Intellectual Opportunity Structures and Science-Targeted Activism: Influence of the Ex-gay Movement on the Science of Sexual Orientation

Social movements frequently seek to shape knowledge-producing institutions, including those found within the sciences. This essay takes up and refines the concept of intellectual opportunity structure to describe factors that enable or constrain movement efficacy in these efforts. Based on interviews with key claimants, participant observation at conferences, and content analysis of media, scientific, and activist literature, this article explains how the ex-gay movement in the United States mobilized knowledge and protest to shape mainstream science. Since 1973, gay-affirmative policies in mainstream mental health institutions have increasingly blocked construction of scientific facts based on the pathologization of homosexuality. Yet, the ex-gay movement has more recently found limited success blending theological premises and science-based methodologies. Shifts in intellectual opportunities, including formal acknowledgement of religious diversity by psychologists, have led the American Psychological Association (APA) to incorporate some ex-gay movement ideas even as the APA maintains that sexual orientation, newly defined, cannot be therapeutically altered.