Homosexuals Anonymous

Last updated
Homosexuals Anonymous
Founded1980
FounderColin Cook, Douglas McIntyre
Location
Key people
Douglas McIntyre, National Director [1]
Website www.ha-fs.org

Homosexuals Anonymous (HA) is an ex-gay group which practices conversion therapy [2] and describes itself as "a fellowship of men and women, who through their common emotional experience, have chosen to help each other live in freedom from homosexuality." [3] HA regards homosexual orientation as "sexual brokeness" that may be "healed" through faith in Jesus Christ. [4] In common with other Christian fundamentalist groups, HA regards heterosexuality as "the universal creation-norm". [2] [4] [5] This approach has been criticized for stressing that a person must renounce homosexuality to be a Christian, [6] and because there is no valid scientific evidence that sexual orientation can be changed. [7]

Contents

Christopher Melilo, Colin Cook and Douglas McIntyre, who all claimed to have struggled with same-sex attractions, [8] founded HA in 1980 with financial support from the Seventh-day Adventist denomination. [9] HA uses a 14-step program [10] developed by Cook, based on his own experiences. [11] Cook resigned in 1986 following a scandal involving him allegedly having sex with 12 out of the 14 male clients interviewed from 1980 to 1986. [2]

History

HA was founded in 1980 by Colin Cook (a Seventh-day Adventist pastor who was defrocked in 1974 for having sex with a man in his church) [9] [12] and ex-gay Douglas McIntyre. [1] Cook founded the Quest Learning Center in Reading, Pennsylvania, as a ministry of the Seventh-day Adventist Church to "help people find freedom from homosexuality." HA was one of seven programs offered by Quest, [5] and people came from around the US seeking assistance from Cook. [13] Cook developed the 14-step program used by HA, modifying five of the standard twelve steps from the Alcoholics Anonymous program and basing the other nine on his personal experience. [11] HA was supported by $47,000 in annual support from the Adventist Church, plus fees paid for treatment. [13] McIntyre (who, when growing up, identified as gay) said he founded HA based on his belief that "homosexuality is not something you're born with, that it's a spin-off of a trauma that occurs during childhood." [14] He attributes abuse at the ages of three and four, and molestation at the age of five, as having contributed to his homosexual attraction. [1]

Rumours of sexual misconduct by Cook came to light in 1986 when Ron Lawson, a gay Adventist and Professor of Sociology at Queens College, New York, began an investigation by interviewing Cook's former clients and writing a letter to church officials outlining his indiscretions. [9] Lawson interviewed 14 individuals counselled by Cook as part of the HA program; none reported any change in sexual orientation as a consequence of HA, and all but two reported having sex with Cook. [2] Cook resigned from HA and shut down Quest; the Adventists withdrew their funding support. [9] [15] With Cook's departure, McIntyre took over as executive director of HA.

Counseling sessions with Cook included giving his clients nude massages, ostensibly to desensitize them to male–male contact [16] and homosexual desires; [15] however, this was counter-productive since counselees began having sexual encounters with each other. [13] Cook admitted in a 1987 interview that he "fell into the delusion" that such actions were a legitimate part of his HA counseling activities, stating: "I allowed myself to hug and hold my counselees thinking I was helping them... But I needed it more than they did." [13] Psychiatrist Ralph Blair in his 1982 monograph Ex-Gay describes practitioners of sexual orientation conversion through religion as often being "individuals deeply troubled about their own sexual orientation, or whose own sexual conversion is incomplete". Blair reports a host of problems with such counselors, including the sexual abuse of clients; [2] Haldeman describes Cook as "the most notable of such ministers". [17] Cook himself also admitted to "occasional falls" before (and throughout) his marriage. [13]

Despite his 1974 defrocking and the 1986 revelations of his client abuse, Cook remains dedicated to the belief that homosexuality can be changed. In 1993 he moved to Colorado and returned to counseling, which ended in 1995 when The Denver Post reported Cook was engaging in phone sex and asking "patients to bring homosexual pornography to sessions so that he could help desensitize them against it". [15] As recently as 2007, Cook has still been promoting the ability to "heal homosexuals". [18] Under McIntyre, HA has also taken on more political advocacy. In 2009 he led a conference held in Kenya promoting the ex-gay movement, [19] controversial to homosexuals as an example of ex-gay advocacy events held in Africa which are followed by incidents of homophobic violence. [20] [21]

Organization

The headquarters of Homosexuals Anonymous is in Houston, Texas. As of June 2009, the organization has chapters in the United States, Germany, New Zealand and El Salvador. [21] [22] HA is a member of the Positive Alternatives to Homosexuality (PATH) group. [23] HA is affiliated with JASON Ministries, headquartered in Germany. [24] It publishes a newsletter and web site and organizes a "Homosexuals Anonymous Annual Conference". [3]

