If you are actually aware of the study then you are getting your sources from somewhere that is slightly outdated.
1) Yes prior to publication there was an article in the Washington Post article about the study the APA criticized it and stated it was not unpublished and not peer reviewed however it subsequently was peer reviewed and published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, a leading publication in it’s field.
2) The point of Dr. Spitzer’s study was not to prove whether a specific form of therapy can work, it was to determine whether or not any therapy was possible.
3) the criticism was not that it lumped together those who studied with unlicensed therapists with licensed, rather that it included those who were treated by therapists with ” a strong anti-gay bias”, whatever that means.
4) The Dr. Spitzer under discussion is the same one who was the driving force behind the creation of the DSM as well as the removal of gay behavior as a psychiatric issue. He was one of the leading researchers in psychiatry and he used the same methodology that was is many of his other studies.
5) He tried to retract his study however the Editor of the Journal Dr. Kenneth Zucker Ph.D stated
” You can retract data incorrectly analyzed… You can retract an article of the data were falsified….As I understand it he’s just saying ten years later he wants to retract hi interpretation of the data. Well we’d probably have to retract hundreds of scientific papers with regard to interpretation and we don’t do that”.