Dr. Robert Garofalo, a Children's Hospital pediatrician in Boston says that the full-page newspaper ads placed by Ex-Gay ministries throughout the nation have grossly distorted his research about gay teens in order to give credence to a bogus theory that homosexuals can change only through experiencing a proper religious conversion.

Ironically, the ads, appearing in July in The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, were titled "Standing for Truth."

Are these gay teens from Boston any more
self-destructive than heterosexual teens?
The religious right belives so.

Dr. Garofalo's research, "The Association Between Health Risk Behaviors and Sexual Orientation Among a School-Based Sample of Adolescents" (Pediatrics, May, 1998) was cited at the bottom of the advertisements as a footnote and was used as "evidence" that homosexuality itself becomes "self-destructive".

The physician did, in fact, note that substance abuse among the 4,300 gay teens he studied was high. But the reasons for that abuse, he said, are far from those tendered by ad-happy fundamentalist and evangelical zealots who are trying to usurp the functions of mental health professionals.

"It's a complete misrepresentation of what the research actually says," the doctor told reporters, "It was taken completely out of context. It comes to the complete opposite conclusion of what the paper actually concluded."

What Dr. Garofalo's conclusions do show is that "a culture that is often unaccepting"-- a judgmental social climate such as the offending "religious" ads are attempting to create—are at the root of any abuse by teens of themselves.

The pediatrician called the teens' attempted suicides and their high levels of substance abuse the result of "alienation" in a hostile social climate.

The great African American sociologist, W.E.B. DuBois, had, over fifty years before, reached similar conclusions in his studies of another minority, social outcasts then referred to as Negroes. "The worst effect of slavery and of discrimination against the Negro," he wrote, "has been to make him doubt himself and to share in a general contempt for other Negroes."

Mainstream news reports are beginning to show increasing awareness about how the so-called Christian Ex-Gays ad campaign wreaks emotional havoc in the lives of those gay men and lesbians who, as yet, have had little opportunity to make in-depth critiques of the ads' false premises.

The American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association, among other national mental health representatives, dispute the Ex-Gay ministries contentions, saying that they are not only ineffective (reputable orientation conversion statistics have not been kept by Ex-Gay ministries) but may even pose psychological dangers to those to whom they are aimed.

Bauer's Family Research Council is among the 15-odd religiously-based groups helping to finance the Ex-Gay ad campaigns. Some of the ads have featured the names of prominent Republican leaders who are seeking the votes of the Religious Right by promoting its views on sexual morality.

Reggie White, a fundamentalist football player has been shown more than once in the controversial ads while inappropriately costumed in a Green Bay Packer uniform. White masquerades as a "Christian" minister who garners notoriety through his unvarnished willingness to promote sexual bigotry.

Dr. Garofalo says he is "horrified" and "angry" by the use of his name in the ads. He calls the "Christians" reading of his research "a divisive and destructive forum."

"It's just an awful and very destructive message," he told the press. "It alienates them (teens), makes them further feel isolated and alone. That's (the ad) the very thing that leads to suicide, and leads to the behaviors that were reported in my (research) paper."