“Changing the Homosexual?” by Robert K. Johnston, The Reformed Journal, March 1981.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Is it possible for another Christian publication to milk yet one more antigay article from the ill conceived and misleading report by Mansell Pattison and his wife? (cf. REVIEW, Winter 1981 and Spirng 1981). Sadly, The Reformed Journal seems to hope so. The Pattison article has now been denounced in letters in the American Journal of Psychiatry as “harmful”, “rosy”, “irrelevant”, “inappropriate”, “misleading”, employing “questionable or inaccurate psychiatric concepts” and, even by a Pattison supporter, as using “less than rigorous methodology” and being potentially “alienating or destructive for the patient”. But Johnston swallows the Pattison promises with the enthusiasm of one who needs desperately to believe that he has found what he wants to find. Perhaps a man who teaches Old Testament really should not be expected to know how to appraise a “psychiatric” – actually anecdotal – report on claims of psychosexual change, but Johnston nonetheless goes right ahead to try to do so. The result is further confusion.
He repeatedly asserts that the Pattison interviewees (they were not Pattison’s patients) changed “from exclusive homosexuality to exclusive heterosexuality”. The Pattison data itself contradicts this. But Johnston’s error is partly excusable since the Pattisons carelessly make such sweeping claims, no matter what their specific data are.
There are blatant contradictions between what Johnston says the Pattisons found and what the Pattisons said they found. Here are a few of these contradictions. Of the 11 so-called “ex-gays”, Johnston says “all declared themselves to be exclusively homosexual” before the “change” but the Pattisons wrote of at least “3 subjects who had considered themselves bisexual before their conversion”. Johnston says “the six who were now married had all sought marriage not as an attempt to overcome their homosexuality” but the Pattisons said that “2 of our subjects married out of motivation to ‘cure’ their homosexuality”. Johnston says that the Pattisons found “eight psychologically and spiritually healthy heterosexuals who had once been confirmed and practicing homosexuals”. However, the Pattisons reported that they found only two men who said they now experienced no homosexual dreams, fantasies, or impulses and that one of these men “at one time considered himself bisexual” and the other man was not one of those who got married. Also, according to the Pattisons, “Homosexual impulses were still a source of neurotic conflict” for the married “ex-gays”. In a rebuttal to my earlier reviews, Johnston defends the Pattisons by “quoting” them as saying that they are dealing with only a “white male subsample” of the Bell and Weinberg study. (RJ, June 1981) This phrase is not to be found in the Pattison report.
Both Johnston and the Pattisons do a very tricky thing in the use of the terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual”. So eager are they to see change that they speak of a person’s being “heterosexual” even though there are continued homosexual dreams, fantasies and impulses and no heterosexual acts but the speak of a person’s “homosexuality” in terms, fundamentally, of overt acts. (It must be remembered that such acts were forbidden in the group.) Otherwise, how could the Pattisons call men with continued intra-psychic homosexual experience Kinsey 0’s? They flatly contradict their own acceptance of the definition of a Kinsey 0 as one who has “no psychic erotic arousal to the same sex, and sociosexual contact exclusively with the opposite sex”. That this is their only hope of making a “convincing” case does not make it right. Evidence of true change must come to grips with the accepted standard expressed by Judd Marmor, Saghir and Robins and other researchers, e.g.: “Romantic emotional attachments, fantasies, dreams, daydreams and sexual arousal are the primary psychological response4s for evaluating the direction and intensity of the sexual propensity of an individual.” No evidence is offered that the 11 men have made this change.
There is nothing straightforward about Johnston’s and the Pattisons’ claim that these men were not pressured to “change” or to “stop” their homosexuality. The whole point of the “ex-gay” program that introduced them to the Pattisons was to get them to become “ex-gay”. In seeking help from the “ex-gay” program, they were told from the beginning and right along through the program that, e.g., “their psychological condition of homosexuality was … a sign of Christian immaturity”, “homosexual behavior was defined as immoral and they were expected not to engage in homosexual practices”, “heterosexuality [was defined] as a necessary component” of a committed Christian life, and as “a result of maturing [they were] expected to develop an erotic attraction to a woman”. This is not pressure?
Johnston’s odd analogy to Alcoholics Anonymous is either disingenuous or naïve for he claims that sexual “orientation” is changed. He must know, though, that nobody in AA sees self as an “ex-alcoholic” but as an alcoholic who is committed to sobriety day by day. His reference to the controversial idea that alcoholics may be safely permitted to drink in moderation (an idea opposed within AA) serves only to expose his desperation, for he does not suggest that homosexuals be permitted to practice homosexuality in moderation. He seems unaware that nobody doubts that homosexuals can and do function physically in heterosexual acts, just as heterosexuals, e.g., in prison, function physically in homosexual acts. But it is change in sexual orientation that is doubted.
Johnston’s bias is revealed rather ironically in one of his arguments. He reports about a psychoanalytic attempt to change homosexuals where only 2 out of 9 people changed. He judges this “largely ineffective”. Then he takes the Pattisons’ claims which amount to 2 professed “cures” out of 300 people in that “ex-gay” program, and has the audacity to present this as evidence of successful change. Well, he seems somehow to sense something fishy, so, in the end, he suggests the single life. He thinks this works for heterosexuals and so it should work for homosexuals. He fails to note, though, that the not so subtle, yet understandable, aim in singles ministries and magazines is eventual coupling.