Ex-Gay Watch

A number of British conservative evangelical leaders have written to the Daily Telegraph to express their support for Lesley Pilkington, the Christian therapist found guilty of professional malpractice for offering a “gay cure” to an undercover journalist.

Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, is among the 70 signatories of the letter. Also joining him are the former Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali, the current Bishop of Chester the Right Reverend Peter Forster, the Old Testament scholar Gordon Wenham — and several names representing the most extreme end of the anti-gay, ex-gay movement in the US. They include JONAH’s Arthur “Abba” Goldberg, PFOX’s Regina Griggs, and David Pickup, Jeffrey Satinover, Julie Hamilton and Benjamin Kaufman of NARTH.

To defend the practice of gay-to-straight reparative therapy, the signatories rattle off the names of Joseph Nicolosi, Dean Byrd, Robert Spitzer, and Jones and Yarhouse, apparently ignorant of just how limited – and sometimes outright misleading — the scope and results of such research have proved.

But Carey et al have also glossed over the reasons why Lesley Pilkington was banned from practising psychotherapy in the UK. That she offered to help journalist Patrick Chapman to change his sexual orientation is almost beside the point — she insisted, despite his denials, that the roots of his homosexuality were in low self-esteem, (non-existent) childhood sexual abuse and (also non-existent) a family history of freemasonry. Lesley Pilkington was guilty of sheer quackery.

It’s no surprise that Lisa Nolland and Chris Sugden of the ultra-homophobic Anglican Mainstream would support Pilkington. But that leading Church of England evangelicals such as Lord Carey and Bishop Michael Nazir Ali would not only support her but throw their weight behind the anti-gay pseudoscience of NARTH is indefensible.

[Edited to reflect the fact that Michael Nazir-Ali is the former Bishop of Rochester.]

An ex-gay therapist who surrounds himself with muscular men to help him feel masculine will be the main speaker at a reparative therapy conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland, tomorrow (Tuesday, June 14). He’ll be joined by a Christian therapist who was found guilty of professional malpractice after she told a client his homosexuality was due to Freemasonry and unacknowledged sexual abuse.

David Pickup will speak at Belvoir Church of Ireland in the city, during a conference for the group Core Issues. A flyer for the event announces, “You don’t have to be gay,” and says there will be “tolerance for all views” as the supposed evidence for reparative therapy — clinical treatment to turn homosexuals heterosexual — is discussed.

Core Issues has, frankly, chosen two sitting ducks as its guest speakers. David Pickup is an enigma, to say the least. In 2008, we reported on the strange notions underlying Pickup’s understanding of gender and sexuality. In common with his compatriots at the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, or NARTH, he believes that being gay stems from inadequate male role models while growing up. With that end in mind, Pickup apparently believes that the key to treating his own homosexuality is to surround himself with muscular men to admire. Read more…

A UK psychotherapist may lose her license if a disciplinary hearing finds she attempted to cure a patient of homosexuality.

It is almost a year since Patrick Strudwick published an article in The Independent (London) detailing his experience of ex-gay reparative therapy in the UK. As part of his investigation, the journalist secretly taped sessions with Christian therapist Lesley Pilkington, whom he met through a NARTH conference.

In Strudwick’s recordings, Mrs Pilkington, 60, told him that homosexuality was “a mental illness, an addiction [and] an antireligious phenomenon.” She agreed to provide SOCE — Sexual Orientation Change Efforts — after he said he was a Christian and wanted to leave the “homosexual lifestyle.”

According to the Sunday Telegraph (London), a letter sent to the therapist by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) accused her of “praying to God to heal [Strudwick] of his homosexuality … [of] having an agenda that homosexuality is wrong and that gay people can change and that [she] allegedly attempted to inflict these views on him.”

Pilkington denied she had forced Strudwick into therapy, saying she only offers the treatment to people who choose it because they are “depressed and unhappy” with their sexual orientation.

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.