by Joel Derfner
So I don’t think the question of whether we’re born gay is all that compelling. To me, the more interesting question is: how effective are attempts to change sexual orientation?
In recent years, I discovered after exhaustive research involving Google and a pint of Häagen-Dazs chocolate peanut butter ice cream, there have been only two relevant studies, and though they were held up in the media as yielding conflicting results, as far as I can tell they fit together pretty well. Robert Spitzer, who spearheaded the successful effort in the 1970s to remove homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental illnesses, interviewed 200 people recommended to him by ex-gay ministries and concluded that “some highly motivated individuals” can change their orientation, but that such instances are “rare” and that “the vast majority of gay people would be unable to alter by much a firmly established homosexual orientation.” Ariel Shidlo and Michael Schroeder, after talking to 202 people who had undergone therapy to try to become straight, determined that 4 percent of them had successfully changed their sexual orientation but that 77 percent of them had suffered “significant harm” as a result of the therapy.
Of course both studies left room for doubt. Dr. Spitzer had talked only once with each subject, whereas Dr. Shidlo and Dr. Schroeder conducted follow-up interviews in which some subjects recanted their previous statements. But Shidlo and Schroeder’s study presented uncertainties too. Just as Spitzer recruited his subjects through Exodus and other ex-gay organizations, Shidlo and Schroeder recruited many of theirs from LGBT publications; in the early days of the study they had even asked specifically for people who felt they had been harmed by “homophobic therapies,” though they changed the wording of their advertisements before long. Furthermore, both studies assessed sexual orientation by interview rather than by physical testing. It’s easy to lie with words, to others and to yourself. When there’s an electronic monitor checking to see whether you get an erection while watching Mount Fuckmore, however, deception might become a little more difficult to maintain.
On top of all that, none of this research takes bisexuality into account. According to the sex researcher of all sex researchers, Alfred Kinsey, human sexual experience covers a spectrum—people who have never had any homosexual fantasies or encounters are a zero on the Kinsey scale, people who have been exclusively homosexual are a six, and people who have had various amounts of experience with both sexes fall somewhere in between the two.
(That’s one thing this conference did for me: I now believe in male bisexuals. Women’s sexuality seems to be capable of a great deal of fluidity, but I was always certain, like most gay men, that guys who claim to be bisexual are either deluded or lying. At the Exodus conference, however, I met a surprising number of people whom I really believed when they said they enjoyed both heterosexual and homosexual sex, and I began to reconsider my position. The men I spoke to may not have relished sex with women as much as they relished sex with men—which, according to Dr. Bailey, is consistent with data suggesting that psychological bisexual arousal is more common than physical bisexual arousal—but the next time somebody tells me he likes boys and girls I will not automatically assume he is on the bi-now-gay-later plan.)
My take on Spitzer, Shidlo, and Schroeder is that the 4 percent of highly motivated individuals who changed had probably fallen somewhere in the middle of the Kinsey scale and simply reinforced some attractions while ignoring others.
Or maybe they were fooling themselves.
Or maybe they were lying.
Or maybe they really had turned straight.
Who the fuck knows? I believe that fundamental change of this sort is impossible. But I also once believed that if you swallowed chewing gum it would get caught in the little hammers in your esophagus that pulverized food as it went down and the little hammers would get gunked up and stop working and you would be unable to digest food and you would starve to death. So I can imagine, at least theoretically, the rare case in which a person who honestly identifies as gay becomes a person who honestly identifies as straight.
What I cannot imagine is that this father-wound-rejection-by-male-peer-group-rising-again-I-bless-Your-nam crap is the way to go about it.
