ABSTRACT

Since the 1970s, the ex-gay movement has brought together professional therapists, ministry leaders, and people struggling with “unwanted same-sex attractions.” Ex-gays in the United States are predominantly male, and the movement tends to attract white Evangelical Christians. In many ex-gay movement worldviews, “gender shame,” an underlying fear of being one’s assigned gender, is often thought to cause homosexuality, and confronting it is supposed to allow the expression of universally natural heterosexual feeling and behavior.These ideas are generally rejected in mainstream science as being based on stereotypes. Nonetheless, practitioners guiding clients through this process often blend theological and psychological concepts, theorizing that becoming heterosexual means aligning oneself with a vision of God’s design for men and women (Moberly 1983). Although the movement in the United States grew in recent decades, it has recently undergone serious setbacks as Exodus International, the leading ex-gay ministry in the U.S., disbanded in June 2013. The movement began to fracture in 2012, the result of a division between ministry leaders,

who claimed that leaving homosexuality meant lifelong struggle with same-sex attractions, and professional therapists, who claimed that full reorientation was possible.These divisions can be traced, in part, to a standard established by the American Psychological Association (APA) pertaining to scientific measurement. In a task force report published in 2009, the APA joined other professional mental health associations declaring that there is no evidence for the efficacy of sexual orientation change efforts, and these efforts are potentially harmful (APATask Force 2009).To make these claims, the APA established a terminological standard that undermined the validity of the self-reports of ex-gays claiming to have become heterosexual as a basis of reorientation research. In the past, “sexual orientation” had been measured as a composite of identity, behavior, and attraction.The APA made a new distinction between “sexual orientation” as a set of physiological attractions and “sexual orientation identity” as the willingness or ability to recognize one’s sexual orientation. In effect, the APA’s new standards meant that selfreports of sexual orientation became nothing more than an expression of sexual orientation identity, unacceptable as evidence for the efficacy of sexual reorientation therapies. Moreover, in order to demonstrate reorientation, a physiological measure was now deemed necessary.