Stuff You Should Know - How Conversion Therapy Doesn't Work

Episode Date: November 28, 2019

Conversion therapy is a misguided attempt by religious zealots to convert people from gay to straight. News flash - it doesn't work. Learn all about this abhorrent practice today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the Backyard Guest House over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, you know what that bad trumpet means? What do you mean bad? I mean, you know, bad as in Miles Davis was bad. Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. We're announcing our live show at our annual trip to San Francisco sketch fest. We're gonna be where? We're going to be at the Castro Theater, our home away from home in San Francisco on Saturday, January 18th. That's right. And I'm doing my third ever movie crush at sketch fest. Nice. And this is going to be a nighttime, usually do a matinee, but this is the following day on Sunday, January 19th at 8 p.m.

And it is going to be at piano fight on Taylor Street. And for all these, you can get tickets at the sketch fest website, or you can learn about tickets at our home touring home on the web, that is sysklive.com, right? That's right. We'll see you guys there. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's guest producer Josh over there. Don't be confused, everybody. They're more than one Josh in the world. It's nice to hear you finally admit that. Let's take it a long time. A lot of therapy. Hey, nice segue. It's like a short stuff. I'm like, let's get to it. Let's get going. Well, I have a COA to issue. You know what cracks me up is

people who are still like, what does that mean? You figure it out and you can email us. Eventually some people will. Yeah. So my COA is just a personal COA that I'm going to try and just disguise my disdain for this entire topic. Okay. But I might not do a great job about it. Well, you've already shown your hands. All right. Good. That's my COA. Yeah. I don't think there's too many Stuff You Should Know listeners who are probably into this. Yeah, but part of the problems we'll see later in this episode is part of the problem with conversion therapies coverage in the media. Mel, yeah. Is that it has largely been fairly even-handed and described as like, this controversial therapy and not said this scam and this junk science fraud

perpetrated by zealots. Super harmful. Yeah. Yeah. So that's where I am. You know, that stuck out to me too that in the late 90s, we'll talk about it, especially when it was treated even handily. Yeah. And it made me think like, we should do an episode on that. Like, should the media treat all sides of an issue equally? And if it does, does that just like perpetuate ignorance? Or if it doesn't, does that like support fascism? Right. Like, it's a hornet's nest. I really think we should do it sometime. It is. That's a good call. Thank you, Charles. I don't know how we, I mean, I guess I could be researched. Yeah. Surely somebody's done a think piece on it and we

can springboard off of, you know? A think piece. That's right. Those are great. That's what we do most of our research on, think pieces. This is from one of our great writers, Julia Layton, and she put this, a lot of this stuff together for us. Yeah. She did a good job on this. I like the additional histories you found out though. Yeah. Because this, so we'll define it first and then we'll talk about some histories, but this stuff goes back way further than you would think, but what we're talking about today is called conversion therapy, reparative therapy, ex-gay therapy. Reparative therapy is trademarked, by the way, we should say. Well, you couldn't hear it, but under my breath I said, yeah.

More like TS. It was, yeah, it was trademarked by a psychologist named Joseph Nicolosi. Yes. Senior. So what conversion therapy is probably what we're going to mostly call it, though? What it is, is it's an alleged psychological theory and practice that is based on the idea that all people are born heterosexual and because of certain events. Past traumas usually. Traumas typically, but also the family dynamics plays a huge role. People who would otherwise are meant to be heterosexual can be accidentally steered into homosexuality. And therefore can be purposefully steered back. Right. Cured. Yes. Cured. Being gay. Right. Back to the righteous land of heterosexuality. Yeah. And as you can imagine that this is a

very popular with the fundamentalist Christian right. Sure. And I mean, that's not even a guess. It overtly is. They've adopted and taken on ex-gay, the ex-gay movement, as basically one of the, what's it called, an attempt poll, attempt post? Sure. One of the planks in the Christian rights platform for social change. Oh, it was officially part of the 2016 Republican Party platform even. What? That's right. The whole RNC. Yeah, which has been called, the 2016 platform has been called by far the most anti-LGTBQ platform in the nation's history. Wow. I mean, yeah, if that's a plank in the party's platform, that's pretty significant. Like they don't throw just anything in there. No, they don't. So with the ex-gay movement and conversion therapy,

I saw it described at least back in the late 90s as a front in the culture war that's as strong and as significant as abortion. Like the Christian right in particular has basically dedicated itself to stamping out gayness and by converting gay people to straightness. The problem is there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that that is even possible. Right. And the problem is when you try and stamp out gayness, that creates a good beat that you can dance to. It makes that sound and they're like, no, no, no, no, stop stamping. Yeah, exactly. I had actually, I went to, well, should I say this? Oh, I don't know. Sure. Why not? Because this is the truth. I went to a church camp once when I was a youth. Oh, I figured a story or two like this. They talked about stomping your

feet to the music or whatever they were playing and they literally said, don't alternate feet because that's too close to dancing. Wow. Right? Yeah. And these weren't like, I mean, these were pretty mainstream Baptist church camps. It wasn't like I went to some. Snake handling thing? No. But I did a really good episode on that. Yeah, that was a good one. So anyway, stamp your feet, everybody. Just don't alternate. So you stomp on both at once because that's. No, just stomp one foot. Just stomp your right foot. I was going to say, that's just jumping. Lightly. Okay, so that's what we're talking about is conversion therapy. And like I said, it became part of the Christian rights kind of philosophy and part of their culture war,

their culture war, their fighting. But it goes back way further than that than I think it was the late 90s when the right kind of adopted it. As a matter of fact, like into the 19th century, there were people who subscribed to this, but they were all psychologists. This is back at the time when you could be a ghost investigator and say, I'm a psychologist. This is the times when you could say, you know, this cigar reminds you of your mother, you know what I'm saying? Right. And you could be a psychologist. You could be a father of psychology at that point. Yeah, you dug up a great article from history.com called gay conversion therapies disderbing 19th century origins by Aaron Blakemore.

