“Curing Homosexuality” Really Freaks Us Out: Part 1

On the face of it, it’s only funny.  The sight of a constipated-looking Man of God standing with a microphone before a group of people, and saying with a straight face that homosexuality is a “mental illness” and it can be “cured”—what’s not funny about that?  I’ve not only seen footage and photos of homosexuality occuring in other animal species, I’ve seen a male Mallard Duck repeatedly having sex with a dead male Mallard.  (You can see it, too.) There is no evidence that being a homosexual causes any problems whatsoever, when you exclude the problems that ignorant and intolerant people cause for them.

When curing gays gets really, really unfunny is when you start digging and find out how they “cured.” You start seeing CIA spooks showing up in weird places (which is their job, after all), you start seeing strong Nazi undercurrents, and perhaps worst of all, you come back around to hypnosis, conditioning, brainwashing and that sneaking suspicion that you might be sleepwalking right now. And by God, if that ain’t Brainsturbator turf, nothing is.

A Long and Ugly History

For most of Western history, homosexuality has carried a death penalty.  This is a pretty crucial thing to understand with any discussion of gay culture—for over a thousand years, you stayed “in the closet” because otherwise you would be killed.  The story of Sodom and Gommorah is a fascinating myth, and the lesson we’re supposed to take away from it is essentially the same as Fred Phelps: “God Hates Fags”.  Apparently all the other lessons are not as important: common etiquitte stuff, like when there’s a crowd of horny homosexuals outside your door who want to rape your houseguests, the proper thing to do is offer up your virgin daughters instead.  (No, really: Genesis 19:8)

(There is also the issue of God turning your wife into a pillar of salt for being sentimental, and then the whole “How to Keep the Bloodline Alive By Getting Drunk Enough to Bang Your Own Daughters” incident.  No, really: Genesis 19:30-38. Ah, the Bible...they don’t call it the Good Book for nothing.)

It’s amazing how few people know what the pink triangle stands for.  Considering there is (apparently) a pervasive conspiracy known as the Homosexual Agenda which is bent upon corroding traditional family values, and spends millions every year to flood America with gay propaganda, you’d think it would be different.  You’d think that all the young drug addicts and unwed mothers would know that this symbol was adopted, not because they’re partial to pink, but because the Nazis forced homosexuals to wear that patch on their clothing around the same time Jews started wearing the yellow Star of David.

For the past century, Homosexuality was more than a mere sexual perversion, it was a mental illness, a disease.  The Nazis took a rather utilitarian approach to socialized medicine and routinely killed the infirm, the elderly and the retarded, and infamously, blacks, gypsies, homosexuals and Jews.  America is less homicidal but equally as insane.  Anyone remember the mass roundups of gays in North Carolina?  The Greensboro Purge? 

The now-obscure episode, which some longtime residents came to call “the purge,” was the largest attempted roundup of homosexuals in Greensboro history and marked one of the most intense gay scares of the 1950s.

Unlike sweeps of subsequent decades, involving raids on public parks and gay bars, Greensboro’s 1957 trials focused on private acts behind closed doors.

The purpose, in the words of the police chief, was to “remove these individuals from society who would prey upon our youth,” and to protect the town from what a presiding judge called “a menace.”

---from the entertaining and depressing book Sex Crime Panic, by Neil Miller.  Other gems:

...referred to by law enforcement as “fruit picking,” officers would solicit men at the local gay bar’s bathrooms and sometimes go home with them. One incident even had an officer having sex with a man he was trying to frame, from start to finish, then pulling out his gun and arresting him. After being arrested an individual would be pressured into giving names of others he had been involved with sexually, creating a gay McCarthy-style witch hunt in the heart of the Midwest.

This is the climate that killed Alan Turing.  Turing, one of the most brilliant computer scientists math monsters of all time, got “busted” in 1952 for being gay, which was of course a crime in the UK.  He was given a choice between a long prison terms and hormone “treatment” for his condition—the treatment was oestrogen injections, which have the infamous side effect of creating breasts in men.  (There is some debate as to wether this “treatment” even had intended medicial benefits—that is, wether it was solely designed to degrade and humiliate.)

Design or no, that was the effect.  Turing lost his security clearance, got shut out of the academic loop, and committed suicide in 1954 rather poetically, with an apple he laced full of cyanide. 

Just the Facts, Sir.

Claims that homosexuality is somehow “un-natural” are quite absurd.  Although I do respect that some people have a simple distaste for homosexuality, there is really no way to make a scientific or rational (or fact-based or...) case that being gay is a bad thing.  Again, the only time when it’s a bad thing to be gay is when you are endangered or attacked by other humans who hate you for being gay.

