Radiolab - UnErased: Dr. Davison and the Gay Cure

Episode Date: November 22, 2018

Today on Radiolab, we're playing part of a series that Jad worked on called UnErased: The history of conversion therapy in America. The episode we're playing today, the third in the series, is one of the rarest stories of all: a man who publicly experiences a profound change of heart. This is a profile of one of the gods of psychotherapy, who through a reckoning with his own work (oddly enough in the pages of Playboy magazine), becomes the first domino to fall in science’s ultimate disowning of the “gay cure.” UnErased is a series with Focus Features, Stitcher and Limina House in conjunction with the feature film, BOY ERASED. Special thanks go out to the folks at Anonymous Content for their support of UnErased.  If you want to hear the whole series, you can find UnErased in all the usual podcast places.  Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate. 

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. See?

See? Yeah. Hey, Robert. Yes. Woken from a long and desperate slumber, Robert Crillwich opens his left eye, then his right, alerted to the presence of gentlemen. Hey, Robert. Over here.

Okay. That's you. I have a thing I would like to share with you. and then by extension, the people out there. What would you like to share? Something you've been mulling? Yeah, so I recently completed a sort of a mini-series in conjunction with a film that's now out in the world

called Boy Erased for a project that we called Unerraceed. Which people can hear. Yeah, put it out four episodes. It's out there in the world, in the wild, on iTunes, Spotify, all the places. And I want to play one of the four today because I think it's just, I think that's something. you'd probably say, I've heard them as it happens.

Yes. Here's the things that sort of like that sort of I found sort of just about the third one. That's our first one. Here's a really important moment in American history. I guess you'd have to say in American cultural history. Yeah. And it almost feels like a single individual walks into one room and says something startling to a group of very important people because of an accidental moment

that he just happened to be over here a talk in a scholarly conversation. So by a crazy quilt of serendipity, enormous changes come. Now, this may be oversimplifying it, and I'm sure there's a lot else going on deeper and shallower rhythms, but the changes come almost by accident

because someone misses a train. Yeah, yeah, that's a pretty good tease. So there you go. There you go. Okay. So can we play? it? Yeah, let's play it. This is Unerased, a new podcast that reveals the hidden history of conversion therapy in America.

I'm Chad Aboumrod. This is episode three. Let's start this episode by talking about one of the great successes in psychology. If you're living with a mental health problem, it can be hard to know which way to turn or what to do to feel better. It's called CBT. Cognitive behavioral therapy. You hear about it sometimes in the news around treatments for PTSD. Like suppose a soul, is triggered by a loud sound. Well, what the therapist will sometimes do is take that same sound, play it for the person, over and over, but under less and less stressful circumstances, until gradually over time the sound gets less stressful.

CBT focuses on goals and focuses mostly on the present day and things that are affecting you in your life now. These kind of techniques can help people with gambling addiction, stop gambling. People who smoke, stop smoking. It is a hugely important wave in psychotherapy. It's often called the second wave. Freud was the first. This is the second.

And what follows is a story about one of the grand poobas of this second wave and a grand awakening that he had. It kind of blew up the world. Okay, maybe that's overstating it. But I don't know. I don't know. So start from all you know about Jerry. So Jerry is a guy.

Case in point, this guy. This is David Tisler. We bumped into him digging through some archives at the Association for Behavior and Cognitive Therapy Central Office. My colleague, Shima Olii and him were hunting around for some tapes. And while they were, he sort of offhandly mentioned that, like, yeah, Jerry, oh, he's trained practically everybody in the field. We have this thing called, there's this river tree. And it basically plots the several different people from whom almost every single, contemporary

psychologist came from. Jerry's one of the six. He's a guy because how many people own their careers to him. You might call him one of the six cardinal bishops of contemporary psychology.

You know, my name is Sigmund Freud. It's Gerald, G-E-R-A-L-D, middle initial C, last name, Davis, and D-A-V-I-S-O-N, professor of psychology, University of Southern California. Jerry grew up in the 1940s.

