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Yeah. There's still some small groups trying it for smoking cessation and addiction therapy, but even in that specific context it's controversial, and for a reason. When using it with sexual arousal, it seems like giving people really unpleasant BDSM kinks is kinda the best-case scenario, and broad hangups or extreme social discomfort more likely. But like the lobotomy, it was popular for a time.
My apologies. This last interpretation is the correct one: of the small group of gay men who actively search out therapy to become less gay or more straight, a large majority either only find themselves 'less gay' in that they're able to go more time without a strong hunger for gay sex, or 'more straight' in the sense of having the ability to have sex with women but not the ability to enjoy it or to find it preferential to sex with men, and in both cases not being any more comfortable with their same-sex attraction.
This is separate from bihackers (mostly straight-to-bisexual-seeking), where there are a small number of unequivocal success stories who aren't sure if they became bisexual or just became comfortable being bisexual, a tiny number who had organic changes cause overt and undeniable differences in attraction (mostly trans people on hormones, kontextmashine's brain tumor), and then a large majority where it couldn't change their likely romantic (or grindr) focuses even as they became comfortable.
Uh... I was kinda trying to motion around really-really-feminine guys, regardless of the anatomical side; that's just a comic that's really explicit about it without being actual porn on the same page.
But it does apply there, too. I'd kinda naively expected trans men with vaginas to maybe be less psychologically difficult for a 'straight' man trying out gay sex, (and a lot of trans guys reasonably don't like being seen as training wheels), if only in a 'it's nothing you haven't
seenfucked before' sorta way, but your specific reactions seem fairly common for guys who strongly prefer women. Even well before male pattern baldness or mastectomy, most normally-straight guys, no matter how much they've gotten used to the idea of men having sex, aren't into a bit of even soft and downy chest hair. Go figure on that one!For that specific comic, with the warning that it's almost certainly too much information :
Fair. And since I do have an actual orientation play kink, if one that doesn't overlap much with conversion therapy or orientation change (or mind control), so that also makes this whole matter complicated to talk about. I definitely don't want to mix real-world advice and smut-world logic, or pretend that pulling psychoanalysis from smut is going to give some broad and consistent view of human thought.
But I also have to recognize the limits of my introspection, so I can't just say I'm looking at the topic completely dispassionately, either for or against.
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