Fridae

In May 2010, the Miami New Times broke a story about one of America's most prominent anti-gay activists and reparative therapy champion George Alan Rekers returning from a 10-day trip to Europe with a 20-year-old male escort. Rekers denied they had any sexual contact and the escort was hired to carry his luggage, the escort however admitted to giving him sexual massages.

Reporters Penn Bullock and Brandon K. Thorp, who wrote the Miami New Times story last year, uncovered the tragic story of Kirk Murphy, who killed himself in 2003 when he was 38. 

In a report titled “Before he hired an escort, Rekers tried to spank the gay away”, they found that the discredited psychologist ran a government-funded programme at UCLA called the Feminine Boy Project in the early 1970s.

“In 1974, Rekers, a leading thinker in the so-called ex-gay movement, was presented with a 4-year-old ‘effeminate boy’ named ‘Kraig,’ whose parents had enrolled him in the program. Rekers put ‘Kraig’ in a "play-observation room" with his mother, who was equipped with a listening device. When the boy played with girly toys, the doctors instructed her to avert her eyes from the child.

Discredited psychologist George Alan Rekers made headlines last year when the Miami New Times exposed the ex-gay leader as having hired a male escort for a 10-trip to Europe.

“Rekers's research team continued the experiment in the family's home. ‘Kraig’ received red chips for feminine behavior and blue chips for masculine behavior. The blue chips could be cashed in for candy or television time. The red chips earned him a "swat" or spanking from his father.”

After two years, Rekers declared the “treatment” a success as ‘Kraig's’ feminine behavior was gone and he became "indistinguishable from any other boy."

Over the several decades, Rekers wrote about ‘Kraig’ as "the poster boy for behavioral treatment of boyhood effeminacy."

Rekers also co-founded the Family Research Council in 1981 alongside James Dobson, and was a board member of the psychologically dubious organisation, the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) until news of going o

He even received US$120,000 to appear as a state "expert witness" in a Florida lawsuit against the idea of gay parenting, calling gay dads and lesbian moms dangerous.

But at age 38, this “poster child” – who had spent eight years in the United States Air Force – was so depressed and disturbed he committed suicide while he was living in New Delhi, India and working for an American finance company .

"I used to spend so much time thinking, why would he kill himself at the age of 38? It doesn't make any sense to me," said Kirk's sister, Maris Murphy, in the AC360 special report: The Sissy Boy Experiment.

"What I now think is I don't know how he made it that long."

Their mother, Kaytee Murphy, remembers being concerned when her 5-year-old son when he was “playing with dolls and stuff.”

"Playing with the girls' toys, and probably picking up little effeminate, well, like stroking the hair, the long hair and stuff. It just bothered me that maybe he was picking up maybe too many feminine traits."

Then she saw a psychologist on local television recruiting boys for a government-funded program at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"He was naming all of these things; 'If your son is doing five of these 10 things, does he prefer to play with girls' toys instead of boys' toys?' Just things like this," she said.

So she decided to enroll Kirk and “nip it in the bud, before it got started any further." Kirk was treated largely by Rekers who was a doctoral student at the time.

The first of the 3-part story was aired on Jun 7 in the US.

Part 1 of "The Sissy Boy Experiment"

Part 2 of "The Sissy Boy Experiment"

Part 3 of "The Sissy Boy Experiment"