Cults, camps and ‘cures’: a brief history of homosexual remedies

Homosexuality is a disease that can be cured.

Sounds as barking as the claims made by Matthias Rath about vitamin cures for AIDS, doesn’t it? But so say - and believe - an alarming number of people in the West. With the recent news that yet another crackpot camp is claiming to hold the secrets to “curing” homosexuality, let’s remind ourselves of some of the more scandalous curative claims from the past few years.

It’s no secret that the Bible frowns on single-sex shenanigans, but religion is an often-cited culprit for good reason: the latest outrageous camp is by no means the first assault against homosexuality from those quarters. In 2005, the “Refuge” in Memphis was investigated by Tennessee’s Department of Child Services for alleged child abuses. The investigation was quietly shelved, but not before revelations appeared from one of the camp’s unwilling attendees, the then 16-year-old “Zack”.

Zack posted what he claimed was a copy of the camp’s rulebook, pilfered from his parents’ e-mail account. The resulting furore spawned two opposing tribes in the blogosphere: apologists for Refuge’s “reparative therapy”, and those - I among them - objecting to impressionable youths being subjected to six weeks’ isolation and indoctrination. Refuge denied it was doing anything wrong, and continued to accept “deliveries” of vulnerable and confused young people - charging their parents up to $4,000 a time.

But although the religious right in America have fairly consistent, and predictably charming things to say about gays, there are more pernicious peddlers of “gay cure” counterknowledge out there: those with even more dubious agendas to push, and even deeper pockets to fill.

The faux-Jewish spirituality cult of Kabbalah has been called ”the Grand High Church of mumbo-jumbo”. Its teachings claim to be “an accessible take” on the ancient Jewish mysticism from which the Centers disingenuously take their name.

Allow me a brief diversion here, because I want you to appreciate how insane these people are: the Kabbalah Center sells bottled water, “blessed” by the Center and apparently “infused with Light”. According to the Center, “Quantum Resonance Technology” (ah, yes - our old friend, “quantum”) is used to “restructure the intermolecular binding” of spring water. (In fact, the water comes from a factory in Ontario which was ordered to improve manufacturing techniques after a 2002 public health investigation.)

Philip Berg, head of the Kabbalah empire, has publicly stated that this water can cure both AIDS and SARS, and once even complained, “If the damn FDA [Food and Drug Administration] would just let me put on the label that the water cures cancer, like it does, I wouldn’t need marketing.” Guess what else the water cures? That’s right: homosexuality.

Longtime nemesis of pernicious cults and all-round hero Rick Ross has documented the Kabbalah’s extraordinary claims, and his website records the stories of families ripped apart by the Center and stripped of their savings. I’m going to return to the Kabbalah Center in a future post. Suffice it to say for now that vulnerable homosexuals have a lot to lose - including their bank balances - by getting involved with Kabbalah.

In Homosexuality: A Freedom Too Far, psychiatrist Charles Socarides wrote that the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-II was a mistake, and that the AIDS epidemic occurred as a result of it. Socarides was not religiously motivated - he did not consider homosexuality immoral - but he did think it was a mental disorder that could be corrected. Though Socarides denounced aversion therapy as quackery, his insistence that homosexuality was a disease that could be cured gained him notoriety in the New York City of the 1970s, when troubled young men regularly submitted themselves to him for “treatment”.

Another of the most horrendous stories is that of the South African Defense Force in the 1970s and 1980s, which subjected gays (or suspected gays) to aversion therapy and chemical castration.

But the counterknowledge crown has to go to - and there are no surprises here - Scientology, whose hostility toward homosexuals is the stuff of legend. The founder of this abhorrent cult (sorry, religion), L. Ron Hubbard - despite having a gay son - claimed that dianetics could be used to as a cure for this “sexual perversion”.

In Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, Hubbard branded gays as “1.1ers” - that is, they score 1.1 on his “tone scale” of behaviour, which runs from -40 (least beneficial) to +40 (most beneficial). The homosexual, Hubbard wrote, is a “skulking coward who yet contains enough perfidious energy to strike back, but not enough courage to ever give warning.” According to Scientology, gays are “incapable of love”: their relationships consist exclusively of “brief, sordid, impersonal meetings” or “longer arrangements punctuated by dramatic tirades, discords, jealousies and frequent infidelity”. Sounds more like the plot of a Wagner opera to me.

In recent years, as Scientology has positioned itself as the darling of airheaded ’slebs (and perhaps in an attempt to poach fag-friendly Madonna from Kabbalah), bosses have realised that homophobia just aint cool in California these days - or in many other well-heeled circles. But despite their attempts to “pinkwash” themselves (and distance the Church from L. Ron’s hateful views), ex-Scientologists confirm that the Church still attempts to “treat” or “heal” this mental “aberration”, using their infamous e-meters and audit counselling. All for a tidy fee, naturally.

Cults like Kabbalah and Scientology prey on the vulnerable and insecure, promising tantalising panaceas in exchange for time and, increasingly, money. Lots of it. These cynical pickpockets offer bullshit “cures” for homosexuality, cruelly exploiting those unsure of, in denial about, or unwilling to accept, their orientation.

Gay lifestyles are vilified by the snake-oil merchants as tawdry, sinful predicaments, characterised by episodic promiscuity and immorality. (Where do I sign up?) But whilst its aetiology is usually acknowledged as complex, the solutions offered to homosexuality are often remarkably simple. (Refuge, for example, recommended that its attendees try, er, celibacy.)

“All within me became resigned to my lot,” writes Charlotte Brontë in Villette. Gays would do well to heed these words: as time passes, the science that favours nature over nurture becomes increasingly compelling. It looks like gays really are “just born that way”, and no amount of brainwashing - or writing of cheques - is going to change that. Nor can you “pray the gay away”.

Perhaps the most delightful of terse gay remedies comes from the great Mr. Hubbard himself:

Break this life continuum concept by running sympathy and grief for the dominant parent and then run off the desires to be an effect of their failures and the homosexual is rehabilitated.

This means, roughly, that if you’re gay, you’re not really sexually attracted to men; you’re just frustrated with your father’s failures, and are projecting them onto other men. Get over your frustrations with dad, and - hey presto! - no more sexual attraction to men.

Which is only slightly less ridiculous than believing in the dark lord Xenu, isn’t it.