The History of Conversion Therapy

Conversion therapy, sometimes known as reparative therapy, targets LGBTQ+ people and seeks to change their sexual or gender identities.Conversion therapy has been shown to be harmful and has been categorically rejected by every mainstream medical and mental health organization for years. However, due to continued societal bias against queer people, some practitioners continue to use conversion therapy. Young people are particularly vulnerable to its harmful effects, which include increases in depression, anxiety, risky drug use, homelessness, and suicide. On today’s episode of In the Den, guest host Dawn Sparling talks with historian Seth Anderson about the history and consequences of conversion therapy and how to fight against it today. 

Special Guest: Seth Anderson

J. Seth Anderson, PhD, was born in Provo, Utah, and raised in Utah and Arizona. He served a mission in the Russia, Samara mission. He earned a BA in Russian and a BS in Economics from Arizona State University, an MA in History from the University of Utah, and a PhD in History from Boston University. His dissertation explores the origin of gay conversion therapy. (He claims to be working on the book proposal, but that's debatable.) He likes to play piano and go to the gym. He and his husband Dr. Michael Ferguson, were the first same-sex couple married in Utah in 2013.

Links from the Show: 

• The Compassion.Science website: https://neuromichael.com/
• Seth’s book LGBT Salt Lake: https://www.amazon.com/Lgbt-Salt-Lake-Seth-Anderson/dp/1540216128 
• Join Mama Dragons today at www.mamadragons.org 
• Mama Dragons on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mamadragons 
• Mama Dragons on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themamadragons/ 

In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you. Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at www.mamadragons.org.  

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Transcript

JEN: Hello and welcome to In The Den with Mama Dragons. I’m your host, Jen. This podcast was created to walk and talk with you through the journey of raising happy, healthy, and productive LGBTQ humans. Thanks for listening. We’re glad you’re here.

DAWN: Hello everyone. I am Dawn Sparling. I’m your guest host for this episode. I’m honored and excited to be here today. I am a proud Mama Dragon, and I joined the Mama Dragons community when it was introduced to me in 2020. I want to thank Jen and the whole Mama Dragons In the Den team for inviting me to be a part of the podcast and this episode in particular.

I am really excited for today’s episode, where we’re going to discuss Conversion Therapy with Dr. Seth Anderson. Myself, growing up in a traditional religious background, I remember hearing about Conversion Therapy as “Praying the Gay Away.” In my research of Seth’s work, it’s really been eye-opening to understand its historical origins, including the involvement of religious beliefs and the psychological impacts to individuals who had to endure this therapy. So it is my hope that in this discussion we can really get an understanding of what conversion therapy is, what it is not and what we can do as Mama Dragons and family and friends to create a supportive environment that counters the negative messages associated with the therapy.

But, first of all, I’d like to welcome you back, Seth! 

SETH: Thank you.

DAWN: It was wonderful to have you and your husband, Michael on Episode #73 with In the Den back in June, and you were talking about your personal stories and narratives. And I really encourage the listeners to listen to that episode if you haven’t, it is so good! And their love story is awesome. Today we are excited to have you back to talk about Conversion Therapy. And I’d like to introduce you a little bit more formally to our listeners.

J. Seth Anderson, PhD, was born in Provo, Utah, and raised in Utah and Arizona. He served a mission in the Russia, Samara mission. He earned a BA in Russian and a BS in Economics from Arizona State University, an MA in History from the University of Utah, and a PhD in History from Boston University. His dissertation explores the origin of gay conversion therapy. And when you provided us your bio, you said you claimed to be working on a book proposal, but that's debatable.

SETH: I have made progress this summer. I did finish a first draft of a proposal and I had my PhD Advisor look at it and he gave me some feedback on it. So now it’s just I need to do that and it’s ready to go.

DAWN: Awesome.

SETH: I’m the hold up.

DAWN: OK. And then I understand you like to play piano and go to the gym. And one cool fact, and if you listen to that episode, you and your husband Dr. Michael Ferguson, were the first same-sex couple married in Utah in 2013.

SETH: That’s right.

DAWN: And that’s a very, very cool story, really good story that you guys talked about.

SETH: And it feels like it was yesterday and it feels like it was a thousand years ago.

DAWN: I bet.

SETH: It’s so fresh and so distant, but that was a wild, wild day and time that was completely unplanned and just one of those twists of history that happened that we were in. So, yeah.

DAWN: Very cool. And you are a history guy, so that will be the first thing that we’ll chat about, is really what motivated you to do your doctoral thesis on the genesis of gay conversion therapy?

