Swaim is unemployed and lives with his parents in Orange County, Calif., where his father is a pastor of the Evangelical Friends Church of the Southwest. But that is far different, he noted, from transforming instinctive sexual desires, something never proved in scientific studies.Ĭameron Michael Swaim, 20, said he is in the early stages of his struggle to overcome homosexual desires. Clearly, he said, reparative therapy helps some people alter sexual behavior. Marc Breedlove, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Michigan State University, said there was overwhelming evidence that sexual orientation is affected by both biology and environment. They also point out that the failures of such therapy are seldom reported. Then this summer, the ex-gay world was convulsed when Alan Chambers, the president of Exodus International, the largest Christian ministry for people fighting same-sex attraction, said he did not believe anyone could be rid of homosexual desires. Spitzer, publicly repudiated as invalid his own 2001 study suggesting that some people could change their sexual orientation the study had been widely cited by defenders of the therapy. Reparative therapy suffered two other major setbacks this year. Major mental health associations say teenagers who are pushed into therapy by conservative parents may feel guilt and despair when their inner impulses do not change. (While some women also struggle with sexual identity, the ex-gay movement is virtually all male.) Confronting these psychic wounds, they assert, can bring change in sexual desire, if not necessarily a total “cure.” The theories, which have also been adopted by conservative religious opponents of gay marriage, hold that male homosexuality emerges from family dynamics - often a distant father and an overbearing mother - or from early sexual abuse. Whether they have gone through formal reparative therapy, most ex-gays agree with its tenets, even as they are rejected by mainstream scientists. Some choose celibacy as an improvement over what they regard as a sinful gay life. Some are trying to save heterosexual marriages.
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Many ex-gays guard their secret but quietly meet in support groups around the country, sharing ideas on how to avoid temptations or, perhaps, broach their past with a female date. Bitzer, who plans to seek a doctorate in psychology and become a therapist himself.
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“I found that I couldn’t just say ‘I’m gay’ and live that way,” said Mr. 1, that he went public and became a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the law as unconstitutional.
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Signing the measure, Governor Brown repeated the view of the psychiatric establishment and medical groups, saying, “This bill bans nonscientific ‘therapies’ that have driven young people to depression and suicide,” adding that the practices “will now be relegated to the dustbin of quackery.”īut many ex-gays have continued to seek help from such therapists and men’s retreats, saying their own experience is proof enough that the treatment can work.Īaron Bitzer, 35, was so angered by the California ban, which will take effect on Jan. Jerry Brown signed a law banning use of widely discredited sexual “conversion therapies” for minors - an assault on their own validity, some ex-gay men feel. Here in California, their sense of siege grew more intense in September when Gov. Smith is one of thousands of men across the country, often known as “ex-gay,” who believe they have changed their most basic sexual desires through some combination of therapy and prayer - something most scientists say has never been proved possible and is likely an illusion.Įx-gay men are often closeted, fearing ridicule from gay advocates who accuse them of self-deception and, at the same time, fearing rejection by their church communities as tainted oddities. “In my 50s, for the first time, I can look at a woman and say ‘she’s really hot.’ ” Smith said in an interview at the house in Bakersfield, Calif., he shares with his second wife, who married him eight years ago knowing his history. He spent 17 years in a doomed marriage while battling his urges all day, he said, and dreaming about them all night.īut in recent years, as he probed his childhood in counseling and at men’s weekend retreats with names like People Can Change and Journey Into Manhood, “my homosexual feelings have nearly vanished,” Mr. Smith, 58, who says he believes homosexual behavior is wrong on religious grounds, tried to tough it out. LOS ANGELES - For most of his life, Blake Smith said, “every inch of my body craved male sexual contact.”