Can Gays Go Straight and Change Their Sexual Orientation? A controversial US study suggests that gay people can become heterosexual if they really want to.

A Vatican Retreat on Homosexuality. Part VII
It turns out that the more you believe homosexuality is innate, the more accepting you are of gay rights.

Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI Part VII

By Ellen Goodman
Saturday, December 3, 2005; A23

BOSTON -- Somewhere along the way the dividing line over gay issues picked up and moved. It's no longer between red and blue states, or left and right wings, but between nature and nurture. Or, to be more precise, between those who believe that homosexuality is a choice and those who believe that homosexuality is innate.

Remember the moment in the 2004 debate when CBS's Bob Schieffer asked George W. Bush and John Kerry whether they thought homosexuality was a choice? The president answered, "I don't know," and the senator replied, "We're all God's children."

Well, it turns out that the more you believe homosexuality is innate, the more accepting you are of gay rights. A full 79 percent of people who think human beings are born with a sexual orientation support gay rights, including civil unions or marriage equality. But only 22 percent of those who believe homosexuality is a choice agree.

The same line can be found in the religious world between those who regard homosexuality as a (bad) choice and those who see it as (biological) trait. The most conservative Protestant churches that talk about the homosexual "lifestyle" prohibit gay men and lesbians from being ministers. Religious liberals who see sexual orientation as an inborn trait are more open to gays in the pulpit.

All in all, Americans seem reluctant to condemn people simply for who they are .

What, then, do we make of the Catholic Church's banning -- and perhaps purging -- of gay priests? On Tuesday the much-leaked and much-awaited document from the Vatican said the church "cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called 'gay culture.' "

What was painful to many Catholics was the obvious scapegoating of gays for the church sexual abuse scandal. But there was something less obvious.

Thirty years ago the Catholic Church accepted the view that some were definitively gay. Church teachings said that "they do not choose their homosexual condition." Nevertheless, the new document doesn't just ban gays who "practice" homosexuality, breaking the vows of celibacy. It bans all those with homosexual "tendencies."

In the strange new backsliding language of the Vatican, homosexuality is a "tendency." The church doesn't define tendency, nor does it say whether such a tendency is biological. Voluntary or not, it marks a man permanently. As Matt Foreman, a gay activist who was raised Catholic, says, "Doesn't matter what you do or believe or practice. If you are gay there is no making that better in the eyes of the church."

Ironically, the only exemptions are offered to men who were not "real" homosexuals but "transitory" ones. They're given a pass, in the words of a Vatican cardinal, for "some curiosity during adolescence or accidental circumstances in a state of drunkenness or particular circumstances like someone who was in prison for many years." A drunk or ex-con is okay; a chaste gay seminarian is not.

The same cardinal said that banning gays from the priesthood was no more discriminatory than "if one does not admit a person who suffers from vertigo to a school for astronauts." Such a dizzying analogy overlooks the fact that gay men are already among the stars of the priesthood.

The document does more than denigrate the priests who have given their lives to ministry. In the face of a conflict between biology and sin, the church has labeled homosexuality as "intrinsically disordered."

Let's remember that the evidence is with those on the nature side of the dividing line. While we don't know the precise biology, the weight of research suggests that sexual orientation is indeed something we are born with. Perhaps there is a "gay gene." Perhaps the Japanese scientists who found how a gene alters the sexual orientation of the fruit fly will find a similar switch for people.

Science may well offer some future shocks. Imagine, for a moment, that we could tweak the "gay gene" in a petri dish or a womb. What would the religious right, which opposes both homosexuality and embryonic cell research, say about eliminating the "sin"? What would the left, which favors reproductive choice but is appalled at the idea of "curing" a population of homosexuals, say?

For now, however, the church has run directly into a conflict. Increasingly, Americans accept homosexuality as something that isn't chosen and cannot easily be changed. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church has moved in the opposite direction, rejecting men with "deep-seated tendencies."

Once, even the most conservative and patronizing churches proclaimed they could love the sinner and hate the sin. The new pope's Vatican has labeled homosexuals themselves as the sin. The case is closed and so are the doors to the seminary.

Thursday May 10, 2001 08:10 PM EDT

Can Gays Go Straight and Change
Their Sexual Orientation? Part V.
A controversial US study suggests that gay people can become heterosexual if they really want to.

Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI

By Maggie Gallagher

Dr. Robert L. Spitzer is a brave man.

