Jim Burroway takes note of something that really needs not to be overlooked in all the volume over the case of Kirk Murphy. Reker’s claimed he had independent verification of his success with Kirk…
Buried in a footnote, Rekers wrote, “I express my appreciation to Drs. Larry N. Ferguson and Alexander C. Rosen for their independent evaluations.”
But Ferguson was a co-founder with Rekers of a religious “think tank” and Rosen was Reker’s longstanding colleague at UCLA. Theirs simply could not be independent evaluations. However, there Was an independent evaluation made that Reker’s could not have been unaware of while Kirk was still living, and it came when Dr. Richard Greene interviewed Kirk at 17, and published his findings in The Sissy Boy Syndrome, in 1987.
That’s where we learn that at Kirk was still attracted to men, was deeply conflicted over those attractions, had engaged in an anonymous sexual encounter with a man, and tried to commit suicide because of it.
Yet for years after Kirk’s suicide Reker’s continued to claim his case as a success.
For the remainder of Rekers’s career, he would never acknowledge what was uncovered in the The Sissy Boy Syndrome interviews. As far as Rekers was concerned, those interviews never happened and “Kraig”, his pseudonym for Kirk, remained a success story.
In the Ex-Gay industrial complex once the patient is out the door they simply cease to exist. And there’s a reason for that. The client is not important. Their family is not important. That they are changed or their lives are improved in any way is not important. What’s important is the message that homosexuals not only can change but they want to. Their lives are lived in the squalor of drugs and disease and hundreds of brief, barren assignations. They aren’t gay, they’re miserable and they want out. And all we want to do is help them escape the prison of homosexuality. And that message is validated simply by getting homosexuals to walk in the door. Once they’re in they’ve played their part. What happens to them afterward is of no importance to the culture warriors running the show.
Reker’s did what every ex-gay leader and their right wing enablers do whenever they’re confronted with evidence, direct and brutal, that their therapies not only don’t work but actually harm the people they claim they are only trying to help. He ignored it. It was easy to ignore. Because the patient does not matter. Their families do not matter. What matters is the message: that homosexuals can change. Because within that message is another: that homosexuals are responsible for their own persecution, not the right wing culture warriors and christianists who wage multi-million dollar campaigns to enact anti gay laws, repeal gay rights ordinances and recall judges who dare to treat gay Americans as anything other then human garbage. No…if the homosexuals suffer it’s their own fault because they can choose not to be homosexual any time they want to. Ex-gay therapy is not about helping homosexuals, but helping bigots.
That is why the right dumps money into ex-gay outfits to keep them afloat year after year. Any business with a failure rate like this one would have folded decades ago. But the ex-gay industry keeps chugging along. Because its success isn’t measured in patients, but victories in statehouse legislatures, and at the ballot. That Kirk Murphy was still gay did not matter. Winning the culture war matters.
[Edited to fix some spelling and punctuation]
“Ex-gay therapy is not about helping homosexuals, but helping bigots.”
What a brilliant statement. It really captures the essence of these programs. I’m going to use it in my speech tonight in Asheville. :)
Thanks Wayne. Hopefully more and more people are seeing through all this now.
How true this is!
Great article, Bruce. This is a very important point. How many of these NARTH and American Association of Christian Counseling (AACC) frauds continued to tout the “success” of this poor boy being subjected to “treatment” after the book was published?
There’s something else about this “experiment” that I think bears repeating. The stated purpose of stifling effeminates traits in young boys was to prevent them from turning gay as adults, right? Well, if that was the case, the only way to prove such an experiment worked would be to track their development as adults. Yet they were calling the therapy successful in 1974, just fours after it began, and Kirk and the other boys were still children. In other words, not only did Rekers and company ignore the fact that therapy failed, they were calling it successful BEFORE IT WAS EVEN POSSIBLE to prove it. Which shows how little they really cared about the outcome.
I hope people were able to translate the numerous typos and errors in the above posted comment.
Bill that absolutely bears repeating. Rekers pronounced the boy cured shortly after he entered the program and then ignored him for the rest of his all too short life. Yes. Absolutely that says it all. This isn’t about preventing homosexuality. It is about preventing acceptance of homosexual people.
Eric Hoffer once said that propaganda doesn’t fool anyone, it allows people to fool themselves. The Ex-Gay industry exists just to give homophobic bigots a way to evade responsibility for the harm they do to innocent people, a way to blame the victim for the crime.
If any of these people were honestly concerned about the welfare of their gay neighbors, spiritual or otherwise, they’d have concluded long ago that ex-gay therapy is ineffective at best, and a hoax at worst. They’d have shut up about the innateness of sexual orientation by now because they’d have seen clearly how persistent and relentless it is despite the best attempts of people to pray or psychoanalyze away the gay. It doesn’t work. They’d have started asking themselves long ago, what can we do to improve the lives, materially and spiritually, of our homosexual neighbors. If they were honestly concerned about that.
But they don’t ask those questions. Instead it’s How Can We Explain Away Or Ignore The Evidence And Keep On Scapegoating Our Gay Neighbors For Social Problems That We’ve Largely Brought Upon Ourselves?