Is It Possible to Systematically Turn Gay People Straight?

A century of treatments have ranged from horrifying to horribly unscientific.

By Melissa Lafsky
Sep 9, 2009 12:00 AMApr 17, 2023 9:01 PM
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(Credit: Cristina Moliner/Getty Images)

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Joseph Nicolosi, a psychologist in Encino, Calif., says he can rid adults, teens, and even children of homosexuality. For nearly 30 years, he has offered a "psychodynamic" form of reparative therapy for people — mostly men — seeking to change their sexual orientation.

"If [a patient] can accept his bodily homoerotic experience while staying connected to the therapist," he wrote in The Paradox of Self-Acceptance, "the sexual feeling soon transforms into something else: the recognition of deeper, pain-generated emotional needs which have nothing to do with sexuality."

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