Orthodox Jewish household. Playing stickball on the streets of Boston at a time when the streets were pretty empty because of the war. I was a good little boy and didn't get into trouble and, you know. Says he was kind of a quiet kid. It wasn't a particularly cheerful child, I would say.

Analytical, watchful. Anyhow, Jerry eventually finds himself one day working in a hands. ham factory. In a ham? Do you say like ham and like ham and eggs? Wow.

Okay. Kind of a weird place for a Jewish kid to be, but there he was. So I had a job in the graveyard shift that would start like at midnight and go until 8 a.m. One day he is at the ham factory or maybe on his way to the ham factory board. What was there to do? So I was reading. Somehow I settled on Freud's introductory lectures at Clark University.

that he gave in the early 20th century. So he's reading Freud in the ham factory, reading Freud's lectures, and something about it hooks him, but also horrifies him? This book made a profound impact on me. I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief

to my neurotic patients. Okay, so this is Freud that you're hearing right now. Don't know what the hell he's saying. Apparently this is the only recording of him that exists. He's talking about the unconscious and kind of make that word out. And Jerry says the whole idea that you could like peel back the layers of a human psyche. It was absolutely almost voyeuristically fascinating. At the same time, he says, he felt like some of the things Freud was saying.

Which is kind of weird. How can Freud say if you dream of a train going into a tunnel, you're really dreaming of having sex with your mother. Anyhow, something about the book both intrigued and enraged him enough that he goes to Stanford and then Stony Brook and to make a long story short, ends up standing at exactly the right place where many streams converge to create the first real upending of Freud. The behavioral therapy revolution. Previously, it had been all about dreams and the subconscious. Now it was scientific. It was about experiments.

And, you know, the basic question. How do you sit with a suffering human being? And help them. How do you make someone happier, less anxious, let suppressed? Do you remember the first patients you started seeing? Yeah. It was the so-called Yavis, you know, Yavis, Y, V, B-I-S, it's another acronym called, Young, young, I want the A-Stand for, able or attractive.

The Yavis patient, it's the patient who is. We're looking it up for you. It is, it is a term psychotherapy that describe the perfect, young, attractive, verbal, intelligent, and successful. That's it. You got it. So, you know, early on, he says he saw a lot of people who were your classic. He's a garden variety of neurotics, which is not a very complimentary term, but... He says that is what they used to call him.

But the whole reason we're telling you this story is that in that initial batch of patients, Jerry says, he began to see, like, fairly frequently these young men walk in, they were mostly young men, who complained that they were sexually attracted to other men, and they really wished they weren't. That's right. He says, he can't remember how many exactly walked in, maybe somewhere between four and a dozen, I'm trying to think of, they all came, and I supervised some cases in the training clinic at Stony Brook. They all came because they weren't happy and they wanted to change. They wanted you to turn them from gay to straight.

Yeah, yeah. And not wanting to impose my heterosexual values on them. Some would say my heterosexist values on them. I would check it out with them. Can you tell me a little bit about what your living situation? like you social life and whatnot, friends and that sort of thing. I've got an apartment off campus. I look by myself.

And in fact, the film... ...by yourself last year, where I really role-played myself. I wasn't acting, but we did have a graduate student play the role of a troubled homosexual young man who wanted to change. You'll see in that film a pretty reasonable rendition. Have you ever previously been to a therapist?

No. You ever thought I'm going to you before? Jerry says that the film that he made, which you're hearing, is sort of a composite of all the cases that he saw of this kind. And what you see in the film is Hymns in a suit sitting in one chair, a couple feet away from him as a young man with big 70s hair, about the same age. I'm kind of having trouble. And the guy explains that he...

That he's having trouble concentrating. Yeah, I'm having a lot of trouble getting down to work. It turned out that he was recently... frightened by an intensification of his long-standing attraction to men. Jerry says initially, he had no idea what to do with these cases. They were anxious, very depressed. These were folks who, the kind of people could, you know, commit suicide. He says he felt like he just had to help.

