IF YOU'VE BEEN THINKING how nifty it would be to convert to heterosexuality, there's good news and bad news. The "good" news is a recent study concluded that, for a very small number of gays, it's possible. The "bad" news is don't bet on it. Whether or not you were born gay, you will almost certainly die gay. So you'd better learn to like it.
Proponents of so-called "reparative therapy" - the effort to make homosexuals into heterosexuals through a variety of techniques, including counseling and religious instruction - have treated the study as a vindication of their efforts. Gay political groups have reacted with horror, attacking the lead researcher himself as biased. Some news outlets described the study as "explosive."
However, it turns out the furor is much ado about very little. The study makes an exceedingly modest conclusion based on questionable methodology.
First, it's important to know what the study did not conclude. It did not conclude that conversion is possible for most - much less for all - gay people, even if they want to change. It did not conclude that homosexual orientation is a matter of choice, like whether to have the chicken or the beef in a restaurant. It certainly did not validate a particular method of conversion.
In fact, Robert Spitzer, the professor of psychiatry at Columbia University who led the study, does not endorse conversion efforts at all. Indeed, he was one of a group of pioneering psychiatrists who successfully lobbied to have homosexuality removed from the official list of mental disorders in 1973. If there's nothing disordered or sick about a trait, why change it?
What the Spitzer study did conclude is that (1) some (2) "highly motivated" (3) gay people can achieve (4) "good heterosexual functioning" (5) for a limited time (6) after more than a decade of effort. Each aspect of this rather limited conclusion deserves closer scrutiny.
Spitzer's study, which has not been published and has not been professionally reviewed for validity or methodology, is based on telephone interviews conducted with 200 people who claimed to have changed from homosexual to heterosexual attraction for a period of at least five years. Each interview lasted approximately 45 minutes, during which the subjects answered 60 questions about their sexual attractions and behavior in the period before and after their effort to change.
That's it. There were no face-to-face interviews; no tests for physiological reactions to various sexual stimuli; no objective verification of the respondents' answers; no long-term study; and no control group.
Of the 200 self-professed converts to heterosexuality, Spitzer concluded that only 66 percent of the men and 44 percent of the women had actually accomplished their goal.
Moreover, this was a very select group of people. It was not 200 gay people taken off the street at random and put through some conversion exercises to see what the outcome might be. Two-thirds of the participants were referred to Spitzer by "ex-gay ministries" that teach homosexuality is sinful or by a notoriously anti-gay outfit called the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality. These groups have a vested interest in showing their effectiveness, so they're likely to submit for review only their strongest candidates.
Also, there's a good chance many of the participants had been indoctrinated with powerful and repeated doses of anti-gay ideology and religion. Such people are likely to be "highly motivated" (to borrow Spitzer's description of them) to report they've successfully changed even when they haven't.
We can't even be sure they were ever really "gay" at all. It could be that many of them were basically straight but had an occasional, experimental gay experience in their teens or 20s causing them so much guilt they decided to "change" so it would never happen again.
But since we know so little about the participants, having been acquainted with them over a telephone line for less than an hour each, it's hard to say anything about them with confidence.
The male participants claimed to have been trying to change for fourteen years; the women, for twelve years. That's about one-fifth of the adult years of the average person's life span.
And what was the return on this huge investment of time and energy? For the one-year period before the interviews, they achieved "good heterosexual functioning," defined by the researchers to mean having an emotionally satisfying relationship with a person of the opposite sex, having satisfactory sex with that person at least once a month, and rarely or never thinking of gay sex while doing it. Only 11 percent of the men and 37 percent of the women interviewed reported a complete absence of homosexual attraction. Even these figures are almost certainly high, since they are entirely self-reported.
What this study really proves is that, after a heroic and protracted effort, it is possible for a person suffering from an extraordinary level of internalized homophobia to refrain from having gay sex for a limited period of time. It shows that behavior can be modified; it does not show that a person's basic sexual orientation can be altered.
We didn't need a study to reach that conclusion. The long and tragic history of efforts to "repair" gay people - from electric shock to hormone injections to hectoring lectures about damnation - have amply demonstrated that it's possible to ruin gay people's lives. Unfortunately, this limited and flawed study will only fuel that destructive fire.