Gay Studies: Controversy, Not Credibility

By Jennifer L. Pozner, Extra!. Posted October 10, 2001.

Thousands of scientific studies are conducted every year, but only a fraction of these ever see newsprint. Even fewer dominate the news cycle for weeks, transform researchers into culture war commentators and move the public debate.

At the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting on May 9, two unpublished, non-peer-reviewed studies offered opposing reports about the effectiveness and potential safety risks of "reparative therapy" to "convert" lesbians and gay men to heterosexuality, a practice long-denounced as unethical and futile by the APA and most mental health professionals.

In one presentation, titled "200 Subjects Who Claim to Have Changed Their Sexual Orientation from Homosexual to Heterosexual," Columbia professor Robert Spitzer interviewed people who said they had successfully undergone conversion therapy, and reported that 66 percent of these men and 44 percent of the women had indeed achieved "good heterosexual functioning." Spitzer was involved in the APA's 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.

Spitzer said the majority of his subjects were "highly motivated" to change, understandable since they were referred to him primarily by religious right "ex-gay ministries" like Exodus International, who only offered him people they saw as success stories.

Of Spitzer's subjects, only 42 percent of men and 46 percent of women rated themselves as "exclusively homosexual" before they sought therapy to diminish gay feelings. While some might therefore refer to the majority of the subjects as bisexual rather than gay, Spitzer said he did not include a category for bisexuality in his study "because there's no accepted definition of what bisexuality is."

After therapy, conducted prior to the study, 54 percent of Spitzer's female subjects and just 17 percent of men rated themselves as "exclusively heterosexual" -- a remarkably low rate for a sample of possibly bisexual people self-selected for believing they had changed from gay to straight.

Another presentation, by New York psychotherapists Ariel Shidlo and Michael Schroeder, stood in stark contrast: Of 202 randomly recruited subjects who had tried to change their sexual orientation through therapy, 88 percent failed completely, while 9 percent considered themselves successful but were celibate or still struggling with same-sex behavioral "slips"; only six people (3 percent) were actually successful.

Additionally, Shidlo and Schroeder found that a great number of their subjects suffered "significant harm" due to instances in which reparative therapists appeared "not to be practicing in a manner consistent with the APA Ethics Code" -- encouraging patients to remember childhood abuse as the "cause" of their homosexuality when no such abuse occurred; insisting that lesbians and gays can never live happy, healthy or monogamous lives; or practicing coercion (for example, students at religious universities were sometimes required to attend conversion therapy in order to graduate or receive financial aid).

Guess which study got journalistic top-billing and which was given short-shrift?

"Smoldering Controversy"

The day before the APA conference, an Associated Press (5/8/01) story included a provocative lead -- "An explosive new study says some highly motivated gay people can turn straight" -- but failed to mention that research to be presented at the same symposium suggested the opposite.

One outlet after another raced to report Spitzer's contention that "some people can change from gay to straight, and we ought to acknowledge that." (CBS Radio, 5/9/01) -- usually alongside sharp responses from activists like the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's David Elliot, who called the study "snake oil, not science" (New York Times, 5/9/01).

Outlets stoked a ratings-grabbing "smoldering controversy" (New Orleans Times-Picayune, 5/10/01) with sensationalized language about the likelihood of gays "switching sides" (Time, 5/21/01) "if they really want to" (AP, 5/8/01). "I hope you're bracing yourself," a CNN interviewer told Spitzer the day he presented his study (5/9/01), "because already it is the buzz of our newsroom." A typical front-page Boston Herald story (5/9/01) framed the study as "reigniting the fiery debate about whether a 'cure' exists for homosexuality."

Though some reporters discussed the gay change theory in terms of pathology ("Gays Have Mental Illness and Can Be Cured, Doctor Says," London Daily Telegraph, 5/10/01), many outlets were suitably skeptical, noting that Spitzer's peers dismissed the study as "lacking in scientific rigor" because "there was no control group, no physiological testing or evidence of long-term success" (San Francisco Chronicle, 5/13/01). Time's Jeffrey Kluger (5/21/01) called Spitzer's sample biased and his standards "decidedly subjective."

Yet aside from one excellent, in-depth interview buried on Newsweek's website (5/10/01), the most relevant criticism, the Shidlo/Schroeder study directly contesting the efficacy and safety of reparative therapy, was generally ignored or mentioned only in passing, without quoting -- or sometimes even naming -- the researchers.

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