I was 19, gay and ready to be ‘cured’ by nversn therapy | Fay | The Guardian

Contents:

• I WAS 19, GAY AND READY TO BE ‘CURED’ BY NVERSN THERAPY
• GAY CONVERSN THERAPY’S DISTURBG 19TH-CENTURY ORIGS
• CURE YOUR GAYS

I WAS 19, GAY AND READY TO BE ‘CURED’ BY NVERSN THERAPY

“And he said, a voice ee of emotn: ‘False Image’, ” rells Conley Boy Erased, his elegant memoir about the year which his southern Baptist upbrgg llid wh his sexual awakeng as a gay man. The methods are cel and equently vlent, om applyg electric shocks while beg forced to watch gay porn, to md ntrol gam aimed at persuadg LGBT “patients” their sir are rooted dysfunctnal or “disempowerg” relatnships wh their LIA the msage was unequivol: homosexualy meant unhapps, isolatn and ath. Stori like the were not unmon at LIA, renamed Rtoratn Path 2012, and wily nsired to be the first morn “ex-gay” mistry predited on changg the sexual orientatn of gay men and women.

Like other gay teens, Conley went through the motns of havg a girliend as a way to “cure” himself, but he was also a vorac rear who found novels a unterweight to the Bible that helped expand the horizons of his world. The knowledge of my homosexualy would seem more shockg than the knowledge of my rape; or, worse, would seem as though one act had evably followed the other, as though I’d had g to me.

There, she jok about an ia for a TV seri, Preachers’ Wiv Gone Wild, while he surreptly observ their handsome the ironi of nversn therapi such as LIA is the fact that they are n and managed largely by gay men who have been through the programme themselv, renounced their past and now seek to make others do the same. Conley characteris them by their “ex-gay s” which the rners of their lips “stretched beyond the lims of normalcy” such person was John Smid, former executive director of LIA and a gay man and Christian who would eventually adm that he’d “never met a man who experienced a change om homosexual to heterosexual”.

GAY CONVERSN THERAPY’S DISTURBG 19TH-CENTURY ORIGS

We were learng Step One of Love Actn’s 12-Step programme, a set of prcipl equatg the ss of fily, btialy, paedophilia and homosexualy to addictive behavr such as alholism or gamblg: a kd of Alholics Anonymo for what unsellors referred to as our ‘sexual viance’. Robert Galbrah Heath, a psychiatrist New Orleans who pneered the technique, ed this form of bra stimulatn, along wh hired prostut and heterosexual pornography, to “change” the sexual orientatn of gay men.

An offshoot of the techniqu was “aversn therapy, ” which was found on the premise that if LGBTQ people beme disgted by homosexualy, they would no longer experience same-sex sire. ” LGBTQ people had long protted the cel and scientifilly dub forms of “treatment, ” but the ncept that homosexualy was a disease was accepted by the majory of the medil tablishment.

This clud the Amerin Psychiatric Associatn, which nsired homosexualy to be a psychiatric the 1960s and 1970s, as a vol gay rights movement took to the streets to mand equaly, the profsn began to turn s back on the ncept that people uld be “nverted” to heterosexualy. In 1973, the APA removed homosexualy om the DSM, s fluential manual of psychiatric disorrs, and medil profsnals began to distance themselv om techniqu they had once embraced. Their methods varied, and clud everythg om talk therapy to “gay nversn” mps and nferenc, LGBTQ people were isolated om fay and iends, hypnotized, told to pray until their homosexualy subsid, stcted to beat effigi of their parents, mocked, ached on “proper” genr rol, and told their sexualy was unnatural and And Anne Plk, both “formerly gay” pose wh their son, Timothy, a mpaign for Gay Conversn to Heterosexualy.

CURE YOUR GAYS

“I read books and listened to dtap about how to have a ‘rrective and healg relatnship wh J Christ, ’” wr Jam Guay, a gay man who attend weekly therapy and nversn semars as a teen.

And Exod Internatnal, an umbrella group that nnected var nversn therapy groups and gay mistry anizatns, closed down 2013 after nearly 40 years of operatns after s print, Alan Chambers, cid ’s impossible to change someone’s sexual orientatn. “The practic have no basis science or medice and they will now be relegated to the dtb of quackery, ” said California ernor Jerry Brown as he signed a bill banng gay-to-straight therapy the state 2012.

Whether the homosexual character beg "cured" is male or female and how they're cured, pends more on when the work was wrten than on anythg else. Gay men's homosexualy was seen as a eper-rooted psychologil problem, often due to supposedly over-dulgent mothers (a popular e for all sorts of ills at the time). Can be Tth Televisn if the trope is merely allud to, such as a homophobic character ''mentng'' as a possible rponse to a gay or lbian character's sexualy, or to a transgenr or non-bary character, or if an LGBT person tri but fails.