That's what I was taught. That's what I was taught. And so, in the film... You know, after maybe, I don't know, 15 minutes. Jerry says to the guy. I'd like to outline for you a procedure. Now, before we actually get into that procedure,

just a little bit of context is necessary. I know that inside now I'm sick. I'm not sick just sexually. I'm sick in a lot of ways. At the time, Jerry was not the only therapist in this situation. There were a lot of therapists all around the country trying to, quote, help their gay patients. No sexuality.

is in fact the mental illness. Anything that we can do to prevent future generations from suffering this affliction must be done. The overall approach certainly did not start with me. There were other people who were doing what was called behavior therapy with gaze. Most of it was aversion therapy. A terrible file of Spanish comes from his body. The odor is so strong.

Which was applying electric shocks when they saw picture. saw pictures of same-sex people who are making them nauseated with injections. He bombed again and again all over everything. Jerry remembers one of the leading aversion therapists coming to Stony Brook where he was training at the time to give a lecture. The guy showed 16-millimeter films of how it was done.

The film showed researchers hooking up gay men to electrodes. So their fingers, their forearms. Show them pictures of men. Naked men. And then they would shock them. Hirting them, inflicting physical pain. They'd then show them another slide of a naked gay man, do it again.

So he comes to associate with anxiety and pain. This bothered me just personally. This had this, it bought the idea of intentionally inflicting physical pain on other people. I just worried about it. It was cringe-worthy. Interestingly, Jerry doesn't fault the researchers who administered those shocks. Picture, they were like dentists before Novakane. You know, pulling a tooth, I'm old enough to remember what going to the dentist was like to get a filling or getting a tooth pulled before there was novocaine.

Is that the right analogy, though? I mean, if your tooth hurts, you need to have it pulled. You don't need to have homosexuality pulled out of you. You may not think so. But if you're gay in the 1960s, Most Americans are repelled by the mere notion of homosexuality, and you're being haunted and discriminated against. The CBS News survey shows that two out of three Americans look upon homosexuals

with disgust, discomfort, or fear. I'm being told that you're an evil person, and you're disgusting. These people need help. And so what Feldman was trying to do... Feldman was a leading aversion therapist. He was the guy that showed that film. He was doing the best that he could. could, given what was available knowledge.

You think they were just trying to help the patient. Yeah, yeah. That's why I don't demonize him. In any case, as Jerry is sitting there in the back of the room watching this guy film and show this film of people being tortured, he says, he just kept thinking, geez, do we have to do it this way? But people were saying, well, but it works. And that's what the literature was telling us. but I was thinking, well, are there other ways to do it?

And so what Jerry decided to do was take the basic idea of aversion therapy and flip it. So what am I supposed to do now? I'm supposed to do. Well, I'd like you to follow me if you can what I want to say now. And this is what you see in the film. He basically tells the patient, here's what I want you to do. Grab a copy of Playboy magazine. Okay, you could probably get hold of a copy of Playboy. Not too much trouble.

You know, go to the newsstand or something. You know, go to the newsstand, get a copy. Playboy was what I thought of as a source of material of attractive women. Then he says, when you get back home. Get yourself aroused in whatever way you're accustomed to. Think about a man. Think about his body. You start masturbating with your homosexual image.

Now there comes a point. You know, the inevitable point. At that point of inevitability, switch over to the female picture. Have your climax. Okay. and, you know. The basic idea was, instead of shocking people into hating their gay thoughts, he would gently encourage them to take their positive gay thoughts

and map them onto a different body. I think the technical term was orgasmic reorientation. And in the video, apparently, it seems to work. In the video, Jerry checks in with him about 10 times, and the guy tells him at first, it was really hard for him to finish the deal. while looking at female pictures, but then it got easier and easier

until finally after about 10 of these sessions. I really feel like I'm really getting into it now. What happened was every time I masturbated, I found now that I can go straight through without any trouble. You know what? Do you like? Do you like what's happening?

I think the thing I like most is I now see some direction. I feel myself moving towards something as opposed to not knowing which way I was going to go. And I think that's a good feeling. Okay, setting aside for a moment, the question of whether this therapy actually worked. I think you can guess the answer to that, and it is not the point of the story.

