On Conversion Therapy: A Perspective

The idea that a person can “change” their sexual orientation has been steeped in controversy for generations. Historically, treatments aimed at trying to change a person from homosexual to heterosexual—often called “reparative” or “conversion therapy”—rose in prominence primarily as a religious and socio-political counter-movement against the gay rights movement of the 20th century. Academics later coined the term “sexual orientation change efforts,” or SOCE. By the late 20th century, virtually every leading worldwide psychological and psychiatric organization denounced SOCE, and its traumatic effects were well documented.

On May 17, 2012 the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), a regional office of the World Health Organization, issued a Position Statement: “Therapies to change sexual orientation lack medical justification and threaten health.” Noting the long-term effects of such therapies as “feelings of guilt and shame, depression, anxiety, and even suicide,” the PAHO added that practitioners of these therapies should be “subject to sanctions and penalties under national legislation. These supposed conversion therapies constitute a violation of the ethical principles of health care and violate human rights that are protected by international and regional agreements.”

More recently in the United States, dozens of jurisdictions passed laws banning forms of conversion therapy. After years of advocacy, in 2018, I helped initiate Canada’s first municipal ban on conversion therapy in my home city of Vancouver, British Columbia. Several provinces and local municipalities in Canada also enacted laws or regulations banning these discredited treatments. In December 2020, I provided testimony before The Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, one of the Committees of Canada's House of Commons, in support of a federal ban. In December 2021, the national ban on conversion therapy passed into Canadian criminal law.

The overall problem with many of these laws is that they do not take into account experiences such as the one I described in The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir. I was not in any kind of formal conversion therapy. Instead, I was simply under the care of a licensed psychiatrist who took it upon himself to try to “correct” my sexual orientation. He prescribed extreme doses of psychiatric medication, used aversive techniques, and contextualized my entire therapeutic treatment and life history in an effort to convince me that I was really heterosexual. In other words, changing laws does not necessarily change hearts. As long as the belief systems of those who treat gay people have not radically changed, there will always be someone “out there” who thinks that gay people would be much happier if they could only “change.”

Bullies

I’m not sure when the bullying began; maybe grade three. Thinking back, it seems so obvious that the other kids would’ve teased me about my last name, Gajdics—at the time, pronounced “gay-dix.” My father, an immigrant from Budapest during the 1950s, had anglicized his surname to make it easier to pronounce, and so I grew up never knowing that the correct Hungarian pronunciation was “guy-ditch.” It didn’t take much for the kids to make a leap from my name, “gay-dix,” to just screaming out “gay,” and always in a pejorative way. At the time, in the early 1970s, I hardly even knew what the word meant yet, but from the way the kids chanted it in my ear when running up behind me in the playground and slapping my back, or spitting in my face, I knew it wasn’t good.

Clearly, “gay” was not something I ever wanted to be, and yet that’s exactly what I felt myself becoming, as I went through puberty.

It was painful to reconcile myself to being the very thing that seemingly caused me so much distress. Separating the name-calling and sense of shame I felt, all connected to my very name, from my emerging identity was fraught with difficulty, and confusion.

I spent almost all of elementary school being teased. The bullying was relentless. The one and only friend I had, Patrick, quickly “changed sides” when he discovered that in order to be my friend he would need to push back against the bullies. He would not. He caved. I suppose to his credit, in retrospect, even though he stopped being my friend, he did not taunt me while the others continued relentlessly.

Finally, my parents sent me to a new high school for grade eight. I was beyond elated. Fresh start, new opportunities, the possibility for actual friendships with no history of ridicule.

At the new school, across town, the other boys and girls welcomed me and I made friendships quickly. No one teased me about my name, even though my family still pronounced it “gay-dix.” I suppose it didn’t hurt that my three older siblings had all gone to the same high school before me, and all of them had been popular. For the first time in my life, I was popular.

Unfortunately, my high school was also near the bottom of the then ranked academic institutions near where I lived. My parents soon realized this, and removed me from that high school at the end of grade eight, sending me to an all-boys school for grade nine. The new high school, it just so happened, was also where all the bullies had gone after elementary school. Even before the first day in September that year, 1978, I knew I was walking back into my worst nightmare.

And so it came to pass that I was not, indeed, mistaken: my history had preceded me, and it seemed as though everyone in the school, even those younger than me, knew all about me and my name when I walked into school that first day. The taunts, ridicule and isolation continued unabated.