SETH: That’s a good question. So I came to history years and years ago through historic preservation. So I was doing historic preservation activism work in Phoenix. And my first true love was the history of the West, the history of Utah and Arizona, history of neighborhoods and buildings, and trying to figure out why did people build these things and why did they do them here. I loved it. That was my whole jam for a long time. But I realized at some point, that I wouldn’t be taken seriously without any kind of academic training, that I would hit a ceiling where I could only go so far. So I began thinking, “Well, I know I need to get some training in this, I just don’t know how or where.” And then Michael and I met and he was working on his PhD at the U. And I moved back from Arizona to Utah so we could be together. And there, the University of Utah is here, I should look at the program. So I applied and got into the Master’s Degree program at the U. It was American History, and then the woman that I worked with, I sort of, it’s not an accident, right? But the way things kind of unfolded was that she did a lot of history of sexuality research, a history of families, and it opened up this world of gay and lesbian history that I didn’t really know existed.

DAWN: Wow.

SETH: And I really interested me, specifically of gay and lesbian history in Utah. And what I discovered quickly was that in large cities like New York, Chicago, LA, there had already been for decades this historical interest in those places and this production of historical works analyzing those cities. And I argued – that’s good, we should know that – but we should also know what this story looks like in a place like Salt Lake or in a place like Phoenix, places that are not New York City.

DAWN: Right.

SETH: Those stories are going to look radically different. And so I”ve always had this local history interest. And so I jumped into that. And then on total accident – this was a happy accident – I was a Master’s student looking for a Master’s thesis topic and kind of stumbling around, feeling things out, what could I work on. And I saw a photograph that had appeared in the Salt Lake Tribune in 1986 and it’s in my book LGBT Salt Lake that I published a couple years ago. It was this really sad photo of this young man covered in KS lesions, Kaposi’s Sarcoma, which is the final stages of AIDS. And he doesn’t have his shirt on, he’s looking down. Behind him is this kind of blurred out picture that I’m pretty sure was the Ogden Temple. It was hard to for-sure say. And I was just like, ‘What is this story? What happened?” And I went looking for a paper or a book or something to read about. And there was nothing. And I went, “Oh, here’s my project. I need to work on the history of HIV and AIDS in Utah. Nobody’s done this.”

DAWN: Wow.

SETH: And so my Master’s thesis was on that, so it’s a pretty heavy topic. Really it’s a history of medicine, a history of HIV and AIDS, history of religion, history of community. And I really quite liked it. I was a new grad student and a new historian. So I don’t think it necessarily was my best work. But it’s good work and I’m still pretty pleased with it and what I discovered. Eventually, later the Law School at the U kind of got wind of the project somehow. I was a grad student with no money. They raised a lot of money, created this new archive at the University of Utah that I was a part of helping to create. And then there was a documentary that was produced about Kristin Riess and Maggie Snyder who were the two main doctors who treated people with HIV and AIDS in the 80’s and 90’s. And they are dear friends. I quite adore them. And the documentary was called “Quiet Heroes.” It played at Sundance. I believe it won awards and stuff.

DAWN: Oh, cool.

SETH: And so that was, as a grad student to see this idea that I had, a couple years later become something much bigger – not because of me. That’s not why it happened. I don’t need the credit or whatever.

DAWN: Well, it started with you digging into it.

SETH: Kind of. I don’t think anybody else was working on it before me. I’m pretty sure I was the one poking at that story saying, “Look, there is a story here. You need to do something with this.” So that happened. And so I finished the Master’s degree. And then Michael had a Postdoc at Cornell. And we moved out east to Ithaca, New York. While there, I knew I wanted to continue grad school. I wanted to do the PhD, but wasn’t sure where or what about. So when Michael got a job at Harvard a couple years after Cornell, I knew I was coming to Boston, and so I applied to some PhD programs here and got in at BU. And as I was thinking through the application process and trying to pitch an idea, the conversation therapy thing kind of came pretty naturally. Michael was the main plaintiff in a lawsuit against conversion therapy that went to trial in 2015. We filed it in 2012. So, since 2012 to 2017 when I started graduate school, the conversion therapy story had been swirling around us all the time because that trial was always there, kind of hovering over everything. And then, as my historian brain does, “Where does this even come from?”

DAWN: Yeah.

