For three years I had weekly sessions with Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, president of the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). Dr. Nicolosi thought that homosexuality was a pathology, a sublimated desire to reconnect with one’s lost masculinity. The theory: under-attentive fathers and over-attentive mothers create gay children. The purpose of therapy was to put me in touch with my masculine identity and thereby change my sexual orientation.
I would like to say that I resisted therapy throughout, but the truth is that I liked and respected Dr. Nicolosi. And the theory sounded plausible (I was too young to know that plausible does not mean true). It is a period in my life that I do not think about often, not because it hurts especially but because it has become increasingly irrelevant.
But Mike Wacker’s column in the Sun last week (“View From the Right: Gender, Psychology and Science”) brought me back. Wacker condemns the American Psychological Association (APA) for its position against sexual reorientation therapy. He cites a study by Dr. Robert Spitzer that found gays could change and criticizes cultural critics for citing philosophers instead of scientists. He presents Dr. Spitzer’s study as an instance of the psychological community ignoring science in favor of ideology.
In fact, I know Dr. Robert Spitzer’s study well. Dr. Nicolosi asked me to participate in it, but instructed me not to reveal that he had referred me; while he wanted his organization’s views represented, he did not want to bring into question the study’s integrity. Wacker must not have read Dr. Spitzer’s study, or perhaps he has a naïve understanding of scientific inquiry. Otherwise he would know that the study consisted of informal interviews with ex-gays and those still in therapy; it was merely a report of what they had said. The APA and the psychological community have criticized the ex-gay movement for not providing controlled, long-term studies — to date, none exist.
If you had asked me at the time whether I thought therapy was working, I would have said yes.
It also puzzles me that Wacker attacked cultural critics and gender theorists for not conducting scientific experiments. He did this instead of focusing on those academics at Cornell who in fact study sexuality scientifically. Dr. Daryl Bern is one of the best-known researchers in the area of sexuality, but Wacker makes no mention of him. His argument, predicated on an elementary distinction between belief and science, fails to note that the majority of those who lobby the APA to change its policy are affiliated with religious groups. While NARTH pegs itself as a purely professional organization, it is telling that Dr. Nicolosi’s office is named the St. Thomas Aquinas Psychological Clinic.
Some of the comments posted to the op-ed online praised Wacker for his courage and research (how easy it is for people to mistake audacity for courage). In truth, Wacker conducted targeted research to support an ideology that includes condemning illegal immigrants, abortion rights, and supporting Mitt Romney.
Years after I stopped therapy, I requested the case notes, knowing they would be destroyed after seven years. They provided an annotated collection of long-forgotten events. Next to the description of an argument with a male friend, Dr. Nicolosi scribbled “needs to look at the real source.” This was code: whatever the problem, it would be traced back to my lost masculine sense of self; I was angry because my friend had not paid attention to me as my father had not. Much of therapy also involved uncovering the numerous ways in which my parents had cheated me (as a teenager, I was more than happy to blame things on them).
Disgust with what was termed the “gay lifestyle” was implicit in therapy. I remember Dr. Nicolosi telling me, in response to the question of whether one could easily contract HIV from semen, that if this were the case then gays would be “jerking off in hamburgers all over” to infect people.
I learned to be a man: I was encouraged to play catch with my father, work out, watch football. At one point Dr. Nicolosi assigned me a therapy partner who was my age. Ryan and I used to speak by phone (he was in Colorado, I in Arizona), gossiping about school, at one point promising to send each other pictures of ourselves (the canker was already on the rose). After not hearing from him for a few weeks I called his family, who told me that Ryan had gone to court and emancipated himself from them. His father, in tears, told me this had ruined his life.
It was a relapse — brought to light by the prying eyes of the housekeeper — that ended things for me. Before leaving home for my freshman year at Yale, I told my parents that I did not think therapy would change me and refused to go, the most assertive decision I had made thus far.
Some time later I indeed felt cheated for all the years I had spent convinced I would be unhappy, for having gone to college an under-confident and fearful young man. That ordeal is in the past, but the sense of injustice remains when I see my peers at Cornell defend “don’t ask, don’t tell,” protest the moral atrocity of anal sex, or harass gay students on facebook. How easy it is for Wacker to say that gays can change, and how hard it was to live.
Gabriel Arana is a graduate student in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at garana@cornellsun.com [1]. The Red Line appeared alternate Thusdays this semester.
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[1] mailto:garana@cornellsun.com