Man, nice attribution Chuck. Yeah, well, Aaron wrote a great article and in it, she talks about in 1899, this hypnosis, well again, in the days where you could be a hypnotist and be a legitimate scientist at the same time. Should I get in the stage shows or psychology? That's right. Maybe both. Where's the money? But he was German, of course, and he claimed to have turned a gay man straight after 45 hypnosis sessions and some other therapies. And that's sort of the first evidence of what we would later call conversion therapy starting up. Yeah. Although I'm sure even before that people, they probably didn't call it conversion therapy, but if you were an effeminate man, you were no doubt probably beaten by your parents

and shunned by your community. Right. I think one of the other things, it's kind of a hallmark of this long tradition of converting people from being gay to straight or trying to, is this idea that there's something wrong with you if you're gay. Right. And that that idea can actually become hung up on the individual, the gay person, so that they actually do seek out help in becoming straight. But the problem is in seeking that help, they're going to be frustrated and they're ultimately probably going to be, they're going to have feelings of shame, guilt, inadequacy, that they're not capable of helping themselves. There's something wrong with them. Why can't they just be straight kind of thing? And then if you're a minor and your parents are forcing this on you,

then that raises a whole other can of worms of ethical dilemmas. Sure. But even from the outset, there were probably people who sought out hypnotists and other psychologists for help. It wasn't just people walking around kidnapping gay people and taking them off the street and trying to convert them. Right. It could have very well been some man that's like, wait a minute, I don't feel normal feelings because I'm looking at Joe out there in the field and things are happening. Right. If you know what I mean, Doc. And they're like, well, come on in. Watching him swing that scythe and take his sweaty shirt off, wring it over his face. That kind of thing. Right. So just sit down and follow the wristwatch with your eyes or I guess the pocket watch. That'd be a weird

technique to swing your arm. I'm moving my wristwatch. But from that same History.com article there, she talks about some of the early attempts, like with electroconvulsive therapy, lobotomies. I think we even talked about some of the lobotomies episode. Man, they would give you a lobotomy for anything. Oh, sure. What about testicular transplantation? Right. Because that was a theory from a doctor, an endocrinologist named Eugene Steinach, who thought that your testicles were the root of the problem. Well, a lot of people did. Yeah. There was like a... You could have gay testicles, literally. And they would swap them out for straight ones. Right. And there's no... I could not find any evidence one way or the other

that any of these testicular transplants worked or were successful. I don't think they were. But I didn't see anything that said all of them just failed or whatever. But what happened? Did they just shrivel up and fall off or something? Well, do you mean if it actually medically took to the body or... Yeah, that's what I mean. Oh, okay. Saying like, did it convert them? Did it work? Right. Yeah. No. Yeah. That's the answer. But yeah, I didn't know that you could in the 1920s have a testicle transplant successfully. That's what I'm saying. Like, I surely... I mean, at some point, and we must have talked about this in the Michael Dylan episode. We talked about the... I don't think it was... But it wasn't a transplant. It was just

a straight up removal. An archaeectomy, I believe. Castration. So, but at some point, testicles have been transplanted onto a person successfully. When did that happen? That's my question. They probably did to a dog first. Right. But I mean, think about it. Like, if it didn't work, well, sorry, you're castrated now. Yeah. They probably didn't say sorry, though. No. But we took your gay testicles. The heterosexual testicles just didn't pan out. Right. But now you don't have any testicles, gay or otherwise. That's right. Some of the other awful techniques that they would use back in the day were chemicals that they might have to make you wretch and vomit when you look at pictures of

people of the same sex. Yeah. That's called covert sensitization. Yeah. Yeah. Or if you're cross-dressing maybe, same thing. Sure. Or if you... Look in a mirror and be disgusted with yourself and wretch and vomit. Yeah. And very sadly, if you have, say, like someone you are in a relationship with that you love, they might show you pictures of that person and carry out aversive therapy or aversive conditioning. Yeah. What's weird, as you said, these are things they used to carry out. From what I've seen, this stuff still goes on today. Yeah, some of it. So what we're talking about, though, back in the 19th and most of the first half or so of the 20th

century, this was all like the domain of psychology. And then eventually, gay psychologists and other straight psychologists, too, were basically like, this is wrong. Yeah. Like the science is not adding up. This is just incorrect. Yeah. There were medical doctors, too, though. It wasn't just psychologists. Right. Sure. Yeah. So eventually, in 1973, the American Psychological Association said, hey, big news, we're no longer going to classify homosexuality as a mental disorder. Right. And a certain part of the population went, yeah, it's 1972. Why did it take this long? Right. Exactly. Yeah. But that was a big deal. And at that point, psychology mostly abandoned the idea that being gay was a disorder of any kind. And therefore, there was no point in

researching how to cure someone of being gay. And so it turned its back on this whole history of conversion. Yeah. But it didn't fully die away. And I believe starting in like the 80s, the Christian right started to kind of pick up on it and kind of breathe new life into it again. That's right. Think we should take a break? Yeah. That's a robust and a half setup. Is that? Oh, I thought we were already into it. Oh my gosh. No, it wasn't just the setup. It was more, you're right. We'll be right back. Hey, everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia, who realized she could Airbnb her

cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So, yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb to find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host on the podcast. Hey, dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show. Hey, dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey, dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember

Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friends paper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey, dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so let's talk a little bit about because there's a couple of schools of thought here and I hesitate to call the one more bonafide, but there's conversion therapy that can happen at a licensed therapist's office

and there's conversion therapy that can happen in somebody's basement or the basement of a church. I was going to say basement too. Yeah, or a room. It doesn't have to be a basement. I know, but a basement makes it seem more sinister. That's probably why I said it. So there are two sort of ways that can happen. We're going to talk a little bit about the first way, the patented way, reparative therapy trademark by Joseph Nicolosi Sr. That guy doesn't even get the Italian accent, man, and I don't believe you. He doesn't, which we should say, by the way, in July of this year, Amazon stopped carrying his works on their website. Yeah, because they considered them that they promoted fraud, which we'll get to. Yeah, which is interesting. But

this guy is like a psychologist. Yeah. He's a trained psychologist who basically said, I'm going to take everything I learned and direct it toward curing gay people of being gay. Yeah. Do you know much about his religiosity? I think he was Jewish and born in Brooklyn, from what I understand. I read a really, really great article. Not a think piece, but a memoir in the American Prospect from 2012. Yeah, this is different. They're gold. By Gabriel Arana. It's called My So-Called Ex-Gay Life. It's definitely worth reading, but it's a great look at conversion therapy, but also is like overlaid with his personal experience with it. Okay. At any rate, his contention was that, like we said, you develop

homosexuality or homosexual feelings at least because of a result of environmental conditions, childhood traumas, and they call it same-sex attraction, SSA, and that could stem, in his opinion, from a few different things. Desire for adventure, peer acceptance, loneliness or boredom or curiosity, approval or affection for males. A lot of this is centered on men, although it's certainly women who have been involved in this as well. Yeah, we'll get to that. Yeah, but a lot of this over the years is making gay men straight. Oh, yeah. I see what you mean. Yeah. But it's not exclusive to that? No, it's not. A general rebellion, which is pretty funny, and then sexual molestation by

another male. And I think that is a very, like, I think that the idea that that leads to being gay is very widespread in culture, well beyond the Christian riot or people who believe in conversion therapy. The idea that if you're sexually abused by a man or somebody of your same sex, you become gay, which is just wrong. But I think a lot of people still believe that. I know that's what I thought when I was a kid. Yeah, that's right. Well, no, it's utterly wrong. And the whole basis of Nicolosi's theory, he takes back to a study from 1992 called Demography of Sexual Orientation in Adolescence. And this was an actual study from the Journal of Pediatrics that looked at patterns of sexual orientation to high school students in Minnesota. And what

they found out was that younger teens in Minnesota in this study were more likely to express sexual confusion about their orientation when they were younger. And as they grew older, they were less confused about their sexual identity and orientation. Right. And that's a legit study. Right. And I think that probably anyone who's ever been an early teenager and a late teenager can be like, that sounds about right. Exactly. But the extrapolation that Nicolosi did was what's the problem is. Right. So Nicolosi was saying, yes, that shows that you're in a dangerous place earlier on and that if a couple of things happen in a certain way, you can be veered off of this natural path toward heterosexuality into homosexuality. Right. And also more dangerously,

that means we got to get them while they're young. Right. So one of the other things that he's, he really based his practice on was this family triad of a domineering over attendant mother, a passive detached father and a sensitive child. Boogie Knights. In kind of, in, in that, that, that triangle, like you would like almost certainly have a gay kid. Yeah. If somebody didn't intervene. So he, he decided like this was his career was intervening and that kind of stuff. But that in and of itself has never been proven to create gay kids. Right. That like whether you believe in conversion therapy or not, if you have a domineering mother and absent father and you're like a sensitive type who likes dolls even doesn't mean you're

going to turn gay. Right. This is the basis of that though, is that yes, you will turn gay. And still to this day, this idea is allowed to live because science has never fully satisfied the question like, are we born gay? Do we develop being gay? And it looks like it's on a pretty strong track toward a genetic basis of homosexuality. Right. But it's still nothing's definitive. And so people can say, well, maybe we do develop, you know, an adolescence, you know, being gay or whatever, because science has not filled this void quite yet. Yeah. And the way Nicolosi will would write about this stuff and describe it is in a very sort of professional innocuous type way where a casual reader might say, well, this seems totally

valid and above board. Yeah. A Newsweek reader. Yeah. Or an Oprah viewer. That's right. This is, this is one of the things, I think this is from one of his books. And this is how he describes the relationship to from patient to therapist. The client has come to the therapist seeking assistance to reduce something distressing to him. And the RT psychotherapist agrees to share his professional experience and education to help the client meet his own goal, his own goal. The therapist enters into a collaborative relationship agreeing to work with the client to reduce his unwanted attractions and explore his had heterosexual potential, which again, it seems very innocuous. And there are plenty of cases where a grown man of his or woman of their

own volition goes and seeks this out. Right. But what they don't say is what happens many times is a parent forces their young child to do this. No, that's a big one. Yeah. That's a big one. In this, um, that American prospect magazine, uh, the author was like in his early teens when he went to Nicolosi's therapy. Um, but he said everybody else in the group was in their like forties or fifties. So it was definitely both. Yeah. Yeah. But there's something here that's really important because like you said, if you just read this stuff, it does sound innocuous. It's all very much based on things like cognitive behavioral therapy, like stuff that works, which means that this works in a weird twisted way, which we'll talk about, but not in the way

it's ultimately meant to. It works in a bent way. Yeah. I mean, do you want me to explain now? I feel like I should. I take issue of the word works at all. There are situations where it might prevent someone from acting on a homosexual impulse. That's what I mean. Yeah. But that doesn't change the nature of their sexuality. No, no, right. And ultimately preventing someone or training someone to not act on their sexuality is damaging in and of itself and causes all sorts of other problems. But maybe good enough for a really religious family. Right. You know. Yeah. Well, that's what I read is that over time, as the Christian right adopted the idea of, you know, championing the ex-gay movement, that part of that was accepting gay people who

refrained from gay sex. Right. So if you were like, I'm gay, I'm never going to be straight, I tried, but I don't have sex with men, you would be welcome in church. Yeah. Yeah. So what I was saying though is with Nicolosi's thing, there's something fundamentally wrong with it and that if somebody came to you and said, I'm tired of being white or black or Hispanic or straight, I can't stand it. Yeah. You wouldn't say, oh, well, let's figure out how to make you not black or white or Hispanic or straight. Right. Let's figure out how to change you. They would say, any therapist worth their salt would say, well, no, there's a lot of great things about being white or black or Hispanic or straight. And let's focus on that so that you can own your identity.

