ARTICLES

Homosexuality Is Not About Sex

AN INTERVIEW WITH REPARATIVE THERAPIST JOSEPH NICOLOSI

Arius and Nestorius, Luther and Calvin, step aside. Controversies surrounding Christ's divinity and humanity, justification and sacraments no longer concern us. Catholics today hold a more enlightened discourse. We would talk of sex.

Indeed, every type of sex interests us, even homosexuality. What makes one desire a person of his own sex? What are its origins, its nature? Answers to such questions have been attempted in numerous books and articles, including a work by the distinguished president and rector of St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park, California, Father Gerald Coleman. This work, Homosexuality, Catholic Teaching and Pastoral Practice, comes complete with an imprimatur by the ex-Archbishop of San Francisco, John Quinn. Fr. Coleman also serves on the board of directors of the Los Angeles Archdiocese's Lesbian and Gay Ministry, under Fr. Peter Liuzzi. What's more, his book has been warmly endorsed by His Eminence, Roger Cardinal Mahony.

"Regarding the origins of homosexuality, Coleman says it is a mystery. Homosexuality simply happens." So says Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, whom the News Notes sought for a critique of Coleman's book. Nicolosi, who holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, is a California state licensed psychologist and a member of the American Psychological Association. Founder and Director of Thomas Aquinas Psychological Clinic in Encino, Dr. Nicolosi has for the past 12 years worked in the field of reparative therapy for homosexual men. He is also the founder and Executive Director of the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) and the author of two books, Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality, and Healing Homosexuality.

Dr. Nicolosi says Coleman's book violates Catholic doctrine "in implying that some people are just naturally gay." But Nicolosi insists that Coleman's words only imply a denial of Catholic teaching on sexuality; nowhere in his book does the author directly attack Catholic doctrine. Yet, Nicolosi thinks, taking the general thrust of Coleman's work into account, the "experts" to whom he refers, the studies he cites, the result of Coleman's opus is "ambiguity, contradiction, and confusion where good theology and good science together tell us truths about homosexuality."

According to Nicolosi, Coleman obfuscates the character of his position by appealing to the "nuanced complexity of Catholic teaching" concerning homosexuality. Coleman falls among those whose public statements, according to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, reveal "a studied ambiguity by which they attempt to mislead pastors and the faithful." Thus, while Coleman pays lip service to Vatican teaching -- that the homosexual tendency is not sin but, as an inclination toward an objective moral evil, is to be seen as an objective disorder -- he nevertheless neutralizes the teaching by distinguishing between an "objective" disorder and a "psychological" disorder. With this distinction in hand, Coleman falls back on San Francisco Archbishop Quinn's statement that the Vatican's language is "philosophical language" and so, concludes Coleman, it is merely "helpful" to an understanding of homosexuality.

While Vatican teachings are only helpful, the research of certain "experts" is definitive for Fr. Coleman. Referencing this research, Coleman writes, "There is a growing body of evidence that definitive homosexuality is biologically determined." According to Nicolosi, this statement is "a blatant untruth and misrepresentation to the reader." According to the psychologist, "Three of the most prominent studies of biological evidence were conducted by gay activist scientists -- LeVey, Bailey, and Hammer -- and in all three studies, efforts to replicate those results to date have not been possible."

Nicolosi queries, "Why does Coleman repeatedly quote homosexual apologists such as Eric Marcuse, John Fortunato, Chandler Burr, Andrew Sullivan, and Alfred Kinsey?" Why, indeed, but that he wishes to substitute "a gay anthropology for a Christian anthropology, which is to say: God made two kinds of people, gays and straights." Thus, "there is a wide range of human experience over which [Coleman] superimposes sociological observation rather than Catholic doctrine. In this, he is Kinseyan."

Alfred Kinsey was a psychologist who identified different kinds of sexual behavior. The implication of Kinsey's work, according to Nicolosi, is that if the number of persons displaying a particular sexual behavior is significant (signficant here indicating, perhaps, only a very miniscule percentage of the population), then that behavior indicates implicit normalization (i.e., such behavior is not deviant). So, since the number of homosexuals is "significant," homosexuality is a normal orientation.

If homosexuality is normal, then, says Nicolosi, it is no longer what one has (as a condition), but what one is (as an identity), encouraging the person "to claim, as part of his unique personhood, his same-sex attraction." It is for this reason that Fr. Coleman "advocates James and Evelyn Whitehead's Pastoral Guide to assist persons to accept their homosexuality, as if this is something good or even Christian. It's a sort of pseudo-psychological, pseudo-Christian 'coming out of the closet' process. He quotes [the Whiteheads'] 'traversing the interior passage of self-acceptance.' The final result being the person's homosexual life becoming 'a public witness to being both homosexual and Christian'; to provide 'a public observable model of homosexual Christian life.' What Coleman is offering here is an explicit advocacy for gay spirituality."

If one wonders how one can embrace his homosexual orientation while abstaining (as the Church insists he must) from any homosexual act, he will find no answers from Coleman. Coleman, says Nicolosi, "doesn't really talk about how to integrate the [homosexual] state with the Christian life. After all, if you remove homosexual behavior from the homosexual, what's left, except a heterosexual?" Finally, what Coleman does is "to confound the nature of the homosexual condition, and, I think, lay a foundation that others might build upon later."

