Spanking the Gay Away

Over at Box Turtle Bulletin, just read this deeply moving seven-part series, "What Are Little Boys Made Of?" on the case of a 5-year-old boy who was subjected to George Rekers' anti-gay therapy - something I wish all my truckbuddies would go check out.  Brings up a lot of thoughts and reflections for me, maybe it will for you, too.

Rekers, in case it's slipped your memory, is one of the big honchos in the conversion therapy movement, a founder of the Family Research Council and an officer of NARTH - and last year was photographed at Miami International after a European jaunt with a rent boy he hired to, um, "lift his luggage."

Excerpt:

Kirk had learned that playing with girls’ toys in the clinic was a bad thing to do, but that lesson didn’t extend to the home. So the Murphy home became the scene for the next phase of Kirk’s therapy with Kaytee set up as Kirk’s primary therapist.

“And so then they set me up with the poker chip program,” Kaytee said, referring to a system of punishments and rewards devised by Dr. Lovaas and adapted by Rekers. Mark and Maris would simply remember it as “the chips,” and they always spoke of it with dread. “Well I didn’t know,” their mother sighed. “I trusted these professionals to know what they were doing, you know?”

She explained how it worked: “When Kirk would do something bad, or play with the doll instead of the train or the truck or whatever, he would get a red poker chip. If he picked up a helicopter or an airplane or did a boy thing, then he would get a blue chip. At the end of the day, I would deduct the red from the blue. And then however many blue chips there were, they told me to give him an M&M for each for a reward. And then I had to keep this all written down.”

They also put Mark on the chips even though he wasn’t under treatment. “I think we put Mark on it so that Kirk wouldn’t feel intimidated,” she said. “It was to show Kirk that big brother was on them too.” . . .

“If it (the study) was based on the numbers of chips,” Mark countered, “I screwed with those chips like you wouldn’t believe. I used to take some of his ‘whip it’ chips and put them in my pile.” As he said that, a note of pride crept in his voice. His reasons for doing this would prove to be the study’s fatal flaw: the terrible consequences of collecting too many red chips.

Mark took a deep breath and explained, “My goal was to take the beating for my brother.” Mark had long been accustomed to getting into trouble and being punished for it, and so he reasoned that he could take the beatings more easily than his younger brother. “I saw my brother’s whole back side bruised so badly one time, my dad should have gone to jail for it. Of course, he was somewhat carrying out instructions from the therapist. But my dad whipped my bare ass so many times before that, I figured I could take it. I mean that’s the way we got spanked. You dropped your pants, you bent over the bed, and he whipped your bottom with a belt.”

“My dad would come home, and every Friday we settled up with the chips. It was like ‘you go to your room; you go to your room’ and the whippings came on, it was over. And then we started with a clean slate.”

The chips became a system of terror. . . .

Update:  Just found this four-part video report by Anderson Cooper.

Casualities of the Culture Wars

Hey guys, you have to check out Frank Rich's brilliant summation of George Reker's obscene hypocrisy in the NYT, along with some very perceptive observations on sex, hypocrisy, and the culture wars.  Excerpt:

OF all wars, only culture wars offer the hope of sheer, unadulterated hilarity. Sex and hypocrisy were staples of farce long before America became a nation, and they never go out of style. Just listen to the roaring audience at the new hit Broadway revival of the perennial “La Cage aux Folles,” where a family-values politician gets his comeuppance in drag. Or check out the real-life closet case of George Rekers, who has been fodder for late-night television comics all month. . . .

But once we stop laughing, we must remember that culture wars are called wars for a reason. For all the farcical shenanigans they can generate, they do inflict real casualties — both at the micro level, on the lives of ordinary people, and at the national level, where, as we’re seeing right now, a Supreme Court nominee’s entire record can be reduced to a poisonous and distorted debate over her stand on the single culture-war issue of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” . . .

By late last week, double-entendre wisecracks about Kagan’s softball prowess were all the rage on Fox News and MSNBC. These dying gasps of our culture wars, like Rekers’s farcical pratfall, might be funnier if millions of gay Americans and their families were not still denied their full civil rights.

Physician, Heal Thyself

Via Joe.My.God.:

There is a moral crime here. We are, after all, talking about men in positions of authority and reach, men who could make laws and influence public perception and who used that power against their own.

Put yourself in the shoes of the teenager, bewildered and frightened by these feelings he or she is not "supposed" to have, feelings of sexual attraction to people of the same gender. You try to deny them, try to ignore them, try to suppress them, but they will not go away. You are all alone, isolated behind a secret that presses down on you like weights, a fear of rejection that haunts you like ghosts.

And here comes Dr. Rekers telling you that you are abnormal, telling you that you are bad, telling you he can cure you, as if you had a disease like measles or the flu. Then, in his off hours, after he's done curing you, he's trolling rentboy.com looking for young men to handle his, ahem ... baggage.

That's more than hypocrisy, more even than self-loathing. It is a betrayal of one's own, a sellout of the most vulnerable. And what's sad is not just that a George Rekers would do this, but that ours is a culture that would encourage and reward such duplicity in the first place.

He purported to heal homosexuals? One is reminded of an injunction from the book of Luke: "Physician, heal thyself" (4:23). Rekers would be wise to heed that advice.  Homosexual urges are the least of his afflictions.

--Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr.

On a lighter note, via Box Turtle Bulletin:  Reker's I-am-completely-heterosexual defense was anticipated by The Onion five years ago.