Looking at Ex, and Ex-Ex-Gay in the Philippines
Straight Up
By Frolic Tan Lopez

A.R. Rodrigo*, 32, joined a few years back a conversion therapy in Makati City, a “long, long way away” from his hometown of Davao City, but something he says “I thought I really, really needed to embrace our Lord, Jesus Christ.”
“For the longest time, there was this conflict in me – knowing I wasn’t like everybody else, but not liking it a bit.  There had to be a way to ‘correct’ my situation,” he says, stressing that he thought it was “what I had to do, because it was what God wanted me to do – I was made to believe that for as long as I can believe.”

And the “solution” came in the form of a conversion therapy.

CLOSING IN ON EX-GAYS

Better known as the ex-gay movement (The two are interchangeable, though advocates of conversion therapy claim theirs is not necessarily religious, while ex-gay is – Ed), the approach is used to refer to persons who once identified as gay or lesbian (though also bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning, and intersex, completing the GLBTQI) who turn away from such identification for various (usually religious) reasons.

Wikipedia.org, in outlining the origins and subsequent development of ex-gay, states that it can be roughly be traced to the time of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), who, in 1896, published his ideas on psychoanalysis, where he mentioned his belief in the “innate bisexuality” of humans, and that the manifestations of heterosexuality or homosexuality may be a result of “environmental factors interacting with biological sexual drives” – obviously easy to interpret as a way to control, so to speak, the “direction” sexual identification can be led towards, even if Freud himself (for all his phallic obsessions) once noted (in a letter to a mother who asked him to “treat” her son of homosexuality):

“By asking me if I can help (your son), you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place.  The answer is, in a general way, we cannot promise to achieve it.  In a certain number of cases we succeed in developing the blighted germs of heterosexual tendencies which are present in every homosexual, in the majority of cases it is no more possible.  It is a question of the quality and the age of the individual.  The result of treatment cannot be predicted.”

Freud added: “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness....".
Still, then, procedures to “cure” homosexuality abound, with treatments including pharmacologic shock and/or electronic shock treatment, hysterectomy, hormone treatment, clitoridectomy, ovariectomy, and sexual stimulants and/or depressants, among others – many of them still actually used nowadays.

The first ex-gay ministry, Love in Action (LIA), was formed in 1973; merging with other ex-gay organizations three years later to form Exodus International (EI), which, to this day, remains the largest ex-gay organization in the world, with “ministries” all over the world, from the US to Canada to Asia and the Pacific, under the umbrella group Exodus Global Alliance.  Since EI is interdenominational – i.e. of/for homosexuals of different religious denominations, other organizations have been formed to specifically respond to religious groups, e.g. Courage (in the US) and Encourage (in the UK) for Roman Catholics, Evergreen International for Latter Day Saints (or Mormons), JONAH for Jews, Transformation Congregations for Methodists, OneByOne for Presbyterians, and Straightway Foundation for Muslims.  Aside from religious groups, other ex-gay organizations have also been formed to deal with specific needs, e.g. Witness Freedom Ministries for people with color, Exodus Youth for the youth, Homosexuals Anonymous (modelled after Alcoholics Anonymous).

VARYING APPROACHES

For the ex-gay movement, there are various way to turn homosexuals “straight.”  There’s the Sexual Identity Therapy, developed by Warren Throckmorton and Mark Yarhouse, which achieves its intention in four phases: Assessment, Advanced/Expanded Informed Consent, Psychotherapy, and Social Integration of Valued Sexual identity.  There’s Gender Wholeness Therapy, designed by ex-gay David Matheson, which focuses on developing “gender wholeness” by reducing homosexual desires, thereby allowing the building of healthy connections with other men.  There’s a play in Ivan Pavlov’s conditioning, e.g. Kenneth Zucker of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health helped developed reparative therapy, a “treatment” wherein children are “helped” to be more content with their biological gender, at least until they are older and can determine their sexual identity, mainly because the “treatment can reduce social ostracism by helping gender non-conforming children mix more readily with same sex peers, and prevent long-term psychopathological development (i.e., it is easier to change a child than a society intolerant of gender diversity)” – activities include making girls play ONLY with dolls and socially defined toys for girls, et cetera, though concerns on intersex people are not discussed, as their gender identification are presumed to be defined by their guardians.  And then there’s Context Specific Therapy, designed by Jeffrey Robinson, which uses the theoretical backgrounds of the clients, e.g. use of fear of God for Christians to go “straight.”

These are largely considered as “professional” methods – though there are also “non-professional” methods, what Wikipedia.org considers as “entirely outside the purview of professional health associations, and hence do not have to obey professional ethics guidelines.” An example are sessions given by coaches (people offering services given by psychologists, sans licenses), e.g. International Healing Foundation, which provides classes to “train” people into heterosexuality.  There are retreats (usually also by coaches) that intend to diminish same-sex desires, e.g. the Journey Into Manhood, organized by People Can Change, uses a “wide variety of large-group, small-group and individual exercises, from journaling to visualizations (or guided imagery) to group sharing and intensive emotional-release work."  And then there are pastoral services, with churches actually releasing specific instructions on how to minister to gays and lesbians, e.g. Ministry to Persons with a Homosexual Inclination from the Roman Catholic Church, and The Path to Freedom: Exploring Healing for the Homosexual from the Presbyterian Church (US).

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