The confusion that Coleman thus generates allows him to opine that "many people are not able to conceive of homosexuality as a possibility for authentic love." To this, Nicolosi cautions: "Love is possible, but not because of anything about homosexuality. What two men with a homosexual problem can achieve is no more than what two straight men can achieve, namely, male friendship. Any gay-inspired romanticism, eroticism, or dependency does not add to the depth of love."

Because Fr. Coleman embraces the biological determinism of homosexuality, his pastoral approach, according to Nicolosi, makes "no reference to the possibility of the treatment of homosexuality, for diminishing homosexual attraction, or increasing the person's heterosexual potentiality." In line with this, Coleman "discredits causal explanations that explain the vast majority of homosexuals."

At the heart of these causal explanations is the "classic triadic relationship," a notion that lies at the heart of Nicolosi's own reparative therapy. According to this model, boys undergo a critical gender-identity phase where, says Nicolosi, "the boy desires to actualize his intrinsic masculine strivings -- he wants to be male. He is seeking a male figure that is perceived as benevolent and strong." If at this critical phase a sensitive, introverted, and passive boy is confronted with a distant, detached or hostile father and an over-involved, intrusive, and manipulative mother, he will not properly actualize his masculinity, and will develop an effeminacy that will make him feel at odds with the masculine world.

Homosexuality, then, according to this model, arises from unmet same-sex identification, attention, affection, and approval. "The homosexual growing up," says Nicolosi, "did not have close male friends. He felt alienated. Men were missing. For the homosexual man, men are a mystery. For the heterosexual man, women are a mystery. Homosexuality is not about sex; it's about identity. It's an immaturity, a developmental disorder. Homosexuals develop an intense emotional attraction that proceeds the desire to have sex with another guy. The desire for sex is a desire to be held, to be close to, to have physical affection with a guy, to be affirmed by a guy. It's not a matter of sticking it in a hole. It's emotional."

So it is, continues Nicolosi, that "part of the healing of homosexuality, part of my particular therapy, would be to ideally tell three straight men of your struggle and have them understand you and support you and affirm you. This goes totally against what Coleman is trying to propose. [For him] it's kind of like, well, here they are. That's who they are. Sexuality is just a kind of phenomenology. That's why he says a homosexual's just a mystery -- he just is."

Coleman, says Nicolosi, "spends four pages of his book describing my reparative therapy. He tries to negate it or neutralize it with reference to one study by three gay advocate researchers [Bell, Weinberg, and Hammersmith] who use an invalid methodology."

Nicolosi points out that a homosexual man may not perceive his homosexuality as arising from his familial environment. "If you believe that you were born gay, you do not say, 'My father rejected me, therefore I did not develop a masculine identification -- that's why I'm gay.' You say, 'I was born gay, my father perceived my effeminacy and, because of his own homophobia, rejected me.' Coleman offers this last as an explanation.

"The fact is that," continues Nicolosi, "at the beginning, gays denied the fact that they tended to have poor relationships with their fathers. But then, many studies showed that homosexual men felt rejected by their fathers. What they said is, the boy is born gay, he acts effeminate, the father picks up the boy's effeminacy, and because of the father's unresolved homosexuality, rejects the boy.

"The problem with this scenario is that, since so many homosexuals have poor relationships with their fathers, it's a kind of indictment of most fathers. The gay mind cannot conceive of a father who sees and loves his effeminate son, but gently and firmly discourages the effeminacy. The gay mind, which does not know men and does not trust heterosexual men, believes that most heterosexual men would reject their sons. Coleman repeats that."

But results speak louder than words. Reparative therapy, pioneered by Sigmund Freud (whose daughter, Anna Freud, reported the successful treatment of homosexual men in the 1940s), Elizabeth Moberly, Robert Stoler, and Van den Aardwig, claims as a success rate: one-third, no change; one-third, significant improvement; and one-third, cured. "When you compare these averages with the success rate of any kind of psychotherapy, for any kind of problem, you get about the same rate. When I say [a homosexual is] cured, I do not mean that the person will never have a homosexual thought for the rest of his life. Rather, he sufficiently understands himself and has integrated self-insight and the techniques that he can apply to himself, so that homosexual attraction becomes minimal.

"When you question men who have come out of the gay lifestyle and are now happily married, they'll tell you that the way they develop their relationship with a woman is, first, friendship, then affection, and then the sexual expression of that affection. For the heterosexual man, it's the other way around. First, its sexual attraction, and then he has to get past the sexual attraction to get to know her as a person.

"This is why we psychologists learn from ex-gay testimony. Your typical heterosexual shrink would never think of it that way. Who would guess, right? Would you? I wouldn't! Until we found this out, we kept working on them until we expected them to walk down the street one day and say, "Wow, look at those breasts!' It never happened. It was, rather, "Look at that sweet young lady; isn't she a nice friend? I'd like to talk to her.'"

Nicolosi claims that the triadic relationship model applies to 90 to 95 percent of all homosexuals, there being some men who develop the disorder after the critical gender identity phase. But for that 90 to 95 percent, it serves as "a basic sketch, a developmental model into which each individual has to be tailored. But the model still stands."

Further, unlike Coleman's work, reparative therapy stands on its own, both scientifically and in relation to the Church. "There's much empirical evidence for, much psychoanalytic literature supports, the principle of reparative therapy. At the same time, it beautifully and perfectly fits with Catholic theology -- that man is heterosexual in his nature. Pope John Paul II has refered to the nuptial significance of the human body. That's what you start from. Reparative therapy dovetails with the Faith."

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