I’ve found myself thinking about George Rekers a lot, more than I might have expected or planned. Yesterday, I became aware of why. There was a boy in a not quite nearby neighborhood that had my same first name. He lived in a place that bordered a large field with no houses, something of a Park. It was a perfect place for the endless "PeeWee" football games we played throughout the fall as preteens. He kept to himself, this effeminate obviously gay guy – but he would sometimes come out and join in the football games. Actually, he was a pretty good receiver. He wasn’t teased or shunned, but he wasn’t "one of the guys" either. I’m not even sure I even knew what the word homosexual meant at that age, in maybe 1954. At the Junior High, he was in the Band, where he seemed to fit in more. At thirteen, he hung himself.
I don’t recall us talking about why, though we knew it had something to do with his being effeminate, at least I did. Everyone that lived in his area seemed to know there was some kind of family trouble. But it’s one of those things that just sits in the mind. There was no place for him then, no designation, he was just ‘other.’ I know no details, but I seem to know that the way he was wasn’t accepted by his family. I’d bet that he was pushed out of the house to play in those sand-lot football games [though I don’t really know that for sure either].
That world is the one George Rekers worked towards maintaining – a world where that kid had no place to be and no way to understand or be understood. We didn’t have any way of understanding either. He actually looked like Rekers, and I think he’s been on the edge of my mind since that orange haired picture of Rekers first appeared. It just seems so incredibly sad. I guess George Rekers grew up in that world too and solved his sense of "other-ness" in a very different way [equally tragic]. He’s another victim who resolved his problem by becoming a perpetrator. Here’s a very good, comprehensive article I ran across where Dr. Rekers was interviewed about his views back in 2008 around the time of his testimony in Florida [FLORIDA’S CASE AGAINST GAY ADOPTION]. Among the many remarkable things Rekers says is this indefensible pronouncement [in a 40+ year career in Medicine and Psychiatry, I’ve never heard anyone make this assertion – ever]:Rekers says there are only two ways to determine if adoptive parents have psychiatric problems: a clinical evaluation or determining if they belong to a high-risk group. Since evaluations measure a person’s current status, he prefers the second method: “The only way you can predict long-term [behavior] is what kind of group they’re in.”
Before He Hired an Escort, Rekers Tried to Spank the Gay Away
Miami New Times
By Penn Bullock and Brandon K. Thorp
May. 17 2010​
… In 1974, Rekers, a leading thinker in the so-called ex-gay movement, was presented with a 4-year-old "effeminate boy" named Kraig, whose parents had enrolled him in the program. Rekers put Kraig in a "play-observation room" with his mother, who was equipped with a listening device. When the boy played with girly toys, the doctors instructed her to avert her eyes from the child. According to a 2001 account in Brain, Child Magazine, "On one such occasion, his distress was such that he began to scream, but his mother just looked away. His anxiety increased, and he did whatever he could to get her to respond to him… Kraig became so hysterical, and his mother so uncomfortable, that one of the clinicians had to enter and take Kraig, screaming, from the room."
Rekers’s research team continued the experiment in the family’s home. Kraig received red chips for feminine behavior and blue chips for masculine behavior. The blue chips could be cashed in for candy or television time. The red chips earned him a "swat" or spanking from his father. Researchers periodically entered the family’s home to ensure proper implementation of the reward-punishment system. After two years, the boy supposedly manned up. Over the decades, Rekers, who ran countless similar experiments, held Kraig up as "the poster boy for behavioral treatment of boyhood effeminacy."
At age 18, shamed by his childhood diagnosis and treatment, Rekers’s poster boy attempted suicide, according to Gender Shock, a book by journalist Phyllis Burke. Rekers, whose early experiments were the first to ostensibly demonstrate a "gay cure," resigned from the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality last week… NARTH, however, stands by his science…[see Behavioral Treatment of Deviant Sex-Role Behaviors in a Male Child, George A. Rekers and O. Ivar Lovaas, Harvard University and University of California at Los Angeles, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis 1974, 7:173-190; Number 2 (Summer 1974)]
This is a tragic and moving story — and unfortunately not so uncommon. Hopefully less common than it used to be.
I hope this doesn’t trivialize the major point of the story, but I also have to comment on the “orange hair.” What is it with these aging, anti-gay activists and their dyed, combed-over hair? Obviously they’re uncommonly preoccupied with looking younger — perhaps regretting their lost young years of being who they wanted to be, and the reaction formation of trying to prevent others is probably also beginning to fail.
I remember back a few years when Charles Socarides was still the arch enemy of the emerging pro-gay analytic circle. By then in his late 70s I think, he had remarried a much younger woman and had a small son with her. He brought the boy to a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association and was parading him around at the cocktail reception — I presumed showing off his heterosexual prowess in fathering a son at his age (perhaps also to make up for the gay son of his first marriage).
But what struck me — it was really garish — was his orange hair. The last time I had seen him, his hair was thinning, brown, and mostly gray. Now he had a head full of bright orange-brown hair that just screamed out “dye-job.”
In fact, Gladys Thompkins, long-time senior editor at Yale Univ. Press and a favorite buddy of mine at the book stalls at the meetings — looked at him and said to me, “He should sue Clairol.”
What a memory.
[…] my mind. In his case, it was more than just his hypocrisy, it was connected to a memory of my own [a memory…]. With Mark Souder, I woke up this morning knowing the part that bothered me about his story. […]