NARTH denies statement on George Rekers – UPDATED

21 thoughts on “NARTH denies statement on George Rekers – UPDATED”

1. Phelim McIntyre,

   You write as though this were simply a case of gay activists rejoicing over the discomfiture and embarrassment of a man who has just been quietly getting on with his life, perhaps suffering internal conflict but doing no harm to a soul, and whose indiscretions, whatever they may be, have come to light. It isn’t.

   Speaking for myself, I find it extremely gratifying that his credibility has been shattered in this way, not because of any personal animosity towards him – I’ve never even met him – but because the mindset that he represents fills me with horror and revulsion. It’s not just a matter of some cranky theory (e.g. creationism, geocentricism or perpetual motion) which has no actual concrete effect on real life. As Rachel Maddow puts it, he is a man who has built his career on trying to make life miserable and dangerous for gay people and who is still doing it. “…He’s quite actively engaged in trying to change this country [America] to make it a more difficult place to be gay – particularly a more difficult place to be a young gay person.”

   This episode should serve as a salutary warning to others who are making an occupation out of playing dishonest and abusive games with other people’s lives.

2. Oops my bad.. Haggard was not outed by someone that was young ..

3. I suppose there is a remote chance that this young man was one of many allegedly interviewed to be an assistant to Dr Rekers and perhaps he did not know the young man’s true profession. In other words that it was a set up. However the multitude of contradictory responses by Dr Rekers per various news sources (assuming they are accurate) would seem to discredit this possiblility.

   On a different note… assuming that he was having some sort of sexual realtions with this young man… I am wondering if the issue with Dr. Rekers is not that he is gay but that he has some fascination with having sex with young ‘boyish’ men (a form of pseudo-pedophilia) similar to Haggard’s story of sex with a young male prostitute. And if so could this be a possible explanation for the severe anti-gay attitudes that come out of people like him? Perhaps in the process of battling their own demons they are also severely against all same sex attractions in people and seek to change them with the hopes of changing their own attractions. I think this is called transference. I am not painting all who believe in orientation change with the same brush here. I am just wondering if this might be possible for some. On the other hand perhaps I am just making illusory correlations such as what Dr Throckmorton mentioned earlier.

4. Phelim M – which story of Rekers are we to believe though? And the e-mail from him via Rentboy.com, how is that to be explained?

   Truth is a defence. We know Rekers lies under oath, that’s been found to be the case by at least two judges.

   We must all be careful not to only see what we want to see. Hence my references. I still am probably biased, but my prejudice precludes me from seeing exactly where.

5. Rick – time to shot someone when they are down because of your own prejudices. Oh well – so Rekers is at war with himself, yet is they gay lobby who runs a new McCarthyism which Rekers is now a victim off. I doubt that if Rekers wins the libel case the gay lobby will report that fact because that isn’t in line with their prejudiced unholy agenda.

6. Tim – In social psych, we call those illusory correlations. While there may be a real relationship, one cannot inferred one from vivid cases like these. My reaction is that homosexuality occurs for reasons that are probably common to humanity and can occur in many contexts, both supportive of it and non-supportive. Without a controlled study, I would be reluctant to infer a relationship. Good question, though, and one that might inspire a researcher somewhere…

7. http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2010/05/my-interview-with-jo-vanni-roman.html

   The cat is out of the bag — one of the pillars of the evangelical ex-gay movement has proven to be a MASSIVE hypocrite, a man who was paid generously on behalf of conservative enemies of gay rights to lobby against gay adoption and gay marriage, and for decades being cited as a “leading authority” on why homosexuality is pathological by anti-gay media outlets, has now proven not only to be gay himself, and actively helping himself to gay sex, but helping himself to gay sex with young male prostitutes — a compound of the “sin” of homosexuality with the “sin” of seeing a prostitute with the “sin” of an elder exploiting a youth.

   Many of us who are openly and unashamedly gay have long known that the most vocal anti-gay advocates were in a war as much with themselves as with the rest of us. This should pretty much make everybody at NARTH and Exodus look suspect.

8. That is….

   http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2010/05/things_rekers_said_to_lucien_w.php

   And I do not know that it would stop doubt.

9. There is no question in my mind that the story is true, and the New Times has just w/in the last few hours broken a new chapter in the story, a phone conversation on which 2 NT reporters eavesdropped, that should put to rest any doubt.

