Gay to straight
Some Gays Can Go Unbent, Study Says
May 9 -- Can gay men and women become heterosexual?
A controversial new study says yes — if they really want to. Critics, though, say the study's subjects may be deluding themselves and that the subject group was scientifically invalid because many of them were referred by anti-gay religious groups.
Dr. Robert Spitzer, a psychiatry professor at Columbia University, said he began his study as a skeptic — believing, as major mental health organizations do, that sexual orientation cannot be changed, and attempts to undertake so can even produce harm.
But Spitzer's study, which has not yet been published or reviewed, seems to indicate otherwise. Spitzer says he spoke to 143 men and 57 women who say they changed their orientation from gay to straight, and concluded that 66 percent of the men and 44 percent of women reached what he called good heterosexual functioning — a sustained, loving heterosexual relationship within the past year and getting enough emotional satisfaction to rate at least a seven on a 10-point scale.
He said those who changed their orientation had satisfying heterosexual sex at least monthly and never or rarely thoug
List of LGBTQ+ terms
A
Abro (sexual and romantic)
A word used to depict people who have a fluid sexual and/or intimate orientation which changes over time, or the course of their life. They may use different terms to describe themselves over time.
Ace
An umbrella term used specifically to describe a lack of, varying, or occasional experiences of sexual attraction. This encompasses asexual people as well as those who identify as demisexual and grey-sexual. Ace people who experience affectionate attraction or occasional sexual attraction might also leverage terms such as same-sex attracted, bi, lesbian, straight and queer in conjunction with asexual to describe the direction of their affectionate or sexual attraction.
Ace and aro/ace and aro spectrum
Umbrella terms used to depict the wide group of people who experience a lack of, varying, or occasional experiences of idealistic and/or sexual attraction, including a lack of attraction. People who identify under these umbrella terms may describe themselves using one or more of a wide variety of terms, including, but not limited to, asexual, ace, aromantic, aro, demi, grey, and abro. People may also use terms such as gay,
Long-suffering Spectator readers deserve a seasonal break from yet another Remoaner diatribe from me. My last on this page, making the outrageous suggestion that the populace may sometimes be wrong, is now creature brandished by online Leaver-readers of my Times column as proof that I am in fact a fascist; so there isn’t anywhere much to move from there.
Instead, I shift to sex. There is little time left for me to write about sex as the thoughts of a septuagenarian on this subject (I spin 70 this year) may soon meet only a shudder. But I hold a theory which I have the audacity to think important.
What follows is not written here for the first time, and much of it is neither original nor new; but on very rare subjects have I ever been more sure I’m right, or more sure that future generations will see so, and wonder that it stared us in the face yet was not acknowledged. My firm belief is that in trying to categorise sex, sexuality and — yes — even gender, the late 19th, 20th and early 21st centuries have taken the medical and social sciences down a massive blind passage. No such categories be. And it has been particularly sad in 2018 to see the ‘tran
Hi. I’m the Answer Wall. In the material planet, I’m a two foot by three foot dry-erase board in the lobby of O’Neill Library at Boston College. In the online world, I stay in this blog. You might say I possess multiple manifestations. Like Apollo or Saraswati or Serapis. Or, if you aren’t into deities of truth, like a ghost in the machine.
I have some human assistants who maintain the physical Answer Wall in O’Neill Library. They take pictures of the questions you post there, and give them to me. As long as you are civil, and not uncouth, I will answer any question, and because I am a library wall, my answers will often refer to research tools you can find in Boston College Libraries.
If you’d like a quicker answer to your question and don’t thought talking to a human, why not Ask a Librarian? Librarians, since they hold been tending the flame of knowledge for centuries, know where most of the answers are concealed, and enjoy sharing their knowledge, just like me, The Answer Wall.
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