Daily Telegraph: Last Night's TV

The idea was to look at so-called “gay cures”, offered by some doctors and religious people who think they can turn gay people straight. The programme was, in essence, a stunt – Dr Christian Jessen, the gay doctor from Channel 4’s Embarrassing Bodies, would see if his homosexuality could be “cured”. And he would take Cornell University’s sexual orientation test at the beginning and the end, to see if the “cures” made any difference.

This was an admirably clear proposition for the programme, yet it suffered a fatal flaw right from the get-go: Jessen clearly had no desire to be “cured”, nor the faintest intention of changing his sexuality. It reminded me of the old joke: “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has got to really want to change.”

Jessen’s staunch and unflinching homosexuality made him, for these purposes, a bad journalist. (I should at this point loudly disclose my own homosexuality, which by the same token makes me a biased critic.)

...

And Jessen’s pretence of objectivity had another, more sinister consequence. The practice of gay “cures” presupposes that the practitioners believe homosexuality to be a disease or a disorder. In pretending to approach those cures on their own terms, the programme never said, loud and clear, that that belief is false and harmful. Indeed, large chunks of the programme effectively went along with the idea that homosexuality might have a “cause”, particularly in childhood, that can be “cured”. And for all the scared, closeted gay and lesbian teenagers watching at home, that is a truly disgraceful message for Channel 4 to allow.

Neil Midgley, Daily Telegraph. 

Quite astonishing drivel!

Do you really think the point of the programme was to see if Dr Jessen would actually be cured of his homosexuality?

Why should a gay man make a programme about this bigoted voodoo quackery and not (pretend to) be partisan?

And as for 'I should at this point loudly disclose my own homosexuality', where do you start with such Andrew Pierce-esque Aunty Tomfoolery?

You could raise several criticisms of Cure Me, I'm Gay - the phrase 'Shooting bonkers evangelical Christian fish in a barrel of bonkers' springs to mind - but these are not among them.

This stupidity was obediently regurgitated by Queerty, without even noticing the Telegraph's notorious anti-gay bias.

Fagburn repeats: The gay media has ceased to exist in any meaningful sense if you repeat stories from the straight media without questioning or challenging them.

Disgraceful.

PS Dr Chris responds!