Stephen Fry travels to Los Angeles to interview Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, one of the founders of NARTH, the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality, which claims to be able to turn gay men into straight men. Â “Ex-gay” or “reparative therapy,” and all so-called sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) have been deemed not only ineffective, but actually harmful and dangerous by all the top major medical organizations.
Fry, a beloved British actor and LGBT activist, recorded this video for a new BBC documentary, “Stephen Fry: Out There.” He talks first with Daniel Gonzales, one of Nicolosi’s former patients, and then with Nicolosi himself — to whom he says, “you could easily pass as a gay man.”
“We believe it’s based on trauma,” Nicolosi says of homosexuality. “We believe it’s about the parents, the boy does not dis-identify with the mother and does not bond with the father. We don’t believe he was born gay.”
He claims to “cure” one-third of his patients. Frighteningly, Nicolosi says sixty percent of his patients are teenagers.How that’s possible under California’s new law banning ex-gay or reparative therapy is unclear. “Parents call up because their son is looking at gay porn. Of course, we have to get them into therapy.”
Fry notes that for “all his talk of success, Nicolosi is unable to find one of his ex-gays to talk to us.”
Gonzales tells The New Civil Rights Movement that “my mother actually had never previously spoken out against ex-gay therapy. Meeting with Fry was her first ever interview which makes it all that more amazing.”