   I find it fascinating that the expert witness for the state of Florida who opined that homosexuals and Native Americans should be prevented from adopting has himself adopted kids. Boys, to be more precise. At least he isn’t Native American.

   Dr. Throckmorton, do you have an opinion as to why homosexuality seems to be so prevalent in the families of anti-gay activists? If it isn’t the anti-gay activist himself who turns out to be gay, it is often a close family member. I am thinking here of the son of Dr. Charles Socarides, the son of the state senator who brought the first anti-marriage initiative to CA, the sister of Frank Schubert, the campaign manager for Prop 8, the son of Phyllis Schafly, the son of Rev. TD Jakes, and on and on. If it is nurture and not nature, then what did Dr. Socarides do to turn his son into a living, breathing threat to Western civilization?

10. After three years of research and writing, Burke’s Gender Shock: Exploding the Myths of Male and Female was published in 1996. It quickly became the focal point of a gender storm. In the book, Burke traces the genesis of the GID designation and treatments back to the 1950s. In the 1970s, a psychologist at UCLA named George Rekers opened a clinic for children. He got hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund his studies, finding children (often through newspaper ads) and testing treatments on them.

    All the precision of science was applied in developing these tests to measure such things as how far the hips swayed as the child walked across the room.

    The tests–many still used today–strike Burke as Orwellian. In one, a child being tested is asked to draw the figure of a person. Girls who draw boys first, predominately, or in positions of power and strength, are suspect, as are boys who draw princesses or mommies. The Barlow Gender-Specific Motor Behavior test examines such things as how far from the back of a chair a seated child’s buttocks are–farther is “masculine,” closer is “feminine.” All the precision of science was applied in developing these tests to measure such things as the angle between the wrist and the hand, how often a child touched his or her hands together in front of his or her body, and how far the hips swayed as the child walked across the room. Especially damning for boys was a lack of hand-eye coordination.

    In keeping with the behaviorist theories of the time, Rekers devised treatments that treated gender-atypical children with an intricate system of rewards and punishments. “Becky,” a seven-year-old girl brought to UCLA, was diagnosed with “female sexual identity disturbance.” She liked basketball and climbing and she refused to wear dresses. She liked “rough and tumble play.” In the clinic, Becky was watched through a one-way mirror as she played in a room equipped with two tables, one of dress-up clothes, the other of toys. Each table had boy-appropriate toys at one end (football helmet, army belt), girl-appropriate toys (lipstick, baby doll, Barbie) at the other. Becky wore monitoring equipment as she played, consisting of a wristwatch-like “counter” (similar to those worn to keep score at golf) and a “bug-in-the-ear” through which she could hear the voice of her therapist talking to her from behind the mirror.

    As Becky played, she was interrupted from time to time and told to press the wrist counter if she had only played with girls’ toys since the last time she heard the doctor’s voice. Becky grew anxious to accumulate points to please her doctor. In this way, Becky was supposed to be trained to develop an aversion to masculine playthings. Other parts of Becky’s therapy consisted of having a team of four therapists come into her bedroom at home to watch, take notes on a clipboard, and time her with a stopwatch as she played with her toys. After seven months, she was declared cured, now showing “a decrease in excessive aggression and an increase in general compliance.”

    Parents who brought their children to Rekers had to agree to participate in the “curing” of them. “Kraig,” a four-year-old who participated in the UCLA Feminine Boy Project, was also monitored in the clinic’s play-observation room. Only this time, it was his mother who wore the bug-in-the-ear, listening for her behavioral cues from the folks behind the wall. While playing, “Kraig would have seen her suddenly jerk upright, and look away from him toward the one-way window,” Burke reports (based on transcripts of his case):

    His mother was being prompted, through the earphones, by the doctor. She was told to completely ignore him, because he was engaged in feminine play. Kraig would have no understanding of what was happening to his mother. On one such occasion, his distress was such that he began to scream, but his mother just looked away. His anxiety increased, and he did whatever he could to get her to respond to him, but she just looked away. She must have seemed like a stranger to have changed her behavior toward him so suddenly and for no apparent reason . . . He was described as being in a panic, alternating between sobs and “aggressing at her,” but again, when his distraught mother finally looked at him and began to respond, she stopped mid-sentence and abruptly turned away, as if he were not there. Kraig became so hysterical, and his mother so uncomfortable, that one of the clinicians had to enter and take Kraig, screaming, from the room.