I have long been inclined to depression and thoughts of suicide as a means of “escape,” and I am sure this is where it all began: in school. There really was no escaping the ongoing trauma, while in school, and so as my only form of escape I skipped school. Often I ended up downtown, alone, which led to even more problems when men three times older than me stalked and then sexualized me for years. The sex, though sometimes pleasurable because it was, after all, still physically arousing, only made matters worse. The psychic dread I felt around possibly ending up “gay” (and “like them”) only exacerbated.

I left high school, finally, in 1982.

Two years later, I was working in a movie theatre in the downtown core. By this time I also had many new friends, though my tendency toward depression always remained just a breath away.

One day a new employee began working in the theatre—one of the bullies from my high school. His name was Bob Taverzan (not his real name, but close enough). I’m sure he recognized me the moment we first laid eyes on each other, but he pretended otherwise. I remembered him as being one of the worst of the worst—daily threatening to beat me up as soon as the school bell rang at the end of the day. He always walked as part of a pack, like wolves, with the other (perhaps “second tier”) bullies circling close behind. The level of fear in my body lasted for years, because of people like him. In more recent years, I have also struggled with adrenal fatigue, which I know can typically be brought on from prolonged trauma, and I’m sure at least in part it dates back to these years of living hell.

Not long after he started working in the theater, I knew what I needed to do. I suppose by this time I also had a much stronger sense of self, and so when he was cleaning the carpets as an usher one evening, I approached him, alone. This would have been in around 1985. Playing in the multiplex were movies like The Colour Purple, The Breakfast Club, Back To The Future, and The Purple Rose of Cairo—pretty fantastic, all things considered.

From across the otherwise empty lobby I could see the panic registering in his eyes, as I cornered in on him, more self-determined than ever before.

“We went to high school together,” I said, several feet away.

“I don’t remember,” he said, backing away, obviously freaked.

“You were a bully. You threatened to beat me up every day. You kept me in of state of terror for years.”

Slowly, he took another step back. He looked scared and small, not at all as I’d remembered him from school: fearsome and larger than life.

“Stay out of my face or else I’ll smack you,” I said, enraged. Then I turned and left.

He quit the theatre sometime soon after that.

Several years later, I was in a gay dance club late one night. From across the club I saw another one of my high school tormentors. The dance floor was body-to-body with skimpily dressed gay men, all sweating, laughing, kissing. I had long suspected that many of the bullies from high school were gay, or perhaps might have ended up gay, which begged the question of whether or not simply being gay was enough to precipitate being bullied. Bullies, I had learned by then, in fact, came in all shapes and sizes: tall, short, skinny, fat, Caucasian, Black, male, female, straight, bi, gay, trans, young, old, whatever.

I walked around the dance floor and stood next to him. His name, I had never forgotten, was Gregory John (also not his real name, but close enough). Seconds later he noticed me standing next to him. Obviously thinking that I was cruising him, he grinned. I did not.

“We went to high school together, years ago,” I said. Startled, he looked me up and down.

“My name is Peter Gajdics,” I said, pronouncing my last name as I had in school, “gay-dix,” even though I’d long since changed the pronunciation back to its original: “guy-ditch.”

“I don’t remember,” he said, finally and flatly, looking pale and expressionless.

I stepped a foot closer, and then moved directly in front of him, staring him in his eyes. Animal to animal.

“Well I do. You teased me for years. You were an asshole. You used to call me faggot.” I glanced around the club, an obvious reference to the fact of where we were: a gay bar. “I lived in fear for years because of you. I just thought you should know.”

I continued staring him in his eyes, until he looked away first. Then I turned and walked away, not looking back.

I saw him many more times after that one time, usually in the gym. He always avoided me.

In summary, here’s what I’ve learned about bullies:

They move in packs, like wolves; the more of them together, like one great “group identity,” the stronger they feel. But they are not strong. As individuals, they are weak.

They will eat you alive as a group, but when alone as individuals, without packs to hide behind (even, especially today, virtually), they will often back down out of fear, or run in the opposite direction.

Bullies are terrified and deeply insecure. They are fuelled by adrenaline and lies. Calm, reasoned truth and a belief in one’s own self-worth are enough to defeat them. Though their threats and bullying and even possible physical violence leave lasting scars, which can never be undermined, ultimately, bullies don’t win.

