Ryan Kendall, another former teenage client of Nicolosi, who blames the therapy for years of depression and suicidal feelings, remembers the day Nicolosi introduced him to one of his supposed success stories. That delusion caused Nicolosi to see transformation where there was none. “That just shows you how deluded he was,” Arana told me. Nicolosi expressed surprise that Arana “went in the gay direction” and then shocked Arana by asking if he wanted to try therapy again. Some 15 years later, Arana - by then a journalist who had long accepted his sexuality - called his former therapist for an article he was working on about the ex-gay movement. He tried to position himself as the supportive father that he thought his clients didn’t have.” “When I told him I was still meeting gay boys from the internet, he said not to feel guilty about it. And I overidentified with my mom because I didn’t feel masculine, and that was the source of my attractions.” Arana didn’t mind his weekly sessions with Nicolosi, who he remembers as warm and nonshaming, even when Arana confessed that the therapy didn’t appear to be working. “My mom was controlling, and my dad was underinvolved. “Nicolosi had a very clear narrative coming in about what my life was about,” Arana recalls.
One of Nicolosi’s teenage patients in the late 1990s was Gabriel Arana, who at 14 agreed to his parents’ request that he try reparative therapy.
He counseled adults and teenagers from his office in Encino, Calif., where the mahogany shelves featured several of his books, including “A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality” and “Healing Homosexuality.” (They are jam-packed with falsehoods and absurdities, including passages like “Two men can never take in each other in a full and open manner” and “Growing up straight is not something that just happens. While many in the ex-gay movement were either struggling with same-sex attractions or had a family member who seemingly was, Nicolosi was ostensibly heterosexual and professed to come at reparative therapy from an intellectual and scientific perspective. Nicolosi stood out in many ways, including being Catholic and having no personal connection to L.G.B.T.
“He was a prima donna, for sure, but he was also a breath of fresh air” in the conservative Christian world they inhabited, Chambers told me. That’s not going to happen, nor do I even want it to happen.’”Īs tense as those conversations were, Chambers could never manage to dislike his old friend, a gruff, offbeat New Yorker who could “cuss the wallpaper off the wall” and whose brashness rubbed many people the wrong way. “I’d say: ‘Joe, you can’t promise to cure people. “I will cure this.” But Chambers was happy as he was. “If you’ll just come into therapy with me, I will fix this,” Nicolosi insisted. During speeches and television appearances, Chambers admitted that he was still attracted to men, that “99.9 percent” of people with unwanted same-sex attractions don’t change and that conversion therapy - sometimes called reparative therapy - is often psychologically harmful, particularly for teenagers.Īfter each public denunciation of the industry they helped build, Nicolosi, a clinical psychologist who believed that male same-sex attraction was a developmental disorder caused by childhood trauma and gender confusion, called Chambers on the phone. It was 2012, and Alan Chambers, Nicolosi’s friend and a fellow leader in the ex-gay movement, was causing trouble by telling the truth. Joseph Nicolosi wouldn’t take gay for an answer.