    Kraig’s treatment continued in this vein. He was also put on the “token system” at home. Inappropriate, feminine behaviors earned him a red token, masculine ones, a blue token. Each red token earned him a spanking from his father. After more than two years of treatment, Kraig’s behavior had turned around. He was now described by his mother as a “rough neck,” and he no longer cared if his hair was neat or his clothes matched. But when he was eighteen, after years of being held up (under a pseudonym) by Rekers as “the poster boy for behavioral treatment of boyhood effeminacy,” Kraig attempted suicide, because he thought that he might be gay.

    I have to help pick up the pieces. Trans women and gay men who went through this, and have been terribly damaged by that.

    I don’t care a fig what Reckers did to whom, with what, or when or how, in Spain, on a Plane, in the Rain, whatever, as they were all consenting adults.

    But he tortured kids. He makes money from selling books on how to torture kids. He lies, blatantly, about the effectiveness of his methods, and shows neither remorse nor repentance.

    The harm that he has done is incalculable, his malign influence poisoning the science everywhere, and making him a lot of money in the process:

    In addition to his clinical psychology practice and expert courtroom testimony, Professor George has published well over one hundred academic journal articles and book chapters and ten books, including the Handbook of Child and Adolescent Sexual Problems (Simon & Schuster) for which he served as the editor.

    His work has been supported by fellowships, contracts, and grants exceeding one million dollars from private foundations and governmental entities, including the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health.

    Dr. Rekers has delivered many invited research presentations on child and family variables before committees of the United States Senate and House of Representatives, and has served as an invited expert for White House staff and several presidential cabinet agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services.

    He has delivered over two hundred invited lectures in universities and academic societies in dozens of countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and in Western and Eastern Europe.

    Professor George served as one of the multidisciplinary experts for the legal team that successfully defended the state of Florida’s law prohibiting adoption of children by homosexually-behaving individuals all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case Lofton v. Secretary of the Department of Children and Family Services.

    Dr. Rekers is a past recipient of the NARTH Sigmund Freud Award for his research contributions on child gender identity disorder.

    In January 2005, Pulaski County Circuit Judge Timothy White … called Rekers’ testimony “extremely suspect.” He also accused Rekers of testifying solely for promoting his “own personal agenda.”

    …

    Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Cindy Lederman … said “Dr. Rekers’ testimony was far from a neutral and unbiased recitation of the relevant scientific evidence. Dr. Rekers’ beliefs are motivated by his strong ideological and theological convictions that are not consistent with the science. Based on his testimony and demeanor at trial, the court can not consider his testimony to be credible nor worthy of forming the basis of public policy.”

    Some of the direct results of his work:

    In 1998, the couple divorced and a year later Michael had gender reassignment surgery and changed her name to Monica. After that, Barbara went to court in their home state of Kentucky and successfully got an order prohibiting Monica from contacting any of their four children because she was now living as a woman.

    But things soon got even worse for Monica. Barbara eventually remarried and she and her new husband petitioned the court to terminate all of Monica’s parental rights so that the new husband could adopt the one child out of the four who was still then a minor.

    The Kentucky trial court granted the petition after concluding that Monica becoming a woman meant that she had neglected her child and caused her grave emotional harm, necessitating the termination of her parental rights. That ruling was upheld by the Kentucky Court of Appeals in 2007.

    In 1980 Dylan Scholinski, a young transgender man then named Daphne, was incarcerated in psychiatric institutions for four years for “Gender Identity Disorder.” His memoir The Last Time I Wore A Dress shows his school reported him to psychiatrists and he was diagnosed using the Barlow Gender Motor Test and treatment including forced makeovers. In 2000, a six-year-old child was taken away from loving parents for “exacerbating a mental disorder.” The “disorder?” Aurora Lipscomb told her parents she was not a boy but was a girl, and her parents supported her decision to live as a girl. Because her parents “exacerbated” her “gender identity disorder” the court took Aurora from loving parents and put her in a household where for four years she was forced to live as a Christian boy rather than a Jewish girl.

    Try as I might, I read those words, and all my scientific objectivity vanishes. I loathe the man.

    Because I have no formal psychological training, I have to pick up the pieces, and sometimes I can’t. Sometimes I fail. And there’s another FUCKING suicide of a woman denied access to her kids when the courts give them to drug addicts and sexual abusers as long as they’re OK’d by the Fine Upstanding Baptist Minister Dr R.

