[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey Robert

ROBERT KRULWICH: Yeah?

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: Woken from a long and desperate slumber, Robert Krulwich opens his left eye then his right, alerted to the presence of Jad Abumrad

JAD: Hey Robert, over here

ROBERT: How you doing? OK. That’s you.

JAD: I have a thing I would like to share with you, and then by extension, the people out there

ROBERT: What would you like to share, something you’ve been mulling?

JAD: Yeah, so I recently completed, sort of a mini series in conjunction with a film that’s now out in the world called Boy, Erased, for a project that we called UnErased

ROBERT: Which people can hear

JAD: Yeah. We put it out, four episodes. It’s out there in the world, in the wild, on ITunes, Spotify, all the places. And I want to play you one of the four today because I think it’s--I think--

ROBERT: I think in all honesty I probably should say I’ve heard them, as it happens

JAD: Yes

ROBERT: Here’s the thing that sort happened--that I found just about the third one of those, that’s our first one. Here’s a really important moment in American history, I guess you’d have to say, in America’s cultural history.

JAD: Yeah

ROBERT: And it almost feels like a single individual walks into one room and says something startling to a group of very important people because of an accidental moment that he just happened to be over here a talk and his colleague comes to him -- so by a crazy quilt of serendipity, enormous changes come. Now this may be oversimplifying it, and I’m sure there’s a lot else going on deeper and shallower rhythms, but the changes come almost by accident. Because someone misses a train.

JAD: Yeah, yeah. That’s a pretty good tease

ROBERT: There you go

JAD: There you go, OK. So can we play it?

ROBERT: Yeah. Let’s play it.

JAD: This is UnErased a new podcast that reveals the hidden history of conversion therapy in America. I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Episode 3. Let's start this episode by talking about one of the great successes in psychology.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: If you're living with a mental health problem, it can be hard to know which way to turn or what to do to feel better.]

JAD: It's called CBT.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Cognitive behavioral therapy.]

JAD: You hear about it sometimes in the news around treatments for PTSD. Like suppose a soldier is being triggered by a loud sound. Well what the therapists will sometimes do is take that same sound, play it for the person over and over, but under less and less stressful circumstances. Until gradually over time, the sound gets less stressful

[ARCHIVE CLIP: CBT focuses on goals and focuses mostly on the present day. And things that are affecting you and your life now.]

JAD: These kind of techniques can help people with gambling addiction stop gambling. People who smoke stop smoking. It is a hugely important wave in psychotherapy. It's often called the second wave. Freud was the first. This is the second. And what follows is a story about one of the grand poobahs of this second wave and a grand awakening that he had. It kind of blew up the world. Okay maybe that's overstating it. But no. I don’t know. I don’t know

SHIMA OLIAEE: So start from all you know about Gerry.

DAVID TEISLER: So Gerry is a god.

JAD: Case in point this guy. This is David Teisler. We bumped into him digging through some archives at the Association for behavior and cognitive therapy central office. My colleague Shima Oliaee and him were hunting around for some tapes while they were, he sort of offhandedly mentioned it. Yeah. Gerry Oh he's he's trained practically everybody in the field.

DAVID TEISLER: We have this thing called—there's this river tree and it basically plots the several different people from whom almost every single. Contemporary psychologist. Came from ...

SHIMA OLIAEE: Gerry's one of the six.

DAVID TEISLER: He's a god because how many people owe their careers to him.

JAD: You might call him one of the six cardinal bishops of contemporary psychology.

GERRY DAVISON: [laughs] My name is Sigmund Freud.

JAD: Yeah.

GERRY DAVISON: It’s Gerald G E R A L D, middle initial C, last name Davison, D A V I S O N. Professor of Psychology, University of Southern California.

JAD: Gerry grew up in the 1940s.

GERRY DAVISON: Orthodox Jewish household.

JAD: Playing stickball in the streets of Boston at a time when the streets were empty because of the war

GERRY DAVISON: I was a good little boy and didn't get into trouble and you know.

JAD: Says he was kind of a quiet kid.

GERRY DAVISON: I wasn't a particularly cheerful child. I would say.

JAD: Analytical, watchful. Anyhow Gerry eventually finds himself one day working.

