Early in my freshman year of high school, I came home to find
my mom sitting on her bed, crying. She had snooped through my e-mail and
discovered a message in which I confessed to having a crush on a male
classmate.

“Are you gay?” she asked. I blurted out that I was.

“I knew it, ever since you were a little boy.”

Her resignation didn’t last long. My mom is a problem solver, and the next
day she handed me a stack of papers she had printed out from the Internet
about reorientation, or “ex-gay,” therapy. I threw them away. I said I didn’t
see how talking about myself in a therapist’s office was going to make me stop
liking guys. My mother responded by asking whether I wanted a family, then
posed a hypothetical: “If there were a pill you could take that would make you
straight, would you take it?”

I admitted that life would be easier if such a pill existed. I hadn’t
thought about how my infatuation with boys would play out over the course of
my life. In fact, I had always imagined myself middle-aged, married to a
woman, and having a son and daughter—didn’t everyone want some version of
that?

“The gay lifestyle is very lonely,” she said.

She told me about Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, a clinical psychologist in
California who was then president of the National Association for Research and
Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), the country’s largest organization for
practitioners of ex-gay therapy. She said Nicolosi had treated hundreds of
people who were now able to live “normal” lives.

I read through the papers my mom had salvaged from the trash. They were
interviews with Nicolosi’s patients, who talked about how therapy helped them
overcome depression and feel “comfortable in their masculinity.” The
testimonials seemed genuine, and the patients, grateful. I agreed to fly with
my father to Los Angeles from our small town on the Arizona-Mexico border for
an initial consultation.

The Thomas Aquinas Psychological Clinic was on the 13th floor of a modern
building on Ventura Boulevard, one of the San Fernando Valley’s main
thoroughfares. Nicolosi’s corner office had emerald-green carpet and mahogany
bookshelves lined with titles like Homosexuality: A Freedom Too Far and
Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth. Middle-aged with thick,
graying black hair, Nicolosi grew up in New York City and spoke with a faint
Bronx accent. Brusque but affable, he put me at ease. When my father and
I first sat down, Nicolosi explained what he meant by “cure.” Although I might
never feel a spark of excitement when I saw a woman walking down the street,
as I progressed in therapy, my homosexual attractions would diminish. I
might have lingering thoughts about men, but they would no longer control
me.

Nicolosi’s acknowledgment that change wouldn’t be absolute made the theory
seem reasonable. His confidence in the outcome made me hopeful. Until I had
spoken with Nicolosi, I had resigned myself to the idea that, desirable or
not, my life would have to accommodate the fact that I was gay. But maybe this
was something I had power over.

For the last half of the session, I talked with Nicolosi alone. “Tell me
about your friends at school,” he said. I said I had two close female friends.
“Male friends?” I admitted that I had always had trouble relating to boys my
age. When I was in grade school, I preferred helping the teacher clean the
classroom during breaks instead of playing sports.

“Are you open to therapy?” Nicolosi asked. “If you don’t think this is
working, you can stop anytime.”

I agreed to start weekly sessions by phone. After our one-on-one meeting
ended, I joined some of his other patients for group therapy. I was by far the
youngest person there. The other men—four or five altogether—were in their
forties and fifties and talked about their years in the “gay lifestyle,” which
had yielded only unhappiness. They wanted normal, fulfilling lives. They were
tired of the club scene, the drug use, the promiscuity; their relationships
didn’t last; they complained that gay culture was youth-obsessed. If that was
what being gay meant—and with 30-plus years on me, they would know—then I
wanted to be normal, too.

I left the office with a copy of Nicolosi’s most recent book, Healing
Homosexuality, and a worksheet that categorized different emotions under
the rubrics of “true self” and “false self.” The true self felt masculine, was
“adequate, on par,” “secure, confident, capable,” and “at home in [his] body.”
The false self did not feel masculine, was inadequate and insecure, and felt
alienated from his body. This rang true. I had been teased throughout my
childhood for being effeminate, and as a lanky, awkward teen with bad skin, I
certainly was not at home in my body.

