Coming Out, Turning Within:
Representation of Reparative Therapy in Memoir and Fiction
In a smoky, Mafia-owned bar in the summer of 1969, bricks shattered the glass of The Stonewall Inn in New York City. For the first time, young gay men, women, and drag queens fought back against police raids of gay bars and were victorious after three nights of rioting and defending their territory. Even though there had been decades of lawsuits and organizations made in order to protect federal workers’ jobs and protest against unlawful targeting by police vice squads, Stonewall was the spark the then-known ‘homophile’ movement had needed to fan the flames of their fight for equal treatment under the law into the national spotlight, the flames reflecting on the fragments of broken glass on Christopher Street. When the riots ended, organizing began, from the streets of New York to the Castro district in San Francisco. Through several years of lobbying, organizing, and societal evolution, same sex marriage was legalized within all fifty states on June 26th, 2015, almost four decades after the riot that gave life to the gay liberation movement.
However, within the victories, there have also been many losses. From the assassination to Harvey Milk, the AIDs epidemic and the government’s silent discrimination through inaction, anti-gay legislation such as DOMA and ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’, and the highly publicized murder of Matthew Shepard, the LGBTQ community has never been immune to tragedy, and for every win, it has been set back four steps to regroup and try again. Less than a year after the marriage ruling, on June 12th, 2016, there was an unimaginable attack at the Orlando Pulse Nightclub, where 49 LGBTQ people were murdered and another 60 injured, making it the largest hate crime against LGBTQ people in the community’s history. Yet the unheard torture and deaths of the youngest in the community have been subdued, within what is known as ‘the ex-gay movement’. While thought of as a joke – sending a kid to gay camp being the most common – or it being a thing of the past in minds of those in the modern, 21st century era of gay rights, the practice is still legal in most of the world, including all but sixteen states and some counties across the United States. The states banned the ex-gay practices - or conversion/reparative therapy – on LGBTQ minors by licensed psychologists; however, the bans do not affect the largest pool of reparative therapy centers, as the First Amendment protects religious institutions to still operate and collect a profit.
The conversation that has been behind the headlines and out of the heads of the general, straight public for years began to bubble again in December 2014, as news broke that 17-year-old Leelah – born ‘Joshua’ – Alcorn committed suicide, after being rejected by her strict, conservative family for being transgender and having been subjected to several months of reparative therapy. In her now viral suicide note, Leelah made a heavy-weighted call for “[her] death to mean something“ and for someone to look [at the transgender suicide rate] and fix society.” Her death was not in vain, as it led to a new wave of legislation and calls for the practice to be outlawed by licensed professionals, including the Obama Administration making two public statements and calls to action (Alcorn). According to QUACKS, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s analysis of conversion therapy, there was study done by Dr. Caitlin Ryan, an LGBTQ issues expert, which stated that “as many as one in three American LGBT youths had [by 2012] been subjected to conversion therapy.” She also observed extended findings by Columbia Law School, which found that twelve out of thirteen conversion therapy programs “had been shown as ineffective and harmful, linked to depression, suicidal thoughts and tendencies, anxiety, social isolation and decreased capacity for intimacy” specifically in the developing minds and self-esteems of young people” (Potock 12). In this new push to end the practice survivors whom came out of the practice and LGBTQ-topic novelists are exploring the power of story and representation of reparative therapy through memoir and literature. In 2018, two movies based on books – one memoir and one novel, both published within the past five years – were released on the topic of young LGBTQ people being subjected to reparative therapy.
Through stories, whether it be told from firsthand experience or imagined in the minds of novelists, the ex-gay movement is exposed for being fraudulent, misinformative, and manipulative. Yet a wide-majority of the evangelical Christian community supports the practice, even against the grain of major psychological associations and the gradual pivot many Christians have made to mending bridges with the the LGBTQ community. After the victory of Obergefell v. Hodges, the call for bans on reparative therapy on vulnerable LGBTQ minors is one of the many frontiers the LGBTQ rights movement has in front of it to achieve full equality. The call has spread from the community itself to the powerful reigns of social media, leading to conversations at and onto the kitchen tables of American, Christian middle-class families. The demand for a representation of the harm and horror done to young people in the ex-gay movement needs to continue to be told, particularly to and in the evangelical community, who are in denial about the harm it causes. Stories within memoir and literature can move conversations forward, holding the ability to change minds and starting fires within hearts; a burn in the belly left for a new revolution and the never-ending war for liberation, for justice, and for equality.
