Dr. Robert Spitzer Renounces Infamous ‘Ex-Gay’ Study

In a significant blow to “ex-gay” programmes and anti-gay organisations, Dr Robert Spitzer has repudiated his much-criticised 2001 study that claimed some “highly motivated” homosexuals could change from gay to straight. His retraction occurred in an American Prospect magazine article that hit news stands in the US today.

This is a big deal, as many of the "ex-gay" movement's organisations relied on Dr Spitzer's credibility. As one of the foremost people responsible for the removal in 1973 of homosexuality from the list of mental disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr Spitzer clearly 'had no axe to grind' and could not be said to have any part in the anti-gay agenda. You can imagine how this distressed the gay rights movement at the time.

Further information:
Commentary: Still the Iconoclast, Dr. Robert Spitzer Renounces His Infamous ‘Ex-Gay’ Study
Posted April 16th, 2012 by Wayne Besen 
Can Some Gay Men and Lesbians Change Their Sexual Orientation? 200 Participants Reporting a Change from Homosexual to Heterosexual Orientation - Robert Spitzer's original paper (pdf)
How The ‘Ex-Gay’ Movement Has Harmed Every Gay Person’s Life - contains two segments from a US tv show by Rachel Maddow

Past2Present

Just a reminder that the LGBT History Project's magazine for 2012 is available online from:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/24371157/P2P2012.pdf

Who started the riot?

A documentary (currently final post-production stage - and looking for backers!) about "the Saint of Christopher Street", transsexual legend Marsha P. Johnson, has uncovered some interesting information about who may have started the Stonewall Riot in 1969...

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/dailymusto/2012/04/who_started_the.php

More information at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots

Mike Wallace and 'The Homosexuals'

Mike Wallace, who died aged 93 on 7th April 2012, was a US journalist who in 1967 fronted the rather sensationalist documentary The Homosexuals. Years after the broadcast, he admited regretting that the film was not more balanced and sympathetic.

The documentary can be viewed at:

http://www.advocate.com/Society/Media/Mike_Wallace_and_The_Homosexuals/

On this day in 1935...

... Sigmund Freud wrote to a distressed mother to say that 'homosexuality was nothing to be ashamed of'.

See a scan of the actual letter (in English!!) here:

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/homosexuality-is-nothing-to-be-ashamed.html

With thanks to @LGBTSpace for tweeting this link.

ILGA-Europe

A history of ILGA-Europe, the European region of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans & Intersex Association.

http://ilga-europe.org/home/about_us/what_is_ilga_europe/our_history

The Mollies Club (1709-1710)

I'm back after a rest from my labours during LGBT History Month. :o)

In a description of the molly houses first published in 1709, Ned Ward, an investigative journalist of the time, talks about mock ‘lying-in ceremonies’, at which men pretended to give birth and refers to the trial in 1709 of 9 gay men, who were arrested at a brandy shop near Jermyn Street (owned by a gay man) where they met regularly.

He may have embellished his facts to make them more sensational, but he did not wholly invent his material. The lying-in ceremonies are confirmed by other sources, including testimony given at trials, and this gay folk ritual crop up throughout the century. However, the mollies were not habitual transvestites. The cross-dressing and lying-in rituals that Ward describes occurred on "Festival Nights", generally towards the end of December. They were usually associated with masquerade festivals and may be similar to folk rituals that still take place today during Mardi Gras carnivals. The camp mimicking of women, however, was a feature of molly house gatherings.

Ward describes a group of ‘sodomitical wretches’ calling themselves the Mollies, who are ‘so far degenerated from all masculine Deportment, or manly Exercises’ that they mimic feminine behaviour even including the ‘Indecencies of Lewd Women’. The group apparently met every weekday in a particular tavern, unnamed so as to avoid fixing an ‘Odium upon the House’. They met to draw innocent youths into corruption and to have a good, and camp, gossip, such as women might after they had ‘laid aside their modesty for the Delights of the Bottle’.

On one festival night, they padded one of their ‘sister’s’ bellies and dressed ‘her’ in suitable nightwear. ‘She’ pulled faces and groaned as if in labour, then ‘gave birth’ to a wooden doll. Other ‘sisters’ played midwife, nurse and (female) neighbours to help the delivery. The ‘child’ was then christened.

Ward describes a whole scene of celebration, with a father and a parson present too, and a feast at which everyone was supposed to talk about their own ‘families’ as ‘Gossips are wont to do upon such Loquacitous (sic) Occasions’. The apparent purpose of this was to rid themselves of any sign of the ‘Natural Affection which is due to the Fair Sex, and to turn their Juvenile Desires towards preternatural Pollutions’.

After that, they washed up, entered into various ‘Beastly Obscenities’ and took such ‘infamous Liberties with one another’ that any normal man would be unable to consider without blushing.

Eventually, after some years, the group was ‘happily discover'd’ by agents of the Society for the Reformation of Manners. Several of the group were prosecuted, some fled to avoid the scandal. In any case, ‘the Diabolical Society were forc'd to put a period to their filthy scandalous Revels’.


SOURCE: "Of the Mollies Club," Chapter XXV of Edward Ward's Satyrical Reflections on Clubs. Thanks to: Rictor Norton, Ed., "The Mollies Club, 1709-10", Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook.

http://rictornorton.co.uk/

See also:

Mother Clap's Molly House