Sexual norms are a matter of cultural conditioning, and in the Wonderbread world of Western monoculture, it’s easy to forget that. 

During the past three decades, I have spent much of my scholarly life examining primary sources such as diaries, autobiographies, doctor’s reports, ethnographic reports and other documents that document what it must have felt like to have been a child--yesterday and today, in the East and the West, in literate and preliterate cultures.

In several hundred studies published by myself and my associates in The Journal of Psychohistory, we have provided extensive evidence that the history of childhood has been a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes--and the further away from the West one gets--the more massive the neglect and cruelty one finds and the more likely children are to have been killed, rejected, beaten, terrorized and sexually abused by their caretakers.

---from the website of Lloyd DeMause, which is most interesting stuff.

It was in the Melanesian culture area—encompassing Papua-New Guinea—where, well into the 20th century, the erotic (in fact homoerotic) energy of male initiation was perhaps most clearly evident (Tejirian, 1990). There, transactions of semen between older and younger males were a pervasive feature of male initiation. Among the “Sambia” with whom anthropologist Gilbert Herdt lived, boys were turned into men by being isolated from their mothers. Living in proximity with adolescent boys, it was necessary that they perform fellatio on the older, sexually mature boys since it was thought that only by the ingestion of semen on a regular basis would they be able to mature sexually themselves.

Among the Marind-anim, who were inveterate headhunters, initiation involved a ritual in which initiates were made to have sexual intercourse with any number of men on a night when the village was visited by Sosom, a dema (spirit)—who was a giant that walked with his penis carried over his shoulder. Later, the boy went to live with his maternal uncle for a while—the only man allowed to have intercourse with him. In this culture area, older males infused the younger ones with sexual power through the act of direct, physical transmission.

----source

I don’t mention that merely to shock, because it’s important to remember this only looks like an aberration from where we’re standing. If you’d been raised over there, that would be perfectly normal, like murders on TV.  Child sexual abuse is a pretty difficult (and really depressing) subject to understand, though—after all, if the United States has the highest rates for treatment of STD’s in children, does that mean there’s actually more abuse or just more hospitals?  Do we really have any right to be pointing fingers in a “civilzed” nation where 2,185 little kids go missing every single day?

Homosexuality occurs in all races including primitive tribal societies.

...recent surveys show a much lower incidence with approximately 4% of respondents overall reporting any homosexual experience.  However a majority of sexually active males, deprived of heterosexual contact for a prolonged period will revert to homosexual behavior.  Apparent variation in the prevalence of homosexuality within different societies may reflect acceptance or tolerance of the practice within a particular society rather than its actual occurrence. 

It is not a recent abnormality of sexual behavior; references to homosexuality occur in English literature throughout the middle ages and into the nineteenth century and are found in ancient Chinese, Roman and Hebrew manuscripts.  References abound in classical Greek writings. Reference to homosexual relationship has been found in the earliest cuneiform script on the clay tablets of the Assyrians.  Many of the cave paintings or carvings of early man have been interpreted as having a sexual significance; many could equally be interpreted as being homosexual.  Some clearly depict homosexual behavior.  There is thus evidence of homosexual behavior since our earliest recorded history.

The DSM—Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—is currently in it’s fourth edition, and popularly known as the DSM-IV, the gold standard, core dogma of Western clinical psychiatry.  The DSM-III listed homosexuality as a mental illness, and that didn’t get changed until 1973.  Which is downright progressive compared to the Department of Defense, which stopped classifying homosexuality as a disorder in....well, in 2006. 

The Curious Case of Robert Spitzer

A great deal of the information from the “de-homofying” ministries refers to the 2001 report of Dr. Robert Spitzer as scientific proof that their methods work.  Sure enough, it’s not unfair to claim that’s the logical conclusion of his study. 

More importantly, Spitzer was a key figure in getting the DSM-IV changed back in 1973.  His career is notable for two controversies—in the 70s, he was pissing off bigots by arguing that homosexuals are perfectly sane and healthy humans, and then in 2001 he’s pissing off gay and lesbian advocacy groups by arguing that perfectly sane and healthy humans can change their sexual orientation.  So clearly, there’s something else going on here.

So, if you pushed me to re-examine the 1973 decision...I would say, it’s still not a disorder but I intuitively think that something is not working.

Doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement to me.  Take a look at this interview, in which Spitzer makes the following point:

CRV:It seems as if when somebody says “change is possible”, the response is automatically “this is violence and anti-gay prejudice”. What would you say to this?

