In the mid 2000s, psychologist Warren Throckmorton realized that his years defending so-called conversion therapy had been in error. Presented with evidence disputing its efficacy, the straight psychologist changed his mind and said so publicly. He became one of the practice’s most vocal critics.

Since then, the now-retired professor has continued his muckraking, with fact-checks on right-wing influencers and two books exposing the myths behind Christian nationalism. The second, The Christian Past That Wasn’t: Debunking the Christian Nationalist Myths That Hijack History, comes out in May.

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Like a Venn diagram, the Ph.D.’s two areas of interest have lately intersected. With the rise of Christian nationalism in the last decade, conversion therapy is seeing a resurgence after years in the wilderness. Red state legislatures and the Trump administration are both endorsing a comeback based on freedom of religion and First Amendment arguments.

Yet the facts haven’t changed: conversion therapy still doesn’t work, and it remains destructive for both its victims and their loved ones. Throckmorton spoke with LGBTQ Nation from his home in Pennsylvania about his own reckoning with the practice.

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LGBTQ Nation: What is conversion therapy, and what do its advocates or practitioners hope to achieve with it?

Warren Throckmorton: Well, the American Psychological Association gave it a term some years ago: Sexual Orientation Change Efforts, when they did their task force report on it — that’s the more psychological term, but it’s probably as succinct a way as there is to describe it.

Before the mid-2000s, you supported the availability of conversion therapy. How did you come to endorse it? Was it based on your own personal experience, your religious convictions, your professional insights?  

I was active with mental health counseling in the American Counseling Association. In 1996 or ’97, there was a movement afoot to ban all conversion therapy, or any kind of “change” efforts, and I heard about it. And I thought at the time, not knowing that much about it, that it seemed kind of aimed at the main people who were doing that at the time, which were evangelical counselors, and, more importantly, evangelical clients.

Maybe it was a religious issue, I wasn’t sure. So I decided that I should look at it, I guess, more clinically. So I did a literature review of all the change efforts over probably the last 100 years, and I wrote up the review for the Journal of Mental Health Counseling. And it seemed to stem the tide. The ACA resolution banning change efforts was watered down considerably, so that counselors were free to work with clients to adjust their behavior to a way they thought they should, based on their religion.

Are you a religious man yourself?

Yes, I’m an evangelical. I don’t like to use that term anymore because it’s got hijacked under Trump, so I just say Christian. I feel like evangelicals have become something else than what I feel like the term historically has been. But that’s another topic.

What was your objection to that resolution? Was it about religious freedom? Was it a First Amendment issue?

There were clients that I had seen, and would see later, who were in no way going to identify as gay. Their religion just didn’t permit it, and if they felt that they could change — and some of them told me stories that they had changed — I thought, well, that’s what they said. They said they had changed, and it must be true. I did a documentary called I Do Exist, where five people on camera said that they had changed. And I thought, well, that’s what they said.

Well, I was naive about that. I mean, I took their experiences as true, and I thought that surely they wouldn’t deceive anybody. But as it turned out, a lot of it had to do with the way evangelicals think about change. One of the founders of Exodus, who eventually left with his gay partner, he said they were taught to kind of “name it and claim it”; to name the result you wanted, then claim it as true, even though it wasn’t yet. And that’s the way a lot of the ex-gay ministries went. They were taught to believe it was true, and then with faith, that would come true.

As well, after that documentary came out, one of the main characters let me know that he didn’t think he had really changed. He was pretty sure that he wasn’t straight, that he was gay, and indeed, he was going to become ex-ex-gay, publicly.

And so that really caused me to go back to those studies that I had included in that review back in ’97, and all the research that I’d been relying on to say that I thought maybe it was possible that change could work. And when I did, when I really went back at it and looked at it objectively, as objectively as I could, I found that there was a lot of fraud in those articles. There were bad methodologies in them. The studies weren’t what would be considered solid evidence.

They weren’t rigorous.

Not at all. Not at all. It’s not anything you could base any findings on.

So I said, publicly, I apologize for the documentary. I took it off the market, and I just said that this doesn’t work, and I started writing pretty aggressively against it.

What form did that take?

There were articles that I wrote for newspapers, op-eds. I published in the Huffington Post, the Christian Post, and various places, basically saying, you know, I don’t think this works.

