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In New Orleans on May 9, near the close of the five-day annual convention of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Robert L. Spitzer of Columbia University released the results of a study purporting to show that "highly motivated" gay people can turn straight. Spitzer's findings delighted proponents of the ex-gay movement, outraged many gay activists, and reignited controversy over whether or not sexual orientation is genetically determined. The debate exasperated civil libertarians who feel that the presence or absence of genetic imperatives bears little relevance to issues of personal freedom.

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The study, which has yet to be published or undergo peer review, was based on telephone interviews with 143 men and 57 women who had, on the average, begun striving to transform themselves from homosexual to heterosexual more than a decade ago. Each subject was asked 60 questions pertaining to sexual feelings, attitudes, and behavior. The results seem to indicate that 44 percent of the female subjects and 66 percent of the males have attained "good heterosexual functioning."

In counterpoint to Spitzer, the New Orleans convention also showcased a sexual-conversion study of 202 individuals by psychologists Ariel Shidlo and Michael Schroeder, who concluded that only 3 per cent of their subjects had fully converted from gay to straight. In response to Spitzer's findings, the 40,500-member APA issued a press release restating its contentions that conversion therapy has no scientific validity, that such therapy carries "great potential risks," and that homosexuality is not a mental disorder.

Mixed agendas

Ironically, it was Robert Spitzer who in 1973, while chairing the APA Committee on Nomenclature, brokered the successful, epoch-making effort to remove homosexuality from the APA's official handbook of aberrations, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Mainstream gay and lesbian organizations once portrayed Spitzer as a hero. But their enthusiasm might have been blunted if they had paid closer attention to the dubious disorders Spitzer was helping to insert in the DSM, including dissociative conditions of use to sexual McCarthyites.

When the impending release of Spitzer's new study was revealed by the Associated Press on May 8, Tim McFeeley of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force called its results "snake oil packaged as science." The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination headlined its pre-emptive May 9 press release "GLAAD Condemns Unscientific Study's Claim That Sexual Orientation Can Be 'Changed.'" The Human Rights Campaign charged that Spitzer was in league with the Religious Right.

Spitzer admits that even if sexual redirection is possible in those committed to change, the percentage of people able to refocus sexual orientation is likely to be small. Only 17 percent of his male subjects claim to have achieved exclusive heterosexuality. Nevertheless, he has received extensive, often adoring media coverage, appearing on everything from "CNN Live" to the much-reviled "Dr. Laura" Schlessinger's radio talk show.

Spitzer told the Christian magazine World that he became curious about the malleability of sexual orientation after observing and meeting with ex-gay pickets at APA events. (Demonstrations by ex-gays protesting the organization's dismissal of "reparative" therapies are a fixture at APA gatherings.) Spitzer seems to have been slow to recognize the political subtexts buried in the nature-versus-nurture issue on both sides of the gay identity debate.

Cold feet

At the 2000 APA conference in Chicago, Spitzer was to have moderated a discussion between proponents and opponents of therapies intended to alter sexual orientation. The symposium was canceled, however, when the therapists scheduled to oppose the ex-gay agenda bowed out. Spitzer then appeared at a press conference alongside such ex-gay luminaries as John Paulk, who four months later would be suspended as chairman of Exodus International following an escapade in a Washington, DC gay bar.

Taking secularly pitched ex-gay propaganda at face value, Spitzer, an atheist submerged in academe, may have underestimated hellfire as the chief motivator of his "highly motivated" subjects, 93 percent of whom said that religion played an extremely important role in their lives. 66 per cent of these individuals had been recruited directly from the ex-gay movement-- 43 per cent from various Christian ministries gathered under the umbrella of Exodus International, and 23 per cent through the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), whose director, psychologist Joseph Nicolosi, may have coined the term reparative therapy.

As a result, Spitzer's contention that "some people can change from gay to straight, and we ought to acknowledge that" has been construed as a social blasphemy emanating from the Right. Spitzer's statements in his own defense have been widely ignored. "At the end of the day," Spitzer wrote in a May 23 Wall Street Journal column, "the full inclusion of gays in society does not, I submit, require a commitment to the false notion that sexual orientation is invariably fixed for all people."

Gene dreams

Much of the gay leadership has, however, adopted an essentialist position-- "We can't help it; we were born that way"-- as a matter of doctrine. Insisting that to claim otherwise undermines the movement, the Human Rights Campaign cites statistics indicating that people who believe that homosexuality is biologically fixed are likelier to support gay rights initiatives.

Such statistics may, in fact, provide the only reason to get behind "gay gene" theories. No reputable scientist has ever pretended to have found clear evidence that sexual orientation always has genetic origins. Simon LeVay's analysis of hypothalamus structure has been shown to be scientifically dubious; Dean Hamer's study of X-chromosomes in pairs of gay brothers has fatal discrepancies (see The Guide, January 1999). The Michael Bailey-Richard Pillard twin studies-- perhaps the best scientific case for the existence of a gay gene-- suggest that sexual preference may be biologically determined in just slightly more than half the gay male population.

The gay political establishment notwithstanding, commitment to genetic determinism may have passed its peak. Many queers are rejecting the I-didn't-choose-to-be-gay mantra as retrograde, unrealistic, and inherently oppressive. Journalist Joe Sartelle spoke for a growing number of gay men and lesbians when he wrote, "The fantasy of the essentially and biologically homosexual body is, among other things, a fantasy about abdication of responsibility for our feelings and actions."

Through an intensive yearlong letter-writing campaign, Gayle Madwin, 24, helped influence the national board of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) to distance itself from the idea that sexual orientation can never be chosen. Internet activist Madwin maintains a website called queerbychoice.com and a 100-plus-member online mailing list called Queerchoice.

"People still have the right to make love to members of either sex regardless of whether nature or nurture causes them to want to," says Madwin. "As for the notion that acknowledging choice will hurt the queer movement, that's just sheer silliness. I could just as easily ask: if heterosexuals aren't born that way and they have the ability to learn to be queer, then why should hets get 'special rights?'"