He was a brave man back in 1973 when, as a member of the American Psychiatric Association's Task Force on Nomenclature, he met with gay activists. As a result of his intervention, the APA, while rejecting the argument that homosexuality is "a normal variant of human sexuality," agreed it "does not necessarily constitute a disorder."

He was an even braver man this week when he reported the results of a new study of 200 "ex-gays": "(S)ome people can change from gay to straight, and we ought to acknowledge that," as he told the Associated Press.

Sixty-six percent of the men and 44 percent of the women studied achieved what he terms "good heterosexual functioning," a sustained loving and sexually satisfying relationship with a partner of the opposite sex, as well as never or rarely fantasizing about somebody of the same sex. Dr. Spitzer's sample was not random. He cannot tell us what proportion of motivated homosexuals could achieve normal sexual relationships with members of the opposite sex.

Research into effective voluntary therapies for same-sex attraction disorder receives very little funding and a surprising amount of professional intimidation. Even so, these results are remarkable.

Certainly gay activists think so. "I'm appalled, absolutely appalled -- it's not scientific," psychologist Barbara Warren of Manhattan's Lesbian and Gay Service Center told the New York Post. Then she shifted into totalitarian high gear: "I cannot believe Columbia would allow any of its professors to do anything like this."

Gay activists have staked their political claims to normalization of unisex marriage and relationships on the race analogy: Sexual orientation is not a "lifestyle choice"; it is a fixed, unchangeable, probably biological characteristic. To anyone with even a cursory knowledge of sexual orientation research, this position is no longer scientifically tenable. Research on identical twins, for example, reveals varying rates of "concordance," but usually well under 50 percent. Though there may be some biological influences, scratch the idea of a gay gene.

Another 1997 longitudinal study of bisexual men found that over a one-year period, 17 percent of the men had moved toward a heterosexual self-identity (compared to 34 percent who had moved toward a homosexual self-identification). As lead author Joseph Stokes put it: "We also acknowledge that changes in sexual feelings and orientation over time occur in all possible directions."

Leading researcher on lesbian parenting Charlotte Patterson pointed out in the November 2000 Journal of Marriage and the Family: "... mounting evidence suggests that, particularly for women, sexual identities may shift over time." A 1997 poll of readers of The Advocate (a major gay publication) found that 54 percent maintained either that "Sexual orientation can change" or that "We are all bisexuals." And in the April issue of American Sociological Review, Judith Stacey and Timothy Biblarz acknowledge that "Some lesbians relinquish lesbian identities to marry; some relinquish marriage for a lesbian identity. ... Sexual desires, acts, meanings and identities are not expressed in fixed or predictable packages." Exactly.

I believe there is rather powerful evidence that human beings are a two-sex species, designed for sexual rather than asexual reproduction. If this is true, then the absence of desire for the opposite sex represents, at a minimum, a sexual dysfunction much as impotence or infertility. Human beings seeking help in overcoming sexual dysfunctions deserve our respect and support (and may I mention, President Bush (news - web sites), more research dollars?).

On the moral plane, I believe that no human being can be reduced to his or her sexual impulses. Desire in itself cannot license us to act, nor can our impulses compel our behavior or identities without our consent. I cannot be defined by that for which I lust, unless I choose to be. In this sense (and this sense alone), a homosexual or heterosexual identity is a choice, for which (like all our choices) we must accept responsibility.

Advocates for treating same-sex relations as a normal, equally desirable, human variant must begin making real moral, and not bogus scientific, arguments.

Source: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ucmg/20010510/cm/fixing_sexual_orientation_1.html

Readers may reach Maggie Gallagher at GallagherIAV@Yahoo.com.

Wednesday, 9 May, 2001, 11:01 GMT 12:01 UK

Can Gays Go Straight and Change
Their Sexual Orientation? Part IV.

A controversial US study suggests that gay people can become heterosexual if they really want to.

The finding flies in the face of the established scientific opinion that sexual orientation is fixed.

Critics say many of the people who took part in the study may have been pressured to believe that being gay was wrong.

It has also been vehemently attacked by gay rights activists.

Dr Robert Spitzer, a psychiatry professor at Columbia University, New York, is due to present the findings of his research at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in New Orleans on Wednesday.

He said he cannot estimate what percentage of highly motivated gay people can change their sexual orientation.

