New Play Exposes the Myth of 'Conversion Therapy'

Jonathan Leaf isn't a gay man, but he has a lot of sympathy for our situation. Leaf is politically conservative but definitely liberal when it comes to issues of equality for gay folks. That said, he harbors a lot of criticism for the Swinging '60s.

In his latest play, Sexual Healing, he takes a dramatic look at a couple's pioneering work in the nascent field of sex therapy. Theater III is producing the play, beginning with previews at the Mint Theater (311 W. 43rd St., Third Floor), on Jan. 6, opening Jan. 13, and running through the end of the month.

Sexual Healing details the taboo experimentation and practices of these sex researchers, who watch as hundreds of couples have sex thousands of times (not all on stage, of course). Leaf's drama explores the development of various techniques for sexual arousal, surrogate wives, impotence and the "reprogramming" of gay men.

Leaf adamantly maintains that the play is fictional and not based on anyone living or dead. The casual playgoer, however, might see a few echoes of Masters and Johnson, the St. Louis couple that, along with Indiana's Alfred Kinsey, founded modern sexual research in the '50 and '60s.

Like Masters and Johnson, Leaf's researchers believe that sexuality can be cured. Masters and Johnson ran a program to "convert" homosexuals. William Masters claimed a success rate of nearly three-quarters of the participants--a claim Virginia Johnson reportedly later refuted. (Kinsey, by comparison, always maintained that homosexual behavior was no more deviant than any other, and could be downright healthy.)

So why would Leaf, whose two previously produced plays deal with German 19th century philosophers and a Palestinian kidnapping scheme, want to write about sex, sex and more sex? Oh yes, did I say that the play was about sex?

Partly, he says, it's because of his interest in the way that the mores of the times have changed. While recreational sex has certainly been with us at least since Eve ate the apple, it's also true that the Pill separated vaginal sex from procreation. Leaf uses his characters as a microcosm to examine the larger repercussions of the Sexual Revolution.

His central character is a woman who makes a fundamental decision not to have children. She becomes an expert on sex. But how much does she understand her own feelings? And does her voyeuristic research enable her to understand human behavior--or is it being used as a mask?

As for reparative therapy, as conversion therapy is generally known these days, Leaf says, "Most people would regard it as immoral. Even so, it's still widely practiced." He points out that the American psychological establishment had considered homosexuality an illness, in direct contradiction of Sigmund Freud.

The theme of conversion therapy may be only one thread running throughout Leaf's play, but it is crucial to his critical examination of the problems of the subjective methods used by the researchers.