GERRY DAVISON: At a ham factory.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Wonderfully different.]

JAD: In a ham and ...

GERRY DAVISON: Like ham and eggs.

JAD: Oh, okay.

JAD: A kind of a weird place for a Jewish kid to be there he was.

GERRY DAVISON: So I had a job in the graveyard shift that would start like at midnight and go until 8:00a.m.

JAD: One day he is at the Ham factory maybe on his way to the Ham factory, bored.

GERRY DAVISON: What was there to do, so I was reading. Somehow I settled on Freud's introductory lectures at Clark University that he gave in the early twentieth century.

JAD: So he's reading Freud in the ham factory, reading Freud's lectures, and something about it hooks him. But also horrifies him.

GERRY DAVISON: This book made a profound impact on me.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: (recording of Sigmund Freud)]

JAD: OK so this is Freud that you're hearing right now, don't what the hell he's saying. Apparently this is the only recording of him that exists.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sigmund Freud: The unconscious ...]

JAD: He’s talking about the unconscious. You can kind of make that word out. And Gerry says the whole idea that you could peel back the layers of a human psyche.

GERRY DAVISON: It was absolutely almost voyeuristically fascinating.

JAD: At the same time, he says, he felt like some of the things Freud was saying was just kind of weird.

GERRY DAVISON: How can Freud say, if you dream of a train going into a tunnel, you're really dreaming of having sex with your mother.

JAD: [laughs]

JAD: Anyhow something about the book both intrigued and enraged him enough that he goes to Stanford and then Stony Brook and to make a long story short ends up standing at exactly the right place where many streams converge to create the first real up ending of Freud. The behavioral therapy revolution. Previously it had been all about dreams and the subconscious. Now it was scientific. It was about experiments and you know the basic question.

GERRY DAVISON: How do you sit with a suffering human being.

JAD: And help them.

GERRY DAVISON: How do you make someone happy or less anxious little depressed.

JAD: Do you remember the first patients you started seeing?

GERRY DAVISON: Yeah they were those so-called YAVIS you know, YAVIS. Y A V I S. It's another acronym called young young--I don’t know what the A stands for. Able or attractive.

JAD: [laughs]

GERRY DAVISON: The YAVIS patient is the patient who--

JAD: Hold on we're looking it up for you.

GERRY DAVISON: OK

JAD: It is a term psychotherapists use to describe the-- young attractive verbal intelligent and successful.

GERRY DAVISON: That's it. You got it.

JAD: So you know early on he says he saw a lot of people who were your classic.

GERRY DAVISON: Garden variety neurotics, which is not a very complimentary term, but ...

JAD: He says that is what they used to call him. But the whole reason we're telling you this story is that in that initial batch of patients, Gerry says, he began to see like fairly frequently these young men walk in. They were mostly young men, who complained that they were sexually attracted to other men. And they really wished they weren't.

GERRY DAVISON: That's right.

JAD: He says he can't remember how many exactly walked in. Maybe somewhere between four and a dozen.

GERRY DAVISON: I'm trying to think of. They were-- they all came and I supervised some cases and the trainee clinic at Stony Brook. They all came because they weren’t happy and they wanted to change.

JAD: They wanted you to turn them from gay to straight.

GERRY DAVISON: Yeah yeah and not wanting to you know impose my heterosexual values on them, some would say my heterosexist values on them, I would check it out with them.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Can you tell me a little bit about what your living situation is like your social life and whatnot, your friends and that sort of thing. We’ve got an apartment off campus. I live with--I live by myself.]

GERRY DAVISON: And in fact the film ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Did you live by yourself last year too?]

GERRY DAVISON: Where I really roleplayed myself, I wasn't acting, but we did have a graduate student play the role of a troubled homosexual young man who wanted to change. You'll see in that film a pretty reasonable rendition.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Have you ever previously been to a therapist? No. Have you ever the thought of going before? Yeah.]

JAD: Gerry says the film that he made, which you’re hearing, is sort of a composite of all the cases that he saw of this kind. And what you see in the film is him in a suit sitting in one chair a couple of feet away from him as a young man with big 70s hair, about the same age.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I was kind of having trouble.]

JAD: And the guy explains that he ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Personal problems.]

