Professional issues – Page 53 – Warren Throckmorton

Did Masters and Johnson fake the gay change cases?

Lots of stuff today…
Here is something worth looking into; a new book by Thomas Maier questions the claims of Masters and Johnson that 70% of their homosexual clients changed orientation.
John Tierney’s blog points to an article in Scientific American by Maier which summarizes the topic.

Back in 1979, on Meet The Press and countless other TV appearances, Masters and Johnson touted their book, Homosexuality in Perspective—a 14-year study of more than 300 homosexual men and women—hoping to build on their groundbreaking sex studies of heterosexuals that had helped ignite America’s sexual revolution. The results seemed impressive: Of the 67 male and female patients with “homosexual dissatisfaction,” only 14 failed in the initial two-week “conversion” or “reversion” treatment. (The 12 cases of attempted “conversion” were for men and women who had always believed they were homosexual and were troubled by it, while the 55 “reversion” cases were in people who believed their homosexuality was more fleeting.) During five years of follow-up, their success rate for both groups was better than 70 percent.
But were Masters and Johnson’s claims of “conversion” in those 12 cases — nine men and three women — even true?

This is an important question given the reputation of Masters and Johnson. Numerous conversion therapy groups have referred to their work as evidence of change (e.g., this Narth paper).
There’s more:

Prior to the book’s publication, doubts arose about the validity of their case studies. Most staffers never met any of the conversion cases during the study period of 1968 through 1977, according to research I’ve done for my new book Masters of Sex. Clinic staffer Lynn Strenkofsky, who organized patient schedules during this period, says she never dealt with any conversion cases. Marshall and Peggy Shearer, perhaps the clinic’s most experienced therapy team in the early 1970s, says they never treated homosexuals and heard virtually nothing about conversion therapy.
When the clinic’s top associate, Robert Kolodny, asked to see the files and to hear the tape-recordings of these “storybook” cases, Masters refused to show them to him. Kolodny—who had never seen any conversion cases himself—began to suspect some, if not all, of the conversion cases were not entirely true. When he pressed Masters, it became ever clearer to him that these were at best composite case studies made into single ideal narratives, and at worst they were fabricated.
Eventually Kolodny approached Virginia Johnson privately to express his alarm. She, too, held similar suspicions about Masters’ conversion theory, though publicly she supported him. The prospect of public embarrassment, of being exposed as a fraud, greatly upset Johnson, a self-educated therapist who didn’t have a college degree and depended largely on her husband’s medical expertise.
With Johnson’s approval, Kolodny spoke to their publisher about a delay, but it came too late in the process. “That was a bad book,” Johnson recalled decades later. Johnson said she favored a rewriting and revision of the whole book “to fit within the existing [medical] literature,” and feared that Bill simply didn’t know what he was talking about. At worst, she said, “Bill was being creative in those days” in the compiling of the “gay conversion” case studies.

Being creative? One member of the M&J team had no first hand knowledge of the results and wanted to back away from the claims. I would say this is a significant problem.
Maier continues:

Until he died in 2001 Masters felt confident their book would be embraced eventually by the medical community, not just by purveyors of religious or political agendas. He believed the prospect of “conversion” therapy offered more hope, more freedom to patients than psychoanalysis ever could. “The criticisms are based on old concepts,” Masters replied dismissively to the press. “We’re reporting on 10 years of work with five years of follow-up—and it works.”
But despite his claims, the success of Masters’s “gay conversion” therapy have never been proved.

It will be interesting to see if any of the patients involved step forward…

When women leave men for women: Sexual fluidity

CNN reproduces an Oprah article on sexual fluidity that is of interest.
Here is the money:

Over the past several decades, scientists have struggled in fits and starts to get a handle on sexual orientation. Born or bred? Can it change during one’s lifetime?
A handful of studies in the 1990s, most of them focused on men, suggested that homosexuality is hardwired. In one study, researchers linked DNA markers in the Xq28 region of the X chromosome to gay males. But a subsequent larger study failed to replicate the results, leaving the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association to speculate that sexual orientation probably has multiple causes, including environmental, cognitive, and biological factors.
Today, however, a new line of research is beginning to approach sexual orientation as much less fixed than previously thought, especially when it comes to women. The idea that human sexuality forms a continuum has been around since 1948, when Alfred Kinsey introduced his famous seven-point scale, with zero representing complete heterosexuality, 7 signifying complete homosexuality, and bisexuality in the middle, where many of the men and women he interviewed fell.
The new buzz phrase coming out of contemporary studies is “sexual fluidity.”
“People always ask me if this research means everyone is bisexual. No, it doesn’t,” says Lisa Diamond, Ph.D, associate professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah and author of the 2008 book “Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire.”
“Fluidity represents a capacity to respond erotically in unexpected ways due to particular situations or relationships. It doesn’t appear to be something a woman can control.”
Furthermore, studies indicate that it’s more prevalent in women than in men, according to Bonnie Zylbergold, assistant editor of American Sexuality, an online magazine.
In a 2004 landmark study at Northwestern University, the results were eye-opening. During the experiment, the female subjects became sexually aroused when they viewed heterosexual as well as lesbian erotic films. This was true for both gay and straight women.
Among the male subjects, however, the straight men were turned on only by erotic films with women, the gay ones by those with men.
“We found that women’s sexual desire is less rigidly directed toward a particular sex, as compared with men’s, and it’s more changeable over time,” says the study’s senior researcher, J. Michael Bailey, Ph.D. “These findings likely represent a fundamental difference between men’s and women’s brains.”
This idea, that the libido can wander back and forth between genders, Diamond admits, may be threatening and confusing to those with conventional beliefs about sexual orientation.
But when the women she’s interviewed explain their feelings, it doesn’t sound so wild. Many of them say, for example, they are attracted to the person, and not the gender — moved by traits like kindness, intelligence, and humor, which could apply to a man or a woman.
Most of all, they long for an emotional connection. And if that comes by way of a female instead of a male, the thrill may override whatever heterosexual orientation they had.

