To Be Straight, Thin, and “Healthy”

Last month, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a law that banned so-called “reparative therapy” for gay children. The law prohibits state-licensed therapists from conducting “reorientation therapy” or other attempts to change the sexual orientation of children under the age of 18. While the value of this form of therapy has long been questioned both inside and outside the therapeutic establishment, it was only in April of this year that psychologist Robert Spitzer repudiated his 2001 psychological study of 200 men and women who had been treated by “reparative” therapies for homosexuality. That study had been used as part of an increasingly tattered foundation for therapy in such organizations as Exodus International, the most famous “ex-gay” organization. The story of Spitzer’s renunciation was poignant, but the cultural tide had turned against such research and any argument in favor of reparative therapy long before.

On the surface then, it seems like an odd moment for Lynne Gerber’s Seeking the Straight and Narrow, a remarkable book that examines Exodus International alongside a Christian evangelical dieting organization called First Place. Gerber pairs these two apparently disparate organizations in order to examine the logic of personal change. The belief that people can re-make themselves is deeply rooted in American culture in ways religious and non-religious. Cultural forms as diverse as beer commercials, Oprah’s empire, self-help books, commercial magazines, as well as evangelicalism and more New Age forms of religion, all rely on the idea that we can bring about desired changes in ourselves through proper belief and hard work. Gerber wants to challenge how we understand “change” in both moral and physical forms, and in doing so, she is taking aim at one of our society’s most deeply held convictions. She uses Exodus International as a foil for Christian weight loss organizations and ultimately as a foil for her readers’ own likely belief in self-propelled transformations in the name of health.

Both of the programs that Gerber studies seek to make fundamental changes in their adherents. For First Place, the desired change is primarily physical: participants want to lose weight. For Exodus International, the change is aimed at desire itself, or if that proves impossible, at the more superficial level of lifestyle and practice. One kind of change (weight loss) is almost universally acknowledged as good and necessary; the other (changing one’s sexual orientation) is almost universally disparaged, except in very specific evangelical Christian communities. But Gerber claims that the two are tied together by a logic of personal transformation that doesn’t belong to evangelicals alone.

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