JAD: That he's having trouble concentrating.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yeah I'm having a lot of trouble getting down to work. It turned out that he was recently frightened by an intensification of his long standing attraction to men.]

JAD: Gerry says initially he had no idea what to do with these cases.

GERRY DAVISON: They were anxious, very depressed. These were folks who the kind of people who could you know commit suicide.

JAD: He says he felt like he just had to help.

GERRY DAVISON: That's what I was taught. That's what I was taught.

JAD: And so in the film ...

GERRY DAVISON: You know after maybe I don't know 15 minutes.

JAD: Gerry says to the guy ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I'd like to outline for you a procedure.]

JAD: Now before we actually get into that procedure just a little bit of context is necessary.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I know that inside now I'm sick - I'm not sick just sexually. I'm sick in a lot of ways.]

JAD: It's time Gerry was not the only therapist in the situation. There were a lot of therapists all around the country trying to quote help their gay patients.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Homosexuality is in fact a mental illness. Anything that we can do to prevent future generations from suffering this affliction must be done.]

GERRY DAVISON: The overall approach certainly did not start with me. There were other people who were doing what was called behavior therapy with gays. Most of it was aversion therapy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Terrible foul stench comes from his body. The odor is so strong.]

GERRY DAVISON: Which was applying electric shocks when they saw pictures of same sex people. Or making them nauseated with injections.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We vomit again and again all over everything.]

JAD: Gerry remembers one of the leading aversion therapists coming to Stoney Brook where he was training at the time to give a lecture. And the guy showed 16 millimeter films of how it was done.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The researcher shows an attractive slide of a male on the screen]

JAD: The film showed researchers hooking up gay men to electrodes.

GERRY DAVISON: To their fingers or their forearms.

JAD: Show them pictures of men.

GERRY DAVISON: Naked men.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: If the patient fails to shut it off you get a physical shock.]

JAD: And they would shock them.

GERRY DAVISON: Hurting them inflicting physical pain.

JAD: They’d then show him another slide of a naked gay man, do it again.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: So he comes to associate the male slide with anxiety and pain.]

GERRY DAVISON: This bothered me just personally. This had this-- it bought the idea of  intentionally inflicting physical pain on other people. I just worried about it. It was cringeworthy.*

JAD: Interestingly Gerry doesn't fault the researchers who administered those shocks.

GERRY DAVISON: Picture it. They were like dentists before novocaine. You know, pulling a tooth, I'm old enough to remember what going to the dentist was like to get a filling or getting a tooth pulled before there was novocaine.

JAD: Is that the right analogy though? I mean if your tooth hurts you need to have it pulled. Here you don't need to have your homosexuality pulled out of you.

GERRY DAVISON: You may not think so but if you're gay in the 1960s.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Most Americans are repelled by the notion of homosexuality.]

GERRY DAVISON: And you're being haunted and discriminated against.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: A CBS News survey shows that two out of three Americans look upon homosexuals with disgust, discomfort, or fear.]

GERRY DAVISON: And being told that you're an evil person and you're disgusting.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: These people need help.]

GERRY DAVISON: And so what Feldman was trying to do ...

JAD: Feldman was a leading aversion therapist. He was the guy that showed that film.

GERRY DAVISON: He was doing the best that he could given what was available knowledge.

JAD: You said they were just trying to help the patient.

GERRY DAVISON: Yeah yeah that's why I don't demonize him.

JAD: In any case as Gerry is sitting there in the back of the room watching this guy Feldman show this film of people being tortured, he says he just kept thinking, geeze. Do we have to do it this way?

GERRY DAVISON: But people were saying well but it works. And that's what the literature was telling us. But I was thinking, Well are there other ways to do it.

JAD: And so what Gerry decided to do was take the basic idea of aversion therapy and flip it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: So what am I supposed to do now? I’m supposed to-- Well I'd like you to follow me if you can, what I want to say now.]

JAD: And this is what you see in the film. He basically tells the patient here's what I want you to do. Grab a copy of Playboy magazine.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: You probably get a hold of the copy of playboy without too much trouble, you know at a newsstand or something.]

JAD: You know. Go to the newsstand, get a copy.

GERRY DAVISON: Playboy was what I thought of as a source of material of attractive women.