It is so old skool to talk about sexual orientation change without bringing male-female differences into the conversation. Advocates who use females to talk about male sexuality and vice versa should be fined and sent to the penalty box. It is also old skool to talk about sexual orientation like it was one experience for all people. Just because some people experience change doesn’t mean all people can (in fact, most apparently don’t) and just because some people experience change doesn’t mean it occurs because of therapy, affect-focused or otherwise.

Reparative therapy information page

I have posted quite a few times on reparative drive theory and related matters. A reader suggested that it would be good to bring it all together on a page, and I agree. Hence, the “reparative therapy information” page is linked here and on the right side of the blog. I will add to it as I get time.
If anyone finds a post I should include, let me know. The format is a little rough right now, but I will work on that.

Scott Lively on Columbine

Ten years ago today, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and a teacher, as well as wounding 23 others before killing themselves at Columbine High School near Denver, CO. Immediately and since then, mental health professionals, journalists and numerous others have searched through the writings of Harris and Klebold, and interviewed their classmates looking for the motives behind the shootings. Immediately after the tragedy, the media reported various theories based largely upon the accounts of classmates and acquaintances. Many of those theories have been discounted by later systematic investigations.
Scott Lively spoke recently to a Republican group in Temecula, CA and, as an aside, told the crowd his version of Columbine. While talking about the influence of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche on the Nazis, Lively tied Hitler, Nietzsche and homosexuality together as the culprit behind the Columbine shootings. At about 1:33 into Part 7 of his speech before the GOP group, Lively said,

They [the Nazis] had Hitler youth meetings around Nietzsche’s writings. You know the kids that killed, who was it, one of the school killers, one of the first ones. He was reading Thus Spake Zarathustra [by Nietzsche] when he committed those murders and he did it…didn’t he do it on Adolf Hitler’s birthday? April 20th, right? Yeah, the Columbine shooting, that was the same spirit that existed in Germany. It was Nietzsche’s writings, and it was Hitler’s birthday and it was associated with homosexuality. That was one of the first stories that came out, it got suppressed immediately that the guys that did this were involved in some kind of homosexual connection. That got squelched. As all this stuff gets squelched.

I asked Mr. Lively for a source for these claims and he had no exact reference, although he thought it might have come from a documentary he saw. I searched for any references connecting Klebold and/or Harris to Thus Spake Zarathustra but found nothing specific. Journals and writings of Eric Harris did have a very Nietzschean quality and according to Langman, Harris did a school report on Nietzsche. However, it is not clear to school violence expert, Dr. Peter Langman that Harris ever read Thus Spake Zarathustra. In his paper, “Influences on the Ideology of Eric Harris,” Dr. Langman said

This article explores the parallels between Eric Harris’s ideas and those of people he admired: Adolf Hitler, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Hobbes, and probably Charles Manson. We know that Hitler fascinated Eric from his choosing to write about him for a school research paper, the references to Hitler and the Nazis in Eric’s journal (along with swastikas and SS insignia), and the testimony of Eric’s friends that he idolized or worshipped Hitler.
We know nothing specific about Eric’s interest in Hobbes and Nietzsche. All we have is his statement, “I just love Hobbes and Nietzsche.” What he read of their works remains unknown. Eric did take a philosophy class at school that may have introduced him to Hobbes and Nietzsche. He may also have done significant reading on his own. Whether or not Eric had an accurate understanding of Hobbes and Nietzsche is not relevant here. Eric would have read these philosophers from his own perspective, perhaps already knowing that he would commit mass murder, and looking for justification or validation of his worldview and intentions.