SETH: I know the contemporary story. But where does this begin? How does this happen? How does it spread? Thinking like a historian and asking questions. And that’s sort of how I came to that as, this is what I’m going to work on. And it was kind of – what’s the right word – on the one hand it felt so tiny and in the weeds and so niche that it almost felt like not a real project because it was just too specific. And I worried that there wasn’t going to be enough evidence or enough of a story to tell. On the other hand, it felt like the complete opposite. It felt like it was this enormous story to tell that had so much information and how was I going to synthesize that into anything meaningful? So there was this really weird tension in completely opposite ways. And when you write a dissertation for the first time, I remember sitting down with my PhD advisor and was like, “Look. I’ve never done this. I don’t know how to write a dissertation.” And so you just kind of stumble your way through it. You feel it out. You go step by step. You have help. And you go to archives and you look for sources and you start about what do they mean. And you start, eventually, to see the pieces start to fall together and it’s probably – oh man, when was it – probably towards the end of 2019 when it was one day when I was on the phone with a friend kind of talking through the ideas and it all went, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk. I watched everything fall into place. And I was like, “Oh finally. Oh, good. Now I know what to do. Now I have a map.”

DAWN: Yeah. That’s awesome

SETH: And then, after that it came pretty quickly. Actually, I had done a ton of archival research before COVID happened. So when COVID happened and everything had shut down, I had all my sources. And then I had all the time. I would’ve been in a bad place if I had nothing to work with. But I had mountains of stuff to work with. So over COVID, I pretty much wrote the whole thing.

DAWN: Nice.

SETH: And it took a different shape, the project, from what I originally pitched to what it became, which it should as you dig in your sources and stuff your ideas should change. And they did. I ended up making some really provocative arguments and I think challenging arguments to this story that are perhaps not intuitive, or contrary to what people would think. And then I leave open space for a more nuanced, philosophical discussion about choice and about adults making choices. That’s really vague and not as eloquent as I would like it to be.

DAWN: That’s okay.

SETH: But I was surprised by some of the conclusions that I came to, which I’m happy to talk about. So that’s how I got to that project. That’s how it happened.

DAWN: Awesome. Thank you for going through that and explaining that. I can imagine it’s a lot to figure that all out and nice when the pieces come together, and I definitely want to talk about some of that. But first, I think I have a limited understanding of conversion therapy and I think our listeners would too. So can you just provide a background on how conversion therapy developed? What were the motivations behind its creation? Maybe some of the methods, that kind of stuff, just high level, just so people can have an understanding.

SETH: Yeah. Let’s see where we can start that then. So it’s not called conversion therapy for quite some time. That’s was a linguistic problem historically trying to nail that down to be able to talk about this idea. It’s sort of been present since the mid to late 19th century. But it’s not being called that which is also true doing any kind of history of sexuality. Words are very tricky because the words we use today and our present views and our presentunderstandings don’t map cleanly onto the past. And it’s irresponsible, I would argue, and I’ve had students argue with me about this – but I sort of get irritated sometimes when people are like, “Abraham Lincoln was gay.” And I’m like, “What does that mean? What do you actually mean by that? And how would you know?” Did Abraham Lincoln go to Lady Gaga concerts? I don’t know what that means because gay means something specifically very, very specific in our language today that it didn’t in the 1850s, right. So if you’re saying, “Oh, there’s this evidence of Abraham Lincoln having these homo-social, homo-emotional relationships with men. That quote ‘proves’ he’s gay.” I’m like, “I don’t believe that. That’s irresponsible to try and claim people of the past for a political agenda today.” So that’s already, with these words, gets really messy.

DAWN: Yeah.

SETH: So the idea of conversion therapy – and I’m doing little quoty fingers – doesn’t really become that term until about the 70’s. Throughout the 20th Century, it’s kind of called Analysis when I could see people talking about it. But they’re just talking about psychotherapy in some ways.

DAWN: Okay.

SETH: So we’ll jump way back then. Comes out of sexology research in Germany 1860’s, 1869 is the first time we see the word “homosexual” appear. And it’s sort of not understood as to what that is or why. So it will move out of Europe then, into the United States. It’s the end of the 19th century, Industrial Revolution, what we refer to as the Progressive Era. There’s a lot happening in the state and people are starting to recognize that there are a certain class of people who seem to really enjoy having sex with people of the same sex even though there’s other options. And so medical doctors at first start going, “Well, why? Why are they doing that?” And then, at the time, they were alienists – today we call them psychiatrists – so they were alienists because they were alienated. They start seeing this too and start kind of collapsing homosexuality and bad mental health together. And then there’s all these theories of maybe this is a problem of modernity, maybe this is a breakdown of masculinity. Maybe this is something to do with gender roles eroding. There’s all the theories that are spinning around.

