Spitzer says he spoke to 143 men and 57 women who say they changed their orientation from gay to straight, and concluded that 66 percent of the men and 44 percent of women reached what he called good heterosexual functioning - a sustained, loving heterosexual relationship within the past year and getting enough emotional satisfaction to rate at least a seven on a 10-point scale. Robert Spitzer, a psychiatry professor at Columbia University, said he began his study as a skeptic - believing, as major mental health organizations do, that sexual orientation cannot be changed, and attempts to do so can even cause harm.īut Spitzer's study, which has not yet been published or reviewed, seems to indicate otherwise.
