James Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin has a thorough exposé of the first known victim of George Rekers. You may remember Rekers by his infamous disgrace from the mantle as one of the leading anti-gay activists in the country.
Rekers rose to prominence in the "ex-gay repartive therapy" circle. He co-founded the Family Research Council and championed reparative therapy to turn gay men straight. Eventually Rekers was exposed to have employed a nubile young man he found on Rentboy.com to "handle his luggage."
But, unfortunately even after his own closeted gay "lifestyle" was exposed, and he resigned from National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), the vicious lies his fraudulent research wrought continue to victimize the LGBT community. Rekers testified in support of keeping Florida's gay adoption ban shortly before the scandal broke. And, still anti-gay activists like Family Research Council, National Organization for Marriage and others quote freely from Reker's pseudo-science to make their case against the gay community's call for equality.
The piece, "What are little boys made of?" begins:
In the summer of 1970, just before Kirk's fifth birthday, his parents learned about a new federally funded research program at UCLA for young boys who were showing early signs of being effeminate. Concerned that Kirk was exhibiting some of the behaviors listed by a UCLA researcher on a local television talk show, Kirk's parents decided to take him in for an evaluation and treatment. Ten months later, Kirk's therapy was judged a success and his parents were reassured he would now grow up to be a normal, heterosexual man.
When Kirk was undergoing treatment at UCLA, he was under the care of a young grad student by the name of George Rekers. In 1974, Rekers and his mentor, Dr. Ivar Lovaas, published a landmark paper describing "Kraig's" treatment - "Kraig" being their pseudonym for Kirk. That paper, which appeared in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, was "the first experimental study on the subject of childhood cross-gender problems." That paper launched Rekers's career, first as an expert in childhood sexual development, and later as an anti-gay activist.
Kirk survived his ordeal, and he continued to grow up under relative anonymity. Neither he nor his family knew that he was the subject of nearly two decades of discussion among behavioral therapists working to change their clients' sexual orientation. Through it all, Rekers wrote that Kirk had a "normal male identity, had normal aspirations for growing up to be married and have a family, and was well-adjusted as a teen-age boy in general." The truth was far different. His suicide attempt at the age of seventeen was unsuccessful. But twenty years later, he took his life on December 21, 2003. He was 38.
To anyone interested in "ex-gay therapy" and the untold damage it's done, Burroway has done excellent work tracing the life of young Kirk, and interviewing his family and friends.
Please check out his 7-part series here.
Tonight Anderson Cooper will air a parallel investigation in a three-part series: "The Sissy Boy Experiment."
Tonight at 10 ET on CNN TV, "AC360º" examines a shocking "experimental therapy" designed to make feminine boys more masculine. See what one family says was the devastating result.