JAD: Then he says when you get back home.

GERRY DAVISON: Get yourself aroused to whatever you're accustomed to.

JAD: Think about a man. Think about his body.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: You start masturbating with your homosexual image. Now that comes to a point.]

JAD: You know the inevitable point.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: At that point of inevitability switch over to the female picture, have your climax, OK. And, you know ...]

JAD: The basic idea was instead of shocking people into hating their gay thoughts he would gently encourage them to take their positive gay thoughts and map them onto a different body.

GERRY DAVISON: In fact, I think the technical term was orgasmic reorientation.

JAD: And in the video apparently it seems to work. In the video Gerry checks in with him about ten times and the guy tells him at first it was really hard for him to finish the deed while looking at female pictures. But then it got easier and easier until finally after about ten of these sessions

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I really feel like I'm really getting into it now. What happened was every time I masturbated, now I can go straight through without any trouble, you know-- You like --you like what’s happening. I think the thing I like most is I now see some direction. I feel myself moving toward something as opposed to not knowing which way I was going to go, and I think that's a good feeling.]

JAD: Okay, setting aside for a moment the question of whether this therapy actually worked. I think you can guess the answer to that, and it is not the point of the story. What happens next is that this therapy takes on a very surprising and consequential...life of its own. And that’s after the break.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad, UnErased

ROBERT: On Radiolab

JAD: Yes

ROBERT: Will continue in just a moment

JAD: I’m Jad Abumrad

ROBERT: I’m Robert Krulwich

JAD: This is Radiolab. Today we’re listening to a story from a series I produce called Unerased. Let’s get back now to the story of Dr. Gerry Davison and the Gay Cure. It is 1966, 67. Gerry has pioneered this new kind of conversion therapy called orgasmic reorientation, he has made a video about it. Shortly after making this video Gerry found himself reading the very magazine implicated in his therapy.

GERRY DAVISON: Naturally reading it just for the articles as they say.

JAD: As they say.

GERRY DAVISON: And I was reading the playboy forum.

JAD: That’s the section in the magazine where readers write letters, talk about stuff, voice concerns.

GERRY DAVISON: And in the forum, this would have been around 1966 or 67, there were people writing in troubled by their homosexuality.

JAD: Here’s one we found. "When I was in the hospital the doctor told me there were very few cures for cases like mine and that I should try to adjust my condition."

GERRY DAVISON: Well being a card carrying behavior therapist, I wrote a letter.

JAD: You wrote a letter to Playboy.

GERRY DAVISON: Crazy isn't it? and I said, actually there are new procedures for helping gay men become less gay. It comes from behavior therapy and I don't know what else I wrote. Well, they printed it.

JAD: What ensued in the Playboy forum over the course of many issues, many years in fact, was a vigorous back and forth. Gerry's letter prompts a series of other letters some positive, some negative. One in particular which calls out aversion therapy as this cruel thing which then causes one of the world's leading aversion therapists, a guy by the my name is David Barlow to jump in and defend himself. He writes, “Our procedures are not torturous or the inquisition, rather methods derived from experimental laboratories and carefully applied to consenting human beings to relieve some suffering.” That letter prompts a famous gay activist, Frank Kameny, to jump in with his own response. He writes, “I find the August playboy forum letter from David H. Barlow offensive and illustrative, not only of the failures of psychology and psychiatry in their approach to homosexuality, but also of the dangers in the form of human engineering.” Here's a weird fact, Kameny’s letter was titled Gay Is Good, and just a few years later, post Stonewall.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Gay is good. Gay is good.]

JAD: That phrase ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Gay is proud. Gay is proud.]

JAD: ... would become the slogan of the entire gay rights movement. And this was maybe the first time that that phrase was used. In the pages of Playboy.

JAMES PETERSON: Everyone raves about how interactive the internet is. People forget how interactive Playboy magazine was.

JAD: OK so this is a little bit of a digression, but I think it's one so worth taking. That's James Peterson.

JAMES PETERSON: I was senior staff writer slash senior editor for Playboy magazine.

