A Cure For What Fails Ya: The Legacy of Sexual Orientation Change Therapies

Last updated on: April 5, 2017 at 7:20 pm by Melinda Selmys

A Cure For What Fails Ya: The Legacy of Sexual Orientation Change Therapies 2017-04-05T19:20:07-04:00 Melinda Selmys

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Even before Chambers’ bayoneted the credibility of sexual-orientation change attempts, the supposed rate of change was far from clear. Shortly before Chambers’ announcement I was trying to track down ex-gay success stories so that I could independently assess the claims that I was seeing tossed around in both Christian and secular media. I contacted NARTH, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, twice: the first time I introduced myself as a woman with SSA in a mixed-orientation marriage and I asked how likely I was to experience orientation change if I went into therapy. The second time, I introduced myself as a Catholic journalist.

Although I wasn’t given specific data in either case, the answers that NARTH provided were substantially different depending on whether I was a potential client, or a reporter who was likely to be fact-checking claims. During the first call, I was cautioned that there were no guarantees, but was offered the line which will be familiar to those who have read a lot of reparative therapy propaganda: one third experience orientation change, one third experience some change, one third experience no change at all.
During the second call, David Pruden (NARTH’s executive director at the time) declined to offer specific numbers and emphasized that the primary goal of therapy was to overcome unwanted behaviours or deal with anxieties about homosexuality – adding that if a client came to affirm their homosexuality, that would be a successful outcome for treatment (a position that he also stated in his interview with NPR.)

Nicolosi was generally known to use the “one-third, one-third, one-third” formula, though in some talks he claimed rates of change as high as 75%.

Jones and Yarhouse’s 2007 study of sexual-orientation change efforts through Exodus offers more rigourous data – and more modest results. They found that 15% of their subjects experienced a significant shift in their sexual orientation, and that 23% successfully achieved chastity without orientation change. If you read the entire study (which nobody does because it’s like 400 pages long), you’ll notice that most of the change experienced was not categorical: people generally didn’t go from gay to straight, but rather from exclusively or predominately gay to more bisexual. The authors also note that all of the instruments used to measure sexual orientation involve self-reported data, and that it’s therefore not clear whether the change was primarily in a person’s self-perception of their attractions, or primarily in the attractions themselves.

To complicate matters, several participants in the study came forward afterwards and said that they had felt pressured by their Exodus groups to claim higher rates of change than they actually experienced. Others stated that they felt like they had achieved change at the time, but that it was not lasting: after leaving Exodus, their homosexuality reasserted itself. Finally, according to Yarhouse he and Jones don’t even agree about what their data shows.

As I was looking into the statistical data concerning orientation change, I was also looking for anecdotal reports. I sent requests to both NARTH and the Catholic Medical Association (another group that promotes orientation-change therapies) asking if they would be able to put me in contact with some people who had successfully achieved heterosexuality through treatment so that I could compare notes with them. I was surprised when I was given the same line that they were giving to secular reporters: their clients didn’t want to talk to hostile journalists.

The thing was, at the time I wasn’t hostile at all: I was writing exclusively for Catholic publications, I didn’t identify as LGBTQ, and I was on the speaker’s circuit myself as a former lesbian. The people I was contacting knew this: one of them had even been on EWTN with me, playing the role of doctor while I played the role of happily married ex-gay. In context, the excuse just didn’t make sense.

So I wrote to Fr. Paul Check, who was then the Executive Director of Courage, and asked if he knew of anyone. He said that there was one guy he knew of in New York who had successfully entered a heterosexual marriage after about twenty years of therapy with Nicolosi. That was the only case he knew of.
I was somewhat floored. I had heard the claims “There are more ex-gays than gays!” repeated in Catholic publications dozens of times. I knew that they were BS, and I also knew how the BS was generated (you simply pretend that opportunistic homosexuality and sexual experimentation aren’t a thing, and therefore any straight person who ever engaged in same-sex activity, even once, in childhood, in high-school, in prison, in college, in the navy, etc. is “ex-gay.”) What I didn’t realize was just how completely non-existent the “success stories” were.

The most surprising aspect of it was that I could name several people who were in successful, long-term mixed-orientation marriages (marriages where one partner is queer and the other is straight), including myself. One of the guys that I know does credit therapy for helping him and his wife get together, but his therapist specifically cautioned him that they were not seeking orientation change, and the therapy didn’t help by making him straight – it helped by reducing anxieties that he had about forming close relationships with women. Most of us, however, just ended up getting married because we formed close friendships that eventually transitioned into romantic relationships. We didn’t go to therapy, have our childhood wounds addressed, or come out straight; we fell in love and decided that our relationships were sufficiently important that we could overcome our natural sexual inclinations in order to pursue them.
The fact that LGBTQ people working this out in their own relationships seemed to be achieving a higher verifiable “success” rate than folks in therapy seemed, to me, to be a pretty severe indictment of the available therapeutic approaches.

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