But he said the research "shows some people can change from gay to straight, and we ought to acknowledge that."

Dr Spitzer conducted 45-minute telephone interviews with 200 people, 143 of them men, who claimed they had changed their sexual orientation from gay to heterosexual.

They answered about 60 questions about their sexual feeling and behaviour before and after their efforts to change.

Most said they had used more than one strategy to help them change.

About half said the most helpful method was to work with a mental health professional, mostly commonly a psychologist. Others used books, or mentoring by a heterosexual.

Dr Spitzer concluded that 66% of the men and 44% of the women had arrived at what he describes as "good heterosexual functioning".

He defined this term to mean being in a sustained, loving and sexually active heterosexual relationship within the past year.

No convincing evidence

Psychologist Dr Douglas Haldeman, of the University of Washington, said the study offered no convincing evidence that people's sexual orientation had been changed.

He also said the participants appeared unusually skewed toward religious conservatives and people treated by therapists "with a strong anti-gay bias."

Dr Haldeman said such participants might think that being a homosexual is bad and feel pressured to claim they were no longer gay.

He added that some 43% of the sample had been referred to Spitzer by "ex-gay ministries" that offer programmes to gay people who seek to change.

An additional 23% were referred by the National Association for Research and Therapy of homosexuality, which says most of its members consider homosexuality a developmental disorder.

David Elliot, a spokesman for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in Washington, said: "The sample is terrible, totally tainted, totally unrepresentative of the gay and lesbian community."

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/newsid_1320000/1320743.stm

Can Gays Go Straight and Change Their Sexual Orientation? Part III. Studies Conflict on Whether Homosexuals Can Change

By Michael Depp

NEW ORLEANS, La. (Reuter) - A study released on Wednesday concluded that many homosexuals can change their sexual orientation through counseling, but another said most attempts to counsel change fail and some are harmful.

The research, unveiled at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, quickly became part of a long-running debate over whether homosexuality is a matter of choice.

Columbia University psychiatrist Robert Spitzer said he interviewed 143 men and 57 women who underwent so-called ''reparative'' counseling and found that 66 percent of the men and 44 percent of the women reported ``good heterosexual functioning.''

``Like most psychiatrists I thought that homosexual behavior could only be resisted and that no one could really change their sexual orientation,'' Spitzer said. ``I now believe that to be false. Some people can and do change.''

Homosexuals had to be ``highly motivated'' for the counseling, which can be psychological or religious, to achieve the goal of changing their sexual orientation, he said.

The APA put out a statement distancing itself from Spitzer's findings, saying there was no ``publishable scientific evidence'' showing that therapy could change a person's sexual orientation.

In the second study, New York City psychologists Ariel Shidlo and Michael Schroeder said just six of 202 gay men and lesbians they interviewed reported changing their orientation to heterosexual after counseling.

Of the rest, 178 said they had not changed and 18 reported becoming asexual or sexually confused. Schroeder called for long-term research to determine the efficacy of counseling, which he said can leave patients depressed and suicidal if it does not change them.

``For those who fail, there is an enormous sense of internalized shame about it,'' Schroeder said.

Gay groups attacked the Spitzer study as tainted, pointing out that most of the patients were referred to him by groups which encourage homosexuals to become heterosexual.

Tim McFeeley, political director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (news - web sites) in Washington, called Spitzer's study ``snake oil packaged as science'' and accused him of being in bed with the religious right, which crusades against homosexuality.

``The general public and virtually every legitimate medical group has come to know that sexual orientation is not a disease that can be cured by reparative therapy or by religious extremism,'' he said.

But supporters said Spitzer's study raised important questions. ``We have always heard that homosexuality is innate and immutable. This suggests that it is neither,'' said Dean Byrd, vice president of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, or NARTH.

The study was particularly significant, he said, because Spitzer led a 1973 task force to remove homosexuality from the APA's official list of mental disorders, in effect saying it did not require treatment.

He downplayed the findings of Shidlo and Schroeder, saying: ''You can get whatever you go after.''

McFeeley said NARTH, based in Encino, California, was anti-gay, but Byrd said it was an organization of scientists who believe homosexuality may be a matter of choice.

