“Curing” Homosexuality Part 3: Last Chapter

Finally got a publishable, non-obscene comment criticizing this series, so thanks to Scott for just stating his case like a calm human.  He presents the following question:

“How can anyone take you seriously when you only write a one sided article, from the perspective of a threatened homo-sexual?”

Perhaps there’s a movement to force heterosexuals to become homos in order to be spared an eternity in hell by God, but I was not aware of that.  Please send me an email, Scott, if I’m missing something.  If anyone wants to read his full critique, it’s over in the comments section, here.

This final chapter is the darkest and ugliest of all—it’s the Nature of the Threat that homosexuals are faced with.  Today, after unraveling the history and the players involved, we’re going to take a look at the therapies involved and consider brainwashing. (Which was actually the point of this series, but the discussions it started are a major bonus.)

Spiritual Warfare: Yup, Still Warfare

Aversion therapy comes highly recommended.  It’s destroyed thousands of lives, and even racked up a couple casualties.  You can see why the compassionate conservative of today would turn to this honored and trusted method to cure gays. 

These shocking revelations were made in a dramatic television documentary, Sexual Aversion, which was broadcast on BBC2 on Thursday 8 August 1996 at 9.30pm.

In 1962, Captain Billy Clegg-Hill of the Royal Tank Regiment was arrested in a police swoop on gay men in Southampton. The judge sentenced him to six months compulsory aversion therapy treatment at Netley military psychiatric hospital. Within three days of his admission, Billy was dead.

He had been shown male pin-up pictures and then injected with apomorphine to make him violently ill. The doctor’s rationale was to associate attraction to men with nausea and vomiting, and to thereby make homosexuality so repellent that Billy would become straight.

---from this very explicit and confrontational article

Here’s the basic concept: humans work on a reward/punishment axis just like any other mammal.  As the good Timothy Leary once observed—and remember, it took 6000 years of civilization to reach this moment of clarity—“It’s good to feel good.  It’s bad to feel bad.”

So “aversion therapy” aims to associate pain, discomfort, and fear with the “bad” behavior.  (Behavior which, remember, happens to feel “good”. Orgasms, man...they’re pretty cool.) So within this paradigm of clinical mind control, the quote above is neither shocking nor atypical—it’s just rather unfortunate that the patient (“subject”) happened to die.

A Brief History of the Penile Plethysmograph

Aversion Therapy comes with it’s own paraphenalia, and it’s worth taking a look at the tools of the trade, because it speaks volumes about the kind of human we’re dealing with here.  The penile plethysmograph—“PPG”—is over 60 years old and owes it’s existence to Karl Freund.

Freund was a loyal Czechoslovakian military man who was very concerned about draft-dodging.  Specifically, he believed the military was losing thousands of recruits a year because they lied about being gay, which was grounds for rejection.  Czechoslovakia, like any civilized nation, knew that gay men were useless on a battlefield.  (That whole “Alexander the Great” thing was just a really weird anomaly.) IF ONLY, Freund mused, IF ONLY there were some way to know for sure if a man was gay or not.

Not to put it too delicately, but the solution Freund hit upon was this: strap a machine to their dick and show them images of men lounging around naked and having sex with each other.  If they experience “vertical growth” or “tumescence”, odds are you have a Genuine Homo on your hands.  If, however, nothing much happens—then you’re dealing with a lying draft-dodger.  BRILLIANT.

Freund later moved to Canada and helped the Royal Canadian Mounted Police purge their ranks of gay men, which must have crippled that organization for decades.

