Straight talk: the genesis of gay conversion therapy, 1945-2015
Embargo Date
2026-09-30
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
This dissertation analyzes the relationship between academia and the state in creating and reinforcing what came to be known as “conversion therapy.” Combining intellectual and political history, Straight Talk argues that after World War II academics working in universities developed the theory and practice of sexual orientation change efforts and how this process made visible tensions between “expert authority” and individual choices related to sexual identities. This research project explores the rise, fall, and lasting impact of ideas, stereotypes, and expectations about sexual minority identities that psychoanalysts and psychiatrists with academic credentials promoted over several decades.
By reinterpreting the development and practice of what came to be called conversion therapy, Straight Talk also reframes conventional understandings of the connections among sexuality, higher education, and religion. Contrary to popular belief, religious motivations did not initially fuel sexual orientation change efforts. Rather, religious leaders and professionals within religious universities took up the scientific and academic orthodoxy about sexual orientation change possibilities and deployed them in new settings. Political pressure from within and without the universities, including pressure from emergent and empowered gay and lesbian political groups (including gay and lesbian student groups on university campuses) of the late 1960s, forced secular universities to stigmatize and abandon therapy practices they had long taught as scientifically sound and therapeutically effective.
By approaching this topic historically, with a chronological scope that extends from the mid-twentieth century to the present day, this project demonstrates how sexual orientation change efforts first emerged as a respected academic endeavor. Only later through a process lasting several decades did conversion therapy practices become a shadowy, unregulated, and stigmatized set of practices without institutional or mainstream support. Conversion therapy allows for a unique entry point for exploring the relationships between universities, medicine, and the state and how these three entities worked in tandem to stigmatize homosexual identities while simultaneously constructing heterosexual masculinity as the ideal citizen of the twentieth century.