Mm-hmm. The conversion therapy does the opposite. It says, yes, let's figure out how to get the gay out of you. Right. Let's change your identity because this group of society has said that it's unacceptable. That's right. And that is an extraordinarily damaging position to come from, and that is the basis of conversion therapy. Yeah. And as we'll see later on, the AMA's official stance is that it is, and we'll read the quote later, that it is a damaging prospect and creates real harm. An American prospector magazine. So this approach by Nicolosi has four steps to it. The first one is interesting because it's the disclosure of the therapist's personal, professional, philosophical, and religious views on homosexuality, which includes, Nicolosi says,

the gay affirmative therapist also discloses his philosophical views to the client, but from a gay affirmative perspective, does he just put that in there to cover his bases? No, it's true. Because you wouldn't send your son or daughter to a gay affirmative therapist to convert them. Right. I think this is what he's saying. You've been to therapy before, right? Sure. Have you ever noticed that when you first, your first session, the therapist tells you a lot about themselves and what they think about mental health or life or whatever? Yeah. And I'm always like, wait a minute, what about my problem? Yeah, I thought we were talking about me. I'm getting charged for this. I don't care about your family.

That's what he's saying that they do, but because this is about being gay, that's what they're going to talk about is their views or whatever. Interesting. They're going to share their opinions of it and that they think that there's problems with it. You know what my line is that the therapist, when they do all that stuff, I'm like, great, that's really interesting. At the end, I'm like, you want to start the clock now? Right. Nice. Either that or I can prorate. Number two of the four steps is encouragement of the client's inquiry. So basically, asking the client the questions, examining their feelings to try and discover what lies beneath. Right. Number three, resolution of past trauma.

If it is in fact one of the reasons they suspect this person has gone down the road to homosexuality and then education regarding features of homosexuality, which includes everything from what motivates you to do this, to you know that if you are gay, then this lifestyle ends in a very bad way for you. Right. There's a lot of physical harm, social harm, emotional harm. Yeah. Right. So what's weird though is like, I can't, Nicholas, he's like a tough person to paint with just one brush. Even though I totally disagree with what he dedicated his career to, he doesn't seem, at least from what I've read in including that American prospect article from somebody who was a patient of his for years, he doesn't seem to have been like

any sort of evil man or anything like that. I don't know if he just thought like this was a real thing and he was really helping people or what. But for example, there's this one quote from Gabriel Arianna who said that he had been like experimenting with sexual encounters with other men as a teenager. And he said that he'd been meeting men off of the internet. And he told Nicolosi, like he's like, I trusted the guy enough to share this in therapy. And he said that Nicolosi told, he said he told me to be careful meeting men off the internet, but that I shouldn't dwell on it or feel guilty. He said my sexual behavior was of secondary importance. If I understood myself and worked on my relationships with men, the attractions would take care of

themselves. I just had to be patient, which is, I mean, that's a pretty great thing for a therapist to tell a patient, right? Don't dwell on it, you know, don't feel guilty, just, you know, accept it and move on and learn from it or whatever. But then the second part, right? That's where it goes down now. Yes. And so the thing is though, with conversion therapy in most cases, Nicolosi is, like, he's almost a shining example in a weird way, whereas other people associated with it are, it's very easy to paint them with just one brush, you know? So we should talk a little bit about the argument against, a little bit more about the argument against, which includes a little bit more history. You know, we talked about the earliest stages of conversion therapy in the late 1800s,

but it really kind of picked up steam in the United States in the 1960s when the civil rights movement, you know, when gay people started coming out of the closet more, presenting themselves more in public, gay bars popping up, things like that. Stonewall. Stonewall, of course, which, you know, anytime something like that is becoming a little more accepted in the mainstream, there's going to be another side that really roots down and digs in. And that's sort of how the modern gay conversion therapy movement was born was out of homosexuality becoming more accepted. Yeah. I read a really interesting journal article from 2007 by Robinson and Spivey. It was in Gender and Society, the journal. And they basically, they looked into the ex-gay movement,

not necessarily the psychology community's basis of it, but the later on the adoption of it by the Christian right. And they explained why the Christian right would be interested in that. And they were interested in it and dug in, like you said, because they saw homosexuality and feminism in particular as signs of a decadent society that would eventually cause us to crumble and collapse. And this is according to Robinson and Spivey. I haven't actually interviewed any one on the Christian right who believes this, but they are academics and this was a peer-reviewed journal that masculinity is the antidote to that. It's the antidote to homosexuality. It's the antidote to feminism and that it was up to each man to be a strong leader among women and children

and to be as masculine as possible. That's how you, how you did that. Yeah. I mean, I went, I heard sermons every Sunday, well, not every Sunday, but I heard sermons on many Sundays where they were still saying why I've submitted to your husbands. Yeah. Straight out of the Bible. You know. Yeah. And like most of the antidote is dads, you're being way too passive. You need to step up and be the leader of your family, but also moms. Right. You can help by saying, oh, you have a question. Ask your father. I defer to your father. Go ask your father. Right. And just, yeah, being passive. Well, which goes back to that triad you mentioned earlier about the domineering mother, the passive father equals