    Please pardon my unladylike language. I reserve it for special occasions. This qualifies.

    Now I’m going to go read 1 Corinthians 13 again, and try to be charitable.

    You know, I’m not angry at him? I’m angry at the situation, at the injustice, at the pain. I’m angry at the enablers, the hypocrites, the liars, those who get the money rolling in by professional persecution.

    I’m even starting to feel a little compassion for Dr R. How tortured he must have been. I hope he gets help. But he can never, ever give restitution for what he’s done. Neither he, nor NARTH, nor the Fake Pediatricians, nor the TVC or whatever.

    So I better get off my posterior and see what I can do to ameliorate the situation, no? Not whinge and complain, but do something useful.

11. One also has to wonder how Dr Rekers managed to contact his travelling companion, if not via the advertisement for his services as a “travelling companion” at Rentboy.com.

    According to Dr Rekers taped testimony, he “may have” contacted his companion via Rentboy.com, but he has later denied this. He has also variously stated in writing that he only found out his companion’s profession during the holiday, and that he hired a prostitute so he could reform him – something of a contradiction.

    Again, please treat these words as suspect. I’ve really tried hard to be fair, but no objective person could trust what I have to say without fact-checking it in detail. Basically,I wouldn’t trust me!

    Now on to why I am prejudiced…..

12. The published pictures of Dr Rekers handling his own luggage merely show him to be loading and pushing them on a cart at an airport, for which he may have needed no assistance.

    Other testimony, regarding this companion’s alleged nude massage:

    Rekers allegedly named his favorite maneuver the “long stroke” — a complicated caress “across his penis, thigh… and his anus over the butt cheeks,” as the escort puts it. “Rekers liked to be rubbed down there,” he says.

    Erotic Massage, but arguably not “sexual activity” as such. And not illegal in Spain. “It depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is.” as one President said. And Dr Rekers has not commented on this allegation.

    Whether such alleged behaviour is “appropriate” or not is a matter of opinion, not fact, in law.

    The companion in question is the same age as Dr Rekers adopted son. We don’t know if there is any physical resemblance.

    Hypothetically, should a man conceive a sexual attraction to his teenage or young adult son, a responsible and moral (IMHO) course of action would be to hire a professional to help him confront such urges, either to withstand them, or if to give in, to do so with no harm to anyone, as they are all consenting adults. Should Dr Rekers have done this, it would be to his great credit, and would improve my opinion of him enormously. Given Dr Rekers sworn testimony in court about “what homosexuals are like as parents”, the question has to arise whether he was speaking from personal experience, and projecting his feelings on to homosexuals in general.

13. I urge anyone who reads my post below to bear in mind that I am prejudiced against Dr Rekers, for reasons that will be obvious in my next post. Despite my best efforts to be properly charitable and unbiased, I cannot say with an open heart that I can be objective on this issue. So my words should be treated as suspect, and assertions of fact should be checked, lest I fall into the trap of seeing what I want to see, rather than what is actually there.

    As Dr Rekers says on his website

    There was nothing inappropriate with this relationship. Professor Rekers was not involved in any illegal or sexual behavior with his travel assistant.

    Dr Rekers has been very careful in his wording here, and in the questions below, which leave neither party in danger of criminal prosecution. It’s called “getting their story straight”, and I readily believe the words to be literally and strictly true.

    Here are the four questions that I sent my travel assistant at his request two days ago, together with the answers we agreed on in our phone conversation this afternoon:

    1. Did Dr. Rekers in fact hire you to lift my luggage when necessary as a travel assistant during the trip, because I cannot do so myself since I had surgery?

    Together we agreed that I in fact hired him to lift luggage when necessary as a travel assistant during the trip, because I cannot do so himself since having surgery. We agreed that this is what my travel assistant agreed to do for pay prior to taking the trip.

    2. Did you in fact lift my luggage during the trip each time it was necessary, or did Dr Rekers lift his own luggage during the trip?

    We agreed that my travel assistant did in fact lift my luggage each time it was necessary, that I did not lift my luggage, and my travel assistant did all the lifting.

    3. Did Dr. Rekers hire you as a prostitute for the trip?

    We agreed that I hired him as a companion and to help with luggage, and that I did not hire him as a prostitute for any sexual purpose.

    4. Did Dr. Rekers spend time explaining how the Christian faith is based in love to you during the trip?

    We agreed that I explained the Christian faith to my travel assistant in conversations on several days during the trip.

