ABSTRACT
The issue of whether people can change their sexual orientation has been obscured by moral controversy ever since homosexual orientation was “constructed” in the late nineteenth century (Bancroft, 1989, 1994). On the one hand, any evidence that such change has occurred has been used by those who condemn homosexuality as evidence of its “acquired” nature which, they would argue, is consistent with it being sinful; on the other hand, those who defend the homosexual reject evidence of such change on the grounds that those changed cannot have been true homosexuals in the first place (e.g., Ellis, 1915). Rational debate about the extent to which people can change, and what characteristics might predict the potential for such change, therefore becomes rapidly buried.
