(Note: This is a transcript of the ABC News "20/20" report on
"converting homosexual men" that aired on Friday, April 24th, 1992.
I've tried to identify all of the speakers in []'s at the beginning of
each paragraph; empty []'s mean that the speaker was never identified.
In those places where what was said was unclear, I've marked a [?].
When reporter John Stossel is questioning a subject, his words are in
quotation marks; when he's talking "to us", his words are not in
quotation marks and aren't prefixed with [].

I won't insert any editorial comments in this transcript.  Anything I
have to say about the report will appear in a followup article.

PLEASE!  If you followup to this article, *please* change the
attribution line at the top of your article.  Don't say
"thomas@acuson.com writes..."  because the words in the rest of this
article are not mine.)


[Hugh Downs]  Can you take a gay man and make him straight?  Can you
actually change homosexual men so that they prefer sex with women over
sex with men?  And, if such things are possible, are they necessarily
desirable?  After all, who's to say that any person's sexual identity
needs correcting?  Tonight, John Stossel has a report that you can be
sure will have people talking.  Are male homosexuals born, or is their
desire for men something learned along the way, something that can be
changed if you hit the right switch?

[Stossel]  "You've known you liked men since you were very young?"

["Alex"]  "Uh-huh, about five years old."

This man, disguised here with makeup, says his sexual feelings never
bothered him, until he turned 13 and learned what they meant.

["Alex"]  "All of a sudden, I found out about sex, and that was it.
It's like sex, desire for men, you're a homosexual."

[Stossel]  "How did you feel about that?"

["Alex"]  "It was devastating."

["Mike"]  "I didn't see homosexuality as a -- as a -- natural way of
acting."

This man, too, just couldn't accept it.  It wasn't...  natural.

[Stossel]  "Why are you in disguise?"

["Mike"]  "Why am I in disguise?  Because no one knows... that I was
ever... a homosexual and I reacted [?] as a homosexual."

He, and all these men, hate being gay.  They want to change -- to go
straight, you might put it.  And their psychologist, Dr.  Joseph
Nicolosi, says he can help them go straight.  he wrote a book called
"Reparative Therapy," in which he argues that he can help men give up
the homosexual life.

[Stossel]  "You diminish their wish to be sexual with men.  Do they get
more interested in women?"

[Nicolosi]  "Some do, some do."

[Alex]  "I feel, for the first time in my life, you know, 30 years of
my life, I feel alive.  I feel like I'm a man, I feel like I'm a boy,
I feel like I'm a guy.

[Mike]  Everything says you're a homosexual and always you will be a
homosexual.  I came to realize through Dr. Nicolosi that it was a
learned thing.

Many psychologists are skeptical of Nicolosi's claims.  But he is a
legitimate therapist, trained at the California School of Professional
Psychology.  And he's not alone; there are hundreds of psychoanalysts
who believe in this kind of therapy.

[Stossel]  "Do you believe homosexuality is wrong?"

[Nicolosi]  I don't think it's preferable.  I personally, for myself, I
cannot see it as equally valid, equally... or equal value to
heterosexuality."

All his patients wanted their identities concealed because they hoped
to pass as straight.  Some have even gotten married.

[Stossel]  "Your wife never knew?"

["Mike"]  "My wife never knew."

He got divorced and tried coming out.  He went to gay clubs around Los
Angeles, but says he hated the scene.

["Mike"]  It's very demeaning to look for sex in gay bars, and gay
bathhouses.  You feel very badly.  You feel like dirt, you feel shame.

["Alex"]  The pain I couldn't deal with was that it was an empty
lifestyle.  I never, no matter who I went out with, received the
fulfillment that I needed."

[Stossel]  "Do you want to get married?"

["Alex"]  "I'd love to.  I think that's great/"

[Stossel]  "Why not marry a man?"

["Alex"]  "I don't think getting married to a man is right.  A man was
made to be with a woman and to raise a family, and that's how sex
works, you know?"

[Nicolosi]  "I began to notice the trend that these homosexual men had
difficulties with their fathers.  An alienation from their father
created what I call male gender deficit, which is to say that the male
homosexual does not feel solid in his own sense of his own
masculinity."

Nicolosi says that this happens to boys who, at the crucial age of
about 2, have fathers who are unavailable or rejecting.

[Nicolosi]  "Then the boy is left with this unfulfilled need to get the
male affection or the male identification."

[Stossel]  "So what do you do about it?"

[Nicolosi]  "Well, the course of treatment then is to bring these men
into an intimate relationship with each other in a non-sexual way, to
repair the lack of connectedness that they did not get from their
father."

