Zombie Therapies and Homosexuality

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Despite being banned for minors in 26 states, as well as in Canada and Iceland, despite major medical and mental health organizations condemning it as ineffective and dangerous, and despite the vast majority of Americans believing that converting someone who is gay into a straight person is either wrong or ineffective, thousands of practitioners of these “conversion therapies” remain active in the United States.

In most cases, the practice is no longer called “conversion therapy,” but has adopted other misleading names, such as “sex addiction therapy” or “faith-based therapy.” It is being carried out by both licensed and unlicensed practitioners, the latter mostly in religious circles, and is operating in what some call a gray area just outside the law. According to a 2018 study by the UCLA Williams Institute, approximately 698,000 LGBTQ adults in the United States have received conversion therapy; that's not counting the minors who have been subjected to it.

As a longtime therapist specializing in relationships and sexual health, I am here to say that conversion therapy itself, or by any other name is both unscientific and dangerous. Renaming it is like putting lipstick on a pig; it’s a coverup, and more than 20 years of solid research shows that it doesn’t work.

The gray area

Some practitioners claim that instead of trying to convert someone from homosexual practices or attraction, they are simply rooting out deep-seated traumas that might have caused same-sex attraction. This is silly. If this were true, it could equally be applied to heterosexuals for whom “deep-seated traumas influence heterosexual attraction.” While deep-seated sexual trauma can cause someone to engage in behavior with people of a different gender than whom they are attracted to, the vast majority of therapists now recognize this as trauma reenactment from earlier abuse. In other words, people are trying to solve the trauma by returning to the scene of the sexual crime, so to speak. They are trauma urges, not sexual urges. Their reenactment is not the same as erotic or sexual attraction to the same sex. Such sexual abuse causes disorientation, not orientation.

These practitioners have for years made absurd claims such as homosexuality is caused by having a domineering mother and an absent father, with no science to back them up. I call this a zombie theory that died in the 1980s and has long been gone but gets resurrected in disguised forms by therapists with an agenda and a bias against homosexuality.

Conversion therapy is abuse

I have had clients and friends who have told me about their experiences in trying to overcome their erotic attraction to the same sex. Some have been sent away as teens to religious “conversion camps” by well-meaning or ashamed parents, where they were subjected to such horrors as being shown arousing homoerotic pictures and then given the choice of either ingesting a chemical that induced vomiting or receiving electric shocks to their testicles.

The toll has been devastating. Researchers at San Francisco State University found in 2018 that rates of attempted suicide among LGBTQ youth more than double when parents try to change their sexual orientation.

It doesn’t work

These conversion therapies have utterly failed at achieving their dubious goals. Whether they are trying to “pray away the gay” or subjecting people to a kind of torture, these programs suffer a virtual 100 percent recidivism rate.

I’ve lost count of how many people who once were champions of such therapies have been caught in same-sex relationships, or finally come out as gay, and even apologized for their gaslighting. Just a few examples: In Anything but Straight, author Wayne R. Besen documents numerous examples of leaders of ex-gay movements being caught in their hypocrisy. One of my favorites is John Paulk, chairman of the board of the now-defunct anti-gay Exodus International North America. (A photo of Paulk fleeing the camera when caught leaving a gay club adorns the cover of Besen’s book.) Dan Scobey, a founder of Exodus, fell in love and married a man, and subsequently apologized to those he had misled about conversion therapy. People are still angry at them today for their “betrayal” of the cause.

Every few years we read of ministers or supposedly cisgender public figures who are outed in compromising situations with their gay lovers. Although I become angry when I think about the suffering such people have engendered for gays, I do feel compassion for them. They are caught in the hopeless struggle to deny their sexuality and desperately trying to heal themselves of something to fit in.

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Nonetheless, those who perpetrate the fallacy of conversion therapy and its misleading spinoffs must be called out for the damage they are causing to thousands of vulnerable people. Conversion therapy by any name has only one name: abuse.

A word about “grooming”

We hear a lot about "grooming" nowadays coming from far-right or religious organizations. Religions, in particular, tend to be fearful or suspicious of sex and sexuality, if not outright hostile to it. Many of them don’t want their kids to be educated about sex or engaging in it, and certainly not a “deviant” kind—that is, something other than what is currently acceptable to their religion or culture. Therefore, they label anything that provides children with information that speaks frankly or truthfully about sex as “grooming.”

But the reality is that we’ve all been “groomed” to be heterosexual, to believe that only heterosexual marriage is normal, and to believe that homosexuality is either a sin, a perversion, or a “biological error,” in the words of talk-show host Laura Schlessinger. No one acknowledges that this is grooming. Banning books on sex education or about LGBT individuals because we fear that reading about sexuality will "turn" kids LGBT or lead them into promiscuity only ensures that children remain ignorant about one of life’s most basic urges.

It is time for us all to just grow up and acknowledge that there are as many aspects and varieties of sexuality and that one size has never fit all. The sooner we admit this, the healthier we will become.