Well when I was living with the secret of being gay in that environment I was
always thinking you know something's wrong with me but also we were taught to
think of homosexuality and really any LGBTQ identity as an addiction or
as some sort of temptation.
Conversion therapy takes many different forms, some of it is electroshock still to
this day, some of it is enforced incarceration. What I experienced was
psychological in nature and I consider it to be a form of torture, I do.
I did not undergo any physical abuse but I would call it a psychological and
emotional abuse. Yes, I have no hesitation with that. This was a cult, you were in a
cult and it was harmful and I had all the effects of being in a cult. It's so
much more nefarious I think, to to tell a teenager who was already dealing with so
much stuff in their life and already wondering you know, what is life? How do i
navigate it? Who am I? What is my body doing? And to tell them that their
natural responses to the world are unnatural, it interrupts the progress of
their development and it causes them to be wary of a number of things like good
sexual health, right? Many people that leave conversion therapy deal with sex
addiction because they don't know what a relationship is. They're taught like, sex
is sex, it's from the devil, it's evil.
I would go, you know, every other weekend or a couple of times a month and the
what fantasies I'd had about men, he would shame me, give me a Bible verses
what fantasies I've had about men, he would shame me give me a Bible verses to
feel bad about it and then you know to somehow climb out of my sin by reading
adults, some of them you know, 50, 60, some of them dealing with marriage issues,
swaths of the Bible. In our morning sessions we would be placed with
adults, some of them you know 50 60, some of them dealing with marriage issues,
some of them dealing with infidelity, bestiality, you name it, people were
dealing with all sorts of things. There was a lot of visualization, role-playing,
there was like a session where we had to sit across from an empty chair and yell
at our invisible father and say that we hated our father. A lot of this was built
off of a model that said it was, it's basically Freudian without any updates
that anyone who's gay has to be gay because they have father issues and
they're too close to their mother, but when I was sitting in the chair across
from my invisible father and they're saying to me, 'hey, you need to tell us
that you hate your father, you need to act this out, yell at him, tell him he's the worst'.
I was just thinking something's not lining up here because
they're telling me to hate someone and they're calling themselves Christian,
doesn't make sense.
700,000 people who were in America who underwent this but I would say even one
person who underwent this sort of therapy, we should be talking about it
because it doesn't come out of nowhere, you know, that this type of
fundamentalist thinking came from the bigotry that has been allowed to persist
in a lot of these communities unchecked and because we've not reported on it,
And I know as a cis white guy right, like I don't even experience a fraction
everything's solved. Well, no we're just beginning.
And I know as a cis white guy right, like I don't even experience a fraction
of what other people have been experiencing their whole lives not being
listened to. And so, you know, my hope is that the more that we get the story
out of here, the more likely it is that other stories get told.