Another sheet illustrated the “triadic relationship” that led to
homosexuality: a passive, distant father, an overinvolved mother, and a
sensitive child. I was closer with my mother than my father. I was shy. The
story seemed to fit, which was comforting: It gave me confidence that I could
be cured.

According to Nicolosi, identification with a parent of the other gender is
out of step with our biological and evolutionary “design.” Because of this, it
was impossible to ever become whole through gay relationships. I wanted to be
whole.

On July 13, 1998—the same year I started therapy—a full-page
ad appeared in The New York Times featuring a beaming woman with a
diamond engagement ring and wedding band. “I’m proof that the truth can set
you free,” she proclaimed. The woman, Anne Paulk, said that molestation during
adolescence led her to homosexuality, but that she had been healed through the
power of Jesus Christ. The $600,000 ad campaign—sponsored by 15
religious-right organizations, including the Christian Coalition, the Family
Research Council, and the American Family Association—ran for several weeks in
such publications as The Washington Post, USA Today, and the
Los Angeles Times. Robert Knight of the Family Research Council called
it “the Normandy landing in the culture war.”

With few voices to challenge the testimonials, reporters transmitted them
as revelation. Newsweek ran a sympathetic cover story on change
therapy, and national and regional papers published ex-gays’ accounts. My
mother might not have so easily found information about ex-gay therapy had the
Christian right not planted this stake in the culture war.

The ad appeared 23 years after the American Psychiatric Association (APA)
declassified homosexuality as a mental illness. As a consequence of that
decision, extreme forms of reorientation therapy—aversion therapy involving
electrocution or nausea-inducing drugs, for instance—had stopped being used. A
small group of therapists continued to practice talk therapy that encouraged
patients to see homosexuality as a developmental disorder, but they remained
on the fringe until the Christian right took up their cause. This was a
calculated political move. Instead of fire-and-brimstone denunciations from
the pulpit, the ex-gay movement allowed the Christian right to couch its
condemnation of homosexuality in a way that seemed compassionate. Focus on the
Family called its new ex-gay ministry Love Won Out and talked about healing
and caring for homosexuals.

The ex-gay movement turned the rhetoric of gay rights against itself:
Shouldn’t ex-gays be able to pursue therapy and live the lives they want
without facing discrimination?

The two largest groups that provide ex-gay counseling are Exodus
International, a nondenominational Christian organization, and NARTH, its
secular counterpart. If Exodus is the spirit of the ex-gay movement, NARTH is
the brain. The organizations share many members, and Exodus parrots the
developmental theories about same-sex attractions espoused by NARTH. Together
with the late Charles Socarides, a psychiatrist who led the opposition to
declassifying homosexuality as a mental illness, Nicolosi formed NARTH in 1992
as a “scientific organization that offers hope to those who struggle with
unwanted homosexuality.” By 1998, the group was holding an annual conference,
publishing its own journal, and training hundreds of psychiatrists,
psychologists, and counselors. Nicolosi remains NARTH’s most visible
advocate.

There are no reliable statistics for how many patients have received ex-gay
treatment or how many therapists practice it, but in the late 1990s and early
2000s, ex-gay therapy enjoyed a legitimacy it hadn’t since the APA removed
homosexuality from its diagnostic manual. Exodus had 83 chapters in 34 states.
Its president, Alan Chambers, claimed in 2004 that he knew “tens of thousands
of people who have successfully changed their sexual orientation.” Nicolosi
appeared often on programs like Oprah, 20/20, and Larry King
Live. Whether or not the Christian right’s alliance with the ex-gay
movement had constituted a D-Day in the culture wars, it had successfully
challenged the prevailing idea that the best choice for gay people was to
accept themselves.

After our initial  meeting, I spoke with Nicolosi weekly
by phone for more than three years, from the time I was 14 until I graduated
high school. Like a rabbi instructing his student in understanding the Torah,
Nicolosi encouraged me to interpret my daily life through the lens of his
theories. I read in one of Nicolosi’s books, Reparative Therapy of Male
Homosexuality, that he tries to position himself as a supportive father
figure, typifying the sort of relationship that he believes his patients never
had with their own father. I indeed came to see him this way.

