Tonight, the facts on a controversial practise called "reparative therapy". Proponents say it can turn gay people straight. "Keeping them honest", a mountain of medical research says otherwise. And even though some people claimed it had helped them, even though practitioners may use it with the best of intensions, plenty of people say there is nothing reparative or therapeutic in what they endured.

 

"I was manipulating into believing that I could change my sexual orientation. But instead I was subjected to terrible abuse that mirrored the traumatic assault that I experienced as a young person. What I can tell you is that conversion therapy does not work. My family and I have wasted thousands of dollars and many hours on this scam."

 

That's Chaim Levin, one of four gay men filing suit today against the New Jersey counseling center called JONAH. Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing. These four men and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is representing them, are claiming that JONAH falsely promised cures and used tactics that sound less like therapy and more like mental torture. Things like being made to undergo individual and group sessions in the nude. Being made to cuddle other same-sex clients and counselors. Being made to beat an effigy of one's mother. Going to gyms and bath houses in order to be nude, the lawsuit cliams, with father figures. Beingn subject, the suit is also claims, to ridicule, and I'm quoting the complain here, as homos and other anti-gay slurs that start with a letter F, but it's too offence to repeat here. Sounds a lot like bullying, doesn't it?

 

Experts say it amounts to quack science. This from the American Psychiatric Association, and I'm quoting now, "In the last four decades, reparative therapists have not produced any rigorous scientific research to substantiate their claims of cure. Until there is such research available, the APA recommends that ethical practitioners refrain from attemps to change individuals' sexual orientation, keeping in mind the medical dictum to first do no harm." 

 

The stories of harm caused by reparative therapy are what prompted California to recently pass a law barring it for minors. As the APA warns, the harm can include anxiety, depression, even suicide. Randi Kaye profiled another young man, a man who went through so- called reparative therapy with traumatic results. Here is his story.