The Skeptic’s Dictionary is mostly a pile of horseshit, but they’re always good for a condescending quote:

One glaring problem with the use of the PPG is the lack of standardized materials to use as stimuli for subjects, a factor which clearly biases the data. Therapists vary greatly in the kind of materials they use to arouse subjects. Some materials are rather tame, e.g., nude adults, children in underwear or bathing suits. Others use hardcore pornography, including depictions of rape and pedophilia. Furthermore, there is no standard of “deviancy” for arousal. Worse, if therapists can define certain arousal as deviant, they can then suggest treatments for the deviancy as well as having the power to declare when the ‘deviant’ is ‘cured.’ More objectionable than the questionable scientific validity of the device, however, are the moral and legal questions its use raises. Some of the materials would probably be illegal on the open market because they constitute child pornography.

And child pornography comes from....that’s right, the FBI, who are tied with the Vatican Library as possessing the largest stash of kiddie porn on Earth.  This is a weird Grey Area where I mostly refuse to venture in public, because it’s frankly not something you can talk about safely in this culture.  I would refer the curious reader to the “Franklin Cover-up” incident, the case of Johnny Gosch, and offer a friendly “welcome to hell”.

The Worst Part: They’re Right

Getting into an argument about the “effectiveness” of aversion therapy is dangerously dumb.  Because the fact is, it really does work.  But is that the point?  If I doped you up on drugs and subjected you to a barrage of torture and weird video footage, I am willing to bet I could make some fairly radical changes to your behavior.

Just because they’re right doesn’t make them right, though.  This is Gestapo logic, and it’s worth at least considering: when the blowtorch is out and there’s a machete up against your testicles, all of your opinions, beliefs, principles, courage and dreams no longer mean shit.  You will do whatever you have to do to escape from that situation.  This is the final, brutal lesson of Orwell’s 1984, and it truly frustrates me how many people overlook or avoid that.  Nothing Orwell wrote was cautionary, nor prophetic, he was passing judgement on what had already happened, on what has been happening for thousands of years.

All around the world, people act like cattle because of fear.  And the worst part is: they’re right, too.  Because when you look at the sum total of human history, the brutality and depravity of Power has been a constant all along.  Look at the accounts of the women who were being tortured in El Salvador by US-trained death squads.  Then compare that to the treatment of IRA prisoners, compare that to the treatment of Palestinians, compare that to Abu Ghirab.  Compare that to anything you want, really, because it’s the same damn story from Vlad the Impaler right on up to Klaus Barbie and Jeff Dahmer.  If you step out of line, horrible things really will happen to you and to those you love.

However, there’s no resolution here....there is no solution for this, and the less we dwell on it the better.

Are You Kidding Me?

From a psychology perspective, it’s darkly fascinating that a male couple living together in a stable and married relationship and raising children (or hideous dogs) together is perverse, while strapping electrodes to the genitals of children is somehow a benevolent act, a medical “cure”.  I leave interpretation to the reader, but we can all agree that’s an interesting moral standard.

I’m referring to the epidemic use of PPGs on children in this country, a topic so richly disturbing it might warrant it’s own post.  Especially since there seems to be very little in the way of detailed research on the matter, it’s been mostly swept under the rug, except for a few courageous stands.  The most prominent is the attorney Lois Yankowski, who tesified before Congress during the inquiry into Arizona’s Phoenix Memorial Hospital.  Phoenix was apparently running these tests on children as young as eight years old.  Her speech was a barnburner:

As this committee is well-aware, during the plethysmograph testing children are subjected to nude slides of men, women, and children, including photographs depicting bondage...children who responded to the “nude adolescent in bondage” photograph were informed of their responsiveness to these photographs—in essence being told by an adult in authority that they exhibited a deviant sexual interest in bondage. Without data on the responsiveness of “normal children,” these children were nonetheless labeled as deviant...

I remember when I was nine years old.  You know what turned me on?  EVERYTHING ON THE FUCKING PLANET. Yeah, girls, boys, men, women, legos and stuffed animals, sure.  All I knew was that my pecker had manifested a new superpower—and I’d rather not imagine what effect a visit to the Phoenix Memorial Hospital would have had on me.  God knows I’m warped enough as it is.