Canada Bans “Conversion Therapy”

Following years of exhaustive advocacy and petitioning, delays and cruel setbacks, on December 7, 2021, Canada’s federal government voted to pass Bill C-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (conversion therapy), thereby criminalizing conversion therapy across the country. Three previous federal attempts to do the same all failed to pass; all were also far less expansive, focussing mainly on protecting minors. Bill C-4, conversely, will now be the most inclusive national ban globally, banning “conversion therapy” outright, for all ages. As a milestone in Canadian LGBT history, I have no doubt that Bill C-4’s passing will go down in the history books, along with Canada’s decriminalization of homosexuality in 1969; the introduction of The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 (and its subsequent 1995 inclusion of “sexual orientation” as a prohibited basis of discrimination); and the legalization of same-sex marriage (only the fourth country to do so at the time), in July 2005.

I still remember when I left my own treatment with Dr. Alfonzo, in 1995. Phrases like “conversion therapy” were not yet widely used, so I strained at the time to find the language that could explain, even to myself, what had happened with that doctor. All I knew was that I’d reached out to the medical community for help with my spiralling depression. I had trusted that this particular psychiatrist would have my best interest at heart. And then one thing led to another (medications, primal scream therapy, living isolated in his “therapy house,” rapid increase to the medications’ dosages, injections of ketamine, aversion therapy, an overdose from the by then near fatal dosages), and I emerged on the other side, six years later, shell-shocked. About two years later, when my mind cleared enough to be able to think on my own again, the only thing I knew was that this doctor’s actions were criminal. If there was such a thing as Laws of the Universe, I knew his efforts to try and “change” my sexuality through all of these extreme measures ought to have been criminalized. They were certainly inhumane. I hung on to this thought for a long time. “His actions were criminal . . .”

Now more than ever, it’s important to note that “conversion therapy” is institutionalized homophobia and transphobia, and so a federal ban is Canada’s effort at dismantling these forms of ignorance and hatred that impact all lives, everywhere, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. When I started this blog in January 2017, five months before publication of my book, The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir, I wrote that “Gays Cross Borders,” and so I think it’s important to note that when ignorance and hatred prevail, anywhere, no one is the winner. Bill C-4’s passing is Canada’s effort at restoring the dignity and humanity, the truth, of LGBT people everywhere, across all borders.

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March 2019: Canada’s government rejects a national petition for a ban on “conversion therapy.”

December 10, 2019: Quebec Senator Joyal, P.C., introduces Bill S-202, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (conversion therapy), into the Senate.

March 9, 2020: Bill C-8, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (conversion therapy) introduced into The House of Commons.

August 2020: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau prorogues Parliament, thereby dissolving all existing Bills, including C-8.

October 1, 2020: with the recent new Parliament, Canada’s government introduces Bill C-6, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (conversion therapy). 

August 2021: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau calls a federal election, thereby once again dissolving all existing Bills, including C-6.

November 29, 2021: following the recent election, Canada’s government introduces Bill C-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (conversion therapy).

December 1, 2021: Bill C-4 fast-tracked to third and final reading in The House of Commons. All sitting Members of Parliament unanimously pass Bill C-4 the same day.

December 7, 2021: Canada’s Senate vote unanimously to pass Bill C-4.

December 8, 2021: Bill C-4 receives Royal Assent, making Bill C-4 law in Canada.

“Please, Sir, Can You Stop the Torture?” (Or, When to Stop Begging)

Recently I declined a request for a radio interview in Ottawa, the first interview I’ve ever declined since the publication of my book, The Inheritance of Shame, in 2017. This latest request came from a journalist who wanted me to discuss “Trudeau’s promise to prioritize the conversion therapy bill his government failed to pass if he’s re-elected.” I told the journalist that I feel “quite conflicted (at times, disgusted) about this government’s past so-called ‘promises’ and any new ones they’re making along an election campaign”—so, for the time being, I would “not be able to add anything constructive to an interview at this time.” And then I politely declined. 

What I did not tell the journalist, as I know it would have served no greater good, is that I’m just not interested in repeating myself endlessly in the form of yet one more interview about the harms of so-called “conversion therapy.”

I have no interest in clarifying, yet again, that the term itself, “conversion therapy,” is a misnomer and that these “treatments” of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other sexual minority people are nothing more than institutionalized abuse.

I do not want to say for the hundredth time that I think a ban on “conversion therapy” is important, life-saving; that the language in such a bill should criminalize “conversion therapy” outright—that it should be for all people, regardless of their age, and not split it by age so that only minors would be protected and not explicitly adults. Criminalizing “conversion therapy” for minors but not explicitly for adults makes about as much sense to me as criminalizing sexual violence on minors, but not on adults, since some adults might “consent” to the “treatment.”