When tracing the battle of banning reparative therapy, it’s very important to point toward the development of psychotherapy and analysis during the Freudian era. In Time Magazine’s 2015 article, “A Half-Century of Conflict Over Attempts to 'Cure' Gay People,” authors Stephen Vider and David S. Byers, they work through the rather contemporary practice of reparative – also referred to as ‘conversion’ or ‘aversion’ – therapy, evaluating the scientific community’s research into the therapies as well as the religious. Early on in the expansion of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud believed that there could possibly be a treatment for homosexuality, but he later expressed concern, particularly when his daughter, Dr. Anna Freud, took a female lover. The research he had conducted was not successful on her nor many of his other patients. “Freud himself had explicitly stated by 1935 that homosexuality was not an illness and strongly discouraged attempts to treat it” (Byers, Vider). The statement would be ignored by the larger psychiatric community for years to come, as many conservative psychiatric specialists wanted to maintain the idealistic American Dream of the seemingly blissful 1950’s As noted by Huffington Post journalist, Jamie Scot in her article “Shock the Gay Away,” the attempts to cure ‘sexual aversion’ and ‘transvestism’ included but are not limited to “castrations, torture drugs, electroshock therapy, and lobotomies” (Scot). Lobotomies were largely practiced and harmed patients in the 40’s and 50’s within the emergence of post-Freud psychoanalysis. They were widespread throughout the country and accepted by every major medical researcher from coast to coast. Dr. Walter Freeman, who popularized the practice of ice-pick lobotomies, performed “thousands of [transorbital] lobotomies, with 40% of the patients being homosexuals” (Scot). The lobotomies were later replaced by a chemical lobotomy, whom allowed a psychiatric drug to affect the same part of the brain without the risk of serious injury, such as being turned into a medical vegetable.
As the gay liberation movement and its allies pushed for equal rights and visibility within the United States, the American Psychiatric Association took homosexuality off of its mental disorders list in 1973. In response, reparative therapies were born again “through “ex-gay” Christian ministries, including [Love in Action] in 1976. Mixing pastoral counseling, Bible study, individual and group psychotherapy, and aversion treatments, ex-gay ministries have promised a cure [or] avoidance to homosexuality to thousands of men and women” (Byers, Vider). When Love in Action promoted their success of six people being ‘saved’ through co-founder Kent Philpott’s “The Third Sex”, it caused dozens of ex-gay ministries to follow suit. In contrast, another co-founder of LIA John Evan’s 1993 article in the Wall Street Journal, which proclaimed that: “They’re destroying people’s lives. If you don’t do their thing, you’re not of God, you’ll go to hell. They’re living in a fantasy world” (Evans). While leading psychiatric, psychological, and medical organizations advised against the practice of attempting to change sexual orientation, the evangelical Christian community embraced it with open arms and hearts, ignoring the growing danger of forcing people – particularly minors – to turn against what they saw as ‘sin’ or an ‘abomination’.
With the emergence and booming practice of the ex-gay ministry and other aversion therapy practices, the APA released a widely publicized statement in 1998 that “‘reparative’ therapy literature uses theories that [do not] formulate scientific selection criteria for their treatment...not only ignores the impact of social stigma in motivating efforts to cure homosexuality…[it] actively stigmatizes homosexuality [and] tends to overstate the treatment's accomplishments neglecting any potential risks” (APA). The American Psychological Association released a similar statement, suggesting that affirming therapy would be best for those coming out and coming into their sexuality. However, the ex-gay ministry endures, hiding behind programs in church basements, summer camps for young LGBTQ people, and retreats into nature. Most of the programs that have lasted through the modern era of gay liberation and continue to operate are evangelically based or on the basis of pseudoscience, discredited by most – if not all – leading psychological and psychiatric associations nationally and internationally. In the literature and memoir to be discussed, all of the characters and/or people come from evangelical or orthodox religious backgrounds, are under the age of 20 at time of treatment, and were subjected to the practice in part by churches or their respective religions, which suggested ex-gay ministry as an avenue toward healing from this ‘unnatural affliction’. For religious people, particularly those who follow the words of Jesus Christ within His church, it is vital that they examine the church’s contribution to subjecting vulnerable young LGBTQ-identifying people to a highly discredited medical practice based on their fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible.