Richard Cohen says it worked for him.  As a young man, Cohen was open
about being gay.

[Cohen]  "My parents knew, my brother and sister knew.  I never hid it.
I had a lover in college for about three years, and he used to come up
with the family visits, so I was pretty out there."

But he never liked being gay.  When he was 30, he married Jae Sook,
who'd just moved here from Korea, telling her he'd once been gay, but
now he was straight.  He had children, and the family has stayed
together -- but it hasn't been easy.

[Cohen]  "Like, a lot of men think, well just get married and it's all
going to go away.  So I repressed my homosexual desires, and I thought
marriage would be the solution, but I found out it wasn't."

[Stossel]  "What happened?"

[Cohen]  "It was the kingdom of hell.  It was like the pits of... the
pits."

He withdrew from Jae Sook, and then to try to cure his attachment to
men, tried Nicolosi's reparative therapy.  He found a friend to act as
a father figure.

[Cohen]  "And he was straight.  And he wasn't afraid to touch me."

Nicolosi says that the friend gave Richard what he didn't get from his
father.

[Cohen]  "I needed Daddy to hold me while I cried and cried and
screamed and hollered.  And this man committed himself to me in that
way, and with his love I broke through."

[Stossel]  "His hugging you enabled you to be a straight man?"

[Cohen]  "My compulsive desire for a man went away."

[Stossel]  "Jae Sook, is he a husband?"

[Sook]  "Yes."

[Stossel]  "What did you think when he was turning away from you,
saying 'I need a man'?"

[Sook]  "It was, as he said, such a hell.  And I cried a lot."

[Stossel]  "Now, is sexuality an important part of your marriage?"

[Sook]  "Uh-huh."

[Cohen]  "We're having a child soon, our third."

[Stossel]  "Well, almost anybody can have children.  That doesn't mean
much."

[Cohen]  "Yes, we have good sex, if that's what you're asking."

[Stossel]  "You're interested in --"

[Cohen]  "Yes, in having sex with my wife, and not with a man."

He's delighted with the change.  So, who could argue with this?  Well,
most anyone you talk to at this gay bar in New York City.  Tell people
here about Nicolosi's theories, and the reaction is anger.

[]  "I'm here to say I never had a suffocating mother, never had a
suffocating father.  I have a suffocating society.  I have suffocating
religion.  I'm not ashamed of who I am, and anybody who keeps trying
to change me, he's just going to come up a brick wall."

[]  "Can they also change you from straight to homosexual?  If
therapists can do that, then the reverse might be true.  But I don't
think they can do that."

[Stossel]  "Presumably, fewer people would want that.  It's easier to
be straight in America."

[]  "Easier for who?"

[]  "Unfortunately, you're right, but it's sad."

For years, psychologists have been trying to cure homosexuals.  Some
would show them pictures of naked men and then give them electric
shocks.  Earlier this century, castration was considered a viable
therapy.  Today, the official position of the American Psychological
Association is that there's no need for a cure because homosexuality
is not a disease.  It's simply a way a minority of people express
their sexuality.

Dr. Richard Isay, who chairs the APA's committee on gay issues, says
the correct role for a psychologist is to help a gay man become a
happy gay man.

[Stossel]  "Help him accept it.  Just say you are gay --"

[Isay]  "Not only accept it, but to express it."

[Stossel]  "But this is what Nicolosi's patients say they want.  They
don't want to be gay, and they say he's helping them."

[Isay]  "I pick up the pieces of these patients who have been to Dr.
Nicolosi, or others like Dr. Nicolosi, and it can be tragic.  These
men come back to me, whether it be in six months, one year, or two
years, anxious, depressed, feeling separate from other people, feeling
they have no passion left in their life, and in some circumstances --
particularly when they have been compliant enough to get married and
to have children -- acutely suicidal."

Far better, says Isay, is to do what his patient Chuck Davis did: make
the most of life as you are.  Chuck and his friend Buddy Dickman have
been living together, as if they were married, for seven years.

[Dickman]  "Well, we met in the elevator.  I'm going up to the party
--"

[Davis]  "And got together a week later for a date.  It was all very
old-fashioned."

Chuck is a psychiatrist who works with people who have AIDS.

[Davis]  "I spent a lot of years suppressing my feelings and trying to
be something different than I was.  And it was awful.  And I think
that's where the pain, the biggest pain, of being gay is: the time
before you learn to accept yourself."

Buddy runs his own accounting firm.