Gabe's son. That's basically the basis of the whole thing from what I could tell is that, at least among the Christian right, that if the father is not the dominant in leading figure in the family, that's where the trouble comes from. And that can produce homosexual children. Interesting. Yes. So something we failed to mention as part of the AMAs change in 1972, or was that the APA? APA. APA was they said, and this is an important distinction, is that homosexuality, they deemed a normal variation, not deviation, but a variation. Right. In human sexual orientation and like other normal sexual orientations can't be changed. In other words, you can't make a straight person gay any more than you can make a gay person

straight. Right. Is what that equals. And because of that, as we'll see later on, that became the basis for this idea that conversion therapy is in essence a fraud. Right. Because it purports to do something that can't be done. That's right. Right. Should we take another break? Oh man, really? They're coming hard and fast. Like men swinging sides in sweaty shirts on the field. Yeah, let's take another break and we'll talk about what might happen in conversion therapy right after this. Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in

Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb, the backyard guest house over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop

references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck, I'm excited about this part.

You're excited about the horror show of version therapy. It's not all horror shows. Some of it is just outright laughable. Yeah, so statistically... Also, I'm sorry, everybody. I want to say something too. We typically try to be super objective. This one is very tough. We have science on our side too. This was really hard for me to research. Nothing is ever hard for me to research. This one was, it was like turning over a log and finding it like maggots writhing underneath. That was what researching this one was like. I just kept putting it off. I would just keep leaving it and just going and watching like

the office or something like that. Just anything but researching this. Because it's super sad. It is. The children are taken at their most vulnerable time in adolescence when they don't know what's going on and they're told that they're wrong and they're sinning and they're dirty. That is the part of why it's sad. Another part to me of why it's sad is that the idea that grown-ups would direct this much thought and attention and effort into slamming their head up against a wall to try to change someone else to a way they think they should be. Right. That I think is, that's at least as sad to me as the

children being misdirected like this. Because a kid can go on and grow up and be like, geez, my family was super messed up. I'm really glad I don't speak to them anymore because I'm much happier over here. Right. Well, that can happen in the ideal circumstance. Sure. Or the ideal circumstance is that the family is just like, hey, we're really screwed up. We're really sorry. We love you no matter who you are. But the idea that there's a group, a social movement dedicated to just eradicating another group of people, I find that very hard to swallow. Yeah, agreed. So apparently statistically about, or close to 700,000 people in the United States have undergone conversion therapy.

And we should mention that it's a real problem in places like Africa and Asia and South America. Yeah. Where you can still be imprisoned for being gay. Yeah. Like Uganda's a big place for that. Conversion therapy is like on the rise in those places. And other places. Right. But we're talking about the United States in this case, 700,000 people. And like we said, sometimes it is in the, with a licensed therapist, sometimes it's done by a religious advisor in a basement or at a church. You know what that reminded me of is another thing we need to talk about sometimes is exorcisms, like church exorcisms. Oh, we've done exorcisms. We did like straight up Roman Catholic exorcisms.

Oh, okay. I'm talking like the kind that somebody does in the basement of their house. Gotcha. Because they're supposedly an exorcist or something like that. Sure. Backdoor exorcism. Basically, yeah. Black market. You'll see, you'll be like, oh man, we should be talking about this. All right. Well, I agree already. I trust you. Okay. So the AMA says that conversion therapy programs may utilize harmful psychological techniques. We were talking earlier about aversion therapy and given chemicals. They can still be given noxious stimulus. And I didn't see exactly what that entailed or could entail.

There was a guy named Robert Gilbreth Heath who was the father of implanting electrodes into the brain to deliver shocks. And one of the things he directed that toward was curing gay people. Mm-hmm. I don't think anyone in their basement is implanting electrodes or whatever. Right. But there are things like giving people nausea. Nausea inducing medications is one. Right. Showing them pictures that might nauseate them and then figuring out how to associate that with masturbating to thoughts of other man or something like that.

Yeah. I mean, we should talk about a few of these specifically. I mean, all you have to do is look up on a search engine, conversion therapy horror stories. And there are plenty of people out there saying what happened to them. Yeah. Look up also conversion therapy super happy fun stories and you're going to come back with almost nothing. Google zero results. There was one teenager who said that he was forced to wear a backpack with 40 pounds of rocks, 18 hours a day to just signify the physical burden of being gay. Right. One person's family gave them a fake funeral, closed casket funeral in front of him where they

said that he died of AIDS and they said their final goodbyes because he went down the sinful path. Pretending he wasn't there, like that he was dead and in the casket. Yes. Talking about him in third person. That's right. His family. One reported being told to strip naked in front of a mirror and say disparaging things about themselves. I just do that normally though. Well, I did read one account where they basically said

the whole idea is to break you down to nothing in the worst way possible and then build you back up again and the image that they want. So I get the impression that that is one route, but that is not necessarily what you're going to get at any place you go for conversion therapy. There's other ones that say. That's the problem is we don't know because so many people don't talk about it. Right. There's some that like you would go to that say, okay, we're not going to abuse you or anything like that, but the basis of our beliefs in this is that you are gay because either you had an absent father, a domineering mother, some combination of the two, or you always like wanted

to be like loved and you know popular among your male peers and you didn't get that. So now you are misdirecting this need, this unmet need toward having anonymous gay sex on the dance floor with some dude in Miami or whatever. So we need to figure out how to meet that need and have you hang out with guys who will tell you how cool you are and how popular you are. Yeah, like tailgating or something. Kind of. And while we're at it, we're going to do that by by accenting the masculinity. We're going to teach you how to be masculine so that you can hang out with dudes in the real world and they will think you're cool. So things like we're going to teach

