Rekers stated on his personal website that he had interviewed several people for the role of travel assistant, and was not aware of his assistant's internet advertisements. He e-mailed them saying "I confessed to the Lord and to my family that I was unwise and wrong to hire this travel assistant after knowing him only one month before the trip", saying he was unaware that his "travel assistant" was "more than a person raised in a Christian home". Rekers explained his regrets for the harm caused by his "unwise decision", and that he was being advised by "an experienced pastor and counselor from my church, so I can more fully understand my weaknesses and prevent this kind of unwise decision-making in the future". On his resignation from NARTH he said "I am not gay and never have been." The scandal became popular fodder for media commentators and comics. Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote: "Thanks to Rekers's clownish public exposure, we now know that his professional judgments are windows into his cracked psyche, not gay people's. But...his excursions into public policy have had real and damaging consequences on a large swath of Americans." Newsweek's June 7, 2010 issue's Back Story listed Rekers, among others, as a prominent conservative activist who has a record of supporting anti-gay legislation and was later caught in a gay sex scandal. Experiments on gender-variant children Rekers co-authored four papers with Ole Ivar Lovaas, a psychology professor at the same university, on children with atypical gender behaviors. The subject of the first of these studies, a 'feminine' young boy who was homosexual by four-and-a-half years old at the inception of treatment, committed suicide as an adult; his family attribute the suicide to this treatment. Following his suicide in 2010, the man's sister told the news that she read his journal which described how he feared disclosing his sexual orientation because when receiving the behavior modification treatment as a young boy, his father would beat him severely if he was given a different color "poker chip" as punishment for feminine-like behavior such as playing with dolls. Publications Growing Up Straight: What Every Family Should Know About Homosexuality (1982) Shaping Your Child's Sexual Identity (1982). Making up the difference: help for single parents with teenagers (1984). Family building: six qualities of a strong family (1985). Counseling Families (1988). The Christian World View of the Family (1989)