Ex-Gay Watch

In the Wavertree district of Liverpool, England, Frontline Church has a ministry to gays and lesbians. It’s an ex-gay ministry, LIFE Liverpool, that they say helps people work through childhood pain to overcome their homosexuality.

It was founded in 2000 with the help of Joanne Highley, head of LIFE New York City, whose unusual teachings and practices include exorcizing demons out of bodily cavities such as the anus, the mouth and the uterus. She says that the homosexual orientation is itself sinful and can be overcome by a combination of counseling and prayer. Writing for The Guardian‘s Comment is free last week, I described LIFE Liverpool’s relationship to Highley:

I spoke to Frontline about the Life connection. They said they were “relationally connected” rather than “formally affiliated” to the New York ministry, which had no official authority over the Liverpool ministry. They have a “positive, ongoing friendship” with Highley’s organisation, and they adapt Life materials, combining them with their own resources, to reflect Frontline’s own beliefs.

Questioned about specific statements by Highley, Frontline said as they were not aware of everything Life publishes, they couldn’t say for sure they agreed with all the teaching. Demonic influence can play a part in homosexuality, but not always, and Frontline discourages members and leaders from identifying themselves as “gay”, preferring the descriptor “Christian who struggles with homosexual feelings”.

But let’s be clear that concern over the Life connection is not a simple matter of guilt by association. Joanne Highley, a woman who teaches that homosexual orientation is a sin that can be cured by a combination of psychological therapy and prayer, personally visited Frontline multiple times to help establish an ex-gay ministry based explicitly on her teachings and methods. The church runs that ministry to this day, although it says very little about it publicly.

An Ex-Gay Marriage Machine?

I first encountered LIFE Liverpool in 2006, when I was researching an article for Third Way magazine about ex-gay ministries in the UK. I’d heard about it from someone else involved in another type of ex-gay ministry in the area, who told me of its existence in a raised-eyebrow sort of way. So I phoned Frontline Centre myself to find out more. Pastor Dan was startling in his boldness. Read more…

The Belfast News Letter reports that the World Health Organization has “affirmed the view of controversial groups which say it is medically orthodox to seek treatment for unwanted homosexuality.”

In an article published yesterday, the site said the affirmation followed this month’s Core Issues conference, featuring reparative therapists David Pickup and Lesley Pilkington.

The News Letter continues:

A WHO spokesman said Ego Dystonic Sexuality is a disorder where “the gender identity or sexual preference (heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or prepubertal) is not in doubt, but the individual wishes it were different because of associated psychological and behavioural disorders, and may seek treatment in order to change it.”

WHO was also clear that it does not consider homosexuality per se a disorder.

The suggestion that WHO has recently affirmed reparative therapy in light of the Core Issues conference is puzzling. The above is, in fact, simply a direct quote from the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases. It is taken from F.66 of ICD-10 (2006), the most recent version of the index:

F66 Psychological and behavioural disorders associated with sexual development and orientation
Note: Sexual orientation by itself is not to be regarded as a disorder.

Egodystonic sexual orientation
The gender identity or sexual preference (heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or prepubertal) is not in doubt, but the individual wishes it were different because of associated psychological and behavioural disorders, and may seek treatment in order to change it.

I can find no evidence outside the article that WHO has made any recent announcement. At best, what may have happened is someone queried WHO about this, and a WHO staffer simply sent them the relevant excerpt from ICD-10.

This makes the story rather misleading. It is true that WHO in the past has affirmed the right to seek treatment to change sexual orientation — without endorsing a particular reparative therapy — and it’s true that WHO denies homosexuality in itself is a mental disorder. What is questionable is whether WHO has made a new statement on the subject in direct response to Core Issues, which is certainly the impression the report gives.

Incidentally, the American Pyschiatric Association (APA) removed ego-dystonic homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1987, having removed homosexuality in 1973.

British teenager Michael Causer died on August 2, 2008, aged 18, a week after being beaten and stabbed for being gay.

Almost three years after this brutal, homophobic hate crime, Michael’s family, along with the LGBT community in Liverpool and across the UK, are asking why the story was largely ignored by the national media in the UK. This short documentary on the subject, The Invisible Death of Michael, retells Michael Causer’s story and features interviews with his family and gay activists, including Peter Tatchell.

Michael lived in the village of Whiston, Merseyside, in the neighbourhood I call home. He was murdered a short distance away, in the adjacent town of Huyton. This documentary was jointly produced by Light Factory and Homotopia, the queer arts festival based in nearby Liverpool. If one positive has come of Michael’s tragic story, it’s that its horrific injustice has strengthened the resolve of the local LGBT to unite and fight homophobia in the city.

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.

Journey into Manhood, the immersion course that claims to help men solve the problem of homosexual attractions, is hosting a weekend retreat in the UK later this month.