In 2004, the news was dominated by the invasion of Iraq, the torture of detainees in Guantanamo, and a young black woman named Fantasia winning American Idol. Meanwhile, away from Congress and the TV cameras, a nineteen-year-old college freshman from Arkansas was enrolled in a residential ex-gay therapy program. Within his memoir, Boy Erased, Garrard Conley retells his traumatic coming out story and his journey through Love in Action, citing the intersectionality between his southern upbringing, his strict Missionary Baptist community, and his sexual orientation. Outed during his freshman year by the peer whom had raped him as well as a fourteen year old boy in a local pentecostal church, he and his parents agreed to try to ‘fix’ the problem of his same sex attraction (SSA) through the two week “Source” program at Love in Action at its ‘Refuge’ home base in Memphis, Tennessee; the orientation was meant to see what therapy he would later require. LIA was endorsed by James Dobson and Focus on the Family, easily convincing his Missionary Baptist parents that this program was the answer to the question: could their only child be healed and saved from a life in sin, a sin that seemed to breed so much misery, shame, and death? “LIA was the oldest and largest residential ex-gay therapy facility in the country. If they couldn’t turn me straight then no one could” (Conley 199). The ‘Refuge’ program that Conley was a part of was headed and directed by John Smid, a then ex-gay himself, who took over the LIA organization in 1990. The program was controversial, because it was misleadingly marketed as a way to heal sex-addiction within teenagers and young adults. Conley had been one of the youngest in his group, and he noticed early on that there were similarities between all of the participants. Upon the first meeting he attended, Garrard noted: “Most of us [participants] were from the South, some part of the Bible Belt...all met with ultimatums…’change this or else’...homeless, penniless, excommunicated, exiled” (Conley 21). Garrard observed that they all had been sold on finding a cure in order to fulfill a strict interpretation of masculinity, gender roles, and sexuality within the Bible they all had been raised to believe in. All of the participants had been rooted within evangelical Christianity, especially of the Southern Baptist variety.
Early on in Boy Erased, it is clear that the author seemed very focused and dedicated to finding a cure for his affliction and being molded into the man he was meant to become – and the man his parents would accept back into their home. “I was here by my own choice...I had too much invested in my current life to leave it behind: in my family and in the blurry God I’d known since I was a toddler” (Conley 5). Conley is adamant that he had been driven by the natural need to honor and obey his parents and the vision they had for him: go to seminary, marry his girlfriend Chloe, and start a family and church of his own. Even as he grew more skeptical and withdrawn from them as he went on with the program, he kept going back to his love of and for his parents. In his dedication and acknowledgments, Conley names them as his inspiration to write the book, reflected throughout in the endearing language he uses to describe his relationship with them.
Contrast Garrard Conley’s personal relationship with his parents and his religious upbringing with the representation of the Jewish faith and ethnic experience of Steven Gaines, author of One of These Things First, after he was committed to a psychiatric facility in the 1950s in order to treat him for a gruesome suicide attempt at the age of 15. He had much rather have died than live as a homosexual, because at the time it meant he was sick and could face castration (Gaines 20). While more ethnically and culturally Jewish than religious, both the Jewish and American societal tradition had no room for someone like him. Even when he realized that his suicide attempt was caused by his realization of his homosexuality, he refused to admit it until much later in his treatment at Payne Whitney and even then, he drew no relief from it. “I finally admitted [my suicide over my homosexuality] to someone. But no great weight was lifted from my shoulders. To the contrary, there had been a kind of nobility in not telling that was now lost” (Gaines 112). What we now know as ‘gay pride’ was nonexistent when Gaines was coming to age in the 50s; he’d had little to no access to people who grew up feeling different and wrong for the strong emotions they had toward the same sex. All he knew about being gay was that he was better off dead, as he would only ever be seen as a mistake and a freak of nature, especially after his suicide attempt.
Activist and Harvey Milk contemporary Cleve Jones delves into the importance of representation within community in his own memoir, When We Rise. He traces his life and the evolution of the gay community, in the sense of it becoming a community and embracing his sexuality without it. Both Cleve Jones and Steven Gaines touch on the fact that they were born into the last time in history that LGBTQ people grew up thinking that they were the only people who felt like they did. “It was simply never spoken of. There were no rainbow flags, no characters on TV, no elected officials, no messages of compassion from religious leaders...Being queer was sick, illegal, and disgusting[...] There was no good news” (Jones 1). Positive representation of LGBTQ people did not exist and the representation that did exist was often in biting tones from church officials and their congregations. Cleve Jones didn’t know other gay people existed and lived authentically as themselves until after he read about the Stonewall Riots of 1969 in an issue of Life Magazine. The only gay man that Gaines was aware of was his aunt’s tenant, and the young Steven was terrified of this man; in part because of the way this person effeminately dressed and another because “all nature’s mistakes recognize each other” (Gaines 21).