Program

The HA program relies on belief in Jesus Christ to effect sexual orientation change. [25] Similar to Alcoholics Anonymous, the change takes place over a lifetime, according to HA. Local chapters conduct meetings at regular intervals where members provide fellowship and support to one another. Unlike AA's 12-step program, HA has 14 steps [26] which are used by about 50 chapters of HA throughout North America. [10] Nine of the steps were based on the experiences of founder Cook, while the other five are adaptations of AA steps. [11] One analysis of the 14 steps commented on the "alleged generosity" of the HA approach, noting that while both approaches emphasize avoidance of undesired behaviors, "AA groups accept the person along with their problems, [whereas] Homosexuals Anonymous stresses that the person is guilty of the sin of homosexuality, must admit it, renounce it, and then accept heterosexuality as a necessary condition to becoming a Christian." [6] According to gay affirmative psychotherapists Kathleen Ritter and Anthony Terndrup, ex-gay organizations like Exodus International and Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX) use this adapted model developed by HA. [27]

Effectiveness

The organization cites several cases where it claims people have changed their sexual orientation. [10] Reporting on Lawson's 1986 findings, the Los Angeles Times reported that counselees' reactions to the Cook revelations followed a common pattern: "a loss of faith, loss of trust in other human beings, and a lack of motivation to get on with their lives". In addition, many of the counselees stayed in Reading, "unwilling or unable to go home to families who expected them to be changed". [13]

Wayne Besen states that former HA clients have reported that the program is ineffective. Besen quotes one former client "One thing that really clued me in was [meeting] with my sponsor every week and hearing him talk about his struggles and talking to other people in the group, and there were people in that group who had been going to HA for four, five, six, seven years and they seemed to be at the exact same spot I was. I didn't see any graduates. I saw people that were still there, that hadn't changed. They were still struggling. ... I don't know anybody from my ex-gay group ... who claims to be ex-gay now." [28]

Criticism

One critic of HA is Cindi Love, the executive director of Soulforce, who states that "the message that homosexuality can be 'repaired' doesn't just ruin lives – it ends them". [21] She describes the expansion of ex-gay organizations around the world as "rearing [their] ugly heads," specifically citing HA's expansion into El Salvador, New Zealand, and Germany, and criticising HA executive director McIntyre's Kenyan conference. [21]

Wayne Besen, former spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign and founder of Truth Wins Out, has argued that the GLBT community needs to challenge the propaganda presented at ex-gay events including those run by HA. [29] He also advocates covert operations against HA and other ex-gay ministries in an attempt to "catch ex-gay leaders engaging in not so ex-gay behavior", though such attempts to discredit the industry are controversial even within the GLBT community. [29] Besen has accused HA of re-writing history, omitting details of Cook's past from its web site. While "reading the group's Web page, one would think that Cook was a smashing success and paragon of heterosexuality," he writes. [30] Haldeman has described the response of the Seventh-day Adventist Church to the 1986 Cook revelations as a cover-up whilst Lawson titled his 1987 presentation to the annual convention of the American Sociological Association: Scandal in the Adventist-funded program to 'heal' homosexuals: Failure, sexual exploitation, official silence, and attempts to rehabilitate the exploiter and his methods. [17] In Julie Scott Jones' study of Christian fundamentalism, Being the Chosen, HA, Exodus International and NARTH are described as organizations that "particularly target teenagers' burgeoning sexuality, and feed into a wider fundamentalist view that all forms of 'sexual immorality' are destroying the moral fabric of the nation". [4]

See also

Related Research Articles

Conversion therapy is the pseudoscientific practice of attempting to change an individual's sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to align with heterosexual and cisgender norms. Methods that have been used to this end include forms of brain surgery, surgical or hormonal castration, aversive treatments such as electric shocks, nausea-inducing drugs, hypnosis, counseling, spiritual interventions, visualization, psychoanalysis, and arousal reconditioning.

The Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity (ATCSI), which until 2014 was known as the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), also known as the NARTH Institute, is a US organization that promotes conversion therapy, a pseudoscientific practice used in attempts to change the sexual orientation of people with same-sex attraction. NARTH was founded in 1992 by Joseph Nicolosi, Benjamin Kaufman, and Charles Socarides. Its headquarters were in Encino, California, at its Thomas Aquinas Psychological Clinic. NARTH has not been recognized by any major United States–based professional association.

The ex-gay movement consists of people and organizations that encourage people to refrain from entering or pursuing same-sex relationships, to eliminate homosexual desires and to develop heterosexual desires, or to enter into a heterosexual relationship. Beginning with the founding of Love In Action and Exodus International in the mid-1970s, the movement saw rapid growth in the 1980s and 1990s before declining in the 2000s.