We mostly talked about how my damaged masculine identity manifested itself
in my attractions to other boys. Nicolosi would ask me about my crushes at
school and what I liked about them. Whether the trait was someone’s build,
good looks, popularity, or confidence, these conversations always ended with a
redirect: Did I wish I had these traits? What might it feel like to be hugged
by one of these guys? Did I want them to like and accept me?

Of course, I wanted to be as attractive as the classmates I admired; of
course, I wanted to be accepted and liked by them. The line of questioning
made me feel worse. Nicolosi explained, session after session, that I felt
inadequate because I had not had sufficient male affirmation in childhood. I
came to believe that my attraction to men was the result of the failure to
connect with my father. Whenever I felt slighted by my male friends—for
failing to call when they said they would, for neglecting to invite me to a
party—I was re-experiencing a seminal rejection from my father. Most guys, I
was told, let things like that roll off their back—an expression of their
masculine confidence—but I was hurt by these things because it recalled prior
trauma.

My parents were surprised at how the therapy blamed them for my condition.
Initially, Nicolosi had told them they were one of the cases that did not fit
the mold of the “triadic relationship”—in other words, that my sexual
orientation was not their fault. Once it became clear that Nicolosi held them
responsible, they disengaged. They continued paying for therapy but no longer
checked in with Nicolosi regularly or asked what he and I talked about. I was
happy to defy my parents. Whether the grievance was that my curfew wasn’t late
enough or that my parents didn’t give me enough money, I had a trusted
authority figure validating every perceived injustice. Any complaint became
evidence of how my parents had failed me.

As I progressed in therapy, I felt that I was gaining insight into
the source and causes of my sexual attractions. The problem was, they
didn’t go away. At Nicolosi’s urging, I told my best friend that I had to
distance myself from her. Instead, Nicolosi encouraged me to form “genuine
nonsexual bonds” with other men. He paired me with another one of his
patients, Ryan Kendall, who was my age and lived in Colorado. We spoke by
phone every few days.

Most of our conversations were mundane. We talked about our friends and
people we didn’t like, recounting every high-school travail and triumph. But
we frequently deviated from the therapist-approved, buddy-buddy talk that was
supposed to repair us. We flirted, a novel experience for me; there were no
openly gay people at my high school. Ryan and I described what we looked like
to each other. He said he had brown hair and eyes and was short but cute; I
said I was tall and skinny (but left out my bad skin). We promised to send
each other pictures, though we never did.

“What would Nicolosi say?” we’d ask. It became a regular refrain, an
acknowledgment that we were misbehaving. Part of the bond we developed was in
our shared rebellion against our therapist. For me, it had less to do with
opposing ex-gay therapy than with the giddy thrill of defying authority. Ryan
was convinced that change was impossible—“Nicolosi’s a quack,” he once said.
Despite my transgressions, I still believed in Nicolosi’s theory. But my
relationship with Ryan evinced a larger problem: While I was uncovering how my
relationship with my parents continued to shape my inner life, I was still
attracted to men. I chatted with older guys on the Internet and on a few
occasions met them.

I felt guilty about this but trusted Nicolosi enough to admit I had been
“experimenting.” He told me to be careful of meeting men off the Internet but
that I shouldn’t dwell on it or feel guilty. He said my sexual behavior was of
secondary importance. If I understood myself and worked on my relationships
with men, the attractions would take care of themselves. I just had to be
patient.

Late into my last year of high school, Nicolosi had a final conversation
with my parents and told them that the treatment had been a success. “Your son
will never enter the gay lifestyle,” he assured them.

A few weeks later, our housekeeper caught me with a boy in our backyard.
This marked the end of therapy for me. My parents were convinced it had failed
because Nicolosi had blamed things on them rather than on my being teased by
my male peers as a child. They sent me to another therapist. I had one session
but refused to continue. While I still accepted Nicolosi’s underlying theory
about why people were gay, I believed that all the talking in the world
couldn’t change me. When I left for Yale, my mother sent me off with a
warning: Were she to discover that I had “entered the gay lifestyle,” my
parents would no longer pay for my education. “I love you enough to stop you
from hurting yourself,” she said.

