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Gays can go straight,study suggests
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AN explosive new study says some gay people can turn straight if they really want to.
Dr Robert L Spitzer, a psychiatry professor at Columbia University who led the study, said he cannot estimate what percentage of highly motivated gay people can change their sexual orientation.
But he said the research ``shows some people can change from gay to straight, and we ought to acknowledge that''.
Spitzer, who said he does not offer reparative therapy and began his study as a skeptic, said the research was paid for out of his department's funds.
He conducted 45-minute telephone interviews with 200 people, 143 of them men, who claimed they had changed their orientation from gay to heterosexual. The average age of those interviewed was 43.
They answered about 60 questions about their sexual feelings and behaviour before and after their efforts to change. Those efforts had begun about 14 years before the interviews for the men and 12 years for the women.
Most said they had used more than one strategy to change their orientation. About half said the most helpful step was work with a mental health professional, most commonly a psychologist. About a third cited a support group.
Spitzer concluded that 66 per cent of the men and 44 per cent of the women had arrived at what he called good heterosexual functioning.
That term was defined as being in a sustained, loving heterosexual relationship within the past year, getting enough satisfaction from the emotional relationship with their partner to rate at least seven on a 10-point scale, having satisfying heterosexual sex at least monthly and never or rarely thinking of somebody of the same sex during heterosexual sex.
In addition, 89 per cent of men and 95 per cent of women said they were bothered only slightly, or not at all, by unwanted homosexual feelings. Only 11 per cent of the men and 37 per cent of the women reported a complete absence of homosexual indicators, including same-sex attraction.
Psychologist Douglas Haldeman, who is on the clinical faculty of the University of Washington and has published evaluations of reparative therapy, said the study offers no convincing evidence of change.
He said there is no credible scientific evidence that suggests sexual orientation can be changed, ``and this study doesn't prove that either.''
He also said the participants appeared unusually skewed toward religious conservatives and people treated by therapists ``with a strong anti-gay bias''. Such participants might think that being a homosexual is bad and feel pressured to claim they were no longer gay, Haldeman said.
David Elliot, a spokesman for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in Washington, also criticized the study because of the main sources of its participants.
``The sample is terrible, totally tainted, totally unrepresentative of the gay and lesbian community,'' he said.
Spitzer said he has no proof that participants were honest. But he said several findings suggest their statements cannot be dismissed out of hand.
For example, he said, participants had no trouble offering detailed descriptions of their behaviour. Spitzer also said the gradual nature of the change they reported indicates ``it is not a simple made-up story''.(SD-Agencies)
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