Richard A. Cohen is a Christian psychotherapist and author associated with the ex-gay movement. He is a co-founder of Positive Approaches to Healthy Sexuality which offers discredited conversion therapy practices purporting to change a person from homosexual to heterosexual. In 2002, Cohen was expelled from the American Counseling Association for multiple violations.

John Paulk is an American activist who, from 1998 to 2003, was an advocate of the ex-gay movement and conversion therapy. In April 2013, Paulk disavowed his belief in gay reparative therapy and issued a formal apology for his role as an advocate of the movement.

The Family Research Institute (FRI), originally known as the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality (ISIS), is an American socially conservative non-profit organization based in Colorado Springs, Colorado which states that it has "...one overriding mission: to generate empirical research on issues that threaten the traditional family, particularly homosexuality, AIDS, sexual social policy, and drug abuse". The FRI is part of a sociopolitical movement of socially conservative Christian organizations which seek to influence the political debate in the United States. They seek "...to restore a world where marriage is upheld and honored, where children are nurtured and protected, and where homosexuality is not taught and accepted, but instead is discouraged and rejected at every level." The Boston Globe reported that the FRI's 2005 budget was less than $200,000.

Wayne Besen is an American LGBT rights advocate. He is a former investigative journalist for WABI-TV, a former spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, and the founder of Truth Wins Out. Besen came out to his parents before starting his Truth Wins Out Organization. After coming out to his parents, they bought him an ex-gay DVD that could supposedly hypnotize people and turn them straight. It was that and the invitation by President George W. Bush of ex-gay leader Alan Chambers to the White House that led him to start the Truth Wins Out organization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Exodus International</span> Defunct Christian conversion therapy organization

Exodus International was a non-profit, interdenominational ex-gay Christian umbrella organization connecting organizations that sought to "help people who wished to limit their homosexual desires". Founded in 1976, Exodus International originally asserted that conversion therapy, the reorientation of same-sex attraction, was possible. In 2006, Exodus International had over 250 local ministries in the United States and Canada and over 150 ministries in 17 other countries. Although Exodus was formally an interdenominational Christian entity, it was most closely associated with Protestant and evangelical denominations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph Nicolosi</span> American clinical psychologist (1947–2017)

Joseph Nicolosi was an American clinical psychologist who advocated and practised "reparative therapy", a form of the pseudoscientific treatment of conversion therapy that he claimed could help people overcome or mitigate their homosexual desires and replace them with heterosexual ones. Nicolosi was a founder and president of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). Medical institutions warn that conversion therapy is ineffective and may be harmful, and that there is no evidence that sexual orientation can be changed by such treatments.

