The Learning Channel (TLC) will soon air a reality-based television show called "My Husband is Not Gay." It is based on the claim that gay people can change their sexual orientation. The claim is bunk. The American Psychological Association (APA) review of the peer-reviewed literature says that Sexual Orientation Change Efforts (SOCE) are unlikely to be successful and pose risk of harm. Some states have banned SOCE for minors. So one can imagine the outrage caused by TLC's decision to air a documentary, My Husband is not Gay, which gives support to SOCE advocates.
The show is associated with lots of anti-gay activists who insist that sexual orientation can and should be chaged because, purportedly, homosexuality is a mental illness. For its part the APA de-listed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1974. To anti-gay activists that move was motivated by political pressure from the Gay Rights movement that, at the time, was in its infancy. While it is true that some activists led by the late great Frank Kameny pushed the APA to de-list homosexuality, the basis of its removal from the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual was the clear science of the day.
Evelyn Hooker's groundbreaking study of homosexuality and mental illness was published in 1957. Before then, most published research were psychoanalytic studies where psychiatrists and psychologists reported on findings of their own patients. The problem with those studies is that the psychoanalysts presumed that their gay patients were mentally ill and that their homosexuality was the cause of their illnesses. So, they brought their own preconceived biases into their work. And further, wouldn't you expect to find mentally ill people at a psychologist's office? This is what we call a clinical sample (one would expect to find a lot of sick people in a clinic) but such research says nothing about the general population of gay people.
Hooker's research was different. Rather than analyzing people who were already deemed ill, she recruited a non-clinical sample of gay men from the community. She also recruited a non-clinical sample of heterosexual men from the community. She administered a battery a psychological tests to the men and had the tests evaluated by leading experts of the day.
She withheld information about the sexual orientation of her subjects from these experts so as to not color their evaluations of these men. She also had the experts try to evaluate the sexual orientation of the subject by just looking at the test results. The experts evaluated the same proportion of gay men and straight men in the highest levels of psychological functioning, and were unable to differentiate the sexuality of the men based on their psychological test results. As a result Hooker concluded that homosexuality is not a clinical entity, and that homosexuality was not inherrently linked to psychopathology.
There were several studies published between Hooker's study and 1974 when the APA de-listed homosexuality as a mental illness that affirmed Hooker's findings: homosexuality, per se, is not a mental illness.
Before 1974, those in the mental health fields routinely subjected gay and bisexual persons to a series of aversion therapies, electroconvulsive therapies, and hormone therapies in an effort to change their sexual orientations. The long term results were poor, often causing more psychological problems than such "remedies" helped.
As gay rights became a political wedge issue on the right, anti-gay activists began reviving the practice as a propaganda effort against gay rights activists who argued based on the science, that they weren't mentally ill, that they did not choose their sexual orientation, and that their sexual orientation was immutable. The idea that one could change their sexual orientation flew in the face of these assertions. If sexual orientation could be changed, then sexual orientation is not immutable. If the change was rooted in resolving previously unresolved issues, say, from childhood, then perhaps homosexuality is a mental illness.
So, SOCE activists began recruiting gay people experiencing difficulties in their lives. Perhaps the gay person in question has a drug addiction, then homosexuality was the cause, and the cure was a sexual oreintation change effort (which anti-gay activists labeled "ex-gay therapy"). If the gay person in question had been emotionally traumatized by abuse as a child, homosexuality was just a way of acting out on that abuse. If the gay person had been through a bad relationship, then homosexuality was the problem there, and SOCE was the cure.
If you applied the same reasoning to heterosexuals, then wouldn't a drug addicted heterosexual need to change his sexual orientation and become gay as a cure for the addiction? If a girl was sexually abused as a child by a man and she was now heterosexual is heterosexuality just acting out on the abuse? If you had a run of bad relationships, is your heterosexuality to blame?
Of course, these things are ridiculous, and if you heard someone say something like that to you, you would write them off as a quack. So, TLC is going to promote this quackery as some sort of legitimate experience. No wonder gay rights activists are concerned and consider the program dangerous propaganda that will hurt the well-being of LGBT youth.
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