In 2001, the year I started college, the ex-gay
movement’s claims received a significant boost. In 1973, Columbia professor
and prominent psychiatrist Robert Spitzer had led the effort to declassify
homosexuality as a mental illness. Four years after Stonewall, it was a
landmark event for the gay-rights movement. But 28 years later, Spitzer
released a study that asserted change in one’s sexual orientation was
possible. Based on 200 interviews with ex-gay patients—the largest sample
amassed—the study did not make any claims about the success rate of ex-gay
therapy. But Spitzer concluded that, at least for a highly select group of
motivated individuals, it worked. What translated into the larger culture was:
The father of the 1973 revolution in the classification and treatment of
homosexuality, who could not be seen as just another biased ex-gay crusader
with an agenda, had validated ex-gay therapy.

An Associated Press story called it “explosive.” In the words of one of
Spitzer’s gay colleagues, it was like “throwing a grenade into the gay
community.” For the ex-gay movement, it was a godsend. Whereas previous
accounts of success had appeared in non-peer-reviewed, vanity, pay-to-publish
journals like Psychological Reports, Spitzer’s study was published in
the prestigious Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Spitzer’s study is still cited by ex-gay organizations as evidence that
ex-gay therapy works. The study infuriated gay-rights supporters and many
psychiatrists, who condemned its methodology and design. Participants had been
referred to Spitzer by ex-gay groups like NARTH and Exodus, which had an
interest in recommending clients who would validate their work. The claims of
change were self-reports, and Spitzer had not compared them with a control
group that would help him judge their credibility.

This spring, I visited Spitzer at his home in Princeton. He ambled toward
the door in a walker. Frail but sharp-witted, Spitzer suffers from Parkinson’s
disease. “It’s a bummer,” he said. I told Spitzer that Nicolosi had asked me
to participate in the 2001 study and recount my success in therapy, but that I
never called him. “I actually had great difficulty finding participants,”
Spitzer said. “In all the years of doing ex-gay therapy, you’d think Nicolosi
would have been able to provide more success stories. He only sent me nine
patients.”

“How’d it turn out for you?” he asked. I said that while I stayed in the
closet for a few years more than I might have, I ended up accepting my
sexuality. At the end of college, I began to have steady boyfriends, and in
February of last year—ten years after my last session with Dr. Nicolosi—I
married my partner.

Spitzer was drawn to the topic of ex-gay therapy because it was
controversial—“I was always attracted to controversy”—but was troubled by how
the study was received. He did not want to suggest that gay people should
pursue ex-gay therapy. His goal was to determine whether the
counterfactual—the claim that no one had ever changed his or her sexual
orientation through therapy—was true.

I asked about the criticisms leveled at him. “In retrospect, I have to
admit I think the critiques are largely correct,” he said. “The findings can
be considered evidence for what those who have undergone ex-gay therapy say
about it, but nothing more.” He said he spoke with the editor of the
Archives of Sexual Behavior about writing a retraction, but the editor
declined. (Repeated attempts to contact the journal went unanswered.)

Spitzer said that he was proud of having been instrumental in removing
homosexuality from the list of mental disorders. Now 80 and retired, he was
afraid that the 2001 study would tarnish his legacy and perhaps hurt others.
He said that failed attempts to rid oneself of homosexual attractions “can be
quite harmful.” He has, though, no doubts about the 1973 fight over the
classification of homosexuality.

“Had there been no Bob Spitzer, homosexuality would still have eventually
been removed from the list of psychiatric disorders,” he said. “But it
wouldn’t have happened in 1973.”

Spitzer was growing tired and asked how many more questions I had. Nothing,
I responded, unless you have something to add.

He did. Would I print a retraction of his 2001 study, “so I don’t have to
worry about it anymore”?

