Scientology opposes same-sex marriage and its founder L. Ron Hubbard called homosexuality a dangerous perversion. The Church of Scientology's perspectives on homosexuality are based on the writings of its founder, and his statements about homosexuality have led critics to state that Scientology promotes homophobia, and being gay or accused of being gay is viewed as negative in the Scientology community. According to a 2018 source, currently used, updated editions of Hubbard's canonical book, Dianetics, continue to use heteronormative and anti-gay language and list gay people as perverts who are physically ill and extremely dangerous to society. Some critics have stated that the Church tried to change their gay attractions through forms of therapy.
Overview Scientology opposes same-sex marriage and its founder called homosexuality a dangerous perversion. Being gay or accused of being gay is viewed as negative in the Scientology community. Journalist Roy Wallis said Scientologists sent messages to his friends stating he was a homosexual in retaliation for him publishing material critical of the organization in 1976.". In the 1960s Hubbard instituted intensive audits called security checks designed to seek out subversive tendencies in adherents which asked, in part, if they had "ever practiced homosexuality".
Hubbard's son Jon Atack and others report that L. Ron Hubbard's son Quentin Hubbard was homosexual. According to Atack, L. Ron Hubbard had repeatedly announced that his son Quentin would succeed him after his death, but Quentin died of an apparent suicide in 1976.
Hubbard's writings
Dianetics In 1950 Hubbard published Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, introducing his "science of the mind", Dianetics. He classified homosexuality as an illness or sexual perversion, citing contemporary psychiatric and psychological textbooks to support his view:
The sexual pervert (and by this term Dianetics, to be brief, includes any and all forms of deviation in Dynamic II [i.e., sexuality] such as homosexuality, lesbianism, sexual sadism, etc., and all down the catalog of Ellis and Krafft-Ebing) is actually quite ill physically... he is very far from culpable for his condition, but he is also far from normal and extremely dangerous to society...
Science of Survival Hubbard further defined perversion in his 1951 book Science of Survival: Prediction of Human Behavior, where he introduced the concept of the "tone scale", a means of classifying individuals and human behavior on a chart running from +40 (the most beneficial) to −40 (the least beneficial). Sexual perversion, a category in which he included homosexuality, was termed "covert hostility" and given a score of 1.1, "the level of the pervert, the hypocrite, the turncoat, [...] the subversive". He considered such people to be "skulking coward[s] who yet contain enough perfidious energy to strike back, but not enough courage ever to give warning". In discussing homosexual people along with others at or below a 2.0 on the tone scale he stated followers should "dispose of them quietly and without sorrow" and that "it is only necessary to delete those individuals who range from 2.0 down, either by processing them enough to get their tone level above the 2.0 line ... or simply quarantining them from the society." He characterized "promiscuity, perversion, sadism, and irregular practices" as well as "free love, easy marriage and quick divorce" as being undesirable activities, "since it is non-survival not to have a well ordered system for the creation and upbringing of children, by families". Such "sexual perverts" engaged in "irregular practices which do anything but tend toward the creation of children" and "efforts [which] tend not towards enjoyment but toward the pollution and derangement of sex itself so as to make it as repulsive as possible to others and so to inhibit procreation". Hubbard's 1951 book Handbook for Preclears likewise classified homosexuality as "about 1.1 (covert hostility) on the tone scale", along with "general promiscuity". He set out what he saw as the cause of homosexuality: a mental "aberration", with the result that "an individual aberrated enough about sex will do strange things to be a cause or an effect. He will substitute punishment for sex. He will pervert others. Homosexuality comes from this manifestation and from the manifestation of life continuation for others." The "aberration" was caused by a child trying to "continue the life" of a dominant parent of the opposite sex.
Ruth Minshull's book Hubbard's views on homosexuality were further explained in a 1972 book by Scientologist Ruth Minshull, How To Choose Your People, which was published through the Church of Scientology, copyrighted to Hubbard, and given "issue authority" by the Scientology hierarchy. Scientology churches sold the book alongside the works of Hubbard until 1983. Minshull described the "gentle-mannered homosexual" as a classic example of the "subversive" 1.1 personality, commenting that they "may be fearful, sympathetic, propitiative, griefy or apathetic. Occasionally they manage an ineffectual tantrum." Minshull stated they were social misfits:
Homosexuals don't practice love; 1.1s can't. Their relationships consist of: 1) brief, sordid and impersonal meetings or 2) longer arrangements punctuated by dramatic tirades, discords, jealousies and frequent infidelity. It could hardly be otherwise since the tone is made up of suspicion and hate, producing a darling sweetness interspersed with petty peevishness. Their "love" turns to deep contempt eventually. Homosexuals had no redeeming "social value", in Minshull's view. She cautioned that "homosexuals should not be abused or ridiculed. But a society bent on survival must recognize any aberration as such and seek to raise people out of the low emotion that produces it."
Attempts to change sexual orientation
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