DAWN: Right.

SETH: It sounds very similar to the same conversation that we’ve had forever. So that’s kind of where it starts to happen. And I’m speaking in very broad generality.

DAWN: Yeah. Yeah. That’s fine.

SETH: The state, meaning the government, starts to recognize this as well and starts to wonder if it’s a crime. And so there’s some laws that are passed about sexual degeneracy that puts people into jail or into mental institutions. And then there’s theories, primarily from medical doctors in this time period – late 19th, early 20th century – of trying to fix this. There’s kind of three phases here with the medical story. Doctors early on really see it as a problem located within the body. So there are surgeries that people do. And I can’t say that this is super wide-spread or it was the norm. But we do know that this happened that there were people who would try to do testicle implants because they would think that the homosexual cells were located in the gonads or something like that. There are other theories about, like there was one report I read that was called – I think they called it Rectal Massage—I think.

DAWN: Oh, wow.

SETH: It was supposedly supposed to move the homosexual cells from the body. It’s comical in a way, right?

DAWN: Yeah.

SETH: Stuff like that, then what happens around that time is it’s the rise of psychiatry and eventually psychotherapy. And these are very complicated histories. But those start to come online and to argue, “Look the problem you’ve identified is actually not in the body. It’s in the mind. And we have to fix the mind to fix that problem.” So by the 19-teens, 1920s there’s really not a lot of like the surgeries that are going on anymore. It’s shifted to more to like a mental analysis. So that’s what they’re doing. And then there’s a whole school of thought of people saying, “Homosexuality is not a problem. We should leave it alone.” There’s people who are saying, “No it is a problem and we can fix it.” There’s no one consensus. It's all very messy. That starts to kind of distill and come together though in the United States by the 40’s. And I’ll stop there because I can go way into more detail with what happens after the 40’s and how that changes. But before that, there’s actually more openness to homosexuality before the 40’s. There’s a lot of work on this. A guy named George Chauncey wrote a book called “Gay New York” which is about New York City of, I think 1880 to like 1945. And you’d be surprised at how open and how obvious and how prevalent homosexuality was and before it was really severely punished. That comes later and it’s kind of a blip like that closet era isn’t necessarily representative of gay history, gay and lesbian history before that time. It gets really messy. But that’s what it is. So, ultimately though, using modern terminology, the idea of conversion therapy is to change a homosexual orientation towards a heterosexual orientation. And that’s primarily always what it was about. Baked into that is indeed ideas of gender, of masculinity and femininity. That’s part of it. It’s not all of it. But it’s generally always targeted gay men. Usually gay men of upper classes who had money to go to a doctor to try to deal with it. Women come online a bit later. Lesbianism, generally, it’s there but it’s not as visible for a variety of reasons. So conversion therapy was generally always geared toward gay men, primarily gay white men of middle and upper class which isn’t to say that people didn’t seek it out. And this is the other component to this, is like we tend to read the conversion therapy story as one of force where people get caught and then are sentenced to a mental institution or to jail and to get out of it, you go to conversion therapy. You promise that you’re not going to do that anymore. That’s true. That’s not wrong. That did happen. But, in my research, what surprised me was how often I found evidence of people going to doctors and saying, “I don’t like this about myself. I need your help. Please help me, medical professional. How can you help me fix this?” That is a surprising element to this story that is not often told.

DAWN: Right. Yeah, because they’re getting signals from society that it’s not right.

SETH: Getting to the motivation there, that question is really difficult historically because is it the question: Are they distressed because they’re genuinely distressed or are they distressed because these outside factors are saying, “Something’s wrong with you. You need to fix it.” And that’s so opaque and historians can’t really answer those questions. So there were some people who really seemed distressed and really wanted their life to be a particular way. And it wasn’t. And they wanted help to live how they felt they really wanted. So, historically, we need to make space for that aspect.

DAWN: Yeah.

SETH: And this gets semi-controversial. That, then, opens up conversations about the contemporary moment as well about adults who choose. of their own free will and accord, to pursue a type of therapy that they say helps them to live a heterosexual lifestyle. That is a difficult thing to talk about and to make space for. And I have to nuance that with a zillion little asterisks because I’m not arguing that it’s a good thing. I’m not arguing that it works. I’m not arguing that people should pursue it. I don’t think that at all. What I am open to is like, “Well, adults can make a choice, if that’s the choice they want to make, free from any interference from me or from the state.”