The fact that Trudeau still makes the issue of outlawing conversion therapy to be about protecting “kids” instead of eradicating a form of torture of all LGBT people tells me that he either still does not get it or is playing more games of political wordsmith. When he talks about his party being committed to the issue of banning “conversion therapy” since the “beginning”—I have to wonder which “beginning” he’s referring to. If memory serves, in early 2019 his government rejected the idea of banning “conversion therapy” and said that it was a “provincial and territorial” issue, not a federal one.

The “beginning” can also stretch back years and years earlier, for survivors and advocates who’ve been trying to get their voices heard through legislation, but hearing only silence.

What I also did not tell this journalist is that I absolutely do not think that I can stomach telling my “personal story of ‘conversion therapy’” one more time to anyone. A lawyer acquaintance recently asked me to tell her “what happened” in my treatment, and I told her to maybe just read my book. It wasn’t a sales pitch, it was self-preservation. 

The thing about repeating one’s own personal narrative of trauma is that if we tell it to enough people over a long enough period of time, decades, really, eventually the same story told just does not reflect who we are as a person “today,” which of course is a constantly shifting point in time. Facts remain the same but their meaning changes dramatically. After a period of years, relaying the details of torture even becomes somewhat banal, and I do not want to do that to myself anymore. I deserve better.

Naturally, I also did not tell the journalist that I do not think I have it in me to say much more about these issues on radio shows that care little about nuance, but are all about a “7-8-minute” sound bite. In less than five minutes on-air, I’m sure, I would be afraid I might start crying (I’ve come close during other interviews in the past). 

When I talk about these issues publicly, all the rage that I felt originally around the injustice of my own “therapeutic experience” and how these forms of abuse continue to play out today, in different ways and with more and more people, sets me on an emotional tailspin. Speaking on the radio about these issues stirs my emotional juices and then, all at once, the interview ends, I hang up the phone, and it is me who has to pick up the pieces of my broken heart. Alone. Again. The job of these journalists, through no fault of their own personally, I’m sure, is to get a quick and catchy on-air interview, but it is always me who has the job of dealing with the atomic fall out to my soul once the interview ends abruptly.

In one form or another, I have been writing and talking to political leaders about these issues for almost twenty-five years, and I sincerely cannot tell any journalist today how sickened I’ve become by the ways in which these leaders make the issue of saving lives into their latest election tactic. The cruelty of it all hurts far too deeply. 

To review the facts: “Conversion therapy” would not exist at all if these practices were aimed at trying to change a heterosexual’s opposite-sex desires, or to change a cisgender into a trans person.

Well, of course not. The mere suggestion is absurd.

“Conversion therapy” exists solely because of the oppression, the shame, inflicted on people who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or any other sexual minority—or even those who do not identity as such but whose inner desires and genders do not match what society has told them they ought to be. “Conversion therapy” exists because of the internalized shame that drives these people to think they just do not deserve better.

“Conversion therapy” exists for no other reason than to try to “change” or to kill these people out of existence. To silence them.

“Conversion therapy” is sexuality abuse.

“Conversion therapy” is gender abuse.

“Conversion therapy” is torture.

Finally, what I find most troubling about discussing the whole idea of trying to outlaw what amounts to torture is that at the end of these interviews I often leave feeling like little orphan Oliver, in the musical, Oliver!, begging for one more measly bowl of soup. “Please, Sir? Please can you stop the torture?”

We deserve better.

Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights

On December 8, 2020, I provided (virtual) testimony before The Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, one of the Committees of Canada's House of Commons responsible for researching Bill C-6, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (conversion therapy). I shared the story of my six years in a form of “conversion therapy,” and I made recommendations for Bill C-6, including that I think the ban should be for all. The full text of my comments are below. All hearings can be viewed on the Committee’s website.

It may go without saying, but it was my great honour to provide testimony at such a prestigious Committee. Indeed, this has been a highlight of the previous decades: to tell federal lawmakers that I lived through “conversion therapy,” and that it was wrong, and should now be legally banned throughout Canada for all.

The entire hearing, however, was not without its discontent.

Immediately before my testimony, another “survivor,” a woman, presented an argument actually in favour of conversion therapy. She described being “gang raped” years earlier, and said that her subsequent “conversion” treatment, presumably serviced by a faith organization, had helped reduce her consequent same-sex desires, and sex and pornographic addiction. Her entire argument left me disorientated.

