” He made other vulgar comments of this nature.

To our knowledge, Cohen has no license to practice any sort of therapy. The licensing authorities in his state, Maryland, told XGW that a license is not required there to offer services as a “psychotherapist” as long as one does not diagnose and treat from the DSM-IV.  They added that the term is essentially meaningless and did not reflect any official designation.  Also in 2007, Cohen claimed to stop counseling clients.

Of note here is the fact that, in this book, Cohen uses the seriously flawed data provided by discredited  researcher Paul Cameron.  One would be hard pressed to find a source with less credibility on this subject, except perhaps another Langa source, Scott Lively.  Langa has truly scraped the bottom of the barrel for information with which to mangle the lives of GLBTs in Uganda.

Yet to such “noted authorities,” we can add Exodus board member Don Schmierer, who traveled halfway around the world to be in such esteemed company while talking to the people of Uganda.