http://www.juliansanchez.com/2011/07/29/are-there-any-genuine-ex-gays/ More here:http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/08/do-real-ex-gays-exist-ctd.html
the pioneers of the 'ex-gay' movement have actually started to come out against it, calling it dangerous and a sham. In the end, you cannot choose your sexuality. science is showing that more and more as time passes. All you can choose is how you react to your sexuality. Some choose celibacy out of personal convictions, and some choose to embrace who they are. neither is right or wrong, because it comes down to the person. but ex-gay is not about choice. it is about people making the choice for you. you cant choose your sexuality... only how you act upon it.
If I'm not mistaken, some of the Exodus and other ex-gay proponents that have since left the movement (and even some of the poster children for ex-gayness) have admitted that all that's happened is they no longer *act on* their feelings... they still feel the attractions, they just live a miserable life wishing they could have what they won't allow themselves to have. I think this movement is slowly being exposed for the sham it always was.
Hmm the story from one of the readers about his brother marrying the woman. Soon as i read that he's still sexually attracted to men, all I could think was, "he's not ex-gay then, he's bisexual".
I think this is what you're talking about? [YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDiYeJ_bsQo[/YOUTUBE]
I do think it is possible, like the guy in the article said, for someone to mistake that they are gay before later realizing that they are straight. Sometimes people might feel that, because of the way they act, they MUST be gay. But I'm sure it isn't quite as publicized. I think we also have to remember that people's orientation/identity can change over time. No, not everyone's does, and you can't force the change, but it happens. I was straight when I was younger, then a lesbian, and now I am panromantic. I don't think ex-gay ministries work, or are a good thing, but I do think there are people out there who used to be gay but are not anymore.
I agree with XXReye. I do think that people's sexuality can change over time, so I do think there may be some people who used to be gay but no longer are. However, I don't think that change is due to some crazy ministry that says they will pray the gay out of them or anything like that. It's just that sexuality is fluid and does change over time sometimes.
Yes, this is absolutely true. In Joe Kort's book, he talks about this specific issue, of people who never actually had a biological sexual orientation toward the same sex in the first place, but that, for one reason or another, were socialized to feel like they were homosexual. For these people, appropriate therapy would clear away the crap and reveal the underlying heterosexual orientation... but this is a far cry from someone who fantasizes about same-sex partners, looks at same-sex porn and so forth. So Kort argues that the few "successes" in changing sexual orientation as reported by the ex-gay movement aren't successes at all... because orientation wasn't changed, it's just that the original underlying orientation was unmasked. The dirty secret here is that the opposite is also the case; in order to acknowledge that underlying straight orientation can happen to people who were conditioned to feel they were gay, one must also acknowledge that the inverse is also possible; that people can have an underlying gay orientation but be conditioned to feel they're straight. And of course, the Exodus people will have nothing to do with that argument. The biggest wildcard/confusion is among male sexual abuse survivors. Male abuse survivors do have a much higher degree of sexual orientation confusion than their non-abused cohort. And there's also little question that a higher percentage of male abuse survivors are gay than a random sampling of similar males who haven't been abused. Where the problem comes in is where people incorrectly assume casuation from a spurious correlation. None of the quality research on male abuse survivors shows any causative link, and there seems to be some indication that, as early as 3 or 4 years of age, some boys can be pretty reliably identified as gay. So it seems likely that there may be some victim selection going on in which an abuser identifies a gay child for abuse, rather than the abuse turning the child gay. This is a very complicated and nuanced subject, one that is completely overlooked and/or brushed under the carpet by the ex-gay industry.