you how to change the oil in your car. We're going to teach you to sit without crossing your legs. No joke. There was a guy who can teach you how to manspread on the subway. There's a guy who's kind of a prominent thinker. I think he was, I saw him as a sexologist, maybe a Christian sexologist, Gerhard Van den Ardluig. It's pretty great. I think I nailed it. He said that homosexual men need to unlearn avoidance of getting their hands dirty, doing manual work like chopping wood, painting a house, using a shovel and that... I say no thanks to all three. I'd chop wood. That's kind of fun. It is fun and that not necessarily just here's an act, start chopping wood,

you're going to just suddenly become cured but that that is part of it. Right. And in this thought, this tack where they're not abusing you, they're not degrading you or anything like that, they're teaching you masculinity and manliness, that the ultimate aim and goal of that is to go get married and have a kid or kids. And that that is a big part of conversion therapy. It was for a very long time was saying, you might still be gay or whatever, but you're not really gay. You're now married and you have a kid and that is what you're dedicating yourself to. That's right. You're a wood chopping football throwing dude.

With a pencil thin mustache. Oh, no, no, not that. So in 1974, we should talk about George Reckers. He was a psychologist who tested whether or not this was an effective treatment and he had a four... This wasn't his boy, but this was his client. I guess client's a weird way to put it. Sure. This child was forced to go to this person at four and a half years old. And this is a boy manifesting, quote, childhood cross-gender identity. And they said this is based on the clothes that this boy wears.

And now of course, looking at this, it was probably a transgender child. Yeah, or gender fluid. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to tell because this was 1974 and the way they wrote about it. It's hard to kind of piece it together. Yeah. And it's also like just how much of this behavior did this child exhibit? Like it makes it seem like this is all the kid did was act like a girl when he was a boy. What else was he into? What else? It's just such a narrow picture of the subject. Of course. So in the end, Reckers did something super damaging. He trained

the boy's mother to be the therapist. Like here's what you need to do. So this kid can get 24 seven therapy from you and basically punish feminine behaviors, reinforce masculine behaviors at all times. And they said that, hey, this is working. Because every time this boy gets punished for doing something feminine, he stops and like chops wood or throws the football and gets a reward. So because he's four and a half years old, he's doing the things that their parents congratulate him for and reward him for. Right. And not doing the things that he's getting punished for. Exactly. The punishment is what stood out to me.

It's just so sad that the mother was instructed to reject him to basically ignore him when he acted like a girl, but not ignore him like pretend it's not going on. Like let him know that she is giving him the cold shoulder and that that's how he learned. Right. That is just devastating. It's heartbreaking. And what's heartbreaking is this is used was used as an example, like see this works. This four and a half year old is now acting more masculine and is not going to grow up to be gay. And this, this child died by suicide at the age of 30. Yeah. Like that's the end result of this road. That's where it ends up. And that's what I meant earlier when I said, like it does kind of work because it follows psychological techniques that actually work, but it works in like kind of

a bent way where yes, you can train somebody. You can mold a four year old to behave in a certain way by conditioning them. It's possible. You can get somebody to do just about anything like that. But the ramifications, the results, the damage to the individual's identity that will eventually come out later are widespread and sweeping. Yeah. And that's the point. That's why you shouldn't monkey around with somebody's identity using proven psychological techniques. That's what's so evil about the whole thing. Yeah. I mean, my daughter's four and a half. I had a hard time even getting through this stuff. And then also if somebody cut, this is the other thing too. If you're a conversion therapy advocate or activist or practitioner and you say, no, there are people

out there who are distressed, who are experiencing psychological distress for being gay. Yes, that's true. I guarantee that there are people like that out there, but directing them toward working on not being gay is not the answer. Yeah. Go to regular therapy and learn to love that you're gay and go find a church that accepts gay people. They're step two. Yeah, because they're out there. Let's talk about the science of it because we are so contributing to a decadent society. In 2009, there was a report from the APA task force on appropriate therapeutic responses to sexual orientation. Quite a read. And this was the actual final stance was sexual orientation change efforts can pose critical health risks to lesbian, gay and bisexual people.

Critical health risks. Not emotional, not, I mean, it's part of emotional health too, but critical health risks. And if you read the review of research and peer reviewed literature and the findings of what it can result in, it reads like the worst pharma ad disclaimer you've ever heard. Depression, guilt, helplessness, hopelessness, shame, self-hatred, hostility, dehumanization, betrayal, social withdrawal, substance abuse, stress, sexual dysfunction, loss of faith, and suicidality. And on that last note, homosexual teens attempt suicide more often than heterosexual teens. And then among those homosexual teens, you're twice as likely to try that if your parents have rejected you and three times as likely if you have undergone conversion

therapy. Three times as likely. Yes. Compared to a heterosexual teen. That's right. Man. Well, you have it. That was just the APA that a bunch of different associations like legit, medical, and psychological associations have come out and condemned in no uncertain terms conversion therapy. Right. And all of their, these condemnations basically follow two different texts. One, there is no science backing up the idea that you can change somebody from homosexuality to heterosexuality. Right. And number two, there is science backing up the idea that trying to do that causes damage to the individual. So don't do that. And as a matter of fact, some countries and states in the United States have said, we're, this is outlawed. You can't do this anymore,

everybody, which is really touchy stuff. Because again, the Christian right kind of adopted it. And we don't really infringe on religious beliefs, but that's how strong these condemnations have been that they're saying, we'll kind of start to wade into that with this one. Yeah. And we'll, we'll talk about the legalities of recent years in a sec. But before that, between the 70s and the APA's stance, changing things a little bit, then through the 80s and 90s where conversion therapy was really sort of hitting its peak, I think in America, there were a lot of, there were a few high profile cases that were exposed that have helped sway things a little bit back to sanity in more recent years. Yeah. So before those high profile cases, and I mean right before them,

