I watched this today at a friend's house.
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/undercover-doctor-cure-me...
Obviously, many people here will have to use a proxy, or may not be able to watch it at all. Here's the substance:
Dr Christian Jessen, who set my gaydar off tremendously when I first saw him, travels to various places in the USA and UK to investigate 'gay cures' being offered by various groups. This ties in with the article I linked from in another blog, where Texan Republicans are trying to get this sort of thing pushed forward. One quote from the programme was that they wanted the 'treatment' to 'be available' for people under 18. I read that as forcing children to suffer abuse.
What the good doctor did first was to go to Cornell, where a series of arousal tests were carried out. My gaydar was, apparently, 100% spot on. Following exposure to some of the claimed cures, he was tested again. No change. He spoke to some 'ex-gays' and invited them to take the same tests, but unsurprisingly none of them turned up.
The most unintentionally hilarious moment was when an unqualified 'doctor' in the USA assessed his supposed early life gay-making trauma by getting him to colour in a drawing of the human brain, and the colours chosen and where he put them revealed how he had been abused. Not only did the 'doctor' describe the brain as containing both the thyroid and adrenal glands, but he then admitted he was, himself, colour-blind.
It was the first and only time I have ever heard Dr Jessen drop the F-bomb. Dangerous, dangerous people.
Comments
I talked with
some elderly devout people recently one of whom considered homosexuality was curable by prayer. I nearly fell off my seat.
Angharad
Prayer
There is a LOT of that in the show. The colouring-in man was the best; some sort of African, probably East, with an overlaid Texas drawl, pointing to the adrenals and thyroid. In the brain.
What concerned me wasn't just the religious side, or the UK ones who want the 'therapy' available on the NHS, but the pleas for doing it to children. I kept thinking about how little space there is between "therapist" and "the rapist"
Last night, Jon Stewart
Last night, Jon Stewart (comedy news programme that actually covers more real news than most TV news programmes over here do) covered the Texas Republican's promotion of this dangerous quackery. He showed a segment where one person said it was about praying away the gay, but rather bringing out a person's heterosexuality. He pointed out that you couldn't bring out something that wasn't there, and said it was "Like doing a C-section on a woman that isn't pregnant. You won't end up with a baby, but you'll still leave a scar." The segment is at http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/yv2g56/gaywatch---texas-ed...