Following his suicide attempt, Gaines was willingly committed to the prestigious Payne Whitney in Manhattan to be cured. He did his best at therapy and, as it continued into adulthood, he volunteered to enter sexual immersion therapy with women, as recommended by his therapist. “...although I enjoyed the intimacy of sex with women, diligently pleasing a partner is the not same as making love. And making love is not the same as lust. Even psychiatry didn’t claim to know how to make people lust. And lust is the glue of love [at first]” (Gaines 172). Within his religious and cultural setting, along with the pressure he had put on himself for much of his adult life, Gaines was driven to a breaking point for no reason beyond what he had been told by his ethnic-religious–cultural setting, the medical community, and the fear of the future he had never planned on having. So much had changed since his generation had been told that they were sick and alone in their homosexual feelings, perhaps it is time to allow the practice that had allowed Gaines and other several thousands of LGBTQ people to feel that they would be better off dead to be retired to history as a part of a dark past instead of a present and a likely future.
In comparison to the memoirs of Garrard Conley and Steven Gaines, The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a novel about a young lesbian who uses her sense of humor and stubbornness to survive. Miseducation follows fifteen year old Montonian Cameron Post, as she is sent to an EXODUS-supported reparative therapy boarding school, God’s Promise, after her female friend-with-benefits revealed their sexual relationship to Cameron’s very religious Aunt Ruth. Upon drop off, she bluntly told Ruth: “[You] have to send me here and try and fix me before it’s too late. Before I’m fucked up for good. Quick! Fix me, fix me fast, Jesus. Heal me up! Quick, before it sets in for life,” sending her closest living relative off in a heap of tears for a six hour drive back home (Danforth 283). Cameron never put in a large amount of effort to change, smoking weed with two of the other members of her support group in their individual time and dreaming of going home at the end of the year.
In many works of this sub-genre, the narrative typically follows an adolescent character who comes out and is sent by their religious parents to a gay summer camp or ‘support’ group against their will and never really put in an effort to change, using it as another point of their rebellion. However, memoirs usually tell of a real effort made to change, even if the author knew deep down that the therapy would not work. Like Cameron, Lexi Hamilton in The Summer I Wasn’t Me was also sent away to a summer camp-school scenario and was somewhat committed to changing if possible, but mostly so it would be easier to get along with her evangelical mother. “I really do want this to work. I don’t know if it can or will, but I want it to. It would solve everything” (Verdi 34). Lexi did not work the program for long and ended up finding a girlfriend while at the camp, telling her mother at the end of the program that it had not worked and that she was in love with this girl.
In Nick White’s How to Survive a Summer, Will Dillard, a Midwestern graduate student from Mississippi, recalls on the time when he was fifteen and willingly went to a summer camp called “The Sons of Levi”, where he was subjected to physical and emotional abuse from the facilitators, which included being locked in a box for hours in the Mississippi Delta summer heat in a heavy swamp area called The Neck, swimming in a contaminated lake for unusual baptism rituals, and revealing deep, personal information that others would later use against him. “Nothing...that was the terrible part; the silence that followed. The silence that proved you were crazy all along. Sometimes there were only voices...But sometimes it was worse. The voices grew into memory, and the memory gathered itself into muscle and bone” (White 5). Through the novel, Will reflects on his roots beyond the cause for his homosexuality and reconnects with his home as he goes to face the past head on, due to a teen slasher movie based on camp being released. He recalls his time at the camp and how he did everything he could to please God and even more so, his Baptist preacher father, even betraying the other boys as they attempted to escape from the abusive situation. Nick White has explained to press during the novel’s promotion that while this was not his story, it was the story of many in the south; for every camp that was revealed, another twenty popped up in its place.
All the fictional characters of Cameron, Lexi, and Will were all young people whom had suffered from grief that comes from losing a parent recently, had a religious relative send them away to be ‘cured’, where they worked the program for a short time, and then would find it unhelpful. The similarities don’t end on the surface; they also witnessed one of their fellow participants be hurt due to the lessons being taught at their respective facilities, with Will unintentionally contributing to one of traumas inflicted. They internalized much of what they were taught to deny and steer away from, whether they intended to put in an effort or not. Cameron ended up running away from the boarding school, Will was left with PTSD and numbing panic attacks, and Lexi fought within herself as she felt that she was falling for a fellow camper, no matter how much she tried to avoid her. “My eyes keep wandering over to Carolyn during the game [and] wonder if she [agrees with me that] the reparative therapy isn’t working [...] God knows I’ve been trying to fully entrust myself to the exercises....but I still keep drifting back to Carolyn [who] looks so completely miserable. I hate that whatever is on her mind is making her so sad” (Verdi 177). The young people that were portrayed in these complex LGBTQ characters had to fight to keep their identities as those who aligned themselves with the church attempted to wash it away, when it was their place to do so or not.