In any event, I could find no evidence that Harris was reading it just before or when he was shooting his peers.
The homosexuality connection is even more tortured. It is true that very quickly after the shootings, some classmates noted that gay slurs had been made toward both Klebold and Harris. However, no credible source has found any verification of the hunch. Langman deals with this rumor in some detail:

More significantly, there were rumors that Eric and Dylan, along with members of the Trench Coat Mafia, were gay. When reporter Dave Cullen investigated this, however, he found that “the stories were generally vague, secondhand, and never from students who personally knew members of the group.”16 A student stated that Eric and Dylan “would touch each other in school. People have seen them. One of them went up to a kid I know and did that” (he demonstrated grabbing his crotch). When asked if that were Eric or Dylan, the student said, “I don’t know,” adding that it was “people in the group.” Thus, behavior that was engaged in by members of the Trench Coat Mafia was attributed to Eric and Dylan because they wore trench coats.
There are, in fact, reports in the JCSO material of Trench Coat Mafia members grabbing crotches in front of people, and of males kissing each other publicly, but none that Eric or Dylan engaged in such behavior. Just to add to the confusion, one of the boys in the Trench Coat Mafia who engaged in this provocative sexual behavior was named Eric. This may be the source of some of the confusion – there were two boys named Eric who wore trench coats. One of them engaged in public homosexual behavior. The other one – Eric Harris – did not.
The same student who was just quoted also said that the Trench Coat Mafia kids were made fun of, and lumped Eric and Dylan in with the TCM: “They [Eric and Dylan] were in the Trench Coat Mafia, and that’s something around our school that we consider freaks.” He said that as a result, Eric and Dylan were picked on. Yet, Eric and Dylan were not in the Trench Coat Mafia, and this student could not talk about them apart from that identification. He said Eric and Dylan were gay and that they were picked on for being in the TCM, but when pushed on the issue, could not be sure he even knew which kids he was talking about.
Similarly, Time Magazine reported the following:

“Columbine is a clean, good place except for those rejects,” Todd says of Klebold and Harris and their friends. “Most kids didn’t want them there. They were into witchcraft. They were into voodoo dolls. Sure, we teased them. But what do you expect with kids who come to school with weird hairdos and horns on their hats? … They’re a bunch of homos, grabbing each other’s private parts. If you want to get rid of someone, usually you tease ’em. So the whole school would call them homos.”19

This passage could easily be used to support the idea that Eric and Dylan were persecuted, but that would be a mistake. Who is this student talking about? The reporters’ comment says he was talking about “Klebold and Harris and their friends,” but nothing that the student said applied to Eric and Dylan. They were not into witchcraft. They were not into voodoo. They did not have weird hairdos. They did not wear horns on their hats. They did not grab each other’s crotches. There were kids at Columbine who did these things, but Eric and Dylan were not among them. Thus, we again see a student apparently talking about Eric and Dylan, but confusing them with all the students who were considered misfits, outcasts, or members of the Trench Coat Mafia.

I reproduced that long section because the context is necessary to understand why the hypothetical connection of homosexuality (or the spirit of it) to the Columbine tragedy is spurious. There is also doubt about the relevance of Hitler’s birthday; April 19th may have been the original date. Nietzsche’s sexuality is in doubt as well. However, even if every component of the conspiracy theory about Klebold and Harris was accurate, it would not prove that they were linked in some manner.
In any case, there is no credible evidence that either Harris or Klebold were homosexual. The best evidence points to mental illness being behind the violence at Columbine. The stories about homosexuality have been squelched, not because they would betray a dark secret about homosexuality and fascism, but because investigation finds no basis for them.

Ugandan gay group responds to recent campaign against homosexuality

What goes around comes around. In Uganda, the same kind of either-or arguments are being offered about the origins of homosexuality in order to gain political advantage. It is easy to see why same-sex attracted people would gravitate toward authorities who say their attractions are inborn. One does not need to propose a plot of cosmic proportions to understand that homosexuals in Uganda are afraid for their safety and counter the misinformation of the recent American visitors with inborn theories.

Truth is, in any given case, we don’t know. If the last sentence of the article is an accurate representation of Mr. Mukasa’s views, there are many doing this research who would agree: “Mukasa however says homosexuals are normal people born like any child but develop a natural attraction to the same sex.”

I just posted a video of Stephen Langa misleading his audience with Richard Cohen’s book. Today an article from UGPulse describes the views of Victor Mukasa, speaking in protest of the recent campaign against homosexuality. Although his statements about origins may or may not be completely accurate for any or all same-sex attracted people, the political environment there does not give him much room for nuance — another casualty of the American visitation.

Let’s hope there are no more casualties.

UPDATE: An AP writer has a story here with the Health Minister Buturo saying he wants to help gays be rehabilitated.

UPDATE #2: A popular Catholic priest and Gospel singer has been outed by the anti-crusaders who hosted the conference where Don Schmierer, Caleb Brundidge and Scott Lively spoke. The priest denies the accusation.