Assuming this woman’s story of “rape” was even true, it seemed to me that she was erroneously conflating sexual trauma (and its aftermath) with sexual orientation. It struck me that her argument in favour of what she then termed “conversion therapy” was more about a treatment to “help” in the recovery of trauma. I’m not sure if this woman’s belief in the correlation between her sexual orientation and her sexual trauma was something she believed herself or if it was presented to her as part of this faith-based “healing,” but it also seemed to me that whatever same-sex desires this woman may or may not have had, and likely still has, had absolutely nothing to do with her sexual assault, and no one, not the faith organization or anyone close to her, has helped her in the long run by conflating the two. Finally, the faith-based treatment this woman claims to have received, and she argued in favour of not banning, was absolutely not conversion therapy.

The conflation of conversion therapy with other kinds of legitimate (or even illegitimate) therapies or services causes me great concern. It’s an argument that pops up often, and I rarely see it unpacked to any great extent. I fear that this is also exactly how conversion therapy passes as valid forms of treatment today—practitioners defend the right to “help” a (vulnerable) person with past trauma, but in reality end up attempting to shame them out of their non-heterosexual orientation or gender identity. This is very dangerous. It is also how my own former psychiatrist ensnared me in his own treatment of my sexuality.

Two days after my hearing, on December 10, the Committee resumed with a “clause by clause” review of Bill C-6. Rhéal Éloi Fortin, one of the members, presented a motion to suspend such a review until after all of the roughly 300+ briefs, submitted by concerned Canadians, could be properly reviewed by the Committee. The motion was struck down, and the review of the Bill proceeded. From my cursory reading of these briefs, I have no trouble admitting that I do not share the opinion of many of these citizens; I do think, however, that each and every one of these voices should have been read and considered before the Committee proceeded with such an important piece of legislation that has the potential to touch many lives throughout Canada. What is the point of a Committee’s “research” into new legislation, and an extremely controversial piece of legislation at that, if in their research they do not even read the formal written opinions of the general public that were submitted specifically for their consideration?

During their meeting, the Committee also discussed the idea of “forced” conversion therapy. While I think all members agreed in principle to the idea of banning what they termed “coercive” forms of conversion therapy, some defended the position that the ban should only apply for adults in cases of being “forced” into treatment.

Listening to these kinds of discussions reminds me of how divergent the reality of “conversion therapy” in practice can be from what law, and a lawmaker, can and is often able to do. Even debating the possibility of consent around these “conversion” treatments completely misses the point. Let’s be real: so-called “conversion therapy” is a misnomer; in reality, there is no such thing as “conversion therapy”—these treatments are not real therapy at all but institutionalized abuse, an expression of homophobia and transphobia, that targets a minority of people based solely on their sexual orientation and gender identity. “Conversion therapy” is a violent assault on the core self of a minority of people, and all forms of these treatments are inherently coercive. It is simply illogical to describe some as coercive and others as, I guess, non-coercive. Walking of one’s own presumed “free will” into the lions den of one of these treatments—even if a person says they “consent” to such a thing—does not change the fact that these treatments exist as an expression of the homophobia and transphobia that has literally groomed these people into seeking out that treatment in the first place. Coercion has occurred, regardless.

The December 10 hearing concluded with an adoption of the amended Bill. It saddened me to read that the Committee did not adopt the recommendation of many that “conversion therapy” should be banned outright. Instead, they chose to adopt the previous language that would ban conversion therapy for minors, and allow it for “consenting” adults. To be clear: Banning conversion therapy for minors while allowing it for “consenting” adults makes about as much sense to me as banning assault for minors but allowing it for “consenting” adults. This entire argument, from where I stand, defeats the purpose of such a legal ban.

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Comments delivered before The Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, December 8, 2020

My name is Peter Gajdics. I’m here to make recommendations for Bill C-6, based on my lived experience. I went through six years of conversion therapy with a licensed psychiatrist when I was a legal adult, between 1989 and 1995. I was 24 years old when I met this doctor, 31 when it ended.

I am the author of the book The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir, about my years in this “therapy” and my road to recovery. For the past 23 years I have spoken out about conversion therapy; in 2018, I helped initiate the first Canadian municipal ban on conversion therapy in Vancouver.