DAWN: Yeah. That they’re not being forced.

SETH: Right. Right. Yeah.

DAWN: And can you also shed some light on what the actual types of modalities of the therapies, so like it’s talk therapy, electric shock therapy too, I think earlier in the 1940’s or earlier probably.

SETH: WE kind of have to put each thing into a different bucket and kind of look at these buckets. So, and again, it kind of maps on to which profession are we talking about? Are we talking about MDs and what are they doing? Versus what are psychiatrists doing? What are psychotherapists doing? The MD thing is kind of the surgery stuff which I touched on and that sort of ends. And then psychiatry comes online. And by the 30’s, psychiatry's really trying to grapple with these ideas of mental illness and mental health. And one thing that’s important to remember is that drugs for mental health regulation do not exist until the 50’s. So imagine a world today where nobody has any access or doesn’t exist to take something for your anxiety or depression or schizophrenia. Before that, the mental health world is quite scary. So what they would do, then, is they used just a variety of sedatives. So I have a whole thing in my dissertation about it and I don’t have it in front of me. But basically sedatives were, you would go to a mental health institution and if you were out of control, they would just sedate you. So that was part of it. So one aspect was just trying to keep mentally unstable people sort of calm. Homosexuality gets wrapped into that. So it’s not that you’re going because – they’re kind of collapsing things and making comorbidities where there aren’t really comorbidities. So the first attempts would be sedation. Other things they would start using was a variety of shock therapy. So one of them was insulin shock therapy. And that was used for not just homosexuality but for like anything that was considered a mental health disorder.

DAWN: Okay.

SETH: That does eventually sort of change in the 30’s they start using electricity. Again, not just for homosexuality. This is the treatment for anybody who has a mental health disorder that is sort of out of control. Is it used on gay people? Yes. Is it super pervasive? No, because to have access to a machine that does that is kind of expensive. It’s not like your doctor down the street has one in his office. It’s just like today, you don’t go get a CAT scan at your doctor’s office. You have to go to a specialist because those machines are expensive.

DAWN: Right. Right.

SETH: So kind of the same idea. Yes, it happened. But usually in hospitals or in medical training facilities. It was experimental and they were trying to figure out what is it doing? Is it helping?

DAWN: Right.

SETH: So that is part of it. What’s the other ones? Into, I think it begins in the 30’s into the 40’s, there are – and this kind of bifurcates into two – there’s lobotomies, which is where they cut your head open and kind of tinker with your brain there. And the guy who develops that actually wins a Nobel Prize for this. It’s not quite this Frankenstein . . .

DAWN: Right. The pick with . . .

SETH: That comes later. There’s another guy who starts saying you can do the ice-pick lobotomy, or the transorbital lobotomy is what it’s actually called. Where they stick a pick in your eye, pop the bone behind your eye.

DAWN: Oh gosh.

SETH: Put something up your nose, swirl it around and pull out your frontal lobe. And it sounds grotesque because it is. For a time, though, this was perceived as perhaps being the cure for mental health. And the guy got a lot of push back on it when he was doing it to – it wasn’t like he was celebrated. There were plenty of medical people who were like, “This is not okay. You are not qualified for this. This is gross.” The guy who did it called them assembly line, he would brag about how many people he could icepick in an hour. But the motivation for that is sort of financial. It’s sort of like the state governments are spending a ton of money on mental health at the time. And so if you can get people out of mental health hospitals, the state can save money. Also, if you’re the guy that cures mental illness, you’re going to be showered with money from everyone for the rest of your life. So there’s a self-interest motivation for that.

DAWN: Right. Yeah. Exactly.

SETH: Though, by the 50’s – and this is a surprise to people – by the 50’s there’s the introduction of the first antipsychotic drugs. It’s not lithium. Lithium is one of the first if not the first. I forget exactly which one was the first. But once that comes into play, the idea of doing physical surgeries again is kind of out the door.

DAWN: Right. Much better to give drugs.