The ex-gay movement has relied on the Spitzer study as
the single piece of objective evidence that therapy can work. The need for
that evidence became more pressing in the early 2000s, when a cadre of
gay-rights bloggers began to scrutinize the movement, ready to expose any hint
of hypocrisy. There was plenty of material.

John Paulk, Love Won Out founder, chair of the board of Exodus
International, and husband of Anne Paulk, was spotted and photographed at a
Washington, D.C., gay bar. Richard Cohen, the founder of PFOX (Parents and
Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays)—intended as the ex-gay counterpart to PFLAG
(Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays)—was expelled from the
American Counseling Association for ethics violations. Michael Johnston, the
founder of “National Coming Out of Homosexuality Day,” was revealed to have
infected men he’d met on the Internet with HIV through unprotected
sex. 

A member of NARTH’s scientific advisory board ignited controversy by
suggesting that blacks were better off having been enslaved, which allowed
them to escape the “savage” continent of Africa. Shortly thereafter, the board
of NARTH removed Nicolosi, who was still president. In 2010 it was revealed
that NARTH’s executive secretary, Abba Goldberg, was a con man who had served
18 months in prison.

Therapists associated with NARTH and Exodus were accused of sexually
assaulting clients or engaging in questionable therapy practices. Among them
were Alan Downing, the lead therapist of JONAH (Jews Offering New Alternatives
to Homosexuality), who made his patients strip and touch themselves in front
of a mirror; NARTH member Christopher Austin, who was convicted of
“unlawfully, intentionally and knowingly caus[ing] penetration of” a client;
and Exodus-affiliated Mike Jones, who asked a patient to take off his shirt
and do push-ups for him.

The movement also suffered several high-profile defections. John Evans, who
had founded the first ex-gay ministry outside of San Francisco, renounced
change therapy when a friend committed suicide after failing to become
heterosexual. Former ex-gay Peterson Toscano, who was involved in the movement
for 17 years, founded Beyond Ex-Gay, an online community for “ex-gay
survivors.” In 2007, Exodus co-founder Michael Bussee apologized for his role
in starting the organization.

Partly as a response to the resurgence of ex-gay therapy, mainstream
professional organizations also took a harder stance. From 2007 to 2009, the
American Psychiatric Association conducted a review of all the literature on
efforts to change sexual orientation. Judith Glassgold, the chair of the task
force that produced the report, said the group found no scientific evidence
that ex-gay therapy works. In fact, they found that it runs the risk of
making patients anxious, depressed, and at times suicidal. “It provided
false hope, which can be devastating,” Glassgold said. “It harmed self-esteem
and self-regard by focusing on the psychopathology of homosexuality.” The APA
now tells its members they should not engage in the practice.

In the past few years, even Exodus has begun to show cracks in its support
for ex-gay therapy. The organization has softened its rhetoric, encouraging
its ministries to promote celibacy rather than change in order to live in
concert with their religious values. The group no longer talks about “Freedom
from Homosexuality”—its motto—but about the nobility of continuing to struggle
against same-sex attractions.

Exodus has also begun to distance itself from NARTH. In September of 2011,
Exodus removed references to Nicolosi’s books and articles from its website.
In January, Exodus president Alan Chambers spoke at a meeting of the Gay
Christian Network. When asked about the possibility of gay people changing
their sexual orientation, Chambers—who’d once claimed that he knew of
thousands of success stories—said “99.9 percent” of those who had attempted to
rid themselves of same-sex attractions had failed.

There are other signs of decline. Attendance at Focus on the Family’s Love
Won Out conference, the movement’s largest annual gathering, has dropped.
Focus on the Family recently sold Love Won Out to Exodus. Ex-gay activists
have less of a presence at religious-right events. Twenty years after NARTH’s
founding, the movement has lost its luster.

I’ve come to know a number of Nicolosi’s former patients
and others who underwent therapy with NARTH members. Part of an informal
alumni network of ex-gay dropouts, we see one another occasionally at
conferences and interact in the blogosphere. Perhaps the best known is Daniel
Gonzales, who writes for the website Box Turtle Bulletin.