Source: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010509/sc/life_gays_dc.html

Thursday May 10, 2001 6:01 PM ET

Can Gays Go Straight and Change Their Sexual Orientation? Part II. APA Responds to ``Gay-To-Straight'' Study

By Paula Moyer

NEW YORK (Reuter Health) - The American Psychiatric Association (APA) said on Thursday that the organization ''maintains there is no published scientific evidence supporting the efficacy of reparative therapy as a treatment to change one's sexual orientation.''

A study presented on Wednesday at the APA's annual meeting in New Orleans suggested that some homosexuals could adopt a heterosexual lifestyle using ``sexual reorientation therapy,'' a controversial process in which a person who is homosexual attempts to change their sexual orientation.

The therapy consists of counseling and other techniques, and organizations that encourage its use tend to be socially and religiously conservative and disapprove of homosexuality. The APA says that the psychological risks of such therapy are ''great,'' because having a therapist who is aligned with societal prejudices against homosexuality ``may reinforce self-hatred already experienced by the patient.''

However, the study was not designed to fit any political or social agenda, according to the New York researcher who presented the findings.

``I'm really concerned about the way the study's been presented, as if any highly motivated homosexual can change,'' Dr. Robert L. Spitzer told Reuter Health. ``That was not what we were saying.'' Spitzer is a professor of psychiatry in the biometrics department at Columbia University.

In the study, Spitzer and colleagues conducted telephone interviews with 143 men and 57 women who tried sexual reorientation therapy. According to the interviews, 66% of the men and 44% of the women said they had changed from a homosexual to heterosexual orientation.

Change in orientation was measured by several indicators beyond sexual activity, Spitzer said, including thoughts while masturbating and daydreaming, as well as a yearning for romantic involvement with someone of the same sex. Although many of the study participants were interviewed at home, most of the married participants' spouses knew about the subjects' previous lifestyle, he said.

However, the study has been criticized because it included many people from ``ex-gay ministries,'' which are religious groups that condemn homosexuality.

An APA spokesperson told Reuter Health that reconsideration of sexual reorientation therapy is not condoned by the APA or by most associations of mental health professionals.

``The APA dismissed homosexuality as a diagnosis in September of 1973, after detailed scientific consideration.... Since then, it has been very clear to the great majority of psychiatrists that the change was correct,'' Dr. Lawrence Hartmann, told Reuter Health.

``In 1998 and 2000, the APA condemned so-called 'reparative therapy' and said it was unethical for psychiatrists to participate in it.'' Hartmann is a past president of the APA and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (news - web sites).

``There is no scientific evidence in any peer-reviewed journal that supports changing people's sexual orientation,'' said Dr. Marshall Forstein, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Forstein was the introductory speaker of a session exploring the ethical issues involved in sexual orientation therapy.

``In order for conversion therapy to be practiced ethically, several conditions would have to be met,'' Forstein told Reuter Health.

``The client would have to give informed consent. The therapist to disclose that this type of therapy is not condoned by the major mental health organizations, and that the therapy could be harmful and entail risks. The therapist would also be required to offer to refer the client to a therapist with a different perspective, should the client choose,'' Forstein added.

He said that ``while therapists can be ethical and listen to a client talk about wanting to change sexual orientation, this practice is different from the therapist having an agenda and telling the client that a change would be morally and socially preferable.''

At the APA annual meeting last year, a debate on sexual reorientation was canceled by the participants, but not by the APA, Spitzer told Reuter Health. Despite the APA's official stance, the organization did not discourage him from presenting his findings this year, he said.

Source: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010510/hl/gays.html

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Can Gays Go Straight and Change Their Sexual Orientation? Part I. American Psychiatric Association Position on 'Reparative Therapy'

"The American Psychiatric Association (APA) maintains that there is no published scientific evidence supporting the efficacy of reparative therapy as a treatment to change one's sexual orientation," according to the the group's medical director Dr. Steven Mirin.

Mirin made his comment in response to a study presented at the association's annual meeting that asserted some highly motivated individuals may be able to change their sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual.

The association, Mirin says, does not endorse meeting presentations, nor do the presentations necessarily reflect the organization's policy.

As is the case at many scientific meetings, many papers presented at the APA meeting have not been subject to peer review nor have they been published in the scientific literature, Mirin says.

The APA opposes any psychiatric treatment, such as reparative or conversion therapy, which is based on the assumption that homosexuality, per se, is a mental disorder or based on the assumption that a patient should change his or her sexual orientation.

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May 9, 2001

Scientist Says Study Shows Gay Change Is Possible. Part VI.