Further inquiry led me to Wikipedia—my God, to think that people used to have to go to the library—where I learned that Exodus’s transformational-ministry approach is a religious variation on something called “reparative therapy,” which was invented in the middle of the twentieth century by three psychiatrists (working independently) named Edmund Bergler, Irving Bieber, and Charles Socarides. They are no longer with us but their work has been continued by counselors such as Joseph Nicolosi (president of the National Association for the Research and Treatment of Homosexuality), Gerard van den Aardweg (author of The Battle for Normality), Richard Cohen (director of the International Healing Foundation), Jeffrey Satinover (author of Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth), and David Matheson (co-creator of the Journey Into Manhood experiential-weekend program). Their approaches differ from one another to a greater or lesser degree, but are generally all aimed at helping the little boy within free himself of neurotic homosexual attractions by becoming a man.
My problem with the work I was reading about wasn’t that I found its goals objectionable, though I did; my problem was that its authors were about as rigorous in their approaches as kindergarten music teachers. Most of the evidence supporting reparative therapy’s efficacy came in the form of anecdotal studies therapists had written about their own patients, studies that had never been independently verified. Taken as a whole, the reparative approach seemed to lack any consistent standard of care. There was no consensus on what constituted successful treatment (heterosexual desire? lack of homosexual desire? abstinence from homosexual sex regardless of desire? complete celibacy? attending a monster-truck show?). Nobody had satisfactorily addressed the increasingly prevalent idea that women’s sexual orientation behaves differently from men’s. The links reparative therapists made between cause and effect, both in the origins of homosexuality and in its treatment, were as far as I could tell only theories spun by men who talked a good game but who didn’t back themselves up with anything solid. (In a version of A Parents’ Guide to Preventing Homosexuality quoted on the Focus on the Family website, for example, Nicolosi wrote that a father who wishes to prevent his son from becoming gay “can play rough-and-tumble games with [him], in ways that are decidedly different from those he would play with a little girl…help his son learn to throw and catch a ball…teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard…[and] even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.”)
I don’t care how many books Nicolosi and friends publish about their own success in the treatment of same-sex attraction. When they do a truly meticulous study, with double blinds and controls and a random sampling and minimal theoretical and procedural weaknesses, vetted by other professionals in the field, that points to an explicit causal link between an absent father and a gay son, or between holding therapy and reduced same-sex erotic fantasizing—then I’ll start taking them seriously.
(After this book went into production, Stanton Jones and Mark Yarhouse published a third study, which, while it shares some of the fundamental flaws of the other two, appears in many ways to be more rigorous. The study is 406 pages long and contains approximately a googolplex tables and charts, and I am not a statistician; that said, I interpret it as suggesting a 5 percent success rate for conversion therapy. Watch somebody come up with an analysis of the study that proves me completely wrong and publish it the day after I’ve sent the proofs back to my editor.)
But if I have to choose between my gut feeling, which seems to be supported by what little data we have, and PowerPoint slides that say “When Someone Has Not Yet Been Able to Forgive Either Their Self, Or Others”—well, I know which side I’m coming down on.
If there had been
any doubt I had returned to the South, it would have been dispelled by the menu at the LifeWay Ridgecrest cafeteria. On offer for dinner the day of “The Process of Transformation,” for example, was chicken-fried steak, ham and hash-brown casserole, and fruit salad with maraschino cherries and mini-marshmallows, which by the way was irresistible despite being so not allowed on the South Beach Diet. To drink we had a choice, as at every meal, between fruit punch, which I avoided because it was blue, and chocolate milk. (When I left my agent and my editor clandestine messages later that night to let them know I was okay I went on and on about the fruit salad, but I was speaking as quietly as possible so as to avoid detection, and later they told me that all they had heard was incomprehensible whispering punctuated occasionally by the word “mini-marshmallows.”)
