Today, Dr. Robert Spitzer repudiated his much-criticized 2001 study that claimed some “highly motivated” homosexuals could go from gay to straight.
Now it is up to anti-gay and so-called “ex-gay” organizations to show some dignity and class by expeditiously removing all citations of Dr. Robert Spitzer’s study from their web pages. This is nothing short of a major integrity test to show which groups are honest and decent enough to do the right thing.
PFOX should be the first to act. This group has relentlessly and shamelessly flogged Spitzer’s study, even when he first began to inch away from the findings and upbraid right wing groups for distorting and exaggerating his findings. Here is a video TWO shot of Spitzer in 2007 urging such groups to stop twisting his work.
Here are a few more examples of how Spitzer’s work is being used to harm LGBT people. We hope these groups will act quickly. The world is watching:
Stanton L. Jones and mark A. Yarhouse (Pg. 89)
“Ex-Gays? A Longitudinal Study of Religiously Mediated Change in Sexual Orientation”
“Perhaps the highly publicized recent study in which participants reported successful change of sexual orientation was authored by research psychiatrist Robert L. Spitzer. Spitzer could be construed to be the most qualified person in the world to conduct this sort of research; in addition to a distinguished research career, he was the lead scientist responsible for revision of the DSM of the APA.”
My time undergoing reaparative therapy with a group called Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality (JONAH) was recently brought to public attention. The one experience that has stood out and has raised eyebrows across the world was my last session with a JONAH “life coach” (a self described ex gay) who manipulated me into removing my clothing and touching myself in a locked room as he looked on. While that experience is something I have to live with every day of my life, I wish I could say that was the only unconventional “technique” that I was exposed to while attempting to change my sexuality. I’ve decided that it’s time to start talking about some of the other experiences that I endured while attending weekends and group meetings with JONAH and another group called People Can Change.
At the age of eighteen I was directed to JONAH by a local rabbi in my community. I was told that JONAH was supposed to be the answer to my prayers and they were supposedly going to “cure” me of my homosexuality.
Upon meeting with Arthur Goldberg, the director of JONAH, I immediately felt reassured by the false hope Goldberg gave me when he said that anyone could change and become straight so long as they tried hard enough. I wasn’t the only person who was victimized by the false hope peddled by these groups. Many of my friends who went to JONAH ended up leaving after not changing their sexual orientation.
However, after speaking to Goldberg I was ready to do anything these people asked of me in order to become straight. I never thought that accepting myself as a gay person was an option, especially because of the strong Orthodox religious community that I was raised in. As far as I knew, there were no other gay people where I came from and hearing that false message from Goldberg only reinforced my ill informed belief that I can change my sexuality and become straight.
Over the next year and a half I endured many different “processes” conducted by JONAH and People Can Change, processes that they claimed would ultimately serve to change my sexuality. Today, four years later, I’m a proud gay man and wouldn’t have it any other way. But I’d like to tell you about some of the “exercises” conducted by the people who claimed to be “experts” in this field — exercises that left me scarred and traumatized until this very day.
The first thing Goldberg told me that I must do was register for an upcoming “Journey into Manhood” (JIM) weekend hosted by People Can Change. He was very insistent that this was the first very big step that I must take in order to get the ball rolling. Four weeks later, on June 1, 2007, I found myself on my way to a retreat center in rural Pennsylvania, feeling anxious and unsure about what to expect from the next 48 hours.
ABC Nightline aired a segment on Journey Into Manhood and interviewed myself as well as another person who had negative experiences while on this weekend. Unfortunately, the producers at ABC gave us merely 10 seconds of a 21-minute segment, which basically turned into a promotional piece for People Can Change and their “Journey Into Manhood” weekend. During my interview with ABC I spoke about some of the dreadful memories that come to mind when I think back to those weekends. I spoke about what it was like to participate in what the facilitators of the weekend called “guts work,” which is something I’d like to elaborate on.
“Guts work,” otherwise known as psychodrama, was one of the main parts of the JIM weekend. We were split up into groups of ten with the point being to recreate a traumatic memory. This was accomplished by choosing people in our group to serve as surrogates for those deemed responsible for causing those traumas. An example of this would be if someone had an abusive father or mother, they were instructed to pick someone to represent that energy and reenact the distressing situation from long ago with the intention of getting in touch with our “authentic” emotions which they claimed would lead us to healing or reduction of our SSA (same sex attraction, gayness).