[Dickman]  "I dated women in high school, in college, but it was all a
farce.  I didn't have a choice to become straight or become gay or
what.  I am what I am, and that's it.  And I don't think my father was
overly distant or my mother overly suffocating, and we don't fit into
any of those stereotypes."

[Davis]  "You're taught from the time you were born that it's a
terrible thing, if people could snap their fingers and change, that
people would.  So that kind of therapy is probably very appealing."

Central to the debate about claims of changing sexual orientation is
the question, is homosexuality born or bred?  If it's bred -- if you
become gay because of something your parents did or didn't do -- then
it's logical for Nicolosi to say that you can change it back.  The
scientific research on this is inconclusive.  A recent study found
brain differences between gay and straight men, but that doesn't mean
the difference caused the homosexuality.  It could be that homosexual
behavior causes a difference in the brain.

Studies on twins suggest a genetic cause.  Identical twins are much
more likely to be gay than non-identical pairs.  But, if homosexuality
is inherited, then why aren't all identical twins either both gay or
both straight?

Still, scientists say the bulk of evidence suggests a biological
cause.  Perhaps most convincing is that anthropologists have found
homosexuality in most every culture, modern and ancient, and
biologists have found it in animals.  One study showed that 14% of the
gulls here in Santa Barbara are lesbian.

If homosexuality is just part of nature, something you're born with,
that would help explain something that surprised us in the course of
meeting Dr. Nicolosi's patients.  Even the people that Nicolosi cited
as success stories are not all that successful.

[Stossel]  "How much better have you got?  What's different?"

["Alex"]  "I'll still look at people going down the street.  That
hasn't completely gone away, and I don't know if it ever will."

["Mike"]  "I don't want to mislead you.  I haven't gotten over it.  I
still have some attractions to males, and to say that I don't would be
totally lying on my part."

[Isay]  "Behavior can be changed by all sorts of means, including
psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, behavior modification.  But the core
orientation in a gay man cannot be changed."

[Stossel]  "A lot of psychologists say that this is unethical, you're
ripping people off, that people aren't cured.  Many of them might get
[?] a little better, but they still want men."

[Nicolosi]  "Not necessarily.  The attraction for men diminishes.
That's the point; that's what these men want.  They are distressed by
their homosexual feelings, and I can help them diminish that.  And
they have a right to seek that kind of therapy, to pay the money for
it, and I'm there to help them."

[Stossel (to Cohen)]  "You're straight?"

[Cohen]  "I would be lying to you if I said it like it's all gone and
all wiped away.  There are traces of it there, and there's still some
times attractions."

[Stossel (to Nicolosi)]  "Some people would say he's still gay --"

[Nicolosi]  "Of course."

[Stossel]  "-- that no one has ever been cured."

[Nicolosi]  "Of course.  But look at the bind that happens.  You have a
man who says 'I am cured, I no longer have homosexual feelings.  I'm
married, I love my wife, I love my kids, I'm doing fine.'  Five years
later he has a fall; he has a homosexual contact.  So what?  It's a
tradeoff, and these men are willing to pay that price."

Most gays we said that to said, why should we have to pay any price,
and why don't you straights just leave us alone.

[(at NYC bar)]  "They're treating it like a disease.  What is a cure
for?  A disease.  This is not a disease.  And, if people just backed
off, let people live as they want to live, people wouldn't feel like
there's something wrong, and they wouldn't go to this man and give
their money, and this guy wouldn't rip them off.  There's no such
thing as a cure."

(Cut to studio:)

[Barbara Walters]  "John, in view of the fact that there has not been a
society in which there wasn't some homosexuality, and the fact that
homosexuals come from all different environments, how does the doctor
answer that?"

[Stossel]  "I asked him that, and he said in those cases too, those men
had rejecting or unavailable fathers."

[Walters]  "Throughout the years, they all --"

[Stossel]  "Throughout the years.  And I also would like to add that,
clearly, this is a minority belief.  Most therapists don't believe
this, and the American Psychological Association and the American
Psychiatric Association both say that homosexuality is not a disease,
doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you, and therefore there's
nothing that needs to be cured."

[Walters]  "You know, we're still talking about prejudice.  And I
wondered if it was ever proven that it was biological, that there
would be less prejudice."

[Stossel]  "I think that there would be."

[Walters]  "This is hardly going to be the last time that society is
going to be examining this very important question.  We'll be right
back."

(End of transcript.)

-- 
Chris Thomas						(415) 694-5614
S4/7 b g+ l y+ z+ n+ o+ x-/+ a++ u v-/+ j++          thomas@acuson.com