Nicolosi had also asked Daniel to participate in Spitzer’s study. When
Daniel left therapy, he thought he had gained valuable insight into his
condition but eventually gave up trying to resist his same-sex attractions. “I
wasted one and a half years of my life on the therapy,” he said. “For a long
time, the things Nicolosi said about gay relationships continued to haunt me.”
His relationships with men continually failed because he was convinced, as
Nicolosi had told him, that they would fall apart as soon as he began to feel
comfortable with them, at peace with his masculine self.

Nicolosi’s ideas did more than haunt me. The first two years of college,
they were the basis for how I saw myself: a leper with no hope of a cure. I
stayed in the closet but had sexual encounters with classmates nonetheless. I
became increasingly depressed but didn’t go to mental-health counseling for
fear that a well-meaning therapist would inform my parents that I was living
the “gay lifestyle.”

I planned for what I would do if my parents decided to stop paying my
tuition. I would stay in New Haven and get a job. I would apply for a
scholarship from the Point Foundation, which gives financial aid to gay kids
whose parents have disowned them. I would not go back to Arizona. I would not
see an ex-gay therapist.

I spent hours in front of the window of my third-story room, wondering
whether jumping would kill or merely paralyze me. I had a prescription for
Ambien and considered taking the entire bottle and perching myself on the
ledge until it kicked in—a sort of insurance.

I am not sure how it all came to a head. Perhaps it was academic pressure
combined with the increasing conflict between my ideals and my behavior. But
in the spring of my sophomore year, the disparate parts of myself I had
managed to hold together—the part of me that thought being gay was wrong, the
part that slept with men anyway, the part of myself I let the world see, and
the part that suffered in silence—came undone. I slept in 20-minute spurts for
two nights, consumed with despair. I eyed the prescription bottles on my
dresser with anxious excitement. I had reached a point at which I feared
myself more than what would happen if I were gay. 

Realizing how close I was to impulsively deciding to kill myself, I went to
the college dean’s office and said I was suicidal. He walked me over to the
Department of Undergraduate Health, and I was admitted to the Yale Psychiatric
Hospital. During  the intake interview, I had a panic attack and handed
the counselor a handwritten note that said, “Whatever happens, please don’t
take me away from here.” I had signed my full name and dated it. More than
anything, I feared going home.

It was gray and cold my first night at the hospital. I remember looking out
the window of the room I was sharing with a schizophrenic. Snow covered the
ground in the enclosed courtyard below. Restless, I gathered a stack of
magazines from the common area and flipped through the pages, noticing the men
in the fashion advertisements. I tore out the ads and put them in a clear
plastic file folder. I lay down in bed and held the folder against my chest.
“It’s OK, it’s OK, it’s OK,” I murmured.

I indeed had to go home for a year before returning to school. By then my
father, who flew to New Haven the day I committed myself, realized that
therapy—and the pressure he and my mother had placed on me—was doing more harm
than good. “I’d rather have a gay son than a dead son,” he said.

The ordeal was a turning point. While it took years of counseling to
disabuse myself of the ideas I had learned while undergoing therapy with
Nicolosi, it was the first time I encountered professionals who were affirming
of my sexuality, and the first time I allowed myself to think it was all right
to be gay.

Ryan, my therapy partner, was even more deeply affected. Two years ago, I
came across his name in transcripts of the lawsuit against California’s ban on
same-sex marriage, Proposition 8, in which he testified about the harm therapy
with Nicolosi had caused. Afterward, I friended him on Facebook.

We recently met in person for the first time at a restaurant on Manhattan’s
West Side. It had been 12 years since we’d last spoken on the phone. At 28,
Ryan had just moved to New York City from Denver to start his undergraduate
studies at Columbia. He looked like he does in his Facebook pictures: solid
and short, with a shaved head and large brown eyes.