So to clarify, the small breakout group spent about ten hours, with each of us given an hour to recreate some of the most traumatic incidents of our life in the hopes of bringing out anger, sadness, or other emotions that came with those memories.
For me, those ten hours were pure hell.
I witnessed people go back to some of the most painful memories of their lives, being sexually abused, being beaten by a parent or classmates, and I watched in fear and horror as every single man “lost it” and started yelling on the top of their lungs and then were encouraged to hit something that represented that anger. So you have someone who’s angry with his father or mother, and he’d be screaming at the top of his lungs while hitting a pillow with a bat or tennis racket and yelling the name of their mother, father or other bully that brought on this anger. As someone who grew up in a household with a lot of yelling, this explosive rage and emotion frightened me.
Despite the facilitator’s reassurance that we were safe, the boiling rage and horrifying screams of people reliving the most traumatic situations in their lives made me feel unsafe, vulnerable and exposed. Though I try to erase these images and memories, they are forever seared in my mind.
When it was my turn to reenact my own traumatic event I was reluctant to participate. But I desperately wanted to become heterosexual and they told me that I needed to step out of my comfort zone in order to complete the “work” that was required to “change.”
I recreated a situation in my childhood that until this day is something I don’t speak about publicly, something too traumatic for me to describe in this essay. I recreated part of the situation and watched it “play out” by the people I picked to represent those energies. I was very detached from the “guts work” and I pretended to get angry and riled up so that I would be able to complete my work as quickly as possible. The event that I reenacted relates to extensive childhood sexual abuse that I endured for a very long time, and watching it play out once again in front of my eyes was so difficult and disturbing, I just wanted it to be over as soon as possible.
After yelling really loud, cursing at the top of my lungs, and even hitting something, as I recall, they asked me to pick someone to represent my parents because according to the facilitators it was my parents’ job to protect me from the abuse I faced, and this tragedy of my childhood was their fault. I was encouraged to yell at my father (someone representing his energy) and blame him for not protecting me.
I have many issues with my family and my parents, but this event that I was reliving was not their fault. One of the saddest parts of reparative therapy is the way it destroys relationships, because clients are falsely led to believe their parents caused their homosexuality. This unscientific and unfounded belief can often lead to enormous resentment, which ends with clients alienating themselves from their families.
One of the many issues I had with this “process” was that licensed medical or mental health professionals weren’t monitoring it. As People Can Change themselves acknowledge, they aren’t a “professional therapy organization,” and so I found myself reliving possibly one of the most traumatic events of my life in the presence of amateurs, which left me feeling unprotected in this explosive environment.
These stories are still only hitting the tip of the iceberg of what reparative therapy was like for me, as time goes by, as I heal from these experiences, I’m becoming more able to write about them and share the experiences that myself and many others endured while attempting to change our sexuality.
The American Psychological Association’s newly released report on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation evaluated peer-reviewed studies of sexual orientation change efforts that were conducted between 1960 and 2007. The report criticized these studies’ measurements of efficacy and safety as methodologically unsound.
Among the studies found to be unreliable was a 2007 study by evangelicals Mark Yarhouse and Stanton Jones. Their work was funded by Exodus and it utilized activist research subjects who were recruited with help from Exodus and the ex-gay therapy lobby NARTH. Critics said the study suffered from the following shortcomings:
The study was conducted by two supporters of ex-gay ministries.
Jones and Yarhouse originally sought 300 participants, but after more than a year of seeking to round up volunteers, they had to settle on only 98 participants.
During the course of the study, 25 dropped out, and one participant’s answers were too incomplete to be used.
Of the remaining 72 only 11 reported “satisfactory, if not uncomplicated, heterosexual adjustment.” (direct quote). Some of these 11 remained primarily homosexual in attraction or, at best, bisexual, but were satisfied that they were just slightly more attracted to the opposite sex, or slightly less attracted to the same sex.
After the study ended, but before the book was finished, one of the 11 wrote to the authors to say that he lied — he really wanted to change, had really hoped he had changed, and answered that he had changed. But he concluded that he hadn’t, came out, and is now living as an openly gay man.
Dozens of participants experienced no lessening of same-sex attraction and no increase in opposite-sex attraction, but were classified as “success” stories by Jones and Yarhouse simply because they maintained celibacy — something many conservative gay people already do.