JAD:He worked at Playboy from 1973 to 2003. He's sort of the institutional memory of the old playboy, last man standing kind of. James reminded me-- actually, the truth is I never even knew this to begin with, that Hugh Hefner's intent with Playboy wasn't just to show naked ladies. He had a whole philosophy that he actually spelled out in great detail.

JAMES PETERSON: I call it the term paper that changed America. When Hefner was an undergraduate the first Kinsey Report on male sexuality came out.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: This research has been possible because some people have cooperated.]

JAMES PETERSON: And it was a bolt from the blue. It changed Hefner's life. It came out I think 1948. And it described a range of male sexuality without judgment. Kinsey described males on a range of one to five, from strictly heterosexual to strictly homosexual. But in the middle were something like 35 percent of American men had had a homosexual experience in their adolescence or early adulthood. So the straight jacket was released. And what struck Hefner.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hugh Hefner: This to me is the value of Kinsey indicated for the first time statistically the great disparity.]

JAMES PETERSON: Was this dissonance.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hugh Hefner: That existed between our professed beliefs and the actual actions of society.]

JAMES PETERSON: Between sex laws versus what people were actually doing.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hugh Hefner: This is one good reason for questioning some of the old morality.]

JAD: And so when Hefner started Playboy along with the magazine and playmates and along with all of the televised parties from the Playboy mansion.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We’re glad you're here too.]

JAD: Along with all that, James says he wrote this constant stream of essays.

JAMES PETERSON: Monthly installments.

JAD: One essay a month for two years. Like really long essays.

JAMES PETERSON: On capitalism, religion. Essays on the history of sex.

JAD: Collectively became known as the Playboy philosophy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hugh Hefner: The philosophy really I think is an anti puritanism.]

JAD: And James says behind the scenes ...

JAMES PETERSON: Through the Playboy Foundation we were funding court cases that advanced gay rights, abortion rights, birth control rights.

JAD: And James says the playboy forum was part of that whole initiative. Right after he finished that two year sort of chain of essays, Hefner then created that space in the front of the magazine.

JAMES PETERSON: For people who had nowhere else to turn.

JAD: And it was in that space where you had some of the first open discussions of homosexuality in America, ever.

JAMES PETERSON: And I said you know it's-- you look back the sexual revolution happened on the newsstand.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Testing. Testing. 1 2 3 5 6 7 8.]

JAD: OK, back to Gerry’s story

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Recording of a workshop by Gerald C. Davison October 6, 1972 New York Hilton.]

JAD: Playboy letter episode aside, Gerry continue to push his playboy therapy and in fact he says among therapists, the technique kind of started to blow up. And in 72, he ends up getting invited to give a workshop.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gerry Davison: And I want to ...]

JAD: A yearly convention.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gerry Davison: Present to you some ideas and data and whatnot from our point of view as we have been working with homosexuals.]

JAD: We're going to skip over the actual specifics of that workshop.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gerry Davison: Well I think it's clear that we have solved all the problems that this field has.]

JAD: Because what's more consequential.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gerry Davison: Thank you this was enjoyable for me. [APPLAUSE]]

JAD: Is what happens after the panel. Gerry is hanging out, waiting for the room to clear and this young young man walks up to him.

GERRY DAVISON: Chubby. He was a little chubby, about my age.

JAD: Gerry was 33 at the time.

GERRY DAVISON: Very pleasant, very friendly, lot of smiles. I don't recall if he had any--a beard. He came up to me and introduced himself as a graduate student at Rutgers.

JAD: And he said you know I heard your talk. I thought it was interesting. I'm actually giving a talk myself the next day. Do you mind if I hand out some flyers for it?

GERRY DAVISON: And I said I don't mind at all, of course.

CHARLES SILVERSTEIN: The decision was made to attack what we called the gatekeepers of American attitudes.

JAD: This is Charles Silverstein. He was that young therapist in training with the flier. Unbeknownst to Gerry he was gay, and was part of a growing movement of activists that were targeting people like Gerry.

CHARLES SILVERSTEIN: You have to understand that the behaviorists have a different point of view.

JAD: Unlike the Freudian weirdos they were scientists.

CHARLES SILVERSTEIN: I would say many of them were.

