Originally appeared May 16, 2001, in the Chicago Free Press.
Dr. Robert Spitzer recently presented a controversial study to an American Psychiatric Association convention purporting to show that "some people can change from gay to straight, and we ought to acknowledge that."
But his new study is seriously flawed and instead of showing that some "highly motivated gays can change to heterosexuality," it nearly demonstrates the opposite.
Spitzer admits that he had "great difficulty" finding people who claimed to have changed their orientation from gay to straight. Ex-gay groups regularly claim to know of "thousands" of people who have "changed" or "left homosexuality." But after searching for nearly a year and a half, Spitzer could only find 274 possibilities.
Most of the subjects were referrals from religious ex-gay or "change" therapy groups and many were public advocates of change therapy who had a strong incentive to describe their past and present lives in terms of the narrative they absorbed about "overcoming" homosexuality.
Even so, 74 of these carefully selected subjects did not even minimally qualify as "changed." They were just people who had stopped having homosexual sex or stopped calling themselves homosexual.
I would not be any less homosexual if I stopped having gay sex or if I called myself "heterosexual." Yet those are exactly what the ex-gay groups call "healing," "change" and "freedom from homosexuality," and the only sort of change many "ex-gays" experience.
So how homosexual were the remaining 200 candidates before their supposed change? Few seem to have been fully homosexual. Most were bisexual.
Nearly 40 percent of the men said they had felt opposite-sex attraction "sometimes" as a teenager and more than half (54 percent) had engaged in heterosexual sex before trying to change. More than 10 percent of the men never engaged in any gay sex at all.
Barely 60 percent of the women said they felt same-sex attraction "often" as a teenager and nearly 60 percent said they had "sometimes" felt opposite-sex attraction as a teenager. Fully two-thirds (67 percent) had already engaged in heterosexual sex before trying to change.
How heterosexual did these not-fully-homosexual people become after their "change"?
Only 11 percent of the men and 37 percent of the women said they now had "no" homosexual thoughts, feelings, desires, yearning or actual sex. That means almost all the men and most of the women still had at least some minimal homosexual desires.
About 70 percent of the men and 37 percent of the women said they still had more than "minimal" homosexual desires, feelings, etc.
A third of the men still occasionally felt strong homosexual desire and even daydreamed about having gay sex.
Of the 112 men (out of the total 143) who acknowledged that they masturbated, more than half (56 percent) said they used homosexual fantasies some of the time and about one-third (31 percent) said they seldom had opposite-sex masturbation fantasies.
Barely a third (37 percent) of the women said they had no homosexual thoughts, desires, yearning or sex. Nearly half (45 percent) still felt homosexual desires sometimes. And more than a third said they had more than "minimal" homosexual desires.
As psychiatrist C.A. Tripp wrote two decades ago about another "change" therapy, "Anyone gullible enough to see this as any kind of secure change - or any change at all beyond a brittle, desperate, tenuous hold on a forced heterosexuality - is probably lost to reason."
So how did Spitzer define "change" as in "some people can change from gay to straight"?
His definition of "change" was "good heterosexual functioning" which included: a year in a "loving," more than adequate heterosexual relationship; fantasizing about gay sex during heterosexual sex less than 20 percent of the time; and heterosexual sex at least once a month.
If you think heterosexual sex "at least once a month" suggests something short of rampant heterosexual lust or even much heterosexual desire at all, you are probably on the right track.
But even by these loose criteria, one-third of the men (34 percent) and more than half the women (56 percent) failed to qualify. So even with the most likely candidates out of "thousands," a complete switch in sexual orientation scarcely seems to occur.
What Spitzer found instead is some degree of movement along the sexual continuum by people who are fundamentally bisexual. No doubt that is "change," so people can "change" in a sense. But this kind of change is very old news.
In his 1948 volume on the human male, pioneer sex researcher Alfred Kinsey wrote that in his thousands of interviews he noted "frequent changes in ratings of individuals on the heterosexual-homosexual scale ... in the course of their lives" (p. 663).
Since some people spontaneously shift somewhat along the continuum over time - by chance, opportunity or a new perception of attractiveness - it seems more than interesting that Spitzer could find so few who could force themselves to make significant change by conscious effort using therapy, counseling, prayer or will-power.