I had already come out as gay before I met this psychiatrist; after starting counselling with him he told me that my history of childhood sexual abuse had created a false homosexual identity, and so my therapy‘s goal would be to heal old trauma in order to, as he said, “correct the error” of my sexual orientation and revert to my “innate heterosexuality.” His methods included prolonged sessions of primal scream therapy; multiple psychiatric medications to suppress my homosexual desires; injections of ketamine hydrochloride followed by “reparenting” sessions to heal my “broken masculinity”; and when none of his methods “worked,” aversion therapy.

At their highest dosages, he was prescribing near fatal levels of these medications and I overdosed. I still consider it a miracle I didn’t die.

I left these six years shell-shocked. It was not so much that I wanted to kill myself as I thought I was already dead.

I later sued the doctor for medical malpractice; he denied treating me in order to change my sexual orientation; he claimed I had consented to his treatment; he said he had treated me for depression.

I imagine some will view my experiences as extreme, that it “couldn’t happen again today”; except that these are the exact words I have heard for over 20 years: As I write in my book: “The horror of it all provokes disbelief.”

Though the facts of my treatment will differ from others, I believe the basic principles of a fraudulent practice, combined with a client’s vulnerability, trust, and lack of informed consent, will always apply to all, even today.

Currently there are no federal laws that would prohibit what happened to me today, with another legal adult, or even that could hold a similar practitioner accountable for their actions. 

These are my recommendation for Bill C-6.

This ban must be for all ages. Banning conversion therapy is about ending a fraudulent practice that causes harm. This applies to all.

The ban should not include the word “will” or any suggestion of coercion.Suggesting coercion or the idea of “forced conversion therapy” or even mentioning the “will” of the client makes it sound as if conversion therapy could be anything other than coercive; it deflects attention away from the fraudulence and harm of these practices and to the actions of the client, their supposed “willingness” or consent to participate.

All forms of conversion therapy are inherently coercive and exist solely as a form of oppression over LGBT people; to imply otherwise is to invalidate the experience of survivors. 

Proper informed consent is not possible in these circumstances because all of these treatments are based on the false premise, the lie, that a person is broken by virtue of being gay or trans and that they can and ought to be changed. To suggest that a person could consent to such a thing is to say that they choose to do to themselves what has been done to them from the start. It is illogical and defeats the purpose of the Bill.

Please ban conversion therapy for all, including for adults.

Thank you.

About the Ban in Lethbridge, Alberta (Canada)

On July 5, 2020, I sent the below email to City Council in Lethbridge, Alberta (Canada), in support of their proposed ban on conversion therapy, which was supposed to have been given its second and third readings on Monday, July 13. In the intervening days, two of their Councillors put forth a Motion to delay these readings and final vote in favour of additional public consultation and even a public hearing.

I do not live in Lethbridge; I do not even live in Alberta. I live in British Columbia, and yet even I heard about this proposed ban in Lethbridge and was able to take the time, as a member of the consulting public, to submit my own thoughts to City Council—as I’m sure any other member of the public could have done by now. The mere ideal of needing additional public consultation is a tactic to delay, plain and simple. And the suggestion that a public hearing might occur, whereby lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or any other sexual minority individual would then be subjected to yet one more debate about whether or not it is justified to torture them or their peers out of who they are is outrageous in the extreme. A recent similar two-day public hearing before City Council in Calgary, Alberta, which I watched online from my home in British Columbia, was distressing and not just because some members of the public were given free reign and a platform to express their vitriolic ignorance and hatred of the LGBT community, but because the issue of conversion therapy was once again needlessly debated in a public forum. Virtually every global health regulator has spoken out about the dangers of conversion therapy—countries all over the world have been consulted, survivors have shared their stories of abuse, voices from the graves of those who did not survive their own abuse have cried out, health and medical experts have now even written their recommendations, and The United Nations, in a final report I cite below, has urged all jurisdictions to ban conversion therapy. What more does anyone need to say to a city like Lethbridge before they take action?

I was particularly struck by the part of this Motion, near the end, that read: “WHEREAS the City of Lethbridge affirms that it has a constitutional obligation to maintain neutrality and must abstain from taking a position in order to avoid adhering to a particular belief.” This statement, perhaps more than any other, is just absurd. Governments do not take neutral positions. Governments pass laws all the time because they take positions on issues that impact their citizens. Even passing a law on parking meters is taking a position on parking. By not standing up and taking a position on the issue of conversion therapy as soon as possible—by not altogether denouncing all forms of conversion therapy and stating publicly that these practices have no place in Lethbridge—they are virtually condoning torture.