JAD: And he says the public trusted the behavior therapists. They had a lot of sway over public opinion, so they could convince Gerry and his colleagues that homosexuality was not something that needed to be cured, maybe the public would go along. But the question was How do you do that? How do you make the case?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Now, if you would like a dialogue to begin, let it begin now.]

JAD: This was around the time when gay activists would start zapping meetings where they'd basically go to a conference where therapists were meeting, storm an event, grab the mic, and just take over.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We want to deal with people -- And we want a change. They’re wanting to burn our brains out.]

JAD: Charlie's sense was that this gonzo approach was not going to convince the people that needed convincing, like Gerry. And so when he approached Gerry after that workshop.

GERRY DAVISON: Very polite and friendly.

JAD: Simply handed him a flier said hey me and a few folks are doing a thing, come by. Charlie says he just had a sense.

CHARLES SILVERSTEIN: His heart was in the right place.

JAD: So he thought maybe you'll take a different approach with this guy.

GERRY DAVISON: I looked-- I remember looking at the flyer and seeing oh it’s those radical gay activists, all these troublemakers. I mean I'd been called in my career I’ve been called a Nazi and a fascist. So I remember looking at the flyer saying to myself well there's no way I'm going to go to this.

JAD: So he shoved the flyer in his pocket.

GERRY DAVISON: Yeah I wasn't interested.

JAD: Went off to the next panel. The following day, the final day of the conference.

GERRY DAVISON: Sunday morning checked out of the hotel. And I was on my way to leave for Penn Station to go back out to Stony Brook.

JAD: And he says on his way out he kept bumping into colleagues who were like hey great workshop. Love your Playboy therapy thing. And so he'd stop and chat.

GERRY DAVISON: And at one point I looked at my watch.

JAD: And he realized - damn it!

GERRY DAVISON: I could not make it down to Penn Station.

JAD: He was going to miss the train.

GERRY DAVISON: And I thought oh the next train doesn't leave, you know, three hours later.

JAD: Suddenly had some time to kill and for whatever reason the thought pops into his head.

GERRY DAVISON: Oh.

JAD: That kid from Rutgers with the flyer.

GERRY DAVISON: Maybe I'll go to-- I pulled out the the flyer he gave me. I hadn't thrown it away. And I found the room, and I went to the room and it was a madhouse.

CHARLES SILVERSTEIN: So the room was electric, in the sense that it was absolutely packed.

JAD: Charlie and two other gay therapists were on stage. There were maybe a few hundred people in the audience.

CHARLES SILVERSTEIN: Although it may seem incredible to you, they had never heard a gay person speak at a convention.

JAD: I mean maybe they’d seen gay people interrupt the convention but never take part.

JAD: So in my Hollywood imagination of this moment, people are shouting, they're waving--

CHARLES SILVERSTEIN: No no no no.

JAD: Charlie says this time he worked very hard to keep it profesh, respectful.

JAD: OK. So it's—so it's cordial but fierce.

CHARLES SILVERSTEIN: I was at the top of my form.

JAD: When it came time for him to speak, Charlie says he took aim at that idea he'd heard people like Gerry repeat over and over again.

GERRY DAVISON: I only work with people who want to change. So what's the—what's the big deal.

JAD: That idea. Here's what he said that day. We asked them to read the remarks.

CHARLES SILVERSTEIN: The discussion of male homosexuality. To suggest that a person comes voluntarily to change his sexual orientation is to ignore the powerful environmental stress, oppression if you will, that has been telling him for years that he should change. To grow up in a family where the word homosexual was whispered, to play in the playground and hear the words faggot and queer, to go to church and hear of sin, and then to college and hear of illness, and finally to the counseling center that promises to cure, is hardly to create an environment of freedom and voluntary choice. What brings them into the counseling center is guilt, shame, and the loneliness that comes from their secret. If you really wish to help them freely choose, I suggest you first desensitize them to their guilt. After that let them choose. But not before. I don't know any more than you what would happen, but I think their choice would be more voluntary and free than it is at present. Yes those are my words.

JAD: Do you remember how those words hit you?

GERRY DAVISON: It affected me very deeply. Affected me very deeply.

JAD: Gerry says he went to Penn Station, with Charlie's speech ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charlie Silverstein: What brings them to the counseling center is guilt, shame ...]

JAD: ... echoing in his mind.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: 5:45 depart.]

