A couple of days ago, I posted an article about the reparative therapy (read: torture) George Rekers conducted at UCLA in the 1970s and one of his victims who committed suicide at the age of 38 after suffering a lifetime of shame and guilt about his natural sexuality.
Worth noting - the government funded that crap.
Today it has come to my attention (thanks to Sage at The Whole World in a Single Flower) that Anderson Cooper has been running a three-part series on this topic.
In 1970, a five-year-old boy named Kirk Murphy was subjected to an ex-gay experiment. Under the care of Dr Ivor Lovaas and George Rekers, then a doctoral student, of UCLA, he underwent therapy to eliminate supposed effeminate behaviors. In 1974, Lovaas and Rekers jointly published a paper about the boy they renamed "Kraig," heralding his treatment for "childhood cross-gender problems" a success and claiming he had been transformed from a gender-confused homosexual-in-waiting to a healthy, heterosexual young man. On the back of this study, Rekers built a career as an anti-gay activist and a supposed expert in childhood sexual development. He co-founded the Family Research Council and championed reparative therapy to turn gay men straight. In 2003, Kirk, aged 38 years old and gay, committed suicide.One of the sad outcomes of this whole thing is that Rekers was eventually caught traveling to Europe with a gay male escort and forced out of the Family Research Council - he denies to this day that he is gay or had sex with his male escort. For what it's worth, the young man says he gave Rekers "sexual" massages.
It seems Rekers has been living with his own form of self-hatred and denial - and I wonder how many of his other victims are also dead as a result of his "treatments."
Part One:
Part Two:
Part Three:
As the 3rd segment points out, there really is NO evidence for reparative therapy being successful, in any way helpful, or even ethical. The APA has taken a stand against it, as have all other therapeutic, social work, and counseling organizations. It needs to be banned.
The guy they talked to in clip three, Joseph Nicolosi, another reparative therapist, makes arguments that are refuted by literally pounds of research - people are born gay, it has nothing to do with incomplete bonding with the father (thanks Freud, you really effed up on that one), and you can't by any stretch of the imagination "pray the gay out."
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