Gay conversion therapy got its start on the Golden Gate Bridge
Where better than San Francisco in 1973?
In 1973, Frank Worthen was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge when he says he heard the voice of God. Worthen had been an “out” gay man for 20 years, but was uneasy with his lifestyle.
Shortly before that, the American Psychiatric Association had removed homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), where it had been listed since 1952. In the eyes of the mental health community, being gay was no longer considered deviant. Worthen disagreed, and started Love in Action.
“We did feel it was a move of God,” Worthen said later. “It was God’s answer to the APA saying homosexuality was normal. And God is saying, ‘not really.’”
Founded in Marin County, Love in Action was the first organization to practice what has become known as conversion therapy, a controversial practice that claims to change a person’s sexual orientation as they “pray the gay away.”
Worthen, who admittedly has no professional psychological training, explained the ideology behind conversion therapy. “I have always felt that homosexuality was what I call Father Replacement Search — it was caused by a lack of affirmation by a significant male in your life in early age.”
The roots of trying to change a person’s sexual orientation go back to Sigmund Freud. The founder of psychoanalysis believed that all humans were bisexual, and we all incorporate aspects of both sexes — thus mutual attraction. He once thought that homosexuality could possibly be removed through hypnotic suggestion. Freud’s 1920 paper, “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” focused on his analysis of a 19-year old woman whose wealthy parents made her go to therapy because she was a lesbian. Her father’s hope was that psychoanalysis would cure her of this ailment. Freud concluded that because the woman was forced into therapy — and homosexuality wasn’t a mental illness — the prognosis wasn’t favorable. “It is not for psycho-analysis to solve the problem of homosexuality,” he explained. Around the same time, Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, who followed in Freud’s footsteps, hypothesized that homosexuality was caused by a man’s hostility towards women — and used resolving this conflict as a main source of his treatment. In Ferenczi’s view, a homosexual was confused about his sexual identity and felt himself to be “a woman with the wish to be loved by a man.”
In 1976, Worthen helped to form Exodus International, a national coalition of ex-gay ministries. Exodus’ homosexual “cure” techniques included: abstinence, religious guilt, verbal abuse, and shame, as well as strengthening a sense of masculine identity, and correcting distorted ways of relating with members of the same gender.
Ten years later, a man named John Smid joined the leadership of Love In Action. Once married with kids, he had divorced his wife in 1980 when he came out as gay. Riddled with guilt, two years later Smid became a born-again Christian, claiming that conversion therapy had changed him from homosexual to heterosexual.
“I firmly believe that someone calling themselves ‘a homosexual’ is really not true,” Smid has said. “It’s about behavior. And I’m not a former homosexual — because I was never a homosexual to begin with, but rather I was involved with homosexuality. I’ve always seen it as behavioral. I’ve always seen it as relationship choices or sexual behavior. Or involvement in a culture. It was always an adjective or a verb; it was never an identifier for me.”
Love in Action moved its headquarters in 1994 from Marin to Memphis, Tennessee. Smid felt its group members, especially those in the yearlong residential treatment program — were too vulnerable to the temptations of nearby gay mecca San Francisco.
“Some people refer to that as brainwashing — I think it’s a semantics question.” Smid said.
But in 2005, Smid began to question the Love in Action program, after a 16-year old named Zach Stark posted a fearful plea for help on his MySpace page:
“It’s like boot camp, if I do come out straight, I’ll be so mentally unstable and depressed it won’t matter.”
Stark had recently come out to his parents, who shipped him off almost immediately to Refuge, Love in Action’s residential teen treatment program. Because of Stark’s MySpace post, the Department of Children’s Services dispatched its special investigations unit to the facility to look into evidence of child abuse. The Tennessee Department of Mental Health also investigated Love In Action for operating an unlicensed mental health facility, which resulted in Love in Action discontinuing the Refuge program in 2007.
Smid resigned from Love In Action in 2008. Two years later, he apologized for any harm he had caused through implementing conversion therapy, admitting that the Refuge program “further wounded teens that were already in a very delicate place in life.”
In 2014, the UN Committee Against Torture (CAT) even heard testimony from the National Center for Lesbian Rights on conversion therapy. NCLR officials lobbied the UN to adopt legislation that would ban attempts to change a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity. “Today, for the first time, a United Nations committee recognized that conversion therapy is an issue of international human rights,” said Samantha Ames of NCLR’s #BornPerfect Campaign.
Conversion therapy is now prohibited to be practiced on minors in six states.
When Smid first started working for Love in Action, he declared, “I am not a homosexual and I never was a homosexual.” But years later, he changed his mind, saying he had “never met a man who experienced a change from homosexual to heterosexual.” In November 2014, Smid married his partner, Larry McQueen.
Frank Worthen, known to many in the conversion community as the “Mother Theresa of the gays,” died this month, still married to his wife of 32 years.
