During the US president George Bush’s term of office, the clock was turned back in Christian America. An ‘ex-gay movement’ arose that considers homosexuality a disease that can be cured.

Hundreds of clinics and therapists work in this field, and it is claimed, without proof, that 30 percent of those who underwent therapy were ‘healed’. In the clinics people can be treated for two weeks for 2,500 US dollars and for six weeks for 6,000 dollars. The therapists are mostly ‘former homosexuals’, who say that after a course of therapy they became real family men. A counter-movement ‘It is OK to be Gay’ points out that the therapies are based on a conditioning of the shame, stigmatisation and discrimination of homosexuals. Suicides are the result.

All indications suggest that our sexual orientation is programmed early in the womb, and thus set for the rest of our lives. Our environment after birth does not affect this. Even the English boarding schools did not lead to an increased frequency of homosexuality in adulthood. I thought that the ‘curing’ of homosexuals was a typical American-Christian delusion, so I was surprised to learn that it happens here in the Netherlands, too. In the Pentecostal Church ‘healings’ are held during which, through prayer, you can be ‘healed’ of your homosexuality and at the same time of your HIV infection, and then married off to a woman from the church membership. It is not only misleading, it is life-threatening if seropositive men believe that they are cured in this way and no longer have to take their medication.

Concentration camps

The outmoded idea that we are free to choose our sexual orientation and that homosexuality is thus just a wrong choice is still causing great suffering. The stories I heard when giving a lecture for Contrario (a Christian gay organisation) showed me that for Dutch homosexuals from a Dutch Reformed Church background, their sexual orientation can still lead to a terrible struggle. Until just recently, medical science also considered homosexuality to be a disease. Only in 1992 was homosexuality removed from the ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases). Until then, doctors tried to ‘cure’ men of their homosexuality.

The idea that your social environment influences the development of your sexual orientation resulted in widespread persecution. Nazi Germany’s view, expressed by Hitler himself, that homosexuality is as contagious as the plague, led to unimaginable consequences: first voluntary castration, then mandatory castration and then the systematic murdering of homosexuals in the concentration camps.

Ideas tried

One important argument against the idea that homosexuality is a ‘lifestyle’ choice or can be influenced by the environment is the evident impossibility of ‘curing’ people of homosexuality. The strangest ideas have already been tried: hormonal treatments like administering testosterone or oestrogen, castrations, treatments that affect the libido but not the sexual orientation. Electroshocks have been given and epileptic insults induced. Prison sentences don’t work either, with the sad example of the humiliation of Oscar Wilde. Testicle transplants were done, with a ‘success story’ of a homosexual man who pinched the nurse’s bum after surgery. Naturally, psychoanalysis was tried, and the emetic apomorphine was given in combination with homo-erotic pictures to condition men away from their homo-erotic feelings. Apparently, the only effect was that the men began to vomit when the therapist entered the room, but their homo-erotic feelings remained unaffected. Brain surgery has also been performed on homosexual men, whose prison sentence was reduced if the treatment had an effect. Of course, the men always said that it had had an effect.

As none of these interventions has ever produced a well-documented change in sexual orientation, there can be no doubt that our sexual orientation is fixed in adulthood and cannot be influenced. Once the churches in the Netherlands finally accept that fact openly, the life of many of their young members would look much rosier. And isn’t that what churches should all be about?

Dit verhaal is geplaatst op dinsdag 24 februari 2009 om 12:25 uur.