From: Peter GAJDICS
Sent: July 5, 2020 8:44 PM
To: Lethrbidge City Council
Subject: Support of ban on conversion therapy in Lethbridge

Dear Mayor Spearman, and all City Councillors,

I am writing to you all today to express my strong support for your proposed ban on conversion therapy in Lethbridge. At your City Council meeting on July 13, I urge you all to vote in favour of this new bylaw.

My name is Peter Gajdics, and I am a 55-year-old gay man, born and raised in Vancouver, BC. I am also the author of the 2017 book The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir, about my six years in a form of “conversion therapy” in British Columbia, and my long road toward recovery (which continues to this day). In 2018, I helped initiate the first municipal ban on conversion therapy in Canada in my home city of Vancouver. In the over two decades that I have advocated for tougher regulations and legal bans on conversion therapy, I have also had essays about my experiences and ongoing advocacy published in Maclean’s (re the Vancouver ban), and in Huffington Post (re a proposed federal ban), among others. In all of my talks and book readings I always state that conversion therapy is an expression of homophobia and transphobia from within a “helping professional” environment, and I sincerely believe that all jurisdictions—municipal, provincial, and federal—have a role to play in passing any kind of law they can to prevent these forms of ignorance and hatred from prevailing.

My own “therapy” began in 1989, when my family physician referred me to a licensed psychiatrist for counselling. I was 24 years old. At the time of our first meeting, I told the psychiatrist I was gay but that my parents had recently rejected me because of my homosexuality. I also told him that I’d been sexually abused as a child but had never dealt with the abuse. Depressed, suicidal, highly anxious, it is no exaggeration to say that I was too emotionally distraught to articulate much of anything else, except to say that I needed help. Still at this point, it had never occurred to me to try to “change” my sexuality, and I had never heard of terms like “conversion therapy.”

I began the psychiatrist’s treatment model: primal scream therapy. One by one, over a period of months and then years, the doctor introduced various other practices into my therapy: concurrent and overlapping use of various prescription medications (sedatives, antidepressants, an antipsychotic), dosages of which he eventually increased to near fatal levels; weekly injections of ketamine hydrochloride (an animal anesthetic) combined with reparenting techniques; and aversion therapy—explaining that all of these treatments would help “correct the error” of my homosexuality. The childhood sexual abuse had caused my homosexuality, the psychiatrist told me, and only by following his direction would I be able to heal from the trauma of the childhood abuse and thereby revert to my “innate heterosexuality” (his words).

Six years after our first meeting I left that treatment shell-shocked. For the next two years it was not so much that I wanted to kill myself as I thought I was already dead. With the help of new friends and a healthier (lesbian) counsellor, slowly, I recovered. I went on to report the doctor to British Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, and then I sued him for medical malpractice on the grounds that he had treated my homosexuality as a disease. At the close of that lawsuit, in 2003, I began to write my book, which as I’ve stated was published in 2017. 

Through the years I have tried my best to speak out about all forms of “change” treatments because I‘ve learned first hand that they are torture; they are not real “therapy”; and nothing ever gets “converted” or “repaired.” In a recent final report to the United Nations, conversion therapy was called “violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity,” and that it amounts to “torture, cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment.” I would strongly suggest all City Councillors refer to this report, especially section VII on page 21, where legal bans are recommended. 

Some people might think that the kind of practice I experienced with a psychiatrist could never recur again today. I am not so sure. Conversion practices do not occur because regulations allow them; they occur despite the regulations that oppose them. Besides, no one would have ever known about my own history, had I not spent decades speaking out about it and then writing my book. I did all of that to stay alive, to resist the silencing effects of shame brought on from a system of Ignorance and intolerance that almost killed me. At one point in my treatment, the level of medications the doctor was prescribing, in order to “kill” my sex drive so I could “flip to the other side” (again, his words), resulted in an overdose. I almost died. My hope now is that similar forms of abuse will never recur again, and legal bans on conversion therapy help do just that. They prevent abuse.

The most public forms of conversion practices today often occur in faith-based organizations. Some of these organizations typically oppose legal bans on conversion therapy by stating that they would restrict their “religious freedoms,” or their “freedom of speech.” To clarify: any organization or person that practices conversion treatments tyrannizes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other sexual minority individuals into conformity; they prey on the vulnerability of these people, and their need to belong—belong to a family, to a faith, to a community. A need to belong turns into a need to change oneself. The locus of attention no longer remains on the ignorance or hatred of the treatment, but on the person whose sexuality or gender is now under direct attack. Bans on conversion therapy oppose tyranny, not religion. 