Spitzer: I think what people will say—and they are probably right—is that this will be used to pressure gays to go into therapy.  It will be used by people who are bigoted.  There is this strange connection between wether you think this therapy is useful and wether you are for the civil rights of homosexuals.

The gay activists believe if they could convince everybody that they can never change, then they would be in a better position to argue for gay civil rights.  I am for gay civil rights.

CRV: What do you mean by “gay civil rights”?  Are they not special rights, for example the right to marry?

Spitzer: Oh, leave aside marriage.

CRV: It is a big topic at the moment.

Spitzer Yes, and I have given some thought to that.  What I mean by civil rights is they could live in any place they want, that there would be no anti-sodomy laws.

They believe that they are in a better position to argue for that, if they can convince everybody: “once you are gay, you can never change.”

My study will say: maybe you can change, but I am still for your civil rights.  The gay community is concerned that my study will be used against them.  I am not sure what I can do about that.

Unspoken and Uncomfortable

At the core of this controversy is something that Timothy Leary was talking about decades ago, and depending on you, it’s either the most liberating fact in the Universe or the scariest thing you’ve ever heard.  The fact is that your sexual orientation really is changeable, just like every single other aspect of your personality.  Everything you think you “are” is mostly an accident of conditioning. 

What’s especially signifigant about this is that it’s a double-edged tool with a very sharp blade. If something as apparently primal and “core” as what we are sexually attracted to can be changed with simple conditioning, then it’s a safe bet that changing somebody’s religion would be just as simple. It’s an even safer bet when you look for evidence: history is abundantly full of proof that brainwashing works, no matter what you choose to call it.

We will refer to him in many other contexts in the months to come, but William Sims Bainbridge is a useful name to bring up in this connection.  He works with “personality capture”: essentially massive surveys, thousands upon thousands of specific questions that allow for an accurate computer modeling of “you” (or at least the frail ego you cling to).

To get Bainbridge’s take on his own work—a fascinating read—check this out.

How About “Curing Pedophilia”, You Sick Fucks?

Sometimes we don’t censor the f***, and this deserves to be one of those rare moments.  The GOP has increasingly been associated with pedophile activity, which is a mighty curious outreach program for the Party of Family Values to be undertaking.  Now, for the sake of clarity for any Normals reading this, I hold the Democrats (and Progressives, and the Green Party) in the same naked comtempt that I do the Republicans—you are all equally worthless prostitutes of your own souls, to me.

However, when you look at the actual evidence, it is downright shocking how many pedophiles there are within the ranks of the Republican machine.

Strom Thurmond got a black servant, Cassie Butler pregnant when she was 15 and he was 22.  (Although this might not technically count, we still advocate beating Thurmond with greased whiffle bats on general principles.)

How about Craig Spence?  He got killed for becoming too visible after getting busted giving some his underage boy prostitutes a tour of the White House.  Yeah, you wish I was making that up.

Spence ties into Lawrence King, the Omaha Republican who was running the child prostitution ring that led to the deaths of several investigators in the late 80s - early 90s.

When Congressman Donald Lukens was put on trial for raping an underage girl, he got a month in prison for it.

This is not uncommon for powerful pedophiles, when Rep. Dan Crane got busted for sleeping with pages, he got “censured”, a symbolic slap on his flabby wrists.

...and I know it’s premature, but still: just wait until Rove gets busted.

Then again, maybe it’s not hypocrisy, after all.  After White House Press correspondent “Jeff Gannon” turned out to be not only a GOP plant whose job was to pitch softball questions and bring up “Talking Points”, but also a part-time gay escort who specialized in military fetishes—how quickly the herd forgets, eh?—maybe it’s time to reconsider “Compassionate Conservatives.”

There’s even (no joke) an organization of Gay and Lesbian GOP believers: the Log Cabin Republicans, who have an official website to compound the surrealism. 

Jack T. Chick: Greatest Artist of All Time, Ever

Anyone not familiar with Jack Chick Bible Tracts is probably wondering where the f*** all the weird black and white comic images came from.  Jack Chick is true American surrealism: hateful and prolific, he’s produced hundreds of these tiny comics, and you can read nearly all of them online.

The basic blueprint here is pretty simple: scare the living shit out of little kids.  Every few months we’d find hundreds of these scattered all over our school playground in the morning, and the first one I ever read stuck with me forever: “This Was Your Life”, an account of a man being judged in the afterlife...apparently it involves watching a movie of your entire existence with God and a bunch of angels providing running commentary.  Years later when I first saw Mystery Science Theatre 3000, I was reminded yet again of Jack Chick and the scar he left on my young psyche.

More Fun Stuff Tomorrow

Part Two will be the actual organizations and folks involved—it gets weirder and more interesting from here. Read on...