Anyone ascribing to the masculinity v. homosexuality dichotomy may want to check out Gay, Straight, or Taken on the lifetime network. Those poor girls are almost never able to figure out who the gay guy is.

Bob’s study was methodologically much better than that one and it does tell us some useful information. For one thing, Bob did not care how it came out. And you can bet if it had come out looking like there was never change, Spitzer would have said so. I suppose the study would have been quoted just as much but by different folks 🙂

He also speaks of the great difficulty in finding research subjects. We had similar difficulty back in the mid 1970’s. E. Mansell Pattision MD asked us at the EXODUS office to find subjects who had changed their orientation. We went through several hundred cases, found 30 we thought MIGHT make the grade and Dr. Pattison found that only 11 of these had made “siginificant change”. His “results” were published in the American Journal of Psychiatry. {“Religiously Mediated Change in Homosexuals,” Amer. J. Psychiatry , Vol. 137, pp. 1553-1562, 1980)

My lover, Gary, and I were 2 of those eleven. I know personally that the other nine were not heterosexual, but had only experienced a decrease in homosexual desire. Some of those still had gay sex on occasion. EXODUS and other organzations continued to quote the Pattison article as evidence that “gays can change” — even years after Gary and I exposed the facts.

Keep in mind: WE selected the subjects hoping for “good” results and Mrs. Pattison conducted the interviews hoping for “good results” — all anecdotal stuff and all from guys who wanted very much to believe (and have others believe) that their orientation had changed. Hardly scientific.

My own sense of this is that we had a great deal of difficulty getting those 200. It took us about two years, and we had several sources where we could make it known that in thestudy we wanted people who had changed to participate. Since it was so hard to get those200, and we were not flooded with hundreds of people, my own view and I, thereÂ’s no way that I can be sure, is that probably a relatively rare experience that people change as much as these people did.

Also, a little later:

Dr. Spitzer: Um, sure, you know, one of the issues that critics have, you know, brought up is: have I really changed my viewpoint or what did I really think? Well, one thing I do recall is there was I believe in the early 80s, Geraldo did a show on “Can gays change?” and the producer got in touch with the American Psychiatric Association because they wanted someone to represent the official viewpoint, so they picked me. And I was up there, and what I said was the official viewpoint, and that was that reports of change were just anecdotal, there were no systematic studies. I was quite, you know, not believing of it. So I mean, that was my view. I think if I would have been asked 5 or 10 years ago, I doubted, now I didn’t know, but I certainly thought probably, that nobody really changed.

Dr. Throckmorton: And now?

Dr. Spitzer: Well, now I think that that is not the case. Although again I have to say I think it’s probably relatively rare.

Dr. Throckmorton: Ok.

Dr. Spitzer: (Laughs) You won’t eliminate that relatively rare?