According to JiM, 80 percent of participants report a decrease in homosexual attractions following the course, and over half say they have experienced increased heterosexual attractions. Patrick Chapman addressed the survey’s flaws briefly, but decisively here on Ex-Gay Watch.

JiM is not strictly Christian, but participation does require belief in a “higher power,” and the course’s contents mimic all the familiar traits of the mostly Christian ex-gay movement. While the website says JiM is “not a gay-bashing weekend” and it will “affirm your inherent value as a man, just as you are,” it also suggests that, as a gay man, you have “issues that are alienating you from your authentic heterosexual masculinity.” Same-sex attraction is due to a lack of “masculine affirmation and healthy male bonding,” among other things.

If you need more convincing that Journey into Manhood is comfortably in the lap of the mainstream ex-gay movement, anti-gay UK group Anglican Mainstream proudly names Arthur Goldberg and Dr Joseph Nicolosi among JiM’s endorsers. Arthur Abba Goldberg, who heads up Jewish ex-gay ministry JONAH, was forced to resign from NARTH in early 2010, after his conviction for fraud–which he has tried to conceal for almost two decades–made headlines. Joseph Nicolosi, also of NARTH, is the chief proponent of the theory that absent fathers and overbearing mothers are the cause of male homosexuality.

To mark the 10th anniversary of People Can Change, Journey into Manhood will also be hosting weekend programs in Texas and Florida.

Arthur Goldberg, the ex-gay leader exposed earlier this year as a convicted Wall Street felon, will speak at a conference in Northern Ireland in November.

Arthur Abba Goldberg was jailed in 1989 after being convicted of fraud. He later founded JONAH, the Jewish ex-gay ministry originally known as Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality, but whose recent name change made it the confusing Jews Offering New Alternatives to Healing. Goldberg appears to have deliberately hidden his identity, and stepped down from the highly anti-gay NARTH when the story became public in February. He subsequently blamed everyone but himself for the fiasco.

Evidently none of this has affected his standing among some conservative evangelicals, including the Northern-Ireland-based Core Issues, who have made him their main speaker at a November 1 event named for Goldberg’s anti-gay, ex-gay polemic Light in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Power to Change. (Actually, the book had the word “Torah” in the title, too.)

Goldberg will be joined by “gender wholeness” counselor Baxter Peffer, erroneously referred to as Baxter “Beffer” on the Core Issues website.

Core Issues joined Goldberg in hitting the headlines in February when gay activists criticized it for hosting a conference by Mario Bergner, an ex-gay Anglican priest who claims to have been miraculously healed of the “symptoms” of AIDS.

Update, October 15: The Core Issues website now says the event has been postponed, due to the untimely death of Matthew Davidson, the son of Core Issues director Mike Davidson. Hat tip: XGW commenter William.

As the UK goes to the polls, questions remain over a prospective MP who allegedly believes that gays and lesbians are demon-possessed, and can be set free through prayer.

An article in Sunday’s Observer (London) accused Philippa Stroud, who is standing for the Conservative Party in today’s election, of founding a church that cures homosexuality by casting out demons.

The story deserved some proper coverage from Ex-Gay Watch, but with the George Rekers scandal breaking this week, it rather fell into oblivion. Since the story is rather timely (the identity of our new Prime Minister will be known sometime in the early hours of tomorrow morning), I’ll do the next best thing and refer you to some of the coverage.

Check out the original Observer article here, and a related article alleging “secret” Tory Party funding from right-wing Christians here.

The ever-reliable Richard Bartholomew has covered the story here and here, with the latest update detailing Stroud’s impending legal action here.

Patrick Strudwick takes on the story at The Guardian’s Comment is free here.

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.

From The Guardian’s Comment is free this morning:

Writing in the Times earlier this week, Patrick Muirhead describes “the day I decided to stop being gay“. Even allowing for its firmly tongue-in-cheek tone, the problem with his article is that he really seems to believe the half-truths he presents about homosexuality.

He talks of his increasing attraction to women, or more pertinently his attraction to the idea of a wife and children – though in fact, when his decision was made, no woman was even in the picture. It was the sight of a father playing with his child that persuaded this one-time “fully fledged homo” to pursue a traditional, heterosexual family life. This is a spectre that cannot be avoided throughout the article: has the author really changed, or is he just enamoured of the idea of “normality”?

In common with many others who have given up the supposedly hedonistic lifestyle of the modern gay man, Muirhead cannot resist taking a parting shot at homosexuals. It’s a familiar pattern, especially in the US, where the religious, rightwing “ex-gay” movement thrives on myth-making about the dangers of same-sex love.

Read the full article, by Ex-Gay Watch’s David L Rattigan, here.