Homosexuality due to ‘acute lack of love in childhood’: gay blogger to chief Italian psychologist
ROME, August 27, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Homosexuality is a result of an “acute lack of love in childhood, an affective immaturity, a net decline,” one homosexual writer has told the head of the Italian association of psychologists in a public letter.
The man, who identifies himself online only as “Elisha of the desert,” wrote an open letter, first published on Saturday on his blog, “Eliseo del Deserto,” addressed to Giuseppe Luigi Palma, the president of the National Council of the Order of Psychologists. Elisha, a popular gay Italian blogger said that he believes the condition is not a mental illness but merely an “orientation” that can be changed.
Giuseppe Luigi Palma, the president of the National Council of the Order of Psychologists
“Homosexuality is much less” than a mental illness, the writer said. “That’s why so many men in the were past homosexuals and are now happily hetero. Sexuality is an orientation, which you will know well, no? Think of compasses or ships, how easy it is to change the route!”
“Male homosexuality is in my opinion an acute shortage of love experienced during childhood, an affective immaturity, a net decline,” the letter continued.
“I remember when I was small and standing in front of the mirror, having heard my mother and father arguing for the umpteenth time, I swore to not grow up, ever! I remember the vehemence with which I wanted to say in those words, ‘I absolutely don't want to become like my father!’.”
Eliseo went on to describe how difficult it is to “find a model of positive and loving masculinity”. He told Palma not to be fooled by the propagandistic view of homosexuality depicted in films, adding, “many men like me are not easy to love. We are self-centered and capricious as children.”
“I don’t want to convince you of anything,” Eliseo continued in a poignant, personal tone, saying he just wanted the right to “decide for myself how to change, as much as a man who decides to become a woman” without being corrected by the psychological profession.
“I'm not interested ‘healing’ from homosexuality! It isn’t homosexuality that makes me unhappy,” he said. Instead, he said, he wanted to be free of the temptations presented by “gay porn sites”.
“I want to stop passing whole days looking for an occasional sexual relationship on internet,” he said. “I want to be free not to watch a muscular guy that goes into the metro [subway] and imagine the anatomical parts of his body. I want to be master of my life and feel accomplished as a male and if this means ‘healing,’ well, then, yes ... I want to healed of this thing.”
Eliseo added that he has “for short periods” been able to realise healthy friendships with heterosexual men, “and to desire a peaceful relationship of tenderness with girls”.
“This makes me feel good, as opposed to when I try to give in to my homosexual impulses. Now I ask you what is the psychological framework that emerges from my words, but the chance to be happy.”
The letter was made public by the news magazine Tempi.it August 23rd. It follows a flurry of controversy in the Italian media over comments by Palma against reparative theories of psychological treatment for homosexuality.
“It is very serious that the detractors of the anti-homophobic laws repeat, among others, the idea that homosexuality is a disease to be cured and, consequently, that homosexual orientation can be changed,” Palma said in a public statement carried throughout the Italian media on August 23rd, published on the website of the National Council. “The international scientific community rightly argues contradicting that. It has long rejected the so-called conversion and reparative therapies.”
Palma added, “You have to wonder if there is something sick in all those people who devote their time to insult millions of citizens who want only dignity and equality in law and in rights.”
Palma’s statement came in response to the intervention of the lawyer Giancarlo Cerrelli, vice-president of the Union of Catholic Jurists, who issued evidence to Parliament that the country’s planned anti-homophobia bill would present a grave threat to civil liberties.
The close association of government with the homosexualist lobby that has become such a feature of public life in other countries is also in evidence in Italy. Palma was featured at a conference on homosexuality and reparative therapy was held in Mantua in March, organized between the Association of Psychologists of Lombardy (www.opl.it) and the national Italian homosexualist lobby, Arcigay.
Speakers and guests at the annual Mantua conference included the Lombardy Regional Minister for Health, Mario Melazzini, Elena Magri, Minister for Equal Opportunities of the Province of Mantua, Roberto Irpo, Welfare Councillor for the municipality of Mantua and Flavio Romans National President of Arcigay.
Meanwhile, the psychological profession in Italy is on the whole adopting the stance of their US, Canadian and British counterparts and condemning any attempts to treat homosexuality as a disorder. The Council of Psychologists of Tuscany issued a statement in May, 2010 on the occasion of the visit of Joseph Nicolosi, president of NARTH (National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality) to Italy.
The statement condemned NARTH, citing “blatant lack of scientific evidence in support of the thesis of the therapies so-called ‘reparative,’ and any other theory, philosophical, scientific and religious claims to define homosexuality as intrinsically disordered or pathological”.
