Can gay men and lesbians change their sexual orientation? Yes, according to Robert Spitzer. When an eminent psychiatry professor who is not a noted homophobe publishes an apparently well-researched paper [1] in a respected journal, one has to take notice. The “ex-gays” must be struggling to contain their glee.
After the embarrassments and scandals that have beset the “ex-gays” (see Wayne Besen’s article, G&LH, Autumn 2003), they must be desperate for straws to clutch at, and that is exactly what Spitzer’s paper is – a straw.
Briefly, Spitzer sought out ex-gays, many from various ministries and the notorious NARTH (National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality) and interviewed them at length by telephone about their sex lives, sexual feelings and orientation before and after “therapy”. Many reported varying degrees of change towards a heterosexual orientation.
Of course this put the cat among the pigeons and, while NARTH predictably gave it pre-eminence on their website, gay groups were clamouring to attack it, albeit not always on valid grounds, it must be said. Certainly it is a thoroughly biased sample, and not remotely representative of homosexuals in general, something Spitzer acknowledges when he states that his results do not prove that change is possible “for most highly motivated individuals”. You can be sure, however, that this point will be lost on the “ex-gays” as they eagerly promote this new “scientific evidence” for their cause.
The study also lacks a control and is not double-blind, as one might expect of a study investigating a medical treatment for a disease, for example. However, as all Spitzer was seeking to prove is that some people can change their orientation, these criticisms can be seen only as limitations, not refutations. Where he really falls down is on whether or not one can believe what the subjects were saying. Spitzer says one can; the evidence suggests otherwise.
Spitzer’s entire house of cards rests on the accuracy of self-reporting. Even if one were charitable and assumed the subjects were honest, they were being asked to recall details from many years ago (an average of twelve years for some of the questions). Human memory is notoriously unreliable at the best of times. Will it be any better when coloured by religious belief and the emotional investment of years of “therapy” and pressure to conform?
I will not be charitable. The subjects were highly religious (mostly Protestant). Do the devout ever lie and deceive themselves? When they routinely believe such absurdities as deities turning themselves into ghosts and inseminating virgins, or corpses coming back to life and floating up into the sky, peddle bogus “faith-healing” stories and claim to have personal relationships with invisible entities, the answer must surely be “yes”! In case that is not enough, there already exists a growing body of research on the links between religiosity and psychosis, fantasy-prone personality types and even criminality. To put it bluntly, you cannot trust the pious.
How sad, then, that Spitzer does. Respected researchers being hoodwinked by dishonest subjects out to promote themselves, or their belief systems, are not without precedent. Parapsychology is riddled with examples of liars and charlatans, as well as the sincere-but-deluded, fooling researchers who naïvely imagine that they cannot be taken in.
That Spitzer is similarly credulous is evidenced by his own lame excuses for trusting his subjects. He says they were not lying, because of their “ability to provide detailed descriptions”. I am reminded of the “recovered-memory” dupes who, after attending “therapy”, give extraordinarily detailed descriptions of being satanically abused, abducted by aliens or living previous lives as Egyptian pharaohs. Presumably, they must be telling the truth. He says his subjects were not lying, because of the “complexity and range of change reported”, or the “gradual nature of change”. So, if the claims are complex and wide-ranging and spun out over a long enough time span, then they must be true.
This really will not do. Self-reporting by the deluded, with strong motivations to deceive themselves and others, is about as scientifically useful as divining, or looking at entrails. Only objective testing of sexual orientation before and after therapy can possibly give a definitive answer. This is actually possible. Erectile and vaginal responses are involuntary and objectively measurable (the method is called plethysmography, for the grandiloquent among you). It should be possible to take it even further by magnetic-resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain, showing subjects porno pictures while monitoring their responses. Until this is done, and replicated by others, the best interpretation of Spitzer’s data is unremarkable – that some deeply religious people can deceive themselves into suppression and denial of their true sexual feelings, or will lie about those feelings to others.
[1] Robert L. Spitzer, “Can gay men and lesbians change their sexual orientation? 200 participants reporting a change from homosexual to heterosexual orientation”, Archives of Sexual Behavior, 32(5), October 2003, pp. 403-17.