Psychiatry Giant Sorry for Backing Gay ‘Cure’

 

New York Times: The simple fact was that he had done something wrong, and at the end of a long and revolutionary career it didn’t matter how often he’d been right, how powerful he once was, or what it would mean for his legacy.

Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, considered by some to be the father of modern psychiatry, lay awake at 4 o’clock on a recent morning knowing he had to do the one thing that comes least naturally to him.

He pushed himself up and staggered into the dark. His desk seemed impossibly far away; Dr. Spitzer, who turns 80 next week, suffers from Parkinson’s disease and has trouble walking, sitting, even holding his head upright.

The word he sometimes uses to describe these limitations — pathetic — is the same one that for decades he wielded like an ax to strike down dumb ideas, empty theorizing and junk studies.

Now here he was at his computer, ready to recant a study he had done himself, a poorly conceived 2003 investigation that supported the use of so-called reparative therapy to “cure” homosexuality for people strongly motivated to change.

What to say? The issue of gay marriage was rocking national politics yet again. The California State Legislature was debating a bill to ban the therapy outright as being dangerous. A magazine writer who had been through the therapy as a teenager recently visited his house, to explain how miserably disorienting the experience was.

And he would later learn that a World Health Organization report, released on Thursday, calls the therapy “a serious threat to the health and well-being — even the lives — of affected people.”

Dr. Spitzer’s fingers jerked over the keys, unreliably, as if choking on the words. And then it was done: a short letter to be published this month, in the same journal where the original study appeared.

“I believe,” it concludes, “I owe the gay community an apology.” continue reading

Stained glass window I saw on the way to work

Our real first gay president

Salon: The new issue of Newsweek features a cover photo of President Obama topped by a rainbow-colored halo and captioned “The First Gay President.” The halo and caption strike me as cheap sensationalism. I realize airport travelers look at a magazine for 2.2 seconds before moving on to the next one. I grant that this cover will probably get Newsweek a 4.4 second glance. I also understand that Newsweek is desperate for sales. Nevertheless, I doubt that the Newsweek of old, before it was sold for a dollar, would have pandered as shallowly.

The caption is a superficial way to characterize an important development of thought that the president — along with the country — has been making over recent years. It is also entirely wrong. Like the mini-furor a couple of months back about the claim that Richard Nixon was our first gay president, the story simply ignores that the U.S. already had a gay president more than a century ago.

There can be no doubt that James Buchanan was gay, before, during and after his four years in the White House. Moreover, the nation knew it, too — he was not far into the closet.

Today, I know no historian who has studied the matter and thinks Buchanan was heterosexual. Fifteen years ago, historian John Howard, author of “Men Like That,” a pioneering study of queer culture in Mississippi, shared with me the key documents, including Buchanan’s May 13, 1844, letter to a Mrs. Roosevelt. Describing his deteriorating social life after his great love, William Rufus King, senator from Alabama, had moved to Paris to become our ambassador to France, Buchanan wrote:

I am now “solitary and alone,” having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.

Despite such evidence, one reason why Americans find it hard to believe Buchanan could have been gay is that we have a touching belief in progress. Our high school history textbooks’ overall story line is, “We started out great and have been getting better ever since,” more or less automatically. Thus we must be more tolerant now than we were way back in the middle of the 19th century! Buchanan could not have been gay then, else we would not seem more tolerant now.

In case you care to know

UnicornBooty: Jersey Shore royalty Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi and Jennifer “JWoww” Farley reveal that Snookers is bisexual, and that they think Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino is gay in a new interview with The Huffington Post.

Light-in-the-loafers reading

GPhilly: If money talks then Scotty Bowers has plenty to say. His new book Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars (Grove Press) may only hit the shelves next month, but it already has people talking.

Outing is quite a controversial subject – especially among well-known types who would like to keep their closet doors locked tight. But the 88-year-old has decided to tell all about the famous men and women who were gay, lesbian and bisexual during Hollywood’s golden years.

“I’ve kept silent all these years because I didn’t want to hurt any of these people,” Bowers told The New York Times. But his Hollywood Babylon-like tales are causing critics to bristle at the notion that the secret and very private lives of many celebs (all long since dead) are coming out – literally.

But in an era of modern tabloid frenzy, none of this should really come as much of a surprise, should it? It’s been almost three decades since Rock Hudson died from AIDS complications. And surely plenty of other scandals have reminded us that the glitzy Hollywood elite are far from perfect, even if their handlers tried (and still try) to paint them that way.

So what’s the juiciest tell-all coming from the new book?

Probably that Katherine Hepburn – a Bryn Mawr grad – was set up with more than 150 women. Or that Vivien Leigh also had a passion for the ladies. He also claimes that Cary Grant and George Cukor were both bisexual.