A new organization of experts in GLBT psychological issues will visit San Diego three times in coming months to meet community leaders, recruit members at the annual American Psychiatric Association meeting, and to offer themselves as a resource to the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association.

The Rockway Institute is a new GLBT organization whose primary goal is to discredit what it calls false psychological claims made by the anti-gay movement.

“The overall goal of the institute is to counter the misstatements of scientific research that are often put out there by right-wing organizations,” said Rockway spokesperson Rick Moore.

Rockway is positioning itself to become the go-to organization for members of the media who wish to find experts capable of discussing the psychological claims of anti-gay groups, who advocate such measures as conversion therapy or who claim that same-sex parents can’t raise healthy children.

“Perhaps the most prominent recent example was back in December when James Dobson of Focus on the Family wrote an editorial or an essay in Time magazine about Mary Cheney being pregnant. In that article, he mis-stated several research results, which kind of presented a little bit of a furor in the psychological community,” Moore said.

The San Francisco-based organization is beginning to make connections around the country, including here in San Diego, where they have invited a small group of people in the community to a presentation on Thursday, April 12. The evening will feature a short introduction and presentation about the organization and its goals.

The first step for the new group, which has a small staff and approximately 30 psychiatric professionals, is to recruit psychologists and psychiatrists from around the country. It’s for this reason that the group will be in San Diego and San Francisco to meet with the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association, respectively. Rockway hopes that these two large meetings of mental health professionals will provide the institute with the number of associates required to make the organization a viable one with experts representing Rockway all over the country.

The first of these two meetings will take place in San Diego when the American Psychiatric Association meets for its annual meeting May 19-24. This will be the organization’s first major recruitment drive.

“They have a gay and lesbian group that works within the American Psychiatric Association, and we’re working with that group and with GLAAD to conduct a media training session at the meeting. So what will happen is that all of the gay and lesbian psychiatrists who are interested in being spokespersons for the group will receive a media training meeting Sunday, May 20,” Moore said.

The group will attend the American Psychological Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco, Aug. 17-20 to again give volunteers media training.

After recruiting and training, the organization’s next step is to make itself known to the media. Shortly after the San Francisco convention, Rockway will be back in San Diego to attend the convention of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, Aug. 30 to Sept. 2. This time, the goal is an informational one, and Rockway will be trying to get the word out that the group exists as a psychological resource for reporters wanting to balance their coverage of claims made by the conservative right.

“We’re going to let them know that we have this service available if they’re going to be doing stories involving psychological aspects of the LGBT community,” Moore said.

Beyond these immediate plans, Rockway plans to act as a catalyst for new research, both by conducting research itself and by securing funding for projects the group supports. One area of study Rockway would like to see more research done on involves male same-sex parents.

“There is a lot of research about the experience of lesbian couples in raising children, but there is very little research about the experiences of gay male couples,” Moore said. “The experience that we have with lesbian couples is that children raised in those households turn out just about the same as children raised anywhere else.”

Rockway is a non-profit organization supported by donations from individuals and organizations. One of the institute’s largest financial backers is the Gill Foundation, named for Tim Gill who founded the software company Quark, Inc.