Until his early 30s, Mike Levenhagen lived his life as an openly gay man.
"I wasn't just a guy who struggled with same-gender attractions, I was
a gay man. That's who I was and that defined who I was," the Oshkosh man
said.
Then things changed.
"It was the emptiness of going from relationship to relationship, the
having to settle for less than monogamous relationships, the emptiness
of the gay lifestyle," he said. "Also, coming back to church and seeing
that that lifestyle really was in conflict with my desire for intimacy
with God, I started saying, you know, this is not God's plan for my life."
He entered reparative therapy, an often controversial process that claims
to alter a person's sexual orientation.
It was long, arduous and frequently emotionally painful, Levenhagen
said, but "it was a battle worth fighting."
Levenhagen, now director of the Reclamation Resource Center run through
Christ the Rock Church in the Town of Harrison, says the therapy changed
his life and he's been happily married to his wife, Kathy, for almost 12
years.
Reparative therapy, as might be expected, has generated a firestorm
of debate. It surfaced again with the recently released study by Dr. Robert
Spitzer, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. The report,
based on interviews with 200 men and women who had sought help in changing
their sexual orientation, found that 66 percent of the men and 44 percent
of the women had achieved "good heterosexual functioning."
Douglas Haldeman, past president of the American Psychological Association's
Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Issues
and author of "The Ethics and Practice of Sexual Orientation Conversion
Therapy" and "Assessment and Treatment of Sexual Orientation," is a skeptic.
What it comes down to is there can be no cure if there is no illness,
he said.
"The scientific understanding of this is that there is nothing about
sexual orientation per se that calls for it to be changed and most certainly
no credible evidence to suggest that it's possible," Haldeman said in a
telephone interview from Seattle. "And while people may well claim to have
changed their sexual orientation, if you stop and think about the social
factors that are weighing on these people, their claims invariably have
to be taken with a pretty hefty grain of salt.
"There's no reason to doubt that many gay people can learn to function
quite successfully in a heterosexual context but that doesn't mean that
there's something about sexual orientation where you can wave a therapeutic
wand over it and it changes itself."
He points out that many reclamation centers have a strong ideological
imperative driving their process.
"If you look at Spitzer's studies, they are almost all of them intensely
religious people. They would have waved a wand, taken a pill, they would
have prayed to Jesus, they would have done anything possible to change
their sexual orientation. If it were a matter of choice to change it, believe
me, they would do it," he said.
"I don't mean any disrespect to people for their religious beliefs,
but it is a domain that is not to be confused with science."
The Reclamation Resource Center, which became part of the group Exodus
International in 1999, has been active in the Fox Valley since 1997. About
a dozen people have been involved in what the center calls the change process,
or reparative therapy, Levenhagen said.
The general theory on which reclamation therapy is based is that somewhere
in the course of a child's early development, his or her needs from a same-sex
parent may not have been fully met. Over time, these longings for connection
are confused and then sexualized.
"You talk with most gays and it's like, 'I've always sensed that somehow
I was different.' I know I did," Levenhagen said. "For that little guy
growing up never feeling connected and always feeling different, what's
mysterious and exciting for him is masculinity and the male."
As part of the therapy, a gay or lesbian examines past experiences and
is then encouraged to get involved in a close but nonsexual relationship
with an adult of the same gender, thus taking the place of the earlier
relationship with the same-sex parent. They also are directed to engage
in traditional male or female activities.
The theory argues that as more so-called normal relationships are developed,
homosexual urges decrease and are replaced by heterosexual drives.
"In my own life, as I started the healing and started finding legitimate
ways to fill those needs, I found that even if there was a temptation,
it didn't define who I was and it didn't have to be a 'No, I can't do that,'"
Levenhagen said. "It's more like, 'Oh, this is what's going on' and it's
like a precursor to a legitimate longing that I could deal with in a healthy
way and it had nothing to do with homosexuality."
Haldeman, again, is skeptical.
"That's what they say," he said. "Yeah, and I've got a great piece of
property on Jupiter. I mean, it's absolutely not supported by any kind
of data and yet, there are some people who want to hear this.
"And some of the ones who want to hear it are the most conflicted, troubled
ones who set themselves up for a lifetime of disappointment. I mean, if
you talk to people who have been through reparative therapy, the number
of people who've felt that they were harmed in some way far outweighs those
who have claimed to make the switch."
Some contend that a closer look at reparative therapy's success stories
would show people who were actually bisexual and the therapy only encourages
them to more narrowly focus their sexual attractions. Others contend celibacy
might be the real result, effectively shutting off the person's natural
sexual drives.
Still others may simply have adopted alternate behavior.
"A lot of people who are members of conservative religious communities
have a tremendous amount at stake in this," Haldeman said. "They risk losing
their families, their place in the community, their belief systems. Those
are not easy things to face.
"Well, lots and lots of gay men absolutely adore women in a companionable
way and to put that in a structure of marriage is not such a difficult
thing for a lot of people. That's what I attribute a lot of these claims
to."
Pastor Ken Hull of Angel of Hope Metropolitan Community Church in Green
Bay, who has personally dealt with similar issues, agrees.
"It might change their behavior but it doesn't change really who they're
attracted to, you know?" he said. "You may change your behavior, you may
go ahead and marry and even have children, but that didn't keep me from
who I was, of being gay.
"As we also have looked at the scriptures, we understand that it really
isn't a condemning of us as who we are. God has created us as a gay person.
We're not sick."
Levenhagen concedes the change process is not successful for everybody.
"The effort to do the things that go into the change process is long-haul,
emotionally painful, spiritually painful in terms of starting to be able
to see some of the core issues in our lives and how we've dealt with them,"
he said. "Not a lot of people really choose to go that route and stay on
that route for a long time."
Quite apart from the viability of changing one's sexual orientation,
Haldeman said he is also troubled by the underlying implications that homosexuality
is a matter of choice.
"Don't think for a minute there aren't gay bashers out there thinking,
'Well, see? It's really a choice. It's really a sin, it's really whatever.
So now I have free license to do what I want to do,'" he said.
Levenhagen acknowledges the issue generates a lot of heated discussion.
All he knows is that his own life has changed.
"I feel like I am a beggar out on the street that's found a wonderful
handout and I want to go tell everybody else, 'Hey, over here's a handout
where you can get wonderful food, you can really grow.' I've been really
blessed to see what changes God's been in my life and to be even part of
what he's doing in other people's lives is such a treasure."
Levenhagen's wife, Kathy, often accompanies him on many of his outings.
"I never intended to wind up in a place where I was married," he said.
"Now I enjoy the oneness and the intimacy and it's exciting."
Heather LaRoi can be reached at 920-993-1000, ext. 238, or by e-mail
at hlaroi@smgpo.gannett.com.
