Floyd Godfrey, an LDS conversion therapy activist is a major player on the "ex-gay" speaking circuit.
Commentary by Wayne Besen
LGBTQ Nation
March 8, 2024
An exclusive report by Truth Wins Out revealed today that in May 2023, Floyd Godfrey, an infamous conversion therapist, who once compared homosexuality to cannibalism, was forced to surrender his license to practice therapy in Arizona.
An investigation by the Arizona Board of Behavioral Health Examiners concluded that Godfrey had made “sexual advances” against two of his employees and included “an additional allegation that Respondent (Godfrey) asked to get naked in front of him.”
Leading “ex-gay” conversion therapist has a disturbing history of domestic abuse
“Godfrey is a fraud who secured his income by claiming to cure LGBTQ people, but never changed his own sexual orientation,” said Truth Wins Out Executive Director Wayne Besen. “This latest scandal proves conversion therapy is a dangerous front for con artists who use the practice to conceal their moral depravity and disturbing penchant to engage in sexual impropriety.”
One of the whistleblowers “provided screenshots of written correspondence to corroborate this allegation.” Truth Wins Out, working with anti-conversion therapy advocates Matt Ashcroft and Stevie Inghram, found that the Arizona Board of Behavioral Health Examiners:
In 03/23…received four separate complaints against Respondent [Godfrey] alleging unwanted sexual in nature advances.
[The Board] voted to offer the Respondent an interim consent agreement that would prohibit him the ability to see client’s directly or provide clinical supervision. Additionally, at the Board meeting, the members issued an Order for a psychosexual evaluation to be completed within 60 days for the Board’s review and consideration.
After this Board meeting, prior to Board staff’s formal investigative interview with Respondent, and without completing the psychosexual evaluation, Respondent contacted Board staff requesting to voluntarily surrender his license.
Based upon the foregoing Findings of Fact and Conclusion of Law, the parties agree to the provision and penalties imposed as follows: 1. Respondent’s license, LPC-10466, shall be surrendered to the Board. 2. The surrender shall be considered a revocation of Respondent’s license.
Respondent’s agreement not to provide direct client services or provide clinical supervision will be considered an active restriction of their license.
His scandal is a severe blow to the “ex-gay” industry. Godfrey, an LDS counselor, is tied to the notorious Brother’s Road organization. He is also an author and a popular speaker on the conversion therapy circuit. Godfrey was on the board of People Can Change, spoke at the now disbanded LDS Evergreen International and the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity (formerly NARTH).
In 2013, Godfrey was an anti-LGBTQ presenter at the United Nations. In 2017, he gave a seminar, “Homosexuality and Etiological Concerns,” for St. Lucia’s Governmental Affairs agency. His most recent seminar was in 2023 at the AACC Global Summit, where he spoke on, “Program Development for Adolescent Males with Compulsive Pornography Problems.”
Godfrey still serves on “the Executive Team at Family Strategies Counseling Center in Mesa, Arizona as an advisor and consultant.” He “supervises other therapists who work in the field of sexual addictions, reparative therapy and other mental health issues.”
“What kind of counseling agency would allow such a troubled individual and certified charlatan to supervise therapists?” asked Matt Ashcroft, a conversion therapy survivor and an activist who played a key role in banning conversion therapy in Canada. “Conversion therapy is a harmful practice that attracts dishonorable hucksters who manipulate clients and abuse their power.”
The website for Family Strategies Counseling Center used to be HealingHomosexuality.com but has since been changed to the more nebulous FamilyStrategies.org, likely as an attempt to avoid controversy at a time when conversion therapy is considered toxic and politically unpalatable.
Despite his recent scandal, Godfrey still appears to practice conversion therapy, hawking “ex-gay” snake oil on his personal website, where he offers private online sessions for “Identity/Gender Confusion” and ‘Unwanted Same Sex Attraction”.