Arguably, the most important topic that Garrard Conley lingers on in Boy Erased is the question of self-acceptance versus the power of a religious community and devotion to the love of family. While throughout the entire memoir he discusses his roots of being a Southern Missionary Baptist, there is a certain point where he creates a barrier in his mind between his religious devotion and his pursuit of education and relationships outside of it, particularly what he was learning at his small liberal arts school as he attended therapy and went home on the weekends. His two friends at college did not understand why he kept going back to his hometown if he was so miserable. His parents – as well as his therapist – wanted him to take time off from school and spend more time and money at LIA. “Both sides [of the gay-Christian debate] seemed to suggest the same efficient solution: cut ties. Either abandon what you’ve known your entire life and your family, or abandon what you’re learning about life and new ideas” (Conley 165). He has a point: how does one, especially in a similar circumstance, choose between the life they have known and the life they want to authentically be a part of? Is there a way to intersect them? There has to be. Too many LGBTQ people, particularly teens, have to resort to ultimatums or either suppressing their longing for relationships for familial and religious affirmation or cutting off what they have always known to pursue a whole new and lonely life.
In Rob Clucas’ academic study at the University of Hull, “Sexual Orientation Efforts, Conservative Christianity and Resistance to Social Justice,” he explores the impact that religion has on one’s willingness to participate in reparative therapy. Citing Elaine E. Macio’s scientific study of on the role of spirituality on reparative therapy patients, Clucas finds that the “participation in conversion therapy is significantly increased in cases of anticipated or actual negative family reactions, high levels of religious fundamentalism, and identifying religion or spirituality as very important in their lives”, as their religion is consistent with the practice’s notion that one’s same sex attraction can be diminished or ‘cured’ if they participate and work the program in order to achieve the heterosexuality their belief – and support – system calls for (Clucas 2). However, when one’s family is openly hostile and emotionally abusive by bigoted comments they claim to be out of love, that young person ultimately might be forced to find a more suitable home to avoid permanent harm to their self-esteem and emotional psyche.
In more extreme cases, LGBTQ kids of strict religious parents are subject to harsh punishments beyond the typical group therapy and gender-role reorientation, as described in How to Survive a Summer where Will Dillard sent to a place and suffered beyond the physical harm and well into his adulthood, or Steven Gaines in One of These Things First, in which he was forced to sleep with people he was not attracted to and later drifted away from. However, none are as harsh as seen in a memoir written by a younger millennial. In Saving Alex, fifteen-old-year Mormon Alex Cooper was sent to an in home treatment center by her parents where she was subjected to eight months of physical, emotional, and even spiritual trauma after she came out of the closet. Her parents feared that she would not be welcome in the celestial family kingdom that many Mormons believe in and they would not be in the afterlife together. Originally from California, where the religion is often more liberal in its culture and lax with its interpretations of the Book of Mormon, than the more traditionally-conservative Utah, Alex was forced to face the dining room wall from breakfast to dinner with a backpack of rocks strapped to her back while being yelled at by her tormentors, Johnny and Tiana Siales, about her choices. “They felt like they were right, all of them—that I had to be broken, that I could be cured, that it would happen in time—because that’s what they had heard from the leaders of our church. I knew they were wrong, but it didn’t change the fact that I was trapped, a prisoner in their home” (Cooper 51). The Siales family were involved in reform homes for troubled youth and had convinced the Coopers that they could cure Alex of her homosexuality by the same methods; they were unlicensed and one of many in Utah who operated in these types of residential treatment programs.
Every time Alex tried to escape, the people she told would immediately go to the Siales’, because of their well-known background in the community and dealing with teens who lied, stole, and needed structure from hard-lined discipline. At one point, as a cry for help, she attempted suicide by swallowing several pills of heavy medication, and even then, she was thwarted in her escape as Tiana shoved water and a spoon down her throat. She was driven to the point of suicide and all they had to say was: “Stupid! What were you thinking, you stupid dyke” (Cooper 62). In such an extreme case of abuse and neglect, Alex reached out for God, despite the Siales’ telling her that He would not listen to her until she fully repented. Even when talking to a bishop, he refused to listen to her pleas for help. “All the stories I had heard about leaders in the church being inspired to help would prove true. But that didn’t happen. He did not see or hear me. I felt myself pull further away, down within myself, away from the sound of his voice. I went numb” (Cooper 64). As time went on, she just went along with the treatment plan and was eventually able to go to a local public school, where she reached out to the Gay Student Alliance to get a case started with CPS in order to finally legally escape from the Siales’ house. Alex was willing to be put in harm's way, as she planned her escape with an attorney and a close teacher at her high school, making it clear that she would only return home if she would be able to live openly gay and date girls; she won the case, which was a landmark decision in the state of Utah.