The study purposely declined to interview any ex-gay survivors: people who claim to have been injured by ex-gay programs and who have formed support groups such as Beyond Ex-Gay. Despite — or because of — this omission, the authors of this study make the unfounded claim that there is little or no evidence of harm resulting from unproven, unsupervised, unlicensed, and amateur ex-gay counseling tactics.
In short, the study design was so flawed that no mainstream, peer-reviewed, mental-health journal would publish it. And the study’s supposed success stories were gay celibate individuals who adopted false labels to direct attention away from frequently undiminished same-sex attraction.
While it acknowledged their sincere observations about clients’ conservative religious values, this week’s APA report criticized Jones & Yarhouse on page 90:
A published study that appeared in the grey literature in 2007 (Jones & Yarhouse, 2007) has been described by SOCE advocates and its authors as having successfully addressed many of the methodological problems that affect other recent studies, specifically the lack of prospective research. The study is a convenience sample of self-referred populations from religious self-help groups. The authors claim to have found a positive effect for some study respondents in different goals such as decreasing same-sex sexual attractions, increasing other-sex attractions, and maintaining celibacy. However, upon close examination, the methodological problems described in Chapter 3 (our critique of recent studies) are characteristic of this work, most notably the absence of a control or comparison group and the threats to internal, external, construct, and statistical validity. Best-practice analytical techniques were not performed in the study, and there are significant deficiencies in the analysis of longitudinal data, use of statistical measures, and choice of assessment measures. The authors’ claim of finding change in sexual orientation is unpersuasive due to their study’ methodological problems.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Yarhouse, of Pat Robertson’s Regent University, praised the APA report for urging a “creative approach to gay clients’ religious beliefs but ‚Äî like [Exodus president Alan] Chambers ‚Äî disagreed with its skepticism about changing sexual orientation.” The Times continued:
Yarhouse and a colleague, Professor Stanton Jones of Wheaton College, will be releasing findings at the APA meeting Friday from their six-year study of people who went through Exodus programs. More than half of 61 subjects either converted to heterosexuality or “disidentified” with homosexuality while embracing chastity, their study said.
To Jones and Yarhouse, their findings prove change is possible for some people, and on average the attempt to change will not be harmful.
Given that the APA has already criticized their research methods, it will be interesting to see whether re-release of flawed data — with some updates and changes — successfully shifts media coverage of the APA report.
Debbie Thurman, of Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church, has founded an ex-gay web site: theFormers.com.
What, one might wonder, qualifies Thurman to mislead people into joining ex-gay political groups?
Almost nothing, apparently — she has no professional training in counseling or mental health. Her autobiographical sketch cites a college degree in English and a stint as public affairs officer in the Marine Corps. Despite her lack of competence, Thurman has spent years profiting from shell “ministries” that inflict her ignorance upon Christians who suffer from clinical depression.
Thurman’s site is well-designed, but it offers little if any original content. TheFormers.com seems to be merely another in a family of religious-right linkfests for Exodus International, Focus on the Family, NARTH, and PFOX — a pricey method of inflating the Google PageRank of these organizations. (Read More)
Focus on the Family denies the existence of former ex-gays ‚Äî a growing movement of hundreds of people who have discovered through personal experience that ex-gay activists’ claims are not only false, but toxic to families and communities.
Former ex-gays gathered this weekend in Memphis, Tenn., at the same time as Focus’ ex-gay roadshow, Love Won Out, which appeals to antigay pastors and parents of gay persons with sales pitches for ex-gay propaganda and political appeals to deny equality to gay couples.
According to Peterson Toscano, a survivor of Exodus International’s flagship live-in program Love In Action: “They [Focus on the Family] basically tell parents of lesbian and gay kids that it’s bad to be gay, and they give testimonies about how awful people’s lives were while they were gay. They say they can change and save you.”
In promoting its roadshow, Focus on the Family on Feb. 20 described former ex-gays (who were to come from as far away as California and Connecticut) as “local activists” who advocate “a revisionist view of the Bible.” Focus concealed the central fact that the “activists” included former ex-gays.
Love In Action has similarly shielded its participants from survivors and allies who have held vigils nearby. Jacob Wilson, now 22, was an ex-gay participant in LIA in 2005. According to the Memphis Commercial-Appeal:
After Wilson left LIA, he found out what the protesters had wanted him to know.
“These people weren’t doing it to be activists, they were doing it to show that we weren’t alone, that we were loved … It crushes me that that message was cut from us.”
What, one might wonder, qualifies Thurman to mislead people into joining ex-gay political groups?