Ryan had initiated dependency-and-neglect proceedings against his parents
at age 16 to escape ex-gay therapy. That’s when we fell out of touch. He
dropped out of high school and lived intermittently with friends, then with
his brother until his house was foreclosed on. Ryan had been homeless at
times. He had a series of short-term jobs and for a period dealt drugs to make
money but was broke most of the time. For food, on a few occasions, he filled
a shopping cart with items and then ran it out of the grocery store. “I was
beyond control,” he said. “Something just broke in me. I was trying to destroy
myself because I had internalized all the homophobia from therapy.”

When did things turn around for him? A few years ago, he said, he landed a
job working in an administrative-support position at the Denver Police
Department. It was then that he started getting involved in gay-rights causes.
“The Prop. 8 lawsuit was the first time I felt people really believed in me,”
he says. “I was surrounded by smart, important people, and they paid attention
to me.”

I could relate to that: Being at Yale was the first time I felt validated
by smart, important people. I asked Ryan what he would say to Nicolosi if he
were at the table.

“I’d ask him why he doesn’t just stop.”

I couldn’t help wondering what Nicolosi would say to me,
or Daniel, or Ryan. Does he feel as though he failed us? Does he think we
failed him? Has hearing the stories of his former patients posted all over
YouTube and the blogosphere changed his thinking? I decide to call him to find
out.

I am anxious about talking to Nicolosi again, afraid of what our
conversation might bring back. He knew me as an adolescent better than my
parents or friends did.

When I first reach Nicolosi on the phone, he says he remembers me well and
that he is surprised that I “went in the gay direction. You really seemed to
get it.” The conversation is quick. He is between clients, so we arrange to
speak a few days later.

I call and tell him I’m recording our conversation. “I’m recording too,” he
jokes, “in case you say, ‘Nicolosi said that gays are sick weirdos and they’re
perverted and they all should go to hell.’”

I chuckle. He’s just as I remember him—irreverent, warm. He says he’s been
thinking about me since I called. I ask why, if he was so sure I had “got it,”
I never experienced change in my sexual orientation.

Nicolosi says his techniques have improved—now his patients focus more on
the moment of sexual attraction instead of speaking generally about the cause
of homosexuality. Therapy, he says, has become more effective. But part of the
reason it failed for me, he says, was also that I was stuck: There were not
men I could bond with, and my parents did not understand me. It’s the same
thing he told me throughout high school.

What about people who don’t fit his model? “After almost 30 years of work,
I can say to you that I’ve never met a single homosexual who’s had a loving
and respectful relationship with his father,” he says. I had heard it all
before.

I’m thinking, as he speaks, that for all his talk about understanding the
homosexual condition, what it feels like to be gay is beyond Nicolosi’s
experience. For him, changing one’s sexual orientation is a hypothetical
proposition. He’s never lived it. Only his patients have had to face the
failure of his ideas.

I mention Ryan and tell Nicolosi he blames him for destroying his family.
Nicolosi says he doesn’t remember Ryan. But he is defensive about taking any
responsibility. “For all this concern about how I damage people, where is the
damage? We’re currently treating 137 people. Over 30 years, don’t you think
there’d be a busload of people who are damaged?”

I asked him what he remembers about me. “All I can do is visualize a
teenager in his room in a hot small town,” he says. “You would talk to me
about the loneliness, the kids at school—you really had no friends. You
desperately wanted to get out.”

He is trying to draw me out, get me to talk to him openly. He is the
therapist, and I am once again his patient. I am reticent. I tell him I did
end up leaving Arizona.

“And I encouraged you, right?” he says. “Quite honestly, Gabriel, I hope
you see me as someone who didn’t make you feel worse about yourself, someone
who did not force you to do or believe anything about yourself that you didn’t
want to.”

It’s true that while in therapy, I did not feel coerced into believing his
theories. Like nuclear fallout, the damage came later, when I realized my
sexual orientation would not change. I could have told Nicolosi about my
thoughts of suicide, my time in the mental institution. I could have told him
that my parents still don’t understand me but that I’m grown up now and it has
less of a bearing on my life. I could have told him that I married a man. But
I realize it wouldn’t be of any use: I’ve changed since I left therapy, but
Nicolosi has not. For years I shared my innermost thoughts and feelings with
him. Now I want to keep this for myself.