I think in 1998, a coalition of church groups got together and sponsored an ad campaign, something like a $600,000 ad campaign and things like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, all this. And these, this ad featured John and Anne, I believe Anne Polk, both of whom were formerly gay, but were now ex-gay and married and had a kid and said, gay conversion helps. And at the time, there wasn't a lot of ink on the other side saying, actually, this is totally discredited. And it captured everybody's attention. And this was when the Christian right came in and said, we're going to make this huge push in the culture of war, and it really worked. That's when that Newsweek story came out. Yeah, they were on the cover of Newsweek. He was the leader of an

ex-gay organization called Exodus International, John Polk was. Right, and it brought a lot of attention. Yeah, he was the poster boy. Yes, and in Exodus International in particular became one of two main umbrella organizations. They were kind of like the, I saw it put the spiritual version of this, the ex-gay movement, and then something called NARTH, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, was like the scientific branch of the ex-gay movement. Right. And so Exodus International became a very well-known prominent organization in the late 90s, but within two, three years, it would be, it would basically be the poster child for how conversion therapy doesn't work. Right, because John Polk is gay. In 2000, just two years later,

he was photographed coming out of a gay bar in Washington, D.C. At the time, he refuted that, he didn't refute that he was there. He said, what you always say, I didn't know it was a gay bar. I went in there asking for directions. No, I saw he wanted to use the bathroom. So no, either way. I just read the articles. And then they were like, but you're in there for a couple of hours. Like, did you get the directions and use the bathroom? It clearly says blue oyster in neon. Have you not seen the police academy movies? That was the name of it, the police academy, right? The blue oyster bar. Oh goodness. In John Polk, we should say now lives life as a gay man and is a chef. He's been on like some celebrity chef shows. Is that right? Uh-huh. Cool. And he

is living his best life. He's living his best life from what it looks like. So he's no longer married any longer to Ann. Actually, that I don't know. Because there are some, well, we'll keep going. I don't think he is, but there are a couple of people that are. In 2003, Michael Johnston, he was another person touted as an ex-gay success story, founder of National Coming Out of Homosexuality Day. He actually was, he was found out to be having sex with men that he met online and infected them with HIV. Very big deal. And then there's Ted Haggard, of course, in 2006. I remember this. Yeah. He was a preacher and president of the National Association of Evangelicals, or was at the time, I guess, very much an anti-gay leader in the religious circles.

And this one sort of unfolded little by little. Like, hey, this guy came out and said, this guy had a relationship with me for like three years. We did crystal meth together. And then Haggard came out and said, you know what? I have to admit, I sinned. I bought crystal meth, but I didn't use it. I threw it in the trash because I wouldn't succumb to the sin. Did, is that what he said? Yeah. He says he did buy crystal meth. And because I assumed that was proof. And he said that he didn't use it at all. He threw it in the trash before he used it, where the other guy was like, no, we did tons of meth and had gay sex a lot. He said, oh, I know he's talking about, I'm like day four of us staying up. He like freaked out and threw it in

the trash, but then he went back and got it. And the proof was that he paid for it by check. Maybe. No. No, probably not. I don't think meth dealers take checks. And then that was, he was outed by a having a relationship with an underage boy, a sexual relationship. This was Ted Haggard again? Yeah. And the boy sued and it was settled by the church with a dollar figure. I think it was like 180 grand. And then finally in 2011, Ted Haggard comes out and is like, all right, so I did have a relationship with a boy, but we never touched each other. I just masturbated in front of him. I threw him in the trash. And in 2011, he said, you know what, I'm bisexual.

I'm going to admit it. I am bisexual, but I am going to choose to live my life as a faithful heterosexual husband to my wife. I wonder if after he admitted that, it came out as bisexual, what that felt like. If he felt like a weight was lifted or if the anxiety associated with it was just so much or what his wife knew or didn't know or thought about it. I'd be very curious to know what life has been like for him after that. I mean, he's a preacher again. Because I mean, more power to him if he's like, I'm a Christian and I'm just not going to have gay sex. That's as much a personal choice as having gay sex. I mean, the whole underage

boy thing, that's a huge problem that I think I'm hoping was addressed, but I wonder what his life is like now. Oh, I mean, he's like I said, he's preaching again, I think in Colorado. He's probably a stuff you should know, listen, haggard right in. We'd like to hear from you, sir. You want to talk about the law? Because right now... Oh, wait, there was one more. Chuck, there's a big one. Who, Alan Chambers? Yes. So John Paul, when he was outed cruising the blue oyster in DC back in 2000, he was running Exodus International. Yes. He was replaced a couple of years later by Alan Chambers and about a decade after Chambers took over Exodus International, he said,

I'm gay. I've been gay. Conversion therapy doesn't work. We're shutting down Exodus International. Yeah. And I apologize to the LGTBQ community. Yes. So within about a decade or so of the Christian right adopting the ex-gay and conversion therapy pillar post as part of the platform for their culture war, the biggest organization, one of two biggest organizations dedicated to conversion therapy said, it doesn't work. We're sorry, gay people, for all the damage we've done. Yeah. That's a pretty big turn of events. It is. Yeah, it still continues. So that led to, yeah. So that led to a bunch of laws that are trying to keep it from continuing. Yeah. And the laws are basically usually around minors saying you cannot

force a minor to do something like this. Right. Not, hey, the whole thing is outlawed. If you're an adult and you want to go do this, then that's up to you. As of 2019 this year, 18 states in Washington DC and Puerto Rico have similar bands enacted. And also it's important to point out that those bands are about the legitimate scientific community. Like you will have your license revoked. Didn't say anything about a preacher that you go to or a youth counselor or any sort of non-licensed church therapist. Right. It's only scientists or licensed counselors or psychologists or psychiatrists or doctors, I'm sure, who can lose their license if they practice it. That's right. But yeah, that's because there's religious freedom. I guess

