Saturday, April 25, 2009

Faked Evidence of ‘Gay Conversion’?

A few days back I did a post about a new book that is out which accuses the famed sex therapists, Masters and Johnson, of falsifying their evidence that gays could undergo "conversion" and become straight. While all of us in the LGBT community who have let go of religious based brainwashing know that one cannot change their sexual orientation, it is helpful that the mainstream media is picking up this story. All too typically, the MSM is worthless and allows anti-gay charlatans to spout lies without exposing them and documenting that the change myth is a fraud and rejected by all legitimate medical and mental health experts. Here are some highlights from the New York Times:
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Did Masters & Johnson fake their evidence that they’d successfully “converted” more than 70 percent of men and women who were dissatisfied with their homosexuality? That claim was made in the 1979 book, “Homosexuality in Perspective,” by William Masters and Virginia Johnson. But it’s questioned in Thomas Maier’s new biography of the sexologists, “Masters of Sex.”
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Mr. Maier
summarizes his doubts in Scientific American, explaining that doubts about validity of the case studies arose among the staff at the Masters and Johnson clinic before the publication of the 1979 book:
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Most staffers never met any of the conversion cases during the study period of 1968 through 1977. . . . Clinic staffer Lynn Strenkofsky, who organized patient schedules during this period, says she never dealt with any conversion cases. Marshall and Peggy Shearer, perhaps the clinic’s most experienced therapy team in the early 1970s, says they never treated homosexuals and heard virtually nothing about conversion therapy.
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When the clinic’s top associate, Robert Kolodny, asked to see the files and to hear the tape-recordings of these “storybook” cases, Masters refused to show them to him. Kolodny—who had never seen any conversion cases himself—began to suspect some, if not all, of the conversion cases were not entirely true. When he pressed Masters, it became ever clearer to him that these were at best composite case studies made into single ideal narratives, and at worst they were fabricated.
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Eventually Kolodny approached Virginia Johnson privately to express his alarm. She, too, held similar suspicions about Masters’ conversion theory, though publicly she supported him. The prospect of public embarrassment, of being exposed as a fraud, greatly upset Johnson, a self-educated therapist who didn’t have a college degree and depended largely on her husband’s medical expertise.
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With Johnson’s approval, Kolodny spoke to their publisher about a delay, but it came too late in the process.” That was a bad book,” Johnson recalled decades later. Johnson said she favored a rewriting and revision of the whole book “to fit within the existing [medical] literature,” and feared that Bill simply didn’t know what he was talking about. At worst, she said, “Bill was being creative in those days” in the compiling of the “gay conversion” case studies.
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I guess "being creative" translates to lying. I am glad that the bogus nature of the Masters and Johnson book is now being exposed. Now if only the MSM would expose the dishonesty of James Dobson, Exodus International and others who make a living peddling "ex-gay" snake oil.

1 comment:

Jonathan said...

I was sad to see a young lesbian talking about how she's now an ex-lesbian on YouTube.

I was looking through Coming Out vlogs with a view to doing one myself when I came across her page. It's terribly sad she feels the need to do this but then as someone who has struggled big time over being gay I can't stand in judgement of her.

Sadly, we do live in a world where there's an awful lot of prejudice towards us and our 'chosen lifestyle' and the need to be loved and approved of makes us do all kinds of things to belong and feel a part of, rather than apart from, wider society.