Though she was subjected to such abuse and neglect, Alex was able to eventually find a place of forgiveness with her family and even one of understanding and love. “The memories bring with them surges of fear, anxiety, sadness, and pain...there are still overwhelming and difficult moments. As for faith, even though my religion played a huge role in my family and my upbringing, and it helped me through some of the hardest times at the Siales’, my feelings are conflicted” (Cooper 128). Alex held onto her spirituality even people were trying to take it from her in the darkest moments of her long life and now it will always be associated with her abusers. While many religious parents of LGBTQ youth mean well by sending their kids to such programs and that they are only trying to help them, the said children and young adults suffer not only in physical and emotional ways, but it takes an impact on their own spiritual beliefs and may turn it sour for them for the rest of their lives.
Another question to consider when regarding religion and spirituality on the topic of reparative therapy would be why is the Christian community preaching on Sunday mornings about the power of the story within the prodigal son, while disowning their LGBTQ-identifying child at the dinner table in their biting prayers and second glances? Young people, straight and LGBTQ alike, are leaving the modern church in droves due in part to the institutional view on social justice and how their beliefs seem to be rooted in a time where those said liberations and movements were not on the radar. It calls to question the validity of the concern Christians claim to have in terms of the LGBTQ community, which views it as homophobia disguised as Christian love. Mary Griffith, the mother of four and main contributor to journalist Leroy Aaron’s Prayers for Bobby, had to grapple with her understanding of God and the Presbyterian faith following her gay son’s suicide, which was caused by her sending him to reparative therapy and constantly condemning him. In a letter to the Walnut Creek City Council, when a gay rights ordinance came to its table in 1987, Mary gave a tear jerking testimony of her and her surviving family’s journey to finally accepting the gay son they had claimed to love when, in fact, they had been openly chastising him, ultimately making an enormous emotional toll on his mental instability and self-esteem. “There are [LGBTQ] children like Bobby sitting in your congregations...listening to your ‘Amens’ [and crying] out to God in their hearts. Their cries will go unnoticed for they cannot be heard. Your fear and ignorance of the word gay will soon silence their cries. Before you echo ‘Amen’ in your home and place of worship, think and remember. A child is listening” (Aarons 35). Even with the circumstances that surrounded Mrs. Griffith, like the grief of losing her son and in a sense, her sense of orthodox belief in a higher power and the Bible being the infallible and literal word of God, she called for the church and the need of understanding young people who are struggling with their emerging sexual orientation and the intersection with their identity of being God’s child.
In Torn: Rescuing the Bible from the Gays-vs.-Christian Debate, Gay Christian Network founder and LGBTQ activist, Justin Lee, travels through his journey to grasp the balance between being a gay man and being a Bible-believing Christian. Lee thoroughly addresses a personal commitment to faith and family to one’s identity and honoring God’s creation within oneself and expressing it in a way that would please Him. Justin committed his adult life to creating a dialogue between Christians and the LGBTQ community, particularly in regard to the ex-gay movement. He didn’t see how the gospel led to this kind of division and would not accept how the ugly scar that ran through it was so deep. “...as the Christians judged the gays [and vice versa], the misunderstanding and resentment fed into itself giving all the more reason for people to feel a need to pick a side” (Lee 158). While fully coming to terms with the intersection of his sexuality and his devout Christianity as he obtained an undergraduate degree at a liberal arts college, Lee tried to find a way to build a bridge between his two realities and within the research, he delved into the ex-gay movement, attending conferences and questioning speakers on a regular basis. “[Many ex-gays] didn’t want to be deceptive; they just wanted to provide hope, and sometimes that meant not telling the truth [of them still feeling attraction to the same sex]...I’m sure their intentions were good. But the deception had disastrous consequences” (Lee 83-84). Through his thorough research and self-immersion, Lee found that the ex-gay movement was preaching falsities about the effectiveness of its techniques; the most common being to bring blame to childhood trauma/abuse or the failure of parenting, most often of an overbearing mother and a distant father. Such an idea has always been a staple of the ex-gay movement; it is spread and sprinkled throughout all of the literature and memoir, in one way or another, and seems to be an industry standard in both the secular and religious circles that treat SSA.