What happens next is that this therapy takes on an entirely surprising and consequential life of its own. And that's after the break. I'm Chad I'm Um-Rod Unerased. On Radio Lab. We'll continue in just a moment. This is Katie from Big Sky, Montana. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.s.

I'm Chad, I'm Ron. Hi, I'm Robert Krollwitch. This is Radio Lab. Yeah, we're listening to a story from a series I produced called Unerased. And let's get back now to the story of Dr. Jerry Davidson and The Gay Cure. It is in 1966, 67. Jerry has pioneered this. new kind of conversion therapy called orgasmic reorientation. He's made a video about it. Shortly after making this video, Jerry found himself reading the very magazine implicated in his therapy. Naturally reading it just for the articles, as they say. And I was reading the Playboy

Forum. That's the section in the magazine where readers write letters, talk about stuff, voice concerns. And in the forum, this would have been around 1966 or 67, there were people writing in troubled by their homosexuality. Here's one we found. When I was in the hospital, the doctor told me there were very few cures for cases like mine, and I should try to adjust my condition. Well, being a card-carrying behavior therapist, I wrote a letter. You heard a letter to Playboy.

It's crazy, isn't it? And I said, actually, there are new procedures for helping gay men become less gay. It comes from behavior therapy, and I don't know what else I wrote. Well, they printed it. What ensued in the Playboy Forum over the course of many issues, many years, in fact, was a vigorous back and forth. Jerry's letter prompts a series of other letters, some positive, some negative, one in particular which calls out aversion therapy as this cruel thing, which then causes one of the world's leading aversion therapists, a guy by the name of David Barlow, to jump in and defend himself. He writes, not torturous or the Inquisition, rather methods derived from experimental laboratories

and carefully applied to consenting human beings to relieve some suffering. That letter prompts a famous gay activist, Frank Kameney, to jump in with his own response. He writes, I find the August Playboy Forum letter of David H. Barlow offensive and illustrative, not only of the failures of psychology and psychiatry in their approach to homosexuality, but also of the dangers of human engineering. Here's a weird fact, Camany's letter was titled Gay is Good, and just a few years later, post Stonewall, Gay is good.

That phrase? Gay is proud. Gay is proud. It would become the slogan of the entire gay rights movement. And this was maybe the first time that that phrase was used. In the pages of Playboy. Everyone raves about how interactive the, Internet is people forget how interactive Playboy magazine was.

Okay, so this is a little bit of a digression, but I think it's one so worth taking. That's James Peterson. I was senior staff writer slash senior editor for Playboy magazine. He worked to Playboy from 1973 to 2003. He's sort of the institutional memory of the old Playboy, Last Man Standing, kind of. James reminds you. in me, actually the truth is I never even knew this to begin with, that Hugh Hefner's intent with Playboy wasn't just to show naked ladies. He had a whole philosophy that he actually spelled out in great detail.

I call it the term paper that changed America. When Hefner was an undergraduate, the first Kinsey report on male sexuality came out. This research has been possible because of tens of thousands of people had. have cooperated. And it was a bolt from the blue. It changed Hefner's life. It came out, I think, 1948, and it described the range of male sexuality without judgment.

Kinsey described males on a range of one to five from strictly heterosexual to strictly homosexual, but in the middle where something like 35% of American men had had a homosexual experience in their adolescence or early adulthood. So the straight jacket was released. And what struck Hefner... This to me is the value of Kinsey

that indicated for the first time statistically the great disparity. Was this dissonance... ...that existed between our professed beliefs and the actual actions of... of society. Between sex laws versus what people were actually doing. This is one good reason for questioning some of the old morality. And so when Hefner started Playboy, along with the magazine and Playmates,

and along with all of the televised parties from the Playboy Mansion, along with all that, James says he wrote this constant stream of essays. Monthly installments. One essay a month for two years, like really long essays. On capitalism, religion, essays on the history of sex. Collectively, it became known as the Playboy philosophy. The philosophy, really, I think, is an anti-Puritanism. And James says behind the scenes...