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Truth Wins Out (TWO) is an organization formed by Wayne Besen to fight what he considers "anti-gay religious extremism", especially the ex-gay movement.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 "From CPAC: Gay converter says "Change is possible"". TalkRadioNews.com. Talk Radio News Service. February 26, 2009. Archived from the original on July 16, 2011. Retrieved November 10, 2010.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Haldeman, Douglas C. (2003). "The Practice of Ethics and Conversion Therapy". In Garnets, L. D.; Kimmel, D. C. (eds.). Psychological Perspectives on Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Experiences (2nd ed.). Columbia University Press. pp. 681–698. ISBN   978-0-231-12413-3.
  3. 1 2 "Home". ha-fs.org. Homosexuals Anonymous Fellowship Services. September 12, 2009. Archived from the original on 2010-08-13. Retrieved November 10, 2010.
  4. 1 2 3 Jones, Julie S. (2010). Being the Chosen: Exploring a Christian Fundamentalist Worldview. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. p. 72. ISBN   978-0-7546-7741-3.
  5. 1 2 Cook, Colin D. (1982). "Church Funds Program For Homosexuals" (PDF). Spectrum . 12 (3): 46–48. Archived from the original (PDF) on May 23, 2012. Retrieved November 10, 2010.
  6. 1 2 Kell, Carl; Camp, Raymond (1999). In the Name of the Father: the Rhetoric of the New Southern Baptist Convention. Southern Illinois University Press. p. 99. ISBN   0-8093-2220-X . Retrieved November 18, 2010.
  7. ↑ Satcher, David (July 9, 2001). ""The Surgeon General's call to Action to Promote Sexual Health and Responsible Sexual Behavior", A Letter from the Surgeon General". surgeongeneral.gov . U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Archived from the original on June 15, 2012. Retrieved November 19, 2010.
  8. ↑ "Treasures: The Official Newsletter of Homosexuals Anonymous Fellowship Services" (PDF). Homosexuals Anonymous Fellowship Services. August 2009. p. 5. Archived from the original (PDF) on July 26, 2011. Retrieved November 20, 2010.
  9. 1 2 3 4 Besen, Wayne R. (2003). "Founding Follies". Anything but Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth. Routledge. pp. 93–94. ISBN   978-1-56023-446-3.
  10. 1 2 3 Jones, Stanton; Yarhouse, Mark A. (2000). Homosexuality: the Use of Scientific Research in the Church's Moral Debate. InterVarsity Press. pp. 135–136. ISBN   978-0-8308-1567-8 . Retrieved November 10, 2010.
  11. 1 2 3 Jones, Stanton L.; Yarhouse, Mark A. (2007). Ex-gays? A Longitudinal Study of Religiously Mediated Change in Sexual Orientation. InterVarsity Press. p. 64. ISBN   978-0-8308-2846-3.
  12. ↑ Imperiale, Nancy (November 24, 2002). "Both Sides Now; One Of The Christian Activists Debating Orlando's Gay-Rights Law Brings A Unique Perspective To The Fight. 'I'm Not Gay Anymore,' Says Alan Chambers". Orlando Sentinel . Archived from the original on 2012-11-05. Retrieved January 9, 2011.
  13. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Japenga, Ann (December 6, 1987). "It's Called Change Counseling: Troubled Pioneer Maintains His Faith in Program". Los Angeles Times . Archived from the original on 2011-12-25. Retrieved November 18, 2010.
  14. ↑ Schupp, Kimberly (November 20, 2010). "Programs claim to convert homosexual feelings". Fox19.com. Archived from the original on January 24, 2013. Retrieved 8 February 2011.
  15. 1 2 3 Culver, V. (October 27, 1995). "Sessions with gays criticized: Former minister's counseling methods brought reprimands". Denver Post .
  16. ↑ Besen, Wayne R. (2003). "Radical Richard". Anything but Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth. Routledge. p. 189. ISBN   978-1-56023-446-3.
  17. 1 2 Haldeman, Douglas, C. (1994). "The Practice and Ethics of Sexual Orientation Conversion Therapy" (PDF). Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology . 62 (2): 221–227. doi:10.1037/0022-006x.62.2.221. PMID   8201058. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2017-11-18. Retrieved 2018-10-26.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  18. ↑ Rix, Jallen (2010). Ex-Gay No Way: Survival and Recovery from Religious Abuse. Findhorn Press. p. 51. ISBN   978-1-84409-187-4.
  19. ↑ Besen, Wayne (February 24, 2010). "Homosexuals Anonymous Had Kenya Event In 2009; Anti-Gay Persecution Campaign Now Underway". truthwinsout.org. Truth Wins Out. Archived from the original on 2011-07-23. Retrieved November 19, 2010.
  20. ↑ Besen, Wayne (March 3, 2010). "Globetrotting Anti-Gay Characters With Character Issues". truthwinsout.org. Truth Wins Out. Archived from the original on 2011-07-23. Retrieved November 19, 2010.
  21. 1 2 3 4 Love, Cindi (November 6, 2010). "Destroying Lives Around the World". The Advocate . Archived from the original on January 16, 2013. Retrieved November 16, 2010.
  22. ↑ "Chapters". ha-fs.org. Homosexuals Anonymous Fellowship Services. October 16, 2009. Archived from the original on February 5, 2009. Retrieved November 10, 2010.
  23. ↑ Stafford, Tim (October 2007). "An Older, Wiser Ex-Gay Movement". Christianity Today. Vol. 51, no. 10. Archived from the original on 2016-03-03. Retrieved January 9, 2011.
  24. ↑ "Homosexuals Anonymous – JASON Ministries". jason-online.webs.com. Robert Gollwitzer. Archived from the original on 2011-08-18. Retrieved November 21, 2010.
  25. ↑ Djupe, Paul A.; Olson, Laura R. (2003). Encyclopedia of American Religion and Politics. Infobase Publishing. pp. 206–207. ISBN   978-0-8160-4582-2 . Retrieved November 10, 2010.
  26. ↑ "The 14 Steps". ha-fs.org. Homosexuals Anonymous Fellowship Services. September 12, 2009. Archived from the original on February 5, 2009. Retrieved November 19, 2010.
  27. ↑ Ritter, Kathleen; Terndrup, Anthony I. (2002). Handbook of Affirmative Psychotherapy with Lesbians and Gay Men. Guilford Press. p. 279. ISBN   978-1-57230-714-8.
  28. ↑ Besen, Wayne R. (2003). "Undercover". Anything but Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth. Routledge. p. 37. ISBN   978-1-56023-446-3.
  29. 1 2 Besen, Wayne R. (2003). "Future Follies and Failures". Anything but Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth. Routledge. pp. 262–265. ISBN   978-1-56023-446-3.
  30. ↑ Besen, Wayne R. (2003). "Founding Follies". Anything but Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth. Routledge. pp. 97–98. ISBN   978-1-56023-446-3.
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