There’s every reason to suppose that sexual orientation can, in some individuals, be changed this has nothing to do with the nonsensical and non-scientific assumption that homosexuality is an “illness.”īut, as so often, the scientific evidence tends to be overlooked by those who make the issue a political football, whether conservatives who claim inaccurately that sexual orientation is nothing more than a The notes and such, and the names of the people he supposedly helped ‘turn’ straight so they could be interviewed. It is telling the Masters never submitted his work on ‘reparative therapy’ to a refereed journal if he had done so, unlike a mass market book, he would have had to give over his research findings,
Really think that if it was real that gays couldn’t have sex with anyone but a same sex partner….tells you how ignorant they really are. Is that they believe that if being gay was ‘real’ that they wouldn’t be able to have sex with a member of the opposite sex (such as gay men or women who were married and had kids), they
Stop someone from being gay, that all it does is reinforce negativity towards being gay and getting people to play act at being heterosexual (one of the funniest things I routinely read from the anti gay crowd The APA came to the conclusion almost 40 years go that being gay was not a mental illness that could be ‘cured’, and since then every study of ‘reparative’ therapy has shown that it doesn’t To prove that being gay could be ‘cured’. I also suspect that Masters was a complete homophobe (maybe he was secretly gay and couldn’t deal with it) and thus had every impetus Views of sex and sexuality then the reality of what the cases showed. Not surprising….Master’s work was incredibly flawed, from everything that has happened since they were the cat’s meow it has become apparent that Master’s work reflected more his own Maiers says the success of the “gay conversion” therapy has Masters continued to defend the evidence until his death, but Mr.
Was being creative in those days” in the compiling of the “gay conversion” case studies.ĭoes “being creative” mean “making it up”? Dr. Rewriting and revision of the whole book “to fit within the existing literature,” and feared that Bill simply didn’t know what he was talking about. 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. The prospect of publicĮmbarrassment, 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. She, too, held similar suspicions about Masters’ conversion theory, though publicly she supported him. When he pressed Masters, it became ever clearer to him that these were at bestĬomposite case studies made into single ideal narratives, and at worst they were fabricated.Įventually Kolodny approached Virginia Johnson privately to express his alarm. Never seen any conversion cases himself-began to suspect some, if not all, of the conversion cases were not entirely true. 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. 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 Clinic staffer Lynn Strenkofsky, who organized patient schedules during this period, says she never dealt withĪny conversion cases. Most staffers never met any of the conversion cases during the study period of 1968 through 1977. Maier summarizes his doubts in Scientific American, explaining that doubts about validity of the case studies arose among the staffĪt the Masters and Johnson clinic before the publication of the 1979 book: But it’s questioned in Thomas Maier’s new biography of the sexologists, “Masters of Sex.” 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 theġ979 book, “Homosexuality in Perspective,” by William Masters and Virginia Johnson.