In Boy Erased, Garrard Conley expresses discontent in blaming his parents – and overall genealogy – for his homosexuality, particularly his father, whom he admired and was inspired to follow in the footsteps of in terms of leadership and kindness. “The process of accommodation takes time. I never expected my father to accept every shifting detail of my life overnight, nor I his. Our moments of misunderstanding, though often damaging, were still far from abusive” (Conley 317). Near the end of his time in therapy, John Smid forced Garrard to reflect on this father-son relationship during group therapy with the ‘empty chair’ therapy, where participants had to yell at a chair, picturing a member of their family. The demand to be angry with his father drove Garrard to the end of his wits. He fought his way out of the facility with the rulebook binder and called his mother to pick him up. On their way back to the hotel, he attempted suicide by pulling apart an airbag dashboard cover. While the technique of blaming parental contribution and non-existent trauma did not apply to Garrard’s situation, it was still effective in negatively influencing Conley to eventually try and harm himself; it was an emotional ice-pick lobotomy, pricking at the brain and subjecting him to harm that shouldn’t have been inflicted in the first place.
In similarity to Garrard’s journey through reparative therapy, in Miseducation of Cameron Post, Cameron’s lesbianism was blamed on a multitude of things, culminating literally into an iceberg; the tip being a lesbian and the depth of it being all of the reasons as to why, such as her love of more ‘masculine’ activities like contact sports and rodeos, unable to grieve properly for her parents after their fatal car accident, and emulating the attitudes and mannerisms of her male friends. “The real problem is the massive, hidden block…[Your loved ones] might manage to steer their ship around the ice above the surface but then crash directly into [it]. The sin of homosexual desire and behavior is so scary…[they’re] fixated...consumed and horrified by it, when the big problems…[are] hidden away below the surface” (Danforth 289). She witnessed a group member have a complete breakdown and then later on try to perform a self-castration; she then realized that the harm being done was too hard to ignore and internalize anymore. Even though Cameron had been very skeptical of the program and its validity in treating – or ‘fixing’ SSA – she was prompted to finally come to terms with the grief she never allowed herself to feel after her parents died, instead finding solace in movie rentals and swimming. While the therapy did not do anything for her ‘affliction’, she did gain to benefit through some sort of growth near the end of the novel. “There was a whole world beyond that shoreline, beyond the forest, beyond the knuckle mountains, beyond, beyond, beyond, not beneath the surface at all, but beyond and waiting” (Danforth 469). In this profound moment of self-acceptance, she not only able to fully accept her sexuality, but also a sense of forgiveness within herself as she swam through the same lake that her parents had been fatally trapped in, deeply cradled by the mountains of rural Montana.
In One of These Things First, Stevens Gaines describes in that his coming out to and getting ‘help’ from his psychiatrist at Payne Whitney focused primarily on his relationship to his squabbling parents, and him sharing a room with them when he was a toddler, where they would be intimate with each other as Gaines slept less than five feet away. Such a thing was not rare in the 1950s or in the Brooklyn Jewish community, but the psychiatrist was adamant that the relationship Gaines had with his parents was what caused his homosexuality and later suicide attempt. Gaines never blamed his parents, but his therapist made it clear to all of them as the young man was let out of Payne Whitney that Mr. and Mrs. Gaines were at fault, making sure that they felt the financial burden to ensure that he received the required treatment. As mentioned briefly before, after his time at Payne Whitney, Gaines spent twelve years of seeing the same therapist, his parents paying for all of the expenses that came with it. “My mother and father made a great sacrifice in the hope of curing their homosexual son. The doctor bills kept us poor, locked in the flat above the store, driving around in old cars, with no savings. To what end we were never certain” (Gaines 161). Parents faced with the reality of having a gay child versus living a life in poverty to ‘cure’ them of homosexuality should not be a decision they have to – or even be allowed to make, especially when they are coming from a Judeo-Christian background, a belief system founded on familial strength and love between God and His Son.
The outrageous cost of reparative therapy is a common thread, as found by an academic study done by the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy at UCLA School of Law. While contemporary bans on conversion therapy done upon minors is illegal in sixteen states and thirty-two counties by licensed practitioners, the remaining therapy by religious organizations are often expensive, reflected in all of the memoirs and literature (3). In The Miseducation of Cameron Post and The Summer I Wasn’t Me, their dead parents’ life insurance policies paid for the treatment instead of going toward a college fund. In the indie satirical film, But I’m A Cheerleader, a parent of one of the participants in the support group makes a remark that the result of heterosexuality better equal the cost of the two month immersion program (Babbit). Garrard Conley’s parents were willing to pay anything to ‘fix’ his affliction and even force him to drop out of college while he attended therapy because it was too expensive to do both for a lower middle-class family. So, within the harms that reparative therapy causes, the root of evil that money contains the greed that Christ Jesus had warned against and the ultimate cost resulting in the lost of young people's’ lives.