Through the Playboy Foundation, we were funding court cases that advanced gay rights, abortion rights, birth control rights. And James says the Playboy Forum was part of that whole... initiative. Right after he finished that two-year sort of chain of essays, Heffner then created that space in the front of the magazine for people who had nowhere else to turn. And it was in that space where you had some of the first open discussions of homosexuality in America ever. And I said, you know, it's, you look back, the sexual revolution happened on the newsstand. Testing, testing

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Okay, back to Jerry's story. Recording of a workshop by Gerald C. Davison, October 6, 1972, New York Hilton. Playboy letter episode aside, Jerry continued to push his playboy therapy, and in fact, he says, among therapists, technique kind of started to blow up. And in 72, he ends up getting invited to give a workshop. I want to present to you some ideas and data and whatnot from our point of view as we have been working with homosexuals. We're going to skip over the actual specifics of that workshop. Well, I think it's clear that we have solved all the problems that this field has.

Because what's more consequential... Thank you. This was enjoyable for me. ...is what happens after the panel. Jerry is hanging out, waiting for the room to clear, and this is... young man walks up to him. Chubby. He was a little chubby. About my age. Jerry was 33 at the time?

Very pleasant. Very friendly. A lot of smiles. I don't recall if he had any, a beard. He came up to me and introduced himself as a graduate student at Rutgers. And he said, you know, I heard your talk. I thought it was interesting. I'm actually giving a talk myself the next day. You mind if I hand out some flyers for it? And I said, I don't mind at all, of course.

The decision was made to attack what we called the gatekeepers of American attitudes. This is Charles Silverstein. He was that young therapist in training with a flyer. Unbeknownst to Jerry, he was gay and was part of a growing movement of activists that were targeting people like Jerry. I have to understand that the behaviors had a different point of view. Unlike the Freudian weirdos, they were scientists. I would say many of them were. And he says the public trusted the behavior of therapists. They had a lot of sway over public opinion.

So if they could convince Jerry and his colleagues that homosexuality was not something that needs to be cured, maybe the public would go along. But the question was, how do you do that? How do you make the case? This was around the time when gay activists would start zapping meetings where they'd basically go to a conference where a therapist were meeting, storm an event, grab the mic, and just take over. Charlie's sense was that this gonzo approach was not going to convince the people that needed convincing like Jerry. And so when he approached Jerry after that workshop Very polite and friendly.

Simply handed him a flyer, said, hey, mean a few folks are doing a thing, come by. Charlie says he just had a sense. His heart was in the right place. So he thought, maybe I'll take a different approach with this guy. I remember looking at the flyer and seeing, oh, it's those radical gay activists, all these troublemakers. I mean, I've been called in my career.

I've been called a Nazi and a fascist. So I remember looking at the flyer saying to myself, well, there's no way I'm going to go to this. So he shoved the flyer in his pocket? Yeah, I wasn't interested in it. Went off to the next panel. The following day, final day of the conference. Sunday morning, checked out of the hotel,

and I was on my way to leave for Penn Station to go back out to Stony Brook. And he says, on his way out, he kept bumping into colleagues who were like, Hey, great workshop. Love your Playboy therapy thing. And so he'd stop and he'd chat. And at one point, I looked at my watch. You realized, damn it.

I could not make it down to Penn Station. He was going to miss the train. And I thought, oh, the next train doesn't leave, you know, three hours later. Suddenly he had some time to kill. And for whatever reason, the thought pops into his head. Oh. That kid from Rutgers with the flyer. Maybe I'll go.

I pulled out the flyer he gave me. I hadn't thrown it away. and I found the room, and I went to the room, and it was a madhouse. So the room was electric in the sense that it was absolutely packed. Charlie and two other gay therapists were on stage. There were maybe a few hundred people in the audience. Although it may seem incredible to you. They had never heard a gay person speak as a convention.

I mean, they'd maybe seen gay people interrupt the convention, but never take part. So in my Hollywood imagination of this moment, moment, people are shouting, they're waving. No, no, no, no. Charlie says this time he worked very hard to keep it profesh, respectful. So it's cordial but fierce. I was on the top of my form. When it came time for him to speak, Charlie says he took aim at that idea he'd heard people like Jerry repeat over and over again.