By ERICA GOODE
NYtimes.com

A psychiatrist at Columbia University who contends that the mental health profession has "totally bought the idea that once you are gay you cannot be changed" will report today that some "highly motivated" gays can become heterosexual.

The researcher, Dr. Robert Spitzer, said his study was based on 45-minute telephone interviews with 143 men and 57 women who had sought help to change their sexual orientation. He and his colleagues found that 66 percent of the men and 44 percent of the women had achieved "good heterosexual functioning," he said.

"If somebody wants to change and it's not because they are just responding to pressure, it shouldn't be automatically assumed that it's irrational or giving in to society," Dr. Spitzer said in an interview.

But the findings, to be described today in New Orleans as part of a symposium at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting, conflict with those of another study also to be presented at the same session. That study, by two psychologists in New York, found that of 202 homosexual subjects who had received therapy to change their sexual orientation, 178 reported that their efforts "failed," many were harmed by the attempt to change and only 6 achieved what the researchers called "a heterosexual shift."

Dr. Spitzer's study was criticized by gay rights groups, which noted that most subjects in the research study had been recruited through groups that condemn homosexuality, like Exodus, a Christian ministry that describes itself on its Web site as "promoting the message of `freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ.' "

"It's snake oil, it's not science," David Elliot, the communications director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, a lobbying group in Washington, said of the study.

The study has not been published or submitted for professional review.

Scientists do not know what determines whether someone becomes heterosexual or homosexual. But most believe that biology plays a strong role in sexual orientation. And most mental-health organizations have passed resolutions discouraging the use of so-called reparative therapies intended to change homosexuals into heterosexuals, saying no scientific evidence exists to show they are effective.

Dr. Spitzer led the task force that in 1973 removed homosexuality from the official list of mental disorders contained in the psychiatric association's diagnostic manual.

But he said he decided that a study was needed after talking with protesters objecting to the association's policy discouraging such therapies.

"It occurred to me that maybe the general consensus, which was that the behavior can be resisted but sexual orientation couldn't be changed, was wrong," Dr. Spitzer said.

Still, he added that the number of homosexuals who could successfully become heterosexual was likely to be "pretty low." And he conceded that the subjects in the study were "unusually religious" and were not necessarily representative of most gays and lesbians in the United States.

Of those who participated in the study, 78 percent had spoken publicly in favor of efforts to convert homosexuals to heterosexuality; 93 percent said religion was "extremely" or "very" important in their lives. About 40 percent said that before they decided to change their orientation they had been exclusively attracted to partners of the same sex.

Dr. Spitzer said the subjects expressed different reasons for wanting to become heterosexual. They included the feeling that a gay "lifestyle" was "not emotionally satisfying" (81 percent of subjects); the belief that their religion conflicted with being gay (79 percent of subjects); and the desire to get married or to stay married (67 percent of the men, 35 percent of the women).

Some subjects — 11 percent of the men and 37 percent of the women — Dr. Spitzer said, reported being entirely free of homosexual feelings or sexual fantasies in the year before they were interviewed. But 29 percent of the men and 63 percent of the women said they were "only slightly bothered" by such feelings.

The researchers defined "good heterosexual functioning," as having been in a "loving and emotionally satisfying heterosexual relationship" for the year leading up to the interview, having engaged in satisfying heterosexual sex at least monthly and having never or rarely thought of same-sex partners during heterosexual sex.

In contrast, Dr. Ariel Shidlo and Dr. Michael Schroeder, both psychologists in private practice in Manhattan, found that the vast majority of the subjects in their study, who were recruited through the Internet and direct mailings to groups advocating reparative therapy, reported failure in their efforts to change through reparative therapies.

Their study has also not yet been published or submitted for professional review. Dr. Schroeder said 18 subjects who deemed themselves "successes" in becoming heterosexuals "don't fit into what the public sees as success."

"They were celibate or they continued to really struggle with homosexual desire or behavior," he said.

Many subjects, Dr. Schroeder said, had invested 5 to 15 years in the therapies, and when they were not successful experienced "an inordinate sense of loss."

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/09/health/09GAY.html

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Can Gays Go Straight and Change Their Sexual Orientation? Part V. A controversial US study suggests that gay people can become heterosexual if they really want to.

Can Gays Go Straight and Change Their Sexual Orientation? Part IV.