    Note the careful wording, which means that the companion cannot be brought up on charges of prostitution. Any sexual activity that may have occurred was not for pre-arranged payment. And a prostitute may be legally hired, if not for any ostensibly sexual purpose.

14. Even if Rekers really HAS no same-sex longings and even if there WAS no hanky-panky on his vacation, the fact remains that this lifelong opponent of gay rights and lifelong critic of homosexuality hired a young and handsome gay male prostitute to share a room with him for ten days on a trip; those facts are not in dispute. How can that NOT raise any eyebrows among the most religious and conservative enemies of “the homosexual agenda”? How completely gullible do you have to be that the whole affair, shall we say, was completely innocuous?

15. “I am the light of the world.” Jesus.

    David Blakeslee,

    🙂

16. …another thought:

    “I am the light of the world.” Jesus.

17. It seems it is always this way…the awkward relationship…the “plausible explanation” and then the facts…

18. Rekers denies he is gay in an email to the Miami New Times Blogs:

    If today’s news story in the Miami New Times is accurate, I have been advised to retain the services of a defamation attorney in this matter, because the fact is that I am not gay and never have been.

    .

    My travel assistant called me this afternoon earnestly asking me to clarify on my website that he worked for me as a travel companion and not as a prostitute. I completely agreed with my travel assistant that it is absolutely true that I hired him and he worked for me as a travel companion and not as a prostitute. I also read to him the first sentence that has been posted on my website for several days that says, “A recent article in an alternative newspaper cleverly gave false impressions of inappropriate behavior because of its misleading innuendo, incorrectly implying that Professor George Rekers used the Rentboy website to hire a prostitute to accompany him on a recent trip.”

    .

    Two days ago a professor friend of mine recommended that I ask my travel assistant to send me an email saying what happened on the trip so I could post a statement on what we agreed on. When I called my travel assistant to ask if he would write a statement to me, he asked me to send him questions to remind him of what topics about our trip he should write to me about, which I did on May 4.

    Here are the four questions that I sent my travel assistant at his request two days ago, together with the answers we agreed on in our phone conversation this afternoon:

    .

    1. Did Dr. Rekers in fact hire you to lift my luggage when necessary as a travel assistant during the trip, because I cannot do so myself since I had surgery?

    Together we agreed that I in fact hired him to lift luggage when necessary as a travel assistant during the trip, because I cannot do so himself since having surgery. We agreed that this is what my travel assistant agreed to do for pay prior to taking the trip.

    .

    2. Did you in fact lift my luggage during the trip each time it was necessary, or did Dr Rekers lift his own luggage during the trip?

    We agreed that my travel assistant did in fact lift my luggage each time it was necessary, that I did not lift my luggage, and my travel assistant did all the lifting.

    .

    3. Did Dr. Rekers hire you as a prostitute for the trip?

    We agreed that I hired him as a companion and to help with luggage, and that I did not hire him as a prostitute for any sexual purpose.

    .

    4. Did Dr. Rekers spend time explaining how the Christian faith is based in love to you during the trip?

    We agreed that I explained the Christian faith to my travel assistant in conversations on several days during the trip.

    .

    Sincerely,

    George A. Rekers, Ph.D.

    Distinguished Professor of Neuropsychiatry and Behavioral Science Emeritus

    University of South Carolina School of Medicine

    Fellow, American Academy of Clinical Psychology

    Diplomate in Clinical Psychology, American Board of Professional Psychology

    Honestly, getting together with his escort to create the answers he likes? So then, the winner is a grossly-impaired judgement – twice. All his titles won’t help him at all. There comes a time where you shut up and hire a lawyer, that came for Rekers when he left the airport.

    …

19. Even if what Rekers says is absolutely truthful; the man has shown such poor judgement so as to ruin his own reputation from this point on. Nothing could have happened and yet the escort would out him simply considering the gay/anti-gay animus that Rekers engenders.

    So it comes down to Rekers as being either homosexual/bisexual or so cognitively impaired as to exhibit a grossly-impaired judgement. Either way he’ll never testify in a court case against gays &/or lesbians again.

    …

20. Oh, well of course very nice and soft spoken very old men (61) in poor health could not possibly be same-sex attracted or act on their attractions.

21. his “escort” reported that he is in fact gay.

    http://advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2010/05/06/Rekers_Is_Gay_Escort/

Comments are closed.