I only work with people who want to change. So what's the big deal? That idea. Here's what he said that day. We asked him to read the remarks. of male homosexuality. To suggest that a person comes voluntarily to change to sexual orientation is to ignore the powerful environmental stress,

oppression, if you will, that has been telling him for years that he should change. To grow up in a family where the word homosexual was whispered, to play in a playground and hear the words faggot and queer, to go to church and hear of sin, hear of sin, and then to college and hear of illness, and finally to the counseling center that promises to cure, is hardly to create an environment of freedom and voluntary choice. What brings them into the counseling center is guilt, shame, and the loneliness that comes from their secret. If you really wish to help them freely choose, I suggest you first desensitize

them to their guilt. After that, let them change. but not before. I don't know any more than you what would happen, but I think their choice would be more voluntary and free than it is at present. Yes, those are my words. Do you remember how those words hit you? It affected me very deeply.

It affected me very deeply. Jerry says he went to Pan Station, which Charlie's speech... What brings them into the counseling center is guilt, shame... echoing in his mind. He says he got on the train back to Stony Brook, sat there staring out the window at the scenery. Thinking.

Thinking. So I was running through the whole talk in my head. And to feel comfortable with their sexuality. And he says by the time he got to Stony Brook, he felt something change in him. I went to Stony Brook. school the following day, I know I began to talk to people about what I had just heard at the convention and how it's gotten me to thinking. He says he was teaching a series of undergraduate

classes at that time and he would get up in front of those classes and for the first time think, what if some of these students are in the closet? Talking to people, mulling things over, talking to students, I began to think, no, what I've been doing was absolutely, Wrong. Meanwhile, his film on the Playboy Therapy was still making the round, still gaining converts. Oh, yeah. People love the film. The film had been out for a year already, and by the time the film began to be shown, I was already wishing that it wasn't being shown, that I had no control over it. In 1973, a couple months after that convention, Jerry gets nominated as the president of the AABT, the gigantic organization that had thrown the conference he'd just attended. He becomes one of the youngest presidents ever. And the following year, he was due to give the presidential address.

This is where things come to ahead. The conference that year was held in Chicago. It came at a time of great fervor and foment. He says in the days and months leading up to the conference. conference? People on the radical left were calling us fascists and Nazis, and they were publishing circulars with our home addresses. Someone published your home address? Absolutely. We had to, I was president of the association at the time. I remember we all had walkie-talkies, and we hired playing close people and Chicago police because we were that afraid of violence. Set the scene,

when you give the speech, how big is the room? Big, big room. Big ballroom. A couple hundred people? A thousand. And these are all therapists? Yeah. And how are you feeling before the speech? Very nervous.

Terrified. He says, before the talk, he'd actually met Charlie at a diner and told him about the speech he was going to make. I remember him saying, do you know that your reputation may suffer? But you have to remember that in those days, if you said something positive about a homosexual, people would suspect you. People may think that you're gay. Oh, he must be gay. That's why he's saying. He warned me.

He warned me. Colleagues and my friends, I want to make plain, if not perfectly clear, that I am speaking only for myself on an ethical issue that impinges importantly on our therapy enterprise. Jerry began the talk by telling the audience. I wish today to voice some concerns

I have been wrestling with for over three years. That he's troubled. Surrounding the way behavior therapists and for that matter, all other therapists have been approaching homosexuality. That he, like a lot of the therapists in the audience, have been approached by clients, gay men mostly, who want their help to be made straight. People who relate to us that they are troubled by their homosexual behavior or feelings.

But then he asks Silverstein's question, what does it actually mean to help these people? As Silverstein put it at the AABT Convention two years ago in a discussion of male homosexuality, and let me quote again, to suggest that a person comes voluntarily to change his sexual orientation is to ignore the powerful environmental stress,

oppression, if you will, oppression, if you will, that has been telling him for years that he should change. To grow up in a family where the word homosexual was whispered. He quoted you in that speech. What was Ellie?