JAD: Says He got on the train back to Stony Brook. Sat there staring out the window at the scenery.

GERRY DAVISON: Thinking. Thinking.So I was running through the whole talk is action in my head.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charlie Silverstein: And to feel comfortable with their sexuality. After that let them choose but not before.]

JAD: He says by the time he got to Stony Brook he felt something change in him.

GERRY DAVISON: I went to school the following day. I know I began to talk to people about what I had just heard at the convention and how it’s gotten me to thinking.

JAD: He says he was teaching a series of undergraduate classes at that time and he would get up in front of those classes and for the first time think, what if some of these students are in the closet?

GERRY DAVISON: Talking to people mulling things over talking to students. I began to think of what I've been doing was absolutely wrong.

JAD: Meanwhile his film on the Playboy therapy was still making the rounds, still gaining converts.

GERRY DAVISON: Oh yeah people love the film. The film had been out for a year already, and by the time the film began to be shown, I was already wishing that it wasn't being shown. But I had no control over it.

JAD: 1973, a couple of months after that convention, Gerry gets nominated as the president of the AABT, the gigantic organization that had thrown the conference he’d just attended. He becomes one of the youngest presidents ever. And the following year he was due to give the presidential address. This is where things come to a head. The conference that year was held in Chicago.

GERRY DAVISON: It came at a time of great fervor and foment.

JAD: He says in the days and months leading up to the conference.

GERRY DAVISON: People on the radical left were calling us fascists and Nazis. And they were publishing circulars with their home addresses.

JAD: Someone published your home address?

GERRY DAVISON: Absolutely. We had to. I was president of the association at the time. I remember we all had walkie talkies. And we hired plainclothes people and Chicago police because we were that afraid of violence.

JAD: Set the scene. When you give the speech how big is the room?

GERRY DAVISON: Big big room. Big Ballroom.

JAD: A couple hundred people?

GERRY DAVISON: A thousand.

JAD: And these are all therapists?

GERRY DAVISON: Yeah.

JAD: And how are you feeling before the speech?

GERRY DAVISON: Very nervous, terrified. But ...

JAD: He says before the talk he'd actually met Charlie in a diner and told him about the speech he was going to make.

GERRY DAVISON: I remember him saying you know that your reputation may suffer.

CHARLES SILVERSTEIN: You have to remember that in those days, if you said something positive about a homosexual, people would suspect you.

GERRY DAVISON: People may think that you're gay.

CHARLES SILVERSTEIN: Oh he must be gay. That's why he's saying that.

GERRY DAVISON: He warned me. He warned me.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gerry Davison: [applause] Colleagues and my friends, I want to make plain if not perfectly clear, that I am speaking only for myself on an ethical issue that impinges importantly on our therapy enterprise.]

JAD: Gerry began the talk by telling the audience.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gerry Davison: I wish today to voice some concerns I had been wrestling with for over three years.]

JAD: That he's troubled.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gerry Davison: Surrounding the way behavior therapists and for that matter there are all other therapists have been approaching homosexuality.]

JAD:That he, like a lot of the therapists in the audience, have been approached by clients, gay men mostly who want their help to be made straight.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gerry Davison: Those people who relate to us that they are troubled by their homosexual behavior or feelings.]

JAD: But then he asks Silverstein's question, what does it actually mean to help these people?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gerry Davison: As Silverstein put it at the AABT convention two years ago in a discussion of male homosexuality, and let me quote again.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charlie Silverstein: To suggest that a person comes voluntarily to change his sexual orientation is through this to ignore the powerful environmental stress, oppression if you will, that has been telling him for years that he should change to grow up into the family where the word homosexual was whispered ...]

JAD: He quoted you in that speech.

CHARLES SILVERSTEIN: Yeah

JAD: What was that like?

CHARLES SILVERSTEIN: I was quite pleased.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gerry Davison: Continuing the quote from Silverstein. "What brings them into the counseling center is guilt, shame, and the loneliness that comes from their secret." In other words, Silverstein suggests that we must go back in the causal network and ask ourselves as determinists what are the determinants of the client asserting to you that he or she wants to change.]

