First, for all that Widdecombe uses the language of helping unhappy people, as in any other psychotherapy, the history of “gay cures” and “conversion therapy” is troubling. Much of the theory underpinning it comes from really odd post-Freudian psychoanalysis about seeking out an idealised “good penis” because of some trauma involving the patient’s mother; from 1952 to 1973 homosexuality was declared a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Until 1988 it still remained in there in the confusing name of “ego-dystonic homosexuality”.
And the treatment was often brutal. Some subjects had electric shocks applied to the hands or genitals as aversion therapy while they were shown homoerotic images, for instance. Others underwent electroconvulsive therapy – not the modern, safe and effective treatment for hard-to-treat depression, but the old kind, barely distinguishable from torture. In rare cases, brain surgery – lobotomies – were performed. [...]
One reason that gay people might be unhappy is that large parts of society – including but not limited to many members of the Conservative Party and the Catholic Church – insist that they have need of a “cure” or an “answer”. You do wonder whether Widdecombe has, as she might claim, no concerns about “happy” gay people continuing to be gay, or if the language of providing therapeutic options for those who want it just is a mask for bog-standard homophobia. [...]
You could also note the large number of prominent anti-gay voices who later turn out to be gay. There’s a website that counts down the number of days since that last happened. At the time of writing, it’s 135 days since, in fact, a Mormon gay conversion therapist came out as wanting to date men, and you’d think that if conversion therapy was going to work on anyone, it would be highly motivated people like that. And yet it consistently doesn’t.
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