Book Review of “Light in the Closet: Torah, Homosexuality, and the Power to Change”
FALLS CHURCH, Virginia, October 28, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A fourteen-year-old boy is taken to a respected therapist after experiencing prolonged depression and violent mood swings. The root of his problems, he eventually confesses, is that he fears he is gay.
While exploring the young man’s background, Stanford psychiatrist Dr. James Lock notes the distant demeanor of the teenager’s father that likely left him longing for genuine male bonding. Lock also describes his patient’s enmeshment with his mother, sensitivity, mistreatment by male peers, and shame over his own body image – a pattern of emotional need common among males developing a same-sex attraction.
Lock’s therapy, however, does not seek to heal the young man’s relational wounds, which are treated as inconsequential. Rather, the focus remains almost exclusively on resolving what he calls the boy’s "severe internalized homophobia": in other words, his repugnance at the notion of being intrinsically and irreversibly homosexual. The young man, known as J, is encouraged to embrace homosexuality through various means.
J himself expresses an aversion of Lock’s idea of wellness: the therapist notes that J felt ill at ease among the members of a local gay teen support group, saying it was "not me," and felt "dissociated and distant from himself" following a sexual encounter with an older male. Lock concludes from J’s disgust towards homosexual sex that the young man is "still quite homophobic," and thus his attempts at such relations are "premature."
According to Lock’s notes, after two years of "homosexuality-affirming" intervention, J did not improve, but fell deeper into depression. After four years, J left his therapist to attend a university – chosen partially for its billing as "gay friendly."
Had J gone to another therapist, might his story – and his ultimate choice of self-identification – been radically different?
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