It’s funny that anyone would think the US is a “permissive” society, because we have taboos just as strict as any tribe in New Guinea.  Don’t believe me?  Go fuck a 16-year old, get caught, and spend some time telling your neighbors that you’re a registered sex offender.  This taboo is irrational and absolute—circumstances mean nothing.  I know people who had consensual sex with underage girls and now they get treated like they raped a whole maternity ward in some hospital.  Your life is destroyed permanently. 

Pete Townsend is still trying to rehabilitate his image after being caught with kiddie porn sites in his browser history.  I realize this is a barely related tangent I will probably have read back to me in court someday, but I also remember back when I was on the LibertyThink forums and users would post up topics like “OUTSTANDING ARCHIVE OF BILDERBURG DOCUMENTS”, and when you’d click the link, it would re-direct to a child porn site.  This made no sense to me until an older and more grizzled member of the forum explained this was “insurance”: the person who posted the link was usually traced back to a military or intelligence IP address.  Once your computer connected to a child porn site—almost all of which, remember, are run by law enforcement to track and trap pedophiles—then you could get busted at their leisure.  It was already on your permanent record, it just becomes a matter of waiting until you become an actual problem before they brought your “crimes” to light.

Bleaugh.  Enough of all this sick, stupid darkness—back to curing homos.

Q: How Stupid Are These People?

Serious question—and I have a serious answer.  I found it in this document, an 8 page pdf entitled “Traditional Values Special Report”.  The report in question is called “Homosexuals Recruiting Public School Children”.

On page 4, they make the point that “homophobia” is a myth.  They mock the claim that gay youth are at any special risk, becuase the statistics simply don’t add up:

Homosexuals promoted the issue of “safety” for “gay teens,” and they pushed the notion that homosexual teenagers were committing suicide in record numbers. Activists used bogus teen suicide statistics created by San Francisco homosexual social worker Paul Gibson.

Gibson’s flawed statistics have been effectively refuted by numerous experts on suicide.

Dr. David Shaffer, a Columbia University psychiatrist and specialist on teen suicide is skeptical of Gibson’s statistics: “I struggled for a long time over [Gibson’s mathematics], but, in the end, it seemed more hocus-pocus than math.”

Peter Muehrer, chief of the Youth Mental Health program in the Prevention and Behavioral Medicine Research branch of the National Institutes of Mental Health says of Gibson’s research: “There is no scientific evidence to support his data.”

Even Joyce Hunter, former head of the National Lesbian and Gay Health Association says it is still unknown if there is any connection between homosexuality and teen suicide.

Crystal clear, right?  Now read the final paragraph of the article:

From what Dr. Nicolosi and Dr. Remafedi have observed, a teen who is recruited into the homosexual lifestyle at an early age is thus conditioned to believe he is born homosexual.  The longer he is in the lifestyle, the more entrenched the behavior becomes and the more difficult it becomes to be free of this destructive behavior. As a result, many self-identified “gay” teens may be tempted to kill themselves because of internal conflicts over their behavior.

And this is the “controversy” I’m supposed to present both sides of, Scott? “Homophobia” is a myth, because there is no link between homosexuality and teenage suicide.  And homosexuality is an unhealthy lifestyle because there is a clear link between homosexuality and teenage suicide..  It’s the same document.  (Here’s the link again, read it.) Either these people are shamelessly and cynically manipulating very sad and gullible bigots, or they are literally and legally mentally retarded. I don’t mean that as a funny joke insult, I suggest that as a serious diagnosis.

A Barrel of Laughs

It’s been about 3 weeks since I started working on this post—not that you could tell, I know—and you know what?  It just barely dawned on me that good old Scott thinks I’m gay:

“How can anyone take you seriously when you only write a one sided article, from the perspective of a threatened homo-sexual?”

I also got a number of responses from gay men who made the same assumption.  Pretty fascinating stuff, but I guess it all makes sense...after all, what heterosexual in his right mind would ever give a shit about faggots, right?