Personally, I hope this year the APA will totally ban its members from using ex-gay snake oil to try to "cure" gays. Hence, it is with dismay that I read that Warren Throckmorton - a leading ex-gay proponent and religious fanatic (in my opinion) who has acquired a taste for the money parents will spend when they learn they have a gay child - will be part of a symposium at the APA's 2008 convention in Washington. I base my low opinion of Throckmorton on numerous e-mail exchanges that we have had, reading his APA Journal articles that do not support the "cures" he purports to offer, and personal attacks he has made against me based on my efforts to expose ex-gays as a fraud perpetrated by Christianists for political and financial reasons.
To this day Throckmorton - who lectured me on the need to change my orientation - has never asnwered a question I posed to him: namely, if homosexuality was the norm and being heterosexual was not, could he change his inate attraction to women as opposed to men so as to be "normal." He asks of others what he himself could not do. One can only suggest that someone at the APA needs their head examined for allowing this carnaval to occur. While Throckmorton claims that he is not a practitioner of reparative therapy, merely calling something by a different name doses not change its substance. One only need read Throckmorton's writings on Christianist web sites to see what he is peddling and it is reparative therapy regardless of what he calls it. Here are highlights from Gay City News on the travesty involving Throckmorton:
[A]t the APA's 2008 convention in Washington, the group will host a symposium, at which one of the two mental health practitioner-panelists is Dr. Warren Throckmorton, a psychologist without state board certification and an advocate for "Sexual Identity Therapy," which he says he has successfully applied to help patients "alter homosexual feelings or behaviors" and live their lives "heterosexually" with "only very few weak instances of homosexual attraction."
[W]hat make this story intriguing, and indeed troubling. Instead it is the embrace by a scientifically-based organization, APA, of an unlicensed practitioner who espouses controversial professional opinions about homosexuality but can point to no peer-reviewed findings that his clinical approach has merit.
While calling on practitioners to "do all that is possible to decrease the stigma related to homosexuality," the group, in the face of determined opposition from a small number of psychiatrists, held back from branding conversion therapy "unethical." But three years later, in 2000, APA adopted a position recommending that "ethical practitioners refrain from attempts to change individuals' sexual orientation, keeping in mind the medical dictum, to 'first do no harm.'"
Drescher doesn't buy this benign view of Throckmorton, terming him in his AGLP riposte to Scasta a "spin doctor of the ex-gay myth," and warning of the symposium's "potential harm," particularly if its presentation at an APA convention "becomes a PR tactic to buttress the standing of conversion therapies to the general public."
On his blog, Throckmorton argues that he is not a conversion or reparative therapist, specifically rejecting the traditional focus of such practitioners on gay men's "failure to bond with the father" as the root of their disorder. Instead, without laying out his own therapeutic approach in detail, he claims to meet troubled gay men where they are, as it were, to help them "pursue their objectives." But like reparative therapists, Throckmorton claims success with leading gay men away from homosexuality and is unable to point to any data or research to buttress his assertions.
Wayne Besen, the founder of Truth Wins Out, a non-profit aimed at exposing "the 'ex-gay' myth," argues that Throckmorton's primary goal is to supplant the reparative therapy model championed by Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, who heads up the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality. NARTH's work, which has won wide acclaim in Christian right circles, is rejected by every leading mental health and education association, including APA. According to Besen, Throckmorton and Nicolosi previously worked collaboratively, but have since had a falling-out.
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