"I love church and the feelings it brings out, but it's like a line from the play: "How do you embrace something that doesn't embrace you?" How do you separate spirituality from religion? I still haven't really worked that out in my life. There's a couple of break-up scenes in the play, but none is as painful as breaking with the church."
Playright Del Shores, excerpt from interview in Creative Loafing
April 11, 2007
For more than a quarter-century, the major professional associations of mental health practitioners and researchers in the United States have recognized that homosexuality is not a mental illness. They are highly critical of attempts to change sexual orientation. An official news release from the American Psychiatric Association notes that: “The American Psychiatric Association does not believe that same-sex orientation should or needs to be changed, and efforts to do so represent a significant risk of harm by subjecting individuals to forms of treatment which have not been scientifically validated and by undermining self-esteem when sexual orientation fails to change. No credible evidence exists that any mental health intervention can reliably and safely change sexual orientation; nor, from a mental health perspective does sexual orientation need to be changed.”