you can still do that to minors though, if it's a religious group doing it. That is what I'm not sure about. Well, it depends on the state. So there was a group or there was a counseling organization called Jonah. And Jonah... Was this Goldberg and Burke? Yes. They ran Jonah, which stood for... I can't find it anywhere. I got to hear Jews offering a new alternative for healing. Okay. They were not only found practicing in New Jersey, conversion therapy. So they both lost their licenses. They were also sued in a civil suit by former patients for fraud and lost. It's interesting if you think about it. Like, wait a minute. If this is not possible, you're charging people for it. That's fraud. So they had like a three and a half million

dollar settlement levied against them and lost their licenses. But then they just set up shop under another name, apparently the same year of the verdict in the civil suit. But for the most part, if you're a state and you pass a law banning conversion therapy to minors among medical practitioners or counselors, the courts are going to uphold that law. Yeah. It's been upheld in California and New Jersey. Most of the challenges are on the grounds of free speech. And when they upheld the New Jersey or maybe it was Maryland, the judge said, we're not infringing on your free speech. You can say whatever you want, but you can't practice this therapy. That's different than free speech. You can believe what you want and say what you want, but you can't do this as

part of your license therapy. It's the same thing as like if you carry out quack cancer treatments that is harmful, like you're poisoning your patients or whatever. And they lose the use of their arms and legs because of a treatment that you gave them for cancer that the American Medical Association has specifically said is damaging and harmful. You're totally going to get held accountable for that. You're lucky to just lose your license in that case. This is the exact same principle. Yeah, for sure. So because it deals mostly with minors or exclusively with minors, the courts have upheld it. But New York City actually is widely considered to have overstepped its bounds and actually misstepped in this kind of culture war about conversion therapy in banning

the practice among minors and adults. And that got New York City sued and New York City was like, well, the Supreme Court's actually gotten pretty conservative lately. I don't know if we should test this and they repealed the ban. Yeah, as a strategy. Right, to keep it from getting tested in the Supreme Court, where the Supreme Court could say no, all laws against conversion therapy are unconstitutional. You can't outlaw it or ban it in any form. Yeah, and I think the Supreme Court already refused to hear one case. Which actually upheld the state's outlaw of conversion therapy. Right. Yeah. Very interesting. There's a movie I haven't seen yet called The Miseducation of Cameron Post. It's a 2018 film from the 2012 novel by Emily Danforth. I haven't seen it yet,

but it's about a girl who undergoes conversion therapy. And it's Chloe Grace Mortz Moritz. You know her? I do. I can't put the face with the name, but I know both. Yeah, you've seen her for sure. Sure. If you want to know more about arrested development, conversion therapy, all that stuff, you can, well, I guess start researching online, see what you think. And since I said, see what you think, it's time for Listener Man. I'm going to call this complaint, pedantic complaint. Okay. I write to complain. Josh, in the episode on historic districts, you kept referring to them repeatedly with the indefinite article, Anne, rather than A, an historic district. I said Anne. That's what he says. That sounds unusual. I don't usually do that. Really? I guess I was just being

unconsciously correct. So is that correct? Yeah. So what's the rule? Because I don't even know it. Huh? What I just said. That's the rule. That's the rule. What I say. Okay. I try not to exercise it too much. Okay, good. Only when I'm right. Joe says this, I realize this infuriating practice has become popular in recent years in the US. I feel passionately that it must be discontinued, especially primarily by those voices are attended by large audiences like you. You are no doubt aware of the letter H as a consonant, necessitating G's. Nice. The use of the indefinite article A rather than Anne. Citation, all grammar books ever. I should limit the scope of my gripe with an important caveat, cockneys. They should probably continue to say

Anne because they pronounce it historic. This guy doesn't even know that the rhyming slaying episode is coming out. How weird. But guys, that's not really what I write today. I love the show. I wanted to tell you, I wanted to wait for a halfway plausible pretense to make the email a little more fun, which I hope this has been any chance on an episode of how pedantry works. Keep up the good work, Joe. Thanks, Joe. He's spoken fun. Turns out he's good peeps after all. Yes. Is the Anne before an H? Is that a thing? Oh yeah. You know that, is it? Yeah. I think, I don't know if it's proper or not, but I understand where it comes from because the vowel that comes right after the H is usually so heavily pronounced in relation to how it's pronounced when it comes after other

consonants, like an historic. An historic district sounds okay. An honor. An honor. A honor. Which one sounds better? Like I was, it's bestowed an honor. Yeah, not safe the other way. But you wouldn't say in high school, I had an history teacher that was great. You know, it's really weird. Did Joe tell you to say that? No, I just thought of it because, and historic. I had a history teacher. I had a historic. Yeah, both work. How about this? We're both right, Joe. Try not to focus on such stupid stuff. I'm curious if there is, I really want to know the rule now because I know it's a consonant, but if people are saying it these days, is that just some sort of a fighting the system? That's the descriptivist way. The prescriptivist is like,

no, it's this way. Right. Joe's the prescriptivist here. We're descriptivists. All right. I think we've proven ourselves there. Maybe we should launch a side podcast called The Descriptivists. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah. Almost has like a Civil War era folk band feel to it. We'd have to go curly queues though. That's fine. We're not going to do that. We could get fake ones that we just took on and off for publicity for. Right. Scout mob. Right. If you want to get in touch with us like Joe did, have a little quibble, a little gripe or praise or whatever, you can go on to stuffyoushouldknow.com and check us out. Our social links are all up there. You can also send us an email to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of

I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with

Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye, listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.