Hot Jon, sitting across from me at dinner, was drinking the fruit punch as he talked to me about his path to Exodus. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I was molested by a male scoutmaster and a female babysitter.” In high school, he continued, he had told his mother that he had feelings for other boys. She found him a counselor who claimed to be able to change these feelings; after working with him for a while, Jon felt he’d licked his problem. Unfortunately, a few months after he and Stacey got engaged, his massage therapist had started becoming suggestive during their weekly sessions. “Eventually he went for it,” Jon said, “and I was like, no! I told Stacey about it, and she understood.” They had gotten married and things were fine, except that Jon found himself looking more and more at gay porn. “Then I was at a medical conference,” he said, “and I acted out with another guy.” Wait, I thought, you did what with another guy? “It was awful. I told Stacey, and we decided to come to the Exodus conference.” What must it be like, I wondered, to have to tell your wife that other men excite you in ways she never has and never will? I can barely bring myself to tell my boyfriend I ate all the Corn Pops.
When his tale came to a resting place, Jon asked me to tell him more about myself; I repeated my cover story from the night before with a few more adjectives thrown in.
“But what do you feel dissatisfied with?” he said.
I realized with a lurch that my spiel, while sufficient for brief interactions, was useless here; I hadn’t counted on the fact that information is currency. Jon had told me a revealing story about himself, and in return I was obliged to tell him an equally revealing story about myself. To do otherwise would have been taking something without paying for it: not just impolite but hostile.
Yet I had prepared nothing beyond my painstakingly crafted three sentences, so I had no idea what to say. I inhaled, about to speak, and then I heard Rob’s voice behind me saying, “Guys, I have to tell you about the workshop I just went to.” He kept talking and I breathed a sigh of relief, because God only knows what would have come out of my mouth once my vocal cords had started vibrating.
Acted out. Struggler. Father wound. Broken. The lifestyle. Words became amorphous at the conference, taking on shades of euphemism they do not ordinarily enjoy in New York. The whole time I was in Asheville, I don’t think I heard one person utter the phrase “have sex with” instead, everybody said “acted out,” which, I realized eventually, could mean anything from “fucked” to “masturbated” to “stole my ex-boyfriend’s Carmen Miranda hat and then wore it to his Oscar party where I deliberately spilled Cabernet on his Louis Vuitton jacket.” “In the lifestyle” meant that somebody identified as gay. “Ministry” meant trying to convince gay people to become ex-gay.
Much of the Exodus vocabulary was infused with a sense of poetry. A person trying to overcome same-sex attractions was a “struggler.” Singing was “worship.” To be imperfect or traumatized was to be “broken.” Once words were separated thus from their meanings, it seemed to me, they could be used to mask otherwise unpalatable ideas. I would react violently against the idea of trying to become straight, but who wouldn’t leap at the chance not to be broken anymore?
“There is no such thing as a homosexual person,” I heard over and over again during the conference. “There is only a heterosexual person with a same-sex attraction problem.” Vito’s bit about chocolate vs. vanilla cake was clearly part of a great tradition of sugary-snacks metaphors. I think five different people explained to me that gay sex was like ice cream. “When you’re hungry,” said Jon, “you can decide to have a banana split, but other things are much better for you.” “You have to catch yourself before you’re on the verge of acting out,” said somebody else. “If the ice-cream cone is in your hand, there’s no way you’re not going to start licking it.” I found these arguments unpersuasive, because I believe it’s actually very important to eat sugary snacks; it reminds us of what we all have in common. There’s something about opening a pack of M&M’s, for example, that makes me feel connected to the world. Whether I eat them individually or by the handful, whether I separate all the green ones out or not, I am sharing a simple pleasure with every creature on earth possessed of taste buds.
Of course, the Exodus community is not the only one with its shibboleths. Show me a homosexual man who can’t complete the sentence “Life’s a banquet, and most poor suckers are ,” and I’ll show you a homosexual man who was raised by wolves. (The answer, in case you are a homosexual man who was raised by wolves, is “starving to death.” Now put this book down, go rent Auntie Mame, and don’t start reading again until you’ve watched it at least six times.)