In closing, gay liberation was sparked by the continued police violence against LGBTQ people and the institutional raiding of a Mafia-owned bar in Greenwich Village in New York City one summer night in 1969. The spark carried it through discriminatory state laws, assassinations, a plague, a massacre, and constitutional amendments. The rainbow bled from Stonewall to San Francisco to the streets of Washington D.C. and all the way up to the Supreme Court steps on June 26th, 2015, as Justice Kennedy delivered his closing statement in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage in all fifty of these United States. “Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness....They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right” (576 U.S __2015). However, the marriage ruling was the tip of the iceberg in the fight for equal rights under the law for LGBTQ people; most notably, the statewide fight to ban reparative therapy on minors. The battle has been an uphill one, as only sixteen states and thirty-two counties currently hold any type of ban of the defunct practice. The damage that has been caused by reparative therapy is evident throughout both medical facts and academic studies as well as the three pieces of memoir and three of literature examined throughout this thesis. The physical, emotional, and spiritual abuse that goes on legally in the United States, the supposed beacon of freedom in the ‘free’ world, should be looked at as shameful, particularly when discussing the lives of young people. These stories should not need to be a part of popular sub-genre that are turned into two movies to be released in the same year, nor should indie films like But I’m A Cheerleader feel the need to satirize it. However, while the general American public is at peace with allowing such a malice of injustice to continue, these stories need to be written about, whether in literature or in memoir. Whether fictional or based on real events, the horrors of reparative therapy being done to our nation’s LGBTQ community needs to be plastered on bestselling lists and the Amazon promoted book list until the topic is more than a butt of a joke.
Leelah Alcorn was one of many LGBTQ children subjected to severe emotional and spiritual abuse that led her to take her life at only seventeen years old. Her death will mean something and for that to happen, society needs to take her death and the premature losses of America’s youth seriously. Evangelical leaders especially need to read the stories – fictional and otherwise – and the facts about the practice of reparative therapy in order for the church to truly reflect itself as the Body and Bride of Christ. Jesus told His disciples to let the little children come to Him, for they would inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. He did not say they needed lobotomies, psychoanalysis, and abusive summer camps to save them from damnation. While the church and the LGBTQ community have often been at odds, especially due to the church’s and other religious communities’ active participation in the ex-gay movement, the power of story is life-changing and could save many if the words read off the page as something bigger than ourselves.
Annotated Bibliography
Aarons, Leroy. Prayers for Bobby: A Mother’s Coming to Terms with the Suicide of Her Gay
Son. HarperCollins Publishers. HarperCollins, 1995.
Alcorn, Leelah. “Suicide Note.” Tumblr, 24 December 2014.
Babbit, Jamie, director. But I'm a Cheerleader. Lionsgate, 1999.
Clucas, Rob. “Sexual Orientation Change Efforts, Conservative Christianity and Resistance to
Sexual Justice.” MDPI, Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 27 May 2017.
Conley, Garrard. Boy Erased: a Memoir. Riverhead Books, 2016.
Cooper, Alex. Saving Alex. HarperCollins. HarperOne, 1 March 2016.
Danforth, Emily. Miseducation of Cameron Post. HarperCollins Publishers. HarperCollins,
2012.
Evans, John. Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal, 1993.
Gaines, Steven. One of These Things First. Delphinium, 9 August 2016.
Jones, Cleve. When We Rise. Hachette Books. Hachette Books Group, 29 November 2016.
Lee, Justin. Torn: Rescuing the Gospel From the Gays- Vs. -Christian Debate. Jericho Books,
2012.
Mallory, Christy, et al. “Conversion Therapy And LGBT Youth.” The Williams Institute, Jan.
2018, pp. 1–4.
Nicolosi, Joseph, and Linda Ames Nicolosi. A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality.
InterVarsity Press, 2002.
“Position Statement on Therapies Focused on Attempts to Change Sexual Orientation
(Reparative or Conversion Therapies).” American Psychiatric Association. American
Psychiatric Association, 1998.
Potock, Mark. “QUACKS: 'Conversion Therapists,’ the Anti-LGBT Right, and the
Demonization of Homosexuality.” Southern Poverty Law Center. SPLC, May 2016.
Scot, Jamie. “Shock the Gay Away: Secrets of Early Gay Aversion Therapy Revealed.” The
Huffington Post, The Huffington Post, 7 Dec. 2017.
United States. OBERGEFELL V. HODGES. no. 576, 26 June 2015.
Verdi, Jessica. The Summer I Wasn’t Me. Sourcebooks Fire, 1 April 2014.
Vider, Stephen, and David S. Byers. “Curing Homosexuality vs Psychiatry: A History of
Conversion Therapy.” Time. Time, 12 Feb. 2015.
White, Nick. How to Survive a Summer. Penguin Random House. Blue Rider Press, 2017.
