This is interesting and I'm a bit nonplussed by the whole thing too.
I followed a few links from the above clip and found the full version of the interview - it seems that whoever posted that clip, in MM's post, edited it to make Cohen look more anti-gay than he is. So, in the interest of fairness, here's the clip of the full CNN piece:
YouTube - Ex-gay therapist Richard Cohen on CNN
The part of the clip in the OP edited out included this passage, from Cohen:
People have a right to determine how they live their life. If they choose to live a gay life great - OK. But to say that I have to live as a gay man because I had those desires, that's discrimination.
Now I agree completely with the first sentence - people do have a right to determine how they live their lives. I also agree with the second sentence - though I think the use of the word 'choose' is not only controversial, but emotive. I would rephrase that with the verb 'want', perhaps.
I'm not so sure about the 3rd bit. I don't think there are many people in the world (with the possible exception of the Peter Tatchell types) who do say that a man who has sexual desires for other men must 'live as a gay man'. For a start what does 'live as a gay man' even mean? Does he just mean having male sexual partners? Does he mean going to Pride events? What? There is no one 'gay lifestyle' any more than there is one 'straight lifestyle'.
I understand the implied offence in his concept that 'gay' can be fixed - it implies that 'gay' means broken, and that's offensive, of course it is - and it is wrong, for that matter. He (Cohen) is under the impression (again this is shown in the full clip and not in the edited clip in the OP) that homosexuality is (or certainly can be) born of childhood trauma. He feels that his own sexuality was moulded by an incident (episode?) of sexual abuse when he was a child. That's another difficult issue. I'm of the opinion that sexuality, of all flavours, is a combination of nature and nurture. In fact that is my take on all human behaviour - it is experimentally impossible to take the nurture out of human development and show, definitively, what is innate.
What I do know, mainly from reading this site - but also from friends, is that there are many, many gay men out there who
did not suffer a childhood trauma, who
did have a wonderful and loving relationship with their fathers, who
did not have over-bearing mothers (another thing mentioned by Cohen). Clearly it is not the case that all homosexuality is born of trauma. One might as well say that all expressions of heterosexuality are
not born of trauma - you just have to look at the beaten wife whose mother was also a victim of domestic violence to see the lie in that.
If a person is unhappy being gay, for whatever reason, is it actually wrong for them to seek to change that? Watching this clip made me think of
Lesbian feminists. Quite often these were women who had no innate homosexual feelings but who wanted, for reasons of politically ideology, to remove themselves from men - part of that was forming sexual relationships with other women. Straight women, unhappy with their heterosexual lifestyles, became gay. Were they wrong to do that?
I'm not for one second advocating the idea that people should seek therapy to change their sexuality. And I am opposed to anyone, or any group, that tells gay men they are 'broken' and must change. I have no idea if this Cohen guy is actively seeking to 'convert' men who do not want to be converted - it doesn't sound like it from that interview, but I might be wrong. But I am left wondering that if a person wants to work on issues of sexuality that may or may not include channelling their desires away from one thing towards another - is that
necessarily a bad thing?