Letter to the editor promoting AR's "gay cure"

by Michael Bluejay

The Aesthetic Realists sent untold numbers of letters to the media trying to promote their supposed gay cure.  In reality, they were stumping for Aesthetic Realism itself; the gay cure was just the bait with which they tried to attract interest to the cult.  (They stopped trying to convert gays around 1990, not because they decided it was wrong, but rather because they were being increasingly hassled by gay rights protesters, and because so many of the "cured" had reverted to gay life that they couldn't really talk up their cure with a straight face any more.)

Below is an example of the kinds of letters that AR used to send to the press.  There are lots more like this and if I can find the time I'll dig them up and post them.

Oh, and after the AR people stopped writing the gay-cure letters, they continued writing other letters promoting Aesthetic Realism.  After all, the principal focus of most cults is to recruit.

Omni magazine, June 1982, p. 5 (source)

Omni's article "Gay Origins" has perpetrated a lie.
    I met Aesthetic Realism by chance in 1974.  After much critical inquiry, I found it to hold truths about the way the mind works in a way that psychology could not.  Aesthetic Realism describes the self accurately in showing how one's deepest hope is to be fair to the world and how the desire for contempt interferes with it.  (In the film Yes, We Have Changed, Aesthetic Realism's founder Eli Siegel's first lesson is "Get rid of your contempt for people and you will get rid of one of the chief ingrediens of homosexuality.")  This knowledge benefited my life tremendously.  Judith Hooper misrepresents Aesthetic Realism and the people who study it.
   The power and logic of Aesthetic Realism can make emotional and organic changes in people.
         Pamela Goren
         New York, N.Y.

Comments:

1. Her citation of AR's film about their gay cure Yes, We Have Changed might be more compelling if the ARists hadn't hurriedly edited out one of its subjects from the film after they found he'd reverted to having gay sex.
2. Notice how she lunges for the word "lie" in the very first sentence.  For decades, when anyone has been critical of Aesthetic Realism, the Aesthetic Realists scream "Liar!"
3. My policy is to anonymize names when the writer is ex-AR (i.e., those who woke up and are no longer apologists for Aesthetic Realism).  I left Ms. Goren's name as she's stil an AR supporter, as evidenced by her piece on AR's ironically-named "Countering the Lies" website.  (There's that word "lie" again.)