“Expanding Alternatives to Same-Sex Attraction and Behavior in Men” by Mark A. Yarhouse.
“Overcoming Male Homosexuality: Growth into heterosexuality” by Alan Medinger, Christian Counseling Today, Vol. 9, No. 2, 2001.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
After a quarter century of here-today-gone-tomorrow “ex-gay” overstatements and back-peddling rationalizations, here are yet further attempts to lower expectations while resisting any acknowledgment that there’s something fundamentally false about the entire enterprise.
Yarhouse, who teaches psychology at (Pat Robertson’s) Regent University, calls his latest suggestions a “practical approach” for homosexuals who are “distressed by their experiences of same-sex attraction.” He tells his readers, members of the evangelical American Association of Christian Counselors, that “the goal of this approach is to expand alternatives to same-sex attraction and behavior, not to change sexual orientation per se.” But to try “to expand alternatives to same-sex attraction [without] chang[ing] sexual orientation” is another “ex-gay” non sequitur. And to try “to expand alternatives” sexually without changing sexual orientation is to drag a heterosexual spouse into anything but a “practical” situation. To try “to expand alternatives” non-sexually is to displace a sexual solution to a sexual need with a non-sexual substitution.
Yarhouse presents four “modules” for “expanding alternatives.” His first is to “help clients become aware of those situations in which they experience same-sex attraction [indicated by] obvious signs of arousal, such as penile engorgement … sweaty palms, racing heart, and so on” – in other words, their everyday experience of their homosexual orientation. One suspects that his “distressed” clients are already all-too-aware of this and hardly need his advising their “keeping a record” of these experiences. Their awareness of their sexual arousal and their belief that it’s incompatible with their Christianity is why they’re distressed in the first place. So much for his first suggestion. One down and three to go.
He next suggests “disconnecting from others” who occasion temptation and from “pornography, engaging in same-sex fantasy, and so on.” He advises displacing such with less-threatening “reading” or “exercising.” In other words: Just don’t do that; do this. He’s arguing the power of the cold shower. This approach may be helpful where it’s been used for “self-soothing behaviors” such as childhood thumb sucking, eating disorders, or even in trauma following incest, but there’s a serious conceptual disconnect in applying it to something as intrinsic, intractable and immutable as sexual orientation. Two down and two to go.
Thirdly, he urges that “distressed” homosexuals listen to their fearful or guilty “parts” to warn and protect themselves from their homosexual “parts.” The client should have his antigay “parts” take the lead over his homosexual “parts.” Again, the “distressed” client hardly needs to be reminded of his conflicting feelings of fear, guilt, and same-sex attraction. Three down and one to go.
His last suggestion is that clients “consider [theologically] what it means to be faithful.” (He cites Lewis Smedes on faithfulness. But Smedes is hardly Yarhouse’s ally in “ex-gay” theology, having keynoted EC summer conferences.) Again, these clients are “distressed by their experiences of same-sex attraction” precisely because they theologically agree with Yarhouse’s version of fidelity vis a vis homosexuality. Four down and none to go. “There are other modules that are not discussed here,” he says. But presumably he’s offered his best shots. And they’re all duds.
Medinger is a past president and executive director of the Exodus “ex-gay” network. This article contains portions of his book, Growth into Manhood. The book title and his repeated use of the term “growth into manhood” reflect his spin: a man’s homosexuality is due to his failure to see himself as a man. Overcoming homosexuality is a matter of identifying as a man rather than “a matter of healing.”
He says that “organiz[ing] a softball game [was] the most significant thing [he’d] ever done for the men” who came to his ministry to overcome their homosexuality. “That game (many others were to follow) turned out to be one of the most healing things we had ever done in our ministry. At the end of the game, every one of the 20 men who had participated seemed noticeably different. In some, the game had brought forth a bit of masculine competitiveness; a few showed a little manly swagger.” He says “we were `doing the things that men do’ [and] this made us feel like men. … [We were] traveling the road to manhood.” Except for his very last sentence – where he alludes to “growth into heterosexuality” – as does the editor in the sub-title, Mediger repeatedly writes in terms of “growth out of homosexuality into manhood.” How did he manage, after “many years to come to the place where [he] possessed a confident sense that [he] was a man like other men?” He says it was by “consciously choosing to do the things men do.”
His notion, and that of Exodus, fixates on an alleged detour from male identity. But this flies in the face of the fact that male homosexuals identify as men and male; not as women or female. They don’t relate romantically as a woman with a man (nor do they wish to); they relate romantically as a man with a man. They no more want just any masculinity in a partner than a heterosexual man wants just any femininity in his. It’s all far more complicated. The notion that “doing things men do” leads to a desire to do the heterosexual things heterosexual men desire to do is ludicrous. But the fact that antigay religionists will tolerate these so-called solutions proves how woefully desperate they are.
Unintentionally apropos, a cartoon in another current AACC periodical mocks a storybook entitled The Little Engine Who Thought He Could And That’s All That Really Matters. Cartoonist Joe Martin comments that it’s “been approved by the National [sic] Psychiatric Association.”