Monday, April 27, 2009

Masters and Johnson 'Gay Conversion' Studies Exposed as Fraud

Oft-cited by right-wing religious groups and the Catholic church, the 1979 Homosexuality in Perspective book by sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson, has nothing to back it up, we learn, 30 years later...

"Back in 1979, on Meet The Press and countless other TV appearances, Masters and Johnson touted their book, Homosexuality in Perspective—a 14-year study of more than 300 homosexual men and women—hoping to build on their groundbreaking sex studies of heterosexuals that had helped ignite America's sexual revolution...When the clinic's top associate, Robert Kolodny, asked to see the files and to hear the tape-recordings of these 'storybook' cases, Masters refused to show them to him. Kolodny—who had never seen any conversion cases himself—began to suspect some, if not all, of the conversion cases were not entirely true. When he pressed Masters, it became ever clearer to him that these were at best composite case studies made into single ideal narratives, and at worst they were fabricated. Eventually Kolodny approached Virginia Johnson privately to express his alarm. She, too, held similar suspicions about Masters' conversion theory, though publicly she supported him. The prospect of public embarrassment, of being exposed as a fraud, greatly upset Johnson, a self-educated therapist who didn't have a college degree and depended largely on her husband's medical expertise..."

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