SETH: And by the 50’s too, psychiatrists are even saying, “We’re not even sure what that does, these surgeries? Does that do anything? What’s our evidence for that?” Meanwhile, psychotherapists are saying, “Why do these psychiatrists keep trying to give these surgeries? They don’t do anything. The problem is in the mind. Psychotherapy can cure these problems in the mind through primarily talk therapy.” And that’s where talk therapy sort of really enters the conversation. It had already been going on. It’s not like it was brand new. But by the 40’s, 50’s, into the 60’s, everybody’s going to a psychotherapist. Everybody goes and talks about their childhood. And even to this day, we live downstream of these Freudian psychotherapy terms, ego, childhood trauma, mother complex, whatever those words are, come from that. We still live in that world. So and as part of that, then, homosexuality gets linked into that as well. Talk therapy is the primary modality far and away. There are still things that are going on, yes. There are still shock therapies that’s happening. There’s still some insulin therapy. Those don’t just end overnight. Those fade out over time, but they were never the go-to or the pervasive method. Oh, and then there’s kind of various strains of that. So there’s the Freudian, that you have to go back to your childhood and figure out what happened. There’s also then, that comes out of Eastern Europe, out of Czechoslovakia which becomes the basis for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. It’s the Pavlovian response thing. So that, by the 60’s, is also a huge part of the mental health conversation about the power of this therapy and of conditioning. So there becomes a different type of talk therapy that’s about training people to behave certain ways, which is still the way we do therapy today.

DAWN: Yeah. It’s super interesting. So, along with that and when you’re talking about surgeries and medical doctors and psychotherapists and things like that, I wanted to move more into, I think most of us – or at least myself – primarily, think of it as something that is promoted from a religious perspective. That it really is touted or it’s your clergy that’s trying to get you to change and to go into this type therapy. And that’s why I said I remember it being called, “Pray the gay away.” So how did religion come into it in promoting conversion therapy and justify those practices and where is that evolution of that as well?

SETH: Good question. So this is one of the other surprising discoveries that I made in my research. What you’re describing comes much later. So we need to break this into two pieces. So there’s the early part that I’ve been describing. What I discovered was that by ’45, there’s the very first psychoanalytic clinic within a university hospital, university medical program, opens up at Columbia University under the leadership of a guy named Sandor Rado, who was a close associate of Freud who has a huge falling out with him. A very controversial figure in the psychoanalytic community. A year after Freud dies, Rado breaks very publicly with two tenets of Freudian orthodoxy. One of them being about libido, the other one being about homosexuality. And Rado says Freud’s wrong. Freud says there’s that famous letter from Freud called “To an American Mother” in which she writes a letter like, “I think my son has a problem. Can he be fixed?” And Freud writes back and says, “Probably not. Best to do is be happy and live his life but it doesn’t seem like psychotherapy can change this.” Rado says, “No. Wrong. Actually psychotherapy can change it. We have the tools for that, Freud's wrong.” So people are very mad at him. He eventually gets to Columbia, sets up this clinic, and he trains then for the next ten years – until he’s forced to retire – the, what I think of as king of the foot soldiers of that mid-century conversion therapy movement. In Rado’s idea,s which he calls psychoanalytic dynamic, I think, after I’m totally blanking.

DAWN: That’s OK.

SETH: It’s not psychotherapy. He called it something different. It’ll come to me in two seconds. And he trains his students in that. So it begins then, I argue, that the modern origin of conversion therapy begins at Columbia, begins at the institution of learning which gets its credence and its power from the fact that we all go, “Oh, somebody’s at Columbia. They have a PhD by their name. They must be a genius. I should do what they say.” We just sort of shift into that appeal to authority almost. So that’s true in the Post World War II Era, academics have a significant amount of authority and power. I think they still do, rightly or wrongly. So he starts promoting these ideas. He starts getting government funding to do this research. And it’s not just on homosexuality. It’s on his whole ideas of everything. But homosexuality is a component of it. That starts to spread out through the 60’s into the 70’s. His students and people who trained with him and who are trained by his students then start to get these positions as professors or as chairs of departments in other universities around the country taking those ideas with them and bringing them to places that are distant to New York. That’s how I see conversion therapy really starting to spread, is through that network of higher education. Then, what happens though, is in the 60’s there’s a huge – and it’s a well studied topic – the anti-psychiatry movement. So it’s very much a 1960’s era, question authority, rebel against authority type of thing. So there’s the anti-war movement. There’s the anti-psychiatry movement. There’s just a lot happening in the 60’s. And even the psychiatrists, Thomas Szasz is a guy, one of them, Albert Ellis, start saying, “Psychiatrists don't know what they’re doing. We’re saying that we know and we don’t. And what this is really about is about controlling people. We’re doing this wrong.” So even within the field of psychiatry, a questioning of its purpose and its methods. Around that same time, the gay rights movement has been going since the 1950’s and it’s kind of ascendent by the 69. I’m very indifferent to the Stonewall narrative. It’s completely wrong. Everybody understands it completely wrong. And it’s not the beginning of anything. Anyway, I’m not going to dwell on it.

