(Part 1 of 2) These posts detail how my 4th year of college (2002) an incident of anti-gay vandalism prompted a civil debate on campus. Linda Nicolosi, wife of Joe Nicolosi intruded into the debate with an editorial in the school paper. I responded with my own letter which would be the first time I spoke out publicly about being an “ex-ex-gay.” In my letter I stated my former therapist, Joseph Nicolosi, asked me to participate in the Spitzer study and to lie when Robert Spitzer when asked how I’d heard of the study. Spitzer recently accused me of fabricating my claim Nicolosi asked me to lie. The purpose of these posts is to show my story of being asked to lie has remained the same my first public disclosure of having been an ex-gay. Part 2 can be found here.
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, my alma matter, has a giant concrete “P” on the hillside behind the school. For pride week spring quarter of 2002 the GLBU, the school’s gay club, painted it with rainbow colors. Decorating the P for club/fraternity events was a university sanctioned activity provided one filled out the proper paperwork first. However shortly after the P was painted by the GLBU, the decorations were vandalized. The GLBU immediately repainted the P and the P was repeatedly vandalized. Needless to say, a storm of civic debate erupted in the Mustang Daily. The story got so big even the LA Times picked it up:
But no sooner had the rainbow palate been applied than others on campus–including a group of 15 to 20 students caught one night with “John Deere green” paint on their hands–began to cover over the gay pride symbol. Again and again.
The painting by gay activists was authorized by the campus booster group. The subsequent paint-overs were not.
That has many gay and minority students concerned about a campus they increasingly describe as intolerant. The case is being investigated by campus police, with officers exploring charges ranging from simple vandalism to a possible hate crime.
The article continues:
In the four days after the initial painting was completed, the P was painted white with the word “HOMO” spelled out nearby in sheets, then painted rainbow again, then green, rainbow again, then white, and finally rainbow again.
The tit-for-tat paint jobs stopped with increased campus police patrol of the hillside trail to the P. The letter was expected to remain rainbow-colored until the gay club repainted it white, which it was set to do over the past weekend.
[“Cal Poly’s Letter P Target of Backlash,” Sally Ann Connell, Los Angeles Times, May 27, 2002.]
Shortly after the LA Times story ran the Mustang Daily received and printed a letter from Linda Ames Nicolosi, wife of ex-gay therapist Joseph Nicolosi:
Editor,
In the Los Angeles Times on May 27th, there was an article about the controversy at Cal Poly regarding gay pride (“Cal Poly’s letter P target of backlash”). As a social science writer who regularly deals with this issue, I’d like to encourage students not to be afraid to speak up with “politically incorrect” arguments!
Decency and tolerance towards people who are different doesn’t mean – as the LA Times would have its readership believe – that one must fall silent in the face of gay activism, or revise one’s moral code and suspend one’s judgment about the normality of homosexual behavior.
All students at Cal Poly, gay or straight, deserve to be treated with sensitivity and respect. But “openness to diversity” requires that the debate also welcome those students who take the principled position that heterosexuality is normative – and that “normality is,” as one psychiatrist so aptly puts it, “that which functions in accordance with its design.”
I believe homosexuality should be viewed as a challenge, a problem, a difficulty to be surmounted, and not as a quality to be embraced as representative of one’s core identity, “who one is.” Students who agree with that principled position, which can be defended on the basics of both science and sexual ethics, should not be intimidated. No university is doing its job when defenders of a traditional sexual ethic fear that speaking out will tar them with the gratuitous label of “homophobic.”
Students interested in learning more about the scientific arguments for heterosexuality-as-normative should access our Web site, www.narth.com. The site offers extensive information provided by the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, a nonprofit education group of psychologists and psychiatrists who have broken away from the political control of the American Psychological Association to make the arguments that APA (under the influence of gay activists) no longer wants to be heard.
Linda Ames Nicolosi is the publications director for NARTH.
[Letter to the editor, Mustang Daily, May 31, 2002]
Before Nicolosi’s letter the issue of ex-gays had not even been discussed. Gay students viewed the letter as irrelevant and as nothing more than a PR stunt by NARTH, an organization hundreds of miles from the Cal Poly community that had was intruding in territory it did not belong.
Your addition of [sic] is incorrect in every instance above. To use “it’s” instead of “its” would be incorrect since “it’s” is a contraction of “it is” which is distinguised from the possessive of it as “its.”
If you want to see what forcing yourself to pretend to be something you’re not, like say, heterosexual, see the video on this “ex-gay” couple that ran on CBN. Is it me or is the “wife’ on medication. Funny and yet incredibily sad.
PS – it’s the story past the anti-BBM stuff. BBM!? Isn’t the Oscars over?
https://www.cbn.com/700club/features/amazing/lifestyle_quinlans.asp
Oh..so she ‘believes’ that homosexuality is a difficulty, a ‘surmountable’ challenge, eh
Not a core identity to be embraced…
Well, who is SHE to determine that?! Her purpose isn’t to understand gay identity to begin with.
Normality to her and a psychiatrist she noted is ‘that which functions in accordance to ‘it’s’ design.
Well, as far as facts go: gay folks aren’t ‘it’ or ‘its’ or ‘it’s’.
You can’t tell gay folks from straight folks, not even by DNA or genetic anomoly that’s distinctive.
Obviously gay folks are designed to be gay folks, and function just fine and accordingly when not chronically interfered with by outside parties.
What an arrogant and worthless statement for her to make.
Running through any negative discussions about gay life, is straight conceit at it’s foundation.
And I’m getting real tired of God taking the rap for little old mere mortal’s interpretations of God’s or nature’s designs and intentions for it.
They are making God look arrogant and petty too.
Am I reading this incorrectly or is Linda Nicolosi actually trying to defend the anti-gay students who were painting over the P?
It sounds like she’s supporting harassment against gay people. WOW. And this from someone who claims that gays “deserve to be treated with sensitivity and respect.”
Timothy, that is how I was reading it to. She has one quick disclaimer that everyone should treat others with respect. But, then she goes in to talk about how homosexuality should be overcome.
Since the debate in question seemed to be about vandalism of a gay-themed decoration, not at all about the morality of gays, where does her article even come in to play in except to defend the vandals? It’s not like she is defending someone that ministered to gay people, she is responding about people’s negative reaction to vandals.
Mark, where is [sic] used above?
Brady and Mark,
I accidentally overwrote Daniel’s final draft of the current article with an earlier draft that contained [sic]s and other typos. Mark then saw that earlier draft. Daniel re-fixed the typos.
I bet her tune would be totally different when talking about the modifications that were made to the exodus billboards in St. Louis.
So, she is taking a page out of the gay playbook?
Homosexuality is not a disorder at all. NARTH is a religious organization that acts on its religious beliefs and not in the interest of the patient. Homosexuality is already stigmatized, and companies like NARTH whom have therapists that alien themselves to the internalized homophobia of the patient is very unprofessional. The study by Dr Sptizer, which NARTH makes it seem like “conversion therapy” is the be all and end all of homosexuality, ended off with saying that reperative therapy results are very rare. The subjects of the study were supplied by religious organizations and bias exists. Mental Health and Health organizations internationally have all gone on record to state that homosexuality isn’t a mental disorder. Maybe, you should consider reading about psychologist “Evelyn Hooker” whom did the first study on homosexuality and demostrated that it isn’t a disorder: further studies were replicated and the same outcome was seen. My advice, speaking from a heterosexual women, is that if you are unconfortable with your homosexuality than you shouldn’t go to NARTH, you should go to a counsellor who will help you appreciate your sexual orientation — there is NOTHING wrong with being gay!