Journey into Manhood, the immersion course that claims to help men solve the problem of homosexual attractions, is hosting a weekend retreat in the UK later this month.
According to JiM, 80 percent of participants report a decrease in homosexual attractions following the course, and over half say they have experienced increased heterosexual attractions. Patrick Chapman addressed the survey’s flaws briefly, but decisively here on Ex-Gay Watch.
JiM is not strictly Christian, but participation does require belief in a “higher power,” and the course’s contents mimic all the familiar traits of the mostly Christian ex-gay movement. While the website says JiM is “not a gay-bashing weekend” and it will “affirm your inherent value as a man, just as you are,” it also suggests that, as a gay man, you have “issues that are alienating you from your authentic heterosexual masculinity.” Same-sex attraction is due to a lack of “masculine affirmation and healthy male bonding,” among other things.
If you need more convincing that Journey into Manhood is comfortably in the lap of the mainstream ex-gay movement, anti-gay UK group Anglican Mainstream proudly names Arthur Goldberg and Dr Joseph Nicolosi among JiM’s endorsers. Arthur Abba Goldberg, who heads up Jewish ex-gay ministry JONAH, was forced to resign from NARTH in early 2010, after his conviction for fraud–which he has tried to conceal for almost two decades–made headlines. Joseph Nicolosi, also of NARTH, is the chief proponent of the theory that absent fathers and overbearing mothers are the cause of male homosexuality.
To mark the 10th anniversary of People Can Change, Journey into Manhood will also be hosting weekend programs in Texas and Florida.
They will keep trying. You come from good stock, Dave….not a thing wrong with our parenting skills….they speak rubbish!
Good article, once again.
I was trying to remember if this retreat was one I’d heard about where there is a lot of more sexually tinged activity, than any other type of bonding ritual.
Such as (and I blush), sitting in a circle naked…handling a sex toy and pretty much the exercises require the sort of self touching and so on heard of in reparative one on one sessions.
Seems to me, as we observe, there is a serious obsession with gay MALE sexuality to the extent that people use such tactics and call it a part of therapy.
Like a cross between sex surrogacy and ALL MALE bonding, in my view.
All this further skews an already twisted idea of what AFFECTION is within casual contact.
Going from the more puritanical ideal of coolness, and little show of emotion where little boys can’t show support for a friend through hand holding or arms around each other…or casual kissing.
Boys are routinely taught (even indirectly) to connect SEX with affection and this hurts them a great deal, whether gay or not.
I might be wrong about this particular group, but considering how many unlicensed therapists are getting busted for inappropriate touching or other sexual issues with gay men especially, it begs questioning.
I attended a JiM weekend [here in the states] a couple of years ago. Regan, JiM is not the group which has the naked circle with the sex toy–that’s Mankind Project’s “New Warrior Adventure Training,” which I also attended a couple of years ago. ( I’m now an ex-ex-gay.) What confounds me is that both groups use the same procedures–psychodrama and role-playing. With JiM these techniques are supposed to “take away the gay” by reaffirming one’s supposedly never-fully-developed masculinity. However, New Warriors, which is gay-affirming, uses the same exact techniques to further one’s development of “authentic masculinity.” So how can it be that one group, using these techniques, says homosexuals can never be fully masculine, while another group, using the same techniques, says that yes, homosexuals can be fully and authentically masculine?!
LOL LOL LOL !
Exactly ludovico! How indeed? That’s the thing about the way the anti gay approach homosexuality, it’s always going to be inevitably backward, contradictory, or completely unnecessary.
You know that saying about the definition of insanity?
Well…there ya go.
ABC News has a recent article and programme about a Jouney into Manhood retreat.
It seems to be the same stuff that was doing the rounds when I was in ex-gay groups back in the late ’90s. Described by one participant as “miraculous”, its therapies include “non-sexual platonic bonding”
And it’s all done in a weekend.
When I had my first weekend at an ex-gay retreat (run by Courage UK when it was still doing “ex-gay”) it was a revelation to me. Being able to share what was then a great burden about my sexuality was a great release, and everyone was very affirming. I mistakenly assumed that all my perceived problems were lifted, and that I was on the road to becoming straight – and that’s what I told a few trusted friends at the time.
However a year later I found that things hadn’t really changed, and I discovered that no-one else on the courses had had any permanent change in their sexuality either. It took me some more years in a type of asexual limbo to take on board the truth about who I was and accept myself.
I really hope that these type of weekend retreats, with their unscientific and unsubstantiated theories, don’t get a hold in the UK or elsewhere. I think they will just end up messing up peoples lives, confusing them further, and leading to many wasted years as folk struggle to repress who they really are in the mistaken belief that they can “work” at becoming straight, either with or without religious faith.
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