DAWN: Okay.

SETH: What is considered one of the first wins is in 1973, with pressure from this emergent gay rights movement, that the APA, the American Psychiatric Association, removes from the DSM which is the Diagnostic Statistics Manual, homosexuality. That’s how this story is remembered. That’s not actually what happened. They removed, in their own literature and their own words at the time, Robert Spitzer writes this. He says, “We removed homosexuality per se.” In the text it even says, “We recognize that there are a lot of people who are distressed by their homosexual orientation who want help. And they should still seek help with psychiatrists and doctors to get help.” There was even a task force report written in ’69 published in ’71 or ’72 and then republished in ’75 and it’s from the National Institutes of Mental Health, written by three eminent people at the time. And one of their recommendations in that report is that the government needs to build more conversion therapy centers to help people who are suffering from their distress of being gay.

DAWN: Oh wow.

SETH: That’s a very different story than this more triumphant one that is told. So the APA, “Removes” homosexuality per se in ’73. They leave in its place a new category called “sexual orientation disturbance,” which means homosexuality in name but it recognizes that there are people who are not happy about it. One thing that is true here is that removal does recognize there are plenty of gay people who are happy, who live healthy lives, who want nothing to do with medicine. They should be left alone. And then it says, but we recognize that there are still people who are unhappy with this. And the way that that change happens is by a vote of the membership of the APA. And it’s kind of like a 60/40 split when it happens, but it’s not even the entirety of the membership votes. It’s kind of a small turnout. So what happens then, in the 70’s, is there are people who are in that minority vote who wanted to keep homosexuality in the DSM saying – and I would argue correctly – that science is not done by vote. Right?

DAWN: Yes.

SETH: They argued and said, “Look, for decades we have said that this works, that these methods work, that we can change sexual orientation. And then basically overnight, this organization just voted and said, ‘Oh, we’re going to change our mind.’”

DAWN: Yeah.

SETH: And they said, “We don’t believe that’s science.” And I’m like, actually, that makes sense to me. That seems like a legitimate argument. So that then just kicks off this major debate within the mental health field. And then it creates these kind of strange bed-fellows which is where the religious part comes in. So there are levels of the religious piece as well. So I kind of identify three. So there is the one that you mentioned, like the “pray the gay away.” So these are the ones that are very evangelical in their orientation and who don’t really care what psychiatrists say one way or the other. If the APA keeps homosexuality in the DSM or they remove it, it doesn’t matter to them. They’re uninterested in what professional doctors have to say.

DAWN: Right.

SETH: They have the Bible and Jesus. And so there is a movement early on, Exodus International is one of them. Love in Action is another one that is, it’s slightly antagonistic to science. It doesn’t really care. And that appeals to a very particular type of religious person, usually religious men. And uses faith as the basis for “Jesus can fix this in you.”

DAWN: Right.

SETH: That’s the one piece. There’s another piece, though, of the religious component that gets involved and it’s sort of a blend of religious belief and scientific thinking. So this is sort of really embodied by a guy name Nicolosi who is a very devout Catholic. He has a PhD. He’s a psychologist. And in 1983, he opens up what’s called the Thomas Aquinas Center in Los Angeles. And it gets a glowing review in the LA Times. People seem to really quite like him. One of the population that he’s working with, though, is gay Catholics that don’t want to be gay. And so he’s pulling from the idea of Rado, actually, saying, “Yeah. Psychology, and the Mental Health Profession can fix this. The reason you’re gay is because…” And he has his theories as to why, what happened, and how to fix it. So, that’s that blend of religion and science, right? He’s doing both. There’s a sort of an LDS, or Mormon I guess I should say, version of that as well, that’s founded in 1989. It’s called Evergreen which is sort of the same. It’s not a totally like “Pray the Gay Away”. It’s not just an appeal to Jesus. It’s partly that. But it’s also saying, “Let’s look at what the best of mental health research has to say.”

DAWN: Okay. 

SETH: So they’re also pulling from that. That’s phase two of this religious component. And then the third phase would be this kind of, this almost secular religious aspect. So the trial that Michael was involved in that kind of kicked off this whole project way back then, was a group called JONAH, which stood for Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality. They eventually changed the name to Jews Offering New Alternatives to Healing. And so they’re Orthodox Jews, Orthodox and/or Conservative Jews, really, an organization that’s based out of Jersey City. So they're pulling from the orthodox jewish community in that tri-state area there. But also it appeals to Mormons and to Catholics to a degree which is kind of the base of this whole customer base if we’re going to think of it like that.

