If it were Fox News I wouldn't have flinched—but it was National Public Radio.
To my surprise, I didn't know—especially in 2011—my sexual orientation was still up for debate. But on Aug. 1 on the "Morning Edition" of National Public Radio (NPR), it was. And the topic on the show that morning was "Can Therapy Help Change Sexual Orientation?"
"Today in Your Health, a controversy that is both political and personal. Conversion therapy is psychotherapy which aims to help gay men and women become straight. It's hardly new, but it's in the news again because the mental health clinic run by the husband of Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann reportedly provides such therapy," Renee Montagne, host of "Morning Edition" said.
My head spins at the thought of how Christian counseling services, like Dr. Marcus Bachmann's, still get so much air time, especially, in spite of the voluminous information disputing the pseudo-science of "ex-gay" conversion therapies.
Just three years ago, the American Psychological Association put out an official position paper stating, "The longstanding consensus of the behavioral and social sciences and the health and mental health professions is that homosexuality per se is a normal and positive variation of human sexual orientation."
The negative health outcomes both emotional and psychological these "conversion" programs exact are untold and include depression, anxiety, self-destructive behavior, sexual dysfunction, avoidance of intimacy, loss of faith and spirituality, and the reinforcement of internalized homophobia and self-hatred, to name a few.
"It took really hard work to get my brain back and to recover from the emotional and psychological damage that I had experienced under that care," Peterson Toscano, a theatrical performance activist, stated on NPR. Toscano spent 17 years in conversion therapies and faith-based ex-gay programs. Today he's the co-founder of "Beyond Ex-Gay," an online community to help ex-gay survivors.
However, there are still groups, usually motivated by religion-based homophobic therapies and ministries like Bachmann's, who are hell-bent on the idea that LGBTQ Americans can and should be made straight.
These groups proselytize ex-gay rhetoric as both their Christian and patriotic duty.
For example, "Pray the Gay Away?," an episode of the television series Our America with Lisa Ling—that aired on Oprah Winfrey's OWN—Alan Chambers, president of ex-gay organization Exodus International, spoke about his surefire remedy for us LGBTQ "prodigal" children, and how his organization can help us reconcile our faith, mend our sinful lives and walk away from our supposedly wrong-headed "lifestyle" choice.
There are hordes of supposedly ex-gay "converts" who'll be poster children for these conversion therapies. However, truth be told, their conversions from being "homosexual" to "heterosexual" don't "cure" their homosexual predilections, but rather these therapies attempt to put LGBTQ people on the road to outwardly live a straight life.
"It meant probably walking away from my religion, not having the wife and children of my future that I would expect, lots of shame and conflict with family and others. It was just devastating to contemplate," Rich Wyler, who grew up in a Christian conservative family, stated on NPR.
However, the truth is that these "ex-gay" reparative therapies have a failure rate of 90 percent, and several "ex-gay" groups over the years have had to shut down when their leaders finally dealt with the reality of their own homosexuality.
A case in point is John Paulk, an "ex-gay" poster boy who appeared in HRC's 2000 photo album with a one-word caption: "Gotcha!"
Wayne Besen, then-associate director of communications of the Human Rights Campaign, captured that Kodak moment as he snapped a picture of the then-37-year-old Paulk in a Washington D.C. gay bar. In the moment, pandemonium broke out in the bar, as the series of flashes from Besen's camera were assumed by some to be those of a homophobe harassing a patron. However, as Paulk hunched down trying to conceal his face, he learned that he could neither run nor hide. Paulk says he went into the bar just to use the bathroom—an unlikely story, as 40 minutes after entering the bar, he was still there, keeping company with both a drink and a fellow patron.
Paulk, a former drag queen known as Candi and a one-time first runner-up in the Miss Ingenue pageant, is presently married to a self-proclaimed former lesbian who also underwent counseling in an "ex-gay" ministry run by Exodus International. Today, they both don the drag of being heterosexually married. They prominently graced the cover of Newsweek in August 1998; appeared on 60 Minutes and Oprah; and wrote the book that gave Focus on the Family its name for its "ex-gay" conferences: Love Won Out, a memoir depicting the Paulks' flight from gayhood.
"Conversion" therapies are a tool used by right-wing religious organizations to raise money and advocate against LGBTQ rights. With this money, these organizations are able to produce politically and religiously Biased Agenda-Driven (aptly abbreviated as "B.A.D.") science like "reparative therapies," attempting to justify them by presenting LGBTQ people as genetically flawed—a charge eerily reminiscent of the scientific racism and sexism that once undergirded treatment of blacks and women morally inferior due to supposed genetic flaws.
Fox News is no friend to the LGBTQ community. However, now I'm wondering about NPR.