“Should an unethical, disgraced therapist who unceremoniously lost his license for sexual impropriety be offering counseling to anyone, no less vulnerable LGBTQ youth?” asked Stevie Inghram, who studies and researches conversion therapy. “What we see here is a recipe for abusive behavior. Godfrey should take down his deceptive website and find a new field of work.”
Godfrey made news when he appeared on right-wing commentator Linda Harvey’s show in 2012 and metaphorically compared homosexuality to cannibalism. Addressing a question by Mission America’s Harvey, Godfrey said:
Dr. Elizabeth Moberly had talked about homosexuality like cannibalism because we’re so hungry. And that is what it feels like to those who struggle with homosexual feelings, they’re so hungry they just want to eat it up, they want to assimilate, they want to eat what they don’t feel like they have. If you look at cannibals they would eat the leaders of the tribe, they would eat those that have the qualities they so admired. A young man with homosexual attractions is so envious, he’s jealous of other boys, he puts them on a pedestal, he might idolize them, he’s jealous of them, so he’s trying to assimilate what he feels like he doesn’t have. So that’s where that metaphor comes from.
Godfrey has always been at war with his nature. According to his testimony, he married a woman in 1992 and had three children. However, from the beginning, his marriage was no honeymoon:
“Unfortunately, during my first year of marriage I became overconfident and neglected some of the things that had been essential in my process in therapy…I made some wrong decisions that resulted to have sexual relations with another man for first time in my life. I felt so bad and so devastated! I had to constantly feed my masculinity and participate in activities with men.”
Godfrey’s depressing life-story represents classic conversion therapy’s prosaic “cause and effect” model. In a video testimony on Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays (PFOX) website, Godfrey claims he felt rejected by his male peers. He said he felt like he was “always the last one picked for a team” and that his “longings to fit in” led him to “be constantly tortured by that desire to be one of the guys.”
Godfrey had the requisite difficult relationship with his father who was hyper-religious and “very legalistic and very demeaning, very critical, it was very hard to please him.” He said that due to the ill treatment by his father he “felt less and less of a man less and less masculine.”
His family’s conservative religious practices made it difficult for Godfrey to accept that he was gay. “The whole time trying hard to reconcile with my faith that that’s just not who I was.”
Conversion therapy attracts clients by creating a false model that deliberately confuses stereotypes with science. The discredited practice often ensnares LGBTQ people who identify with experiences such as Godfrey’s, creating a cause and effect where none exists.
Most despicably, Godfrey offers the canard that homosexuality is caused by being molested as a child, although there is no evidence to back this assertion. “I’d also had friends who had been sexually molested and said that contributed to some of their problems and their attractions,” he claims without evidence.
The false conversion therapy model flies in the face of reality. LGBTQ people come from every imaginable background and family dynamic. There are gay professional athletes! Some LGBTQ people are sexually abused, as are countess heterosexuals. Godfrey’s male rejection didn’t lead him to “sexualize” his feelings toward men, as he claims.
Instead, he is a victim of misguided ideas, fueled by guilt, shame, stigma, and religious conditioning, which, tragically, led him to illegitimately “medicalize” his natural sexual orientation, against the advice of every respected medical and mental health association in the world.
The result of suppressing his true self finally burst out in the open, with the now-disgraced therapist acting out in unhealthy, humiliating ways that led to unethical decisions that undermined his career.
In his video testimony, Godfrey claimed, “My wife and I have a wonderful marriage and have a wonderful life. At this point, I don’t feel like I’m repressing who I am.”
Godfrey’s dishonorable actions and career collapse belie his sugarcoated words and carefully curated life story. When it comes to “ex-gay” leaders, their ignoble actions always speak louder than their slippery words. Just like recently scandalized conversion therapists Christopher Doyle and Jayson Graves, Floyd Godfrey is a two-bit charlatan who unscrupulously peddles “ex-gay” poison to clients, even though his magic cure clearly didn’t work for himself.
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