I was quite pleased. Continuing the quote from Silverstein, What brings them into the counseling center is guilt, shame, and the loneliness that comes from their secret. In other words, Silvestine suggests that we must go back in the causal network and ask ourselves as determinists. What are the determinants of the client asserting to you that he or she wants to change? Jerry then delivers the simple point, which is that the problem that these people are asking us to solve is a problem we created, that we labeled as a problem. And so, even if we could affect certain changes, there is still the more important question of whether we should. I believe we should not.

To us now, or to many of us now, that may sound like kind of a simple, easy, obvious thing to say. But that was an extraordinary statement. You see, everybody else was arguing that the attempts to change sexual orientation, ended in failure. That was not what he did. He did something quite different. He said in that speech, it makes no difference how successful the treatment is.

It is immoral. Charlie says he was the first person to say that. To ever say that trying to change sexual orientation was an immoral thing to do. And that's not a trivial thing. I mean, you could see this moment in a way as one of the early tremors in a tectonic shift in not just therapy but all of science.

Like science to that point had concerned itself with objectivity. That was all that mattered. We stand apart from the world and we examine it as it is objectively. But that, from this moment forward, would start to be questioned all over the place, even in places like mental illness.

You know, you look at history, you see that some diseases come and go, Oh, why would that be? Well, people would begin to argue that even mental illnesses are social constructs created by the society, by the people who study them. What Jerry was doing here, he was shifting the language. He was saying forget objectivity, forget bullshit empiricism. Let's talk about ethics.

Let's talk about morality. We shouldn't do this. not because it doesn't work, which it doesn't, but because it's wrong. I hope and I recommend that we continue to devote the necessary energy to the important challenges. Thank you. You write about that moment, like as you were talking, about how, like, the air felt in that moment. You write, friends commented afterwards that one gets that kind of silence when everyone in a room full of a thousand people stops breathing at the same time. Yeah, yeah, exactly right.

I remember that. I just remember that, you know, like, what are they going to do when I say this? And it turned out that what they were doing was holding their breath. They do eventually clap. But afterwards, Jerry says, at the reception, he walked in and it was like parting the red seas. Nobody wanted to talk to him. They're all looking at me. And I remember one person, I will not name him, he came over to me and shook my hand.

Then he bent over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. Well, didn't you like that? Oh, like he was making a point to say you must be gay because you said those things? Yeah, yeah. And I said, I said, screw you. So it took a while to get the peeps on board. But they did start to come around and get on the right side of history. And it's not a straight line by any means, but there is a line that you can draw between Charlie's words coming out of Jerry's mouth

and the epically huge decision that the psychiatric community as a whole would make to remove homosexualities and mental illness from the DSM, that big Bible of mental illnesses. Jerry's speech happened right at that beginning point when science was just starting to wash its hands of the whole idea of a gay cure. And what's interesting, I find, just as one final thought, you could read this entire story as a sort of prelude. Psychotherapists were basically ready to say that homosexuality was not an illness,

by about 1986. That is precisely the time when the Christian community walked in and grabbed the baton. The scientific communities were accepting homosexuality, and they were saying that it's not a disorder anymore. They were removing it from the DSM3, which is why we need to do what we're doing, because Christians have to fight the battle. Christians have to fight this battle of homosexual sin,

because the professional counseling community won't do it anymore. So it was very explicit in your mindset. Oh, yeah. So that story is a story that you hear in the next episode of Honor Race, which I think we might also play on Radio Lab. Well, I hope so because all of a sudden, instead of talking to data, instead of talking to genes, or instead of talking to chemicals,

now you're talking to either God or your parents or your teachers or your society or to pressures that are all around you. And it gets really, really lonely and really, really tough. Yeah. This episode of Radio Lab was drawn from Unerased, the untold history of conversion therapy in America. It's a series I worked on with folks' features, Stitcher and Limit House, in conjunction with feature film Boy Erased. Special thanks go out to Shimoli Ayei, Kat Aaron, Michael Alcesser, Alice Quinlan, David Craig,

Garrett Conley, and all the folks at anonymous content for their support of Unerased. If you want to hear the whole series, which I hope you will, you can find unerased in all the usual podcast places. I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krollwitch. Thanks for listening. Happy Thanksgiving. Yeah.