JAD: Gerry then delivers this simple point which is that the problem that these people are asking us to solve, is a problem we created. That we labeled as a problem. And so ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gerry Davison: Even if we could affect certain changes there is still the more important question of whether we should. I believe we should not.]

JAD: To us now, or to many of us now, that may sound like kind of a simple, easy, obvious thing to say.

CHARLES SILVERSTEIN: But that was an extraordinary statement. You see everybody else was arguing that the attempts to change sexual orientation ended in failure. That was not what he did. He did something quite different. He said in that speech, it makes no difference how successful the treatment is. It is immoral.

JAD: Charlie says he was the first person to say that

CHARLES SILVERSTEIN: To ever say that trying to change sexual orientation was an immoral thing to do.

JAD: And that's not a trivial thing. I mean you could see this moment in a way as one of the early tremors of a tectonic shift in, not just therapy but all of science. Like science to that point, it concerned itself with objectivity. That was all that mattered. We stand apart from the world and we examine it as it is, objectively. But that from this moment forward would start to be questioned all over the place, even in places like mental illness. You know you look at history, you see that some diseases come and go. Why would that be? Well people would begin to argue that even mental illnesses are social constructs created by the society, by the people who study them. What Gerry was doing here, he was shifting the language. He was saying, forget objectivity, forget bullshit empiricism. Let's talk about ethics. Let's talk about morality. We shouldn't do this not because it doesn't work -- which it doesn't -- but because it's wrong.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gerry Davison: I hope and I recommend that we continue to devote the necessary energy to the important challenges. Thank you.]

JAD: You write about that moment like as you were talking about how like the air felt in that moment. You write, “friends commented afterwards that one gets that kind of silence when everyone in a room full of 1000 people stops breathing at the same time.”

GERRY DAVISON: Yeah yeah exactly right. I remember that. I just remember that you know like what are they going to do when I say this. And it turned out, that what they were doing was holding their breath.

[applause]

JAD: They do eventually clap. But afterwards Gerry says, at the reception, he walked in and it was like parting the Red Seas. Nobody wanted to talk to him.

GERRY DAVISON: They're all looking at me. And I remember one person, I will not name him, he came over to me and shook my hand. Then he bent over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Well did you like that?”

JAD: Oh like he was making a point to say you must be gay because you said those things.

GERRY DAVISON: Yeah. And I said—I said screw you.

JAD: So it took a while to get the peeps on board. But they did start to come around and get on the right side of history. And it's not a straight line by any means, but there is a line that you can draw between Charlie's words coming out of Gerry's mouth and the Epically Huge decision that the psychiatric community as a whole would make to remove homosexuality as a mental illness from the DSM, that big bible of mental illnesses. Gerry’s speech happened right at that beginning, when science was just about to wash its hands of the whole idea of a gay cure. And what's interesting, I find just one final thought, you could read this entire story as a sort of prelude. Psychotherapists were basically ready to say that homosexuality was not an illness by about 1986. That is precisely the time when the Christian community walked in and grabbed the baton.

JOHN SMID: The scientific communities were accepting homosexuality, and they were saying that it’s not a disorder anymore. They were removing it from the DSM-3, which is why we need to do what we’re doing. Because Christians have to fight the battle. Christians have to fight this battle of homosexual sin, because the professional counseling community won’t do it anymore.

JAD: So it was very explicit in your mindset

JOHN SMID: Oh yeah.

JAD: That, that story is a story that you hear in the next episode of Unerased, which I think we might also play on Radiolab.

ROBERT: I hope so, because all of a sudden instead of talking to data, instead of talking to genes or instead of talking to chemicals, now you’re talking to either God or your parents or your teachers or your society or to pressures that are all around you. And it gets really, really lonely and really, really tough.

JAD: Yeah. This episode of Radiolab was drawn from UnErased: The Untold History of Conversion Therapy in America. It's a series I worked on with Focus Features, Stitcher and Limina House in conjunction with the feature film, BOY ERASED. Special thanks go out to Shima Oliaee, Kat Aaron, Michael Oesser and all the folks at Anonymous Content for their support of UnErased.

JAD: If you want to hear the whole series, which I hope you will, you can find UnErased in all the usual podcast places. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening and happy Thanksgiving.

ROBERT: Yeah.

 

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