Don't Despair! Do Trust!

First, no one can accuse Dr. Spitzer of  “religious bias”. “He describes himself as a Jewish atheist.” [Douglas Leblanc, “Therapeutically Incorrect: Atheist psychiatrist argues that gays can change,” Christianity Today, (April 2005), p. 94]

Second, no one can accuse Dr. Spitzer of “anti-gay bias”. He has been described as “the psychiatrist who led the team that deleted homosexuality from the diagnostic manual    [the official system for classification of psychological and psychiatric disorders prepared by and published by the American Psychiatric Association] in 1973...” [NARTH Bulletin, (August 2001), p. 1]

Third, the story of how Dr. Spitzer came to do this study is important. He attended an annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association where it was being argued by the politically correct that reorientation therapy should be banned. “Dr. Spitzer had been convinced that sexual orientation is unchangeable” [Idem.]. “...I spoke to some ex-gays who were picketing the meeting. They explained how they had changed. And that got me interested”  [Idem.].

As a result Dr. Spitzer designed a study that “involves systematically interviewing a large group of individuals who report that their sexual orientation had been predominantly homosexual, but who now report that because of some kind of therapy they have sustained for a least 5 years some change to a heterosexual orientation” [Robert L. Spitzer, Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 32, Issue 5, p. 403-417].

He was able to recruit 200 individuals (143 males, 57 females) who had experienced “predominantly homosexual attraction for many years, and in the year before starting therapy, at least 60 on a scale of sexual attraction (where 0 = exclusively heterosexual and 100 = exclusively heterosexual…” [Idem.] “Almost half of the participants (41%) had at some time prior to the therapy been ‘openly gay.’ Over a third of the participants (males 37%, females 35%) reported that they had serious thoughts of suicide, related to their homosexuality” [Ibid., p. 406].

Dr. Spitzer noted that the most commonly reported reasons for seeking to change “were that the individual did not find life as a gay man or lesbian emotionally satisfying (males, 85%; females, 70%...), conflict between their same sex feelings and behavior and the tenets of their religion (79%), and desire to get married or stay married (males, 67%; females 35%...)” [Ibid., p. 407]

 “Although all the participants had been sexually attracted to members of the same sex, a small proportion had never engaged in consensual homosexual sex (males, 13%; females, 4%...).

Significantly more males than females had engaged in consensual homosexual sex with more than 50 different sexual partners during their lifetime (males 34%; females 2%...). Significantly more males than females had not experienced consensual heterosexual sex before the therapy effort (males, 53%; females, 33%...)” [Ibid., p. 408].

Dr. Spitzer’s subjects were asked about their same-sex attraction, sexual orientation identity, same-sex lustful thoughts, yearning for romantic emotional intimacy, same-sex masturbatory fantasies, same-sex thoughts during heterosexual sex, gay pornography, homosexual behavior, and being bothered by homosexual feelings in the 12 months prior (PRE) to the effort to change and the 12 months prior to the interview (POST). What was the outcome?

First, Dr. Spitzer found that “typically the effort to change did not produce significant results for the first two years. Subjects said they were helped by examining their family and childhood experiences, and understanding how those factors might have contributed to their gender identity and sexual orientation. Same-sex mentoring relation-ships, behavior therapy techniques and group therapy were also mentioned as particularly helpful.”