And I especially took aim at reparative therapy, which is a specific kind of change effort. Reparative therapy holds to the idea that the reason people are gay is because of problems with their same-sex parent, and it’s more psychoanalytic in its approach. If it’s a gay man, it would be the assumption — and it still is in reparative therapy — that there was a rift or a distance or problem in the bond with the father, and that’s what caused it. In other words, childhood problems are what lead to having same-sex attraction. And I thought that was particularly harmful.

Because what I heard so many times was that therapists would basically tell clients, “Here’s why you’re gay, even if you don’t think it’s true.” People would come in and say that they wanted to change, and the therapist would say, “Well, here’s why you’re gay.” And the person would say, “Well, that’s not my family at all. That’s not my background.” And the therapist would just forcefully say, “No, that’s why.” And families would blame each other, and it was just an awful mess.

So I took special aim at that, and how not only that it didn’t wash with experience, but there’s no evidence for it either, in any research, and there’s actually evidence against it.

What are some of the harms that come from the different versions of conversion therapy?

Well, in no particular order: torn relationships, disrupted relationships, depression.

With reparative therapy, families would have such guilt that they caused their child to have this conflict, particularly within religious families where homosexuality was not considered proper. And they would be like, “Well, we’ve done something to cause this in our child or son or daughter,” and they would be [mad] at each other, and there’d be a lot of guilt.

Of course, the son or daughter would feel guilt, as well, and then the anxiety around the therapy of, “Why isn’t this working? Because here I’m doing what the therapist says, and it’s not happening, I’m not changing.” And depression, again, for similar reasons: “Why is this not working?” And maybe, “God doesn’t love me. I’ve tried to pray” — you know, as the saying goes, “Pray the gay away” — “and it’s not happening.” Is God not listening?

Even in situations where a person comes out of the therapy and they feel like, “Well, I know it didn’t work, but it didn’t particularly harm me,” they still report low levels of these things, and they kind of have to get over the therapy. They almost need therapy to get over the therapy, and that’s not really what we want therapy to be, where you have to have another therapist to get over the first one.

Along with you going after conversion therapy, you and a colleague came up with an alternative therapy for clients concerned about their sexual orientation.

Well, it’s more of an approach to therapy. We call it a framework. And the idea there is, what’s the proper stance of the therapist? And instead of being someone who says, “Here’s what you need to do, client,” we took more of a client-centered approach, which was, “There’s some things you need to know about this, but other than that, we want you to feel totally free to explore your perspective.”

Mark Yarhouse and I called it the Sexual Identity Therapy framework. It first came out in 2006, and we were very clear that this was not about sexual orientation change. We felt like we needed to let any client that we worked with know that that was not something we thought was possible. So it was anti-reparative therapy in that sense.

But as far as whether or not a person was going to change their religious views or whatever, we were neutral on that. We wanted people to explore their religious views and values for themselves without our guidance. And that was, I think, the major distinction about it.

Is it correct to say that you thought about it as an alternative to both conversion therapy and gay affirmative psychotherapy?

Well, it certainly had a lot more in line with affirmative psychotherapy. Because we felt like we were affirming the client. I think that the major difference would be that we just didn’t feel like it was our job to tell somebody to change their religion. Because there were some people in the affirmative camp who felt that it was fine to tell people to change their religion. And we just felt like that was maybe a step too far for a client-centered approach.

But as far as affirming people where they were as same-sex attracted — as gay — we felt like that was definitely within this framework.

You introduced your framework at the American Psychological Association convention in San Francisco in 2007. What was the reaction?

Some skepticism (laughing) that we meant it.

I mean, think about it. In 2000, we presented at APA and defended the practice. We said, you know, it should be available. And it was pretty controversial and was just a really hot topic. And I’d done that documentary, and that made a lot of people mad, which I understand. Fully understand.

And so then here we come along, and we’re saying, “No, we were wrong.” And Mark probably had less to apologize for than I did, because he was never super-strong on the “It worked” statement. I’m sure I came across much stronger about that, but I had to say I was wrong. So, yeah, there was some skepticism, but mostly it was, “You know, this looks pretty good.”

A couple of years later, the APA came out with their task force report on this topic, and they actually mentioned us in two ways, Mark and me. The first part of the report was, “There are some therapists that say that these efforts are ethical,” and they mentioned us. And then at the end they said, “There are other frameworks that affirm clients, but don’t offer change.” And that was still us. (Laughing) It was like the new us.

I really thought that that was very fair and professional, because they saw what we were doing. I mean, we really changed our view.

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