Category: Religion and sexuality

Sexual identity therapy: An interview with Dr. Nicholas Cummings

This is a draft of an article that is looking for a home. Dr. Cummings related his experience in private practice working personally with an estimated 2,000 plus gay clients. The HMO (Kaiser-Permanente) where he was Chief of Mental Health used their experience with between 15,000 and 16,000 gay and lesbian people to form policies that were implemented while he was there. He discloses this information here in print for the first time. Having interviewed Dr. Cummings, I understand better why he is an enthusiastic supporter of our sexual identity therapy framework.

An excerpt:

Therapists at Kaiser developed means to help clients pursue their values and desires in an informed manner. “Over time, we were able to identify within 4 or 5 sessions which clients were likely to pursue change and which ones were not.” Cummings learned that clients most likely to change attractions either had a strong, internalized value system which contradicted homosexual behavior or they developed a homosexual adaptation through a childhood of abusive life experiences. Those with no prior heterosexual inclination and those with a longer history of same-sex attraction were not as likely to develop heterosexual adaptation.

NOTE: 3/8/07 – Inexplicably, a NARTH writer has plagiarized my interview with Dr. Cummings. It is here on the NARTH site and contains quotes that are verbatim from my article.

3/9/07 – Dave Pruden has written to say that the article has been removed. No explanation was given. Dave apologized for this but he said he does not know who is responsible.

Church coalition files FCC complaint over suicide of Brent Dugan

David Blakeslee posted in January about Reverend Brent Dugan’s tragic death in Mercer, PA hotel room. Now, a coalition of Pittsburgh area church denominations have filed a complaint with the FCC surrounding the reporting of KDKA – Pittsburgh.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette posted a complete copy of the letter filed by the “Christian Associates, a regional ecumenical association representing 15 Christian denominations.”

I will be adding background and information on this matter as I find it. Local paper, the Sharon Herald filed this report. In November of 2006, the Post-Gazette provided some depth on the KDKA report. The Post-Gazette posted a report of Reverend Dugan’s death on November 4, the same day Ted Haggard was dismissed from New Life Church.

Has the real Donnie Davies finally stood up?

This email purports to speak for the “real” Donnie Davies (is it you Joey?) with the low down on the whole gig.

Thanks to “arlopop,” a commenter here for this link.

UPDATE: 2/9/07 – Early today, this YouTube video showed up with a “hot tub interview” of the Donnie Davies crew. I am not enbedding it here because it gets a little risque in a place or two. So watch at your own risk.

If you don’t want to watch it, essentially you have YouTube user “bsnation” providing webcam interviews of those who are purported to be the people behind the Donnie Davies episode. They were surprised anyone took it seriously and intended it as a lampoon of groups like Westboro Baptist. I will admit I was not sure it was a hoax at first which is somewhat unsettling.

The folks at Brainfood (or wherever) continued the hoax well past the initial reveal. “Donnie” continued to correspond with me up until a couple of days ago, once writing:

Hi Warren. Have you been following Ted Haggard’s recovery? Its a rather amazing demonstration of reparative therapy, don’t you agree? What do you know about Tim Ralph?

And then this from Joey Oglesby in a Feb 4th email on his feelings about Donnie Davies:

As for Mister Davies, if he isn’t real, it would appear to me to be taking a shot at those who preach hate in the name of Christianity. And those that would have audacity to protest a fallen soldiers funeral or a funeral of a mass killing in an Amish community.

CNN segment on Ted Haggard

I may add some additional comments later but I wanted to post the transcript of the Anderson Cooper CNN segment (scroll a bit over half way down the page) this evening regarding Ted Haggard’s rehabilitation.

The report was quite interesting with several points worthy of discussion. I felt Alan’s tone and responses were reasonable and quite consistent with the sexual identity paradigm. The stance of the Human Rights Campaign representative was less so in my judgment.

COOPER: Mark, you know people who have been through this kind of therapy. Some call it reparative therapy. In your experience, does it work?

SHIELDS: Again, absolutely not. Every bit of evidence we’ve seen is that it does not work. And at the Human Rights Campaign, we believe the only choice there is about being gay is, you know, whether or not you choose to be open and honest about it, if that’s how you were born.

I think that people have the choice that they can try and hide that or try and deny that piece of themselves, but ultimately, that’s not healthy for them or for their loved ones.

COOPER: But Mark, if someone is not happy being gay, as Alan clearly wasn’t as a child, what’s wrong with him trying to change?

SHIELDS: You know, again, the mental health professionals tell us that, in trying to change or fix something that’s not broken, you can actually cause a great deal of harm to yourself and ultimately to those that are around you.

You know, I wonder if Ted Haggard had been told as a child that it was OK to be gay and that he could have a rich, full life, if his life story wouldn’t have been less painful and contorted

Here is an example where the Shidlo and Schroeder study of possible harm relating to reorientation is referred to but not cited. Also, the real picture regarding research on etiology of sexual orientation and outcomes of sexual identity integration efforts is of course much more complex than depicted by Mr. Shields.

Another interesting point was the agreement between Alan and Mr. Shields that being gay does not preclude happiness. When I said this in the October, 2006 LA Times article regarding the NARTH controversies, I was the target of some conservative fire. I wonder how things will go for Alan.

Are love and sex bidirectional?

Some interesting recent articles online from the APA Monitor. Specifically this one detailing the interface of romance and sexual attractions brings into mainstream discussion research and theorizing very relevant to the definition of ex-gays and change.

Daryl Bem briefly anticipated some applications of this work in July, 2005 on his website.

The subtitle of the APA article, “Why romantic love isn’t limited by a person’s sexual orientation” does not convey the bidirectional nature of Diamond’s views. It could have been better worded: “Why romantic love isn’t limited by a person’s sexual orientation and vice versa” According to Diamond’s 2003 scholarly article, romance can be a pathway to sexual interest as well as flow the other direction.

The first chapter in the book I am working on more fully expands this line of research and theory. I note that many same-sex attracted men (ala Jim in A Valued Life) seem more generally attracted to men but are heterosexually responsive only to their wives. Over the years, I have seen a handful of women who also demonstrate this sexual pattern. Such a framework would actually address many disconnects in we have discussed this issue over the years (Side one – “but you really are gay”; side two – “but I love and am attracted to my wife and that is a real change”).

Seems to me this perspective could accommodate all five vision-impaired men and their understanding of the elephant. Change might happen and not happen all at the same time to different degrees for different people. Men and women clearly differ. Men, in general, are probably less likely to show rapid or permanent change in general erotic attractions (but some men appear to take the romance road to heteroeros); whereas women appear to be more flexible. However, this cannot be viewed prescriptively (“just find a good woman/man and you’ll be fine”) since the interactions of the sexual attractions and romantic attachment systems are complex and cannot be reduced to a formula. In other words, you Can’t Force Love.

The development of the sexual identity therapy framework has been informed in part, for me at least, by this line of thought and theorizing. I think sexual identity ministries could find much here that would be beneficial.