After dinner with Jon I stopped at the LifeWay Christian Store. This was not my first visit to an evangelical bookseller; when I was in eighth grade, as an exercise in sociological observation, my family had spent a weekend at Heritage, USA, the theme park created by televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Everybody there said please and thank you all the time, the ceiling of the mall was painted sky blue so you felt like you were outside, and the Tammy Faye Bakkery (would that I were joking) sold really good cookies. When I found the music store I was very excited until they told me that not only didn’t they have Heart’s new album (Bad Animals) but they had never even heard of Heart. The bookstore, fortunately, yielded better results. True, they didn’t carry Magician’s Gambit (the sequel to Queen of Sorcery, which I had finished in the car on the way up, and I was going crazy not knowing what Eternal Belgarath and Prince Kheldar had been up to while Polgara the sorceress had been rescuing Garion from the palace of Salmissra the Serpent Queen), but they offered a number of other fascinating books, each one more outré than the last; I finally selected a slim volume called Satan’s Mark Exposed, about how bar codes are instruments of the devil, because the guys in one of the sketched illustrations were really cute.
The tables in the LifeWay Christian Store were piled high with soothing titles like He, Watching Over Israel and Worthy Is the Lamb, but farther toward the back I was thrilled to find Satan’s Mark Exposed. My copy had long since gone the way of all flesh, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to replace it. As I skimmed the familiar lines, however (“By way of electronics, Antichrist will be able to invade the privacy of your home as you have devotions! In the Tribulation Period Christians will suffer persecution and have nowhere to hide! The day will soon come when all hospitals will refuse admittance to a mother with a sick child because neither bears the Mark of Antichrist!”), I was distracted by the bubbling of three teenagers looking at bracelets.
“Totally get the FROG one,” said a dark-haired boy wearing a “What Would Jesus Do?” T-shirt.
“FROG?” said the blond boy beside him.
“Um, Fully Rely On God,” said the girl.
“I want this one,” said the blond.
“Um, the rainbow one?”
“Don’t get that one.” Scorn filled the dark-haired boy’s voice. “People will totally think you’re gay.”
I wanted to yell at them for being uncharitable at a Christian conference center. I also wanted to hide so they didn’t see me. Not that I really thought they would beat me up among shelves of inspirational literature, but still
I was afraid; of exactly what, I couldn’t say. I stepped behind a display rack and, ashamed of my cowardice, turned my Exodus conference name tag around so it didn’t face out. I bought a notebook (I’d filled up the old one) with characters from something called Veggie Tales on the cover—I was at a loss to say what a cucumber, an asparagus, and two unidentifiable vegetables, all dressed as gangstas, had to do with Jesus—and left, making sure to take the path that kept me farthest away from the teenagers. The ex-gays may be delusional, I thought as I made my way back to my room, but they’re better Christians than a lot of people we call sane.
Before leaving New York I had decided to bring along episodes of television shows on DVD, in case of sleeplessness or suicidal ideation. I had searched Kim’s Video for Oz, HBO’s violence- and gay-sex-filled prison drama, but somebody had checked out the seasons with Chris Meloni (naked Chris Meloni, to be precise), so I picked up the 1980s version of The Twilight Zone instead.
Back in my room after my visit to the LifeWay Christian Store, in an effort to regain the equilibrium that had vanished with the real-world homophobia I had just witnessed, I put the first Twilight Zone DVD in my computer. I was hoping for the feel-good episode in which a present-day teenager saves an eighteenth-century girl from execution as a witch, but instead the first episode, entitled “Shatterday,” began with Bruce Willis (oh, my God, he has hair!) as an asshole in a bar who picks up the phone (oh, my God, it’s a rotary dial!) and accidentally calls his own home, where the phone is answered by Bruce Willis. The two Bruce Willises spend the rest of the week dueling over one life; in the end the kinder, more responsible one triumphs, and the selfish and inconsiderate Bruce fades into nothingness. I hated the new Bruce for being perfect when the old Bruce was defective like me.