DAWN:Right.

SETH: But JONAH, JONAH, they’re not saying the Torah and God, that’s a part of it and they’re definitely pulling from Jewish theology and Jewish thinking about sexuality. But they were far more invested in academic – some might disagree with that term “academic” and, fair – with research that purported to be academic, I’ll say that. That claimed to have success rates in changing sexual orientation. So it’s religious, but again, not Jesus, right? They’re Jewish. They’re not praying to Jesus. And the woman who started that group, her name’s Elaine Burke, very interesting story about how that all started with that.

DAWN: Right.

SETH: But then that’s how those strange bed-fellows converge, is there’s that segment of the mental health profession people starting to move away from thinking of homosexuality as an illness and then those who say “You can’t just vote it away. It is an illness and we can fix it.” But then there’s also this element of, “Well, but it’s also a sin.” And so it kind of vacillates between “Is it a sin or is it a crime? What are we doing?” That’s when in the 70’s you really see what becomes known as the “ex-gay movement” emerge after that split. But I always hasten to add with context, that wasn’t in the weeds. It wasn’t like they were far off the mark of what the general consensus was. There was no real general consensus and there was lots of debate about does it even work and if it does work, then why can’t we do it? And even, I’ll add this part in that I found quite interesting, was there’s this infamous dissertation published in BYU in the early 70’s, I think it's published in ’74, that’s about the use of electroshock therapy in treating homosexuality. That’s not exactly what that study was about. It was about, “Can electroshock therapy be used as an aversive stimuli to get people to behave differently?” And the group of men that were being studied were gay men and they were trying to move them away from same sex attraction. That’s not wrong. That is what that study was trying to do. This is what I discovered, though that literally floored me. I was like “Holy Crap.” So people give BYU a hard time over that study and say, “BYU is promoting conversion therapy, electroshock.” And I’m like, “It really wasn’t. It was one study from a graduate student. It wasn’t like it was department policy.” But here’s the kicker: that study that he did was based on a study that had been published by Harvard several years before.

DAWN: Oh, wow.

SETH: Harvard did an even more invasive study by the Chair of the psychiatry department that was a longitudinal study that lasted several years that was much more intense. The electroshock therapy voltage that they used was way more intense.

DAWN: Wow.

SETH: Group therapy that was required and individual therapy that was required, for the purpose of making these men not gay, was done at Harvard. Nobody was like, “Well Harvard is a homophobic organization promoting gay conversion therapy.” I was like, ‘Okay, this changes how I think about this BYU study in fundamental ways.”

DAWN: That is very surprising.

SETH: Isn’t that weird?

DAWN: Yeah. Very interesting. Anything as we’re wrapping up. Anything that you feel like we missed or in your dissertation that you think would be helpful for our listeners?

SETH: I think it’s true in the political moment we live in now and the climate, I think it’s really difficult to listen to people and to actually have a conversation. And I strive and try to do that. Even in this research it was very hard for me to go to these conferences and interview people and read these reports and read journals and letters of this because I do find it really, really sad. But I learned a lot talking to people and just letting people speak. I think there’s value in having rational, emotionally regulated conversations with people you disagree with and trying to find common ground. And I hope culturally, we can move towards that again rather than these silos where we just live in our echo chambers and demonize and really hate on people who think differently than we do. I find that really too bad.

DAWN: Right. Definitely. Hopefully we can get to that.

SETH: I hope that I can just be kind to the people who make different choices than me and try to understand [inaudible] rather than tell them what to do.

DAWN: Well, and I think, too, that’s some of the reason our listeners are listening to things like this: to educate themselves, to understand, to try to hear a different perspective and think, “Okay.” Agree just having those open conversations. Well, thank you so much, Seth. It was great to chat with you and learn more and really appreciate you coming back.

SETH: Thank you, you as well, appreciate it.

JEN: Thanks for joining us here In the Den. While we have you, we want to let you know about the inaugural LUV Conference coming up this October 18th and 19th in Salt Lake City, Utah. The conference is all about learning and connecting and creating a more supportive environment for LGBTQ+ individuals and their families. Get more information at www.luvwithoutlimits.org . That’s L-U-V- without limits.org. Or find the link in the show notes under the links from the show. We hope to see you there. 

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