On July 13, please vote in favour of the bylaw to ban conversion therapy in Lethbridge. 

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Peter

Peter Gajdics

Canada’s Proposed Ban on Conversion Therapy Falls Short

On March 9, 2020, the Canadian federal government introduced Bill C-8, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (conversion therapy) into the House of Commons. Later that same week, most of Canada, including the House, went into lockdown or was suspended due COVID-19. Since then I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this newly proposed law—the product of years of advocacy by many people, myself included, calling on all levels of government to ban what the United Nations recently called “violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity”: conversion therapy. 

The fact that Bill C-8 exists at all is, of course, cause for celebration; if passed, Canada would become only the sixth country globally to ban conversion therapy. Especially at this crucial precipice, I think it is reasonable to examine some of the shortcomings, and problematic language, contained within this draft legislation. Most prominent of these, in my estimation, is that as it’s currently written, the law would ban conversion therapy for adults only in cases of “coercion,” or when it is used against a person’s “will.” 

Earlier this year I explained why I believe conversion therapy should be banned across Canada for everyone, including for adults. Since I was not a minor when I went through my own six years of conversion therapy with a licensed psychiatrist, I am left to wonder if this new law could have prevented my own conversion experience, or at least held my former psychiatrist accountable for his actions, had my treatment occurred more recently. For that matter, I wonder if the new law could at all help other adults who might find themselves in a situation now that is similar to mine some two decades ago. 

First, a bit of a disclaimer: though it may be obvious to most, I am not a lawyer or any kind of legal expert. I am a gay man who experienced a form of conversion therapy. Since then I’ve advocated for stronger regulations, and eventually, legal bans, surrounding conversion therapy. I started advocating for these changes long before I even knew the words “conversion therapy,” because I don’t think it matters so much what this practice is called as what it has the potential to do: kill. I’ve learned over the years that my position as a gay man and survivor may not always align with what government can, or will, do in passing legislation, but I remain committed to speaking on behalf of myself as a gay person and a survivor.

As it stands, the proposed Criminal Code amendment would define “conversion therapy” as:

“. . . a practice, treatment or service designed to change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual or gender identity to cisgender, or to repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviour. For greater certainty, this definition does not include a practice, treatment or service that relates (a) to a person’s gender transition; or (b) to a person’s exploration of their identity or to its development.” 

Five offences would then be added to the Code: a) causing a person to undergo conversion therapy against their will; (b) causing a child to undergo conversion therapy; (c) doing anything for the purpose of removing a child from Canada with the intention that they would undergo conversion therapy outside Canada; (d) advertising an offer to provide conversion therapy; and (e) receiving financial or other material benefit from the provision of conversion therapy. Courts would also be authorized to order that advertisements for conversion therapy be disposed of or deleted. 

In terms of prohibiting conversion therapy for adults, the only part of the new law that would apply is the first offence, delineated under the heading “Forced conversion therapy”:

“Everyone who knowingly causes a person to undergo conversion therapy against the person’s will is (a) guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than five years; or (b) guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.” 

During a presser also on March 9, Justice Minister David Lametti further explained:

“With respect to adults, we are criminalizing where there has been coercion, so the person is not making the decision necessarily of their own free will  . . . We felt that a competent adult could conceivably defend the right in a court to consent to this kind of activity and we felt that we couldn’t move ahead in that case scenario simply because of the Charter of Rights.” 

Generally speaking, I have grave concerns with the idea of dividing a ban on conversion therapy up by age—prohibiting it for minors, not prohibiting it explicitly for adults—since it implies that a criminal offence is warranted because of the harm conversion therapy causes to some (minors), but that there may still be something about conversion therapy that is useful or at least not as harmful to others (adults). Rather than focusing on the fact that conversion therapy is a fraudulent practice (it does not work, and any claim to the contrary is fraudulent) and causes harm for all (as agreed by virtually every valid health regulator globally), it refocuses on the issues of “choice” and “coercion”—that an adult could conceivably still “choose” one of these treatments “of their own free will.” 

Issues of choice and coercion deflect attention away from what, I believe, should be the primary concern: fraudulence and harm. 

Either conversion therapy is fraudulent and harmful, in which case it would be true for all and a ban should apply to everyone, or else conversion therapy is not fraudulent and harmful, in which case there is no need for a ban for anyone. Besides, at what point can it be said that an LGBT person is coerced into trying to “change” their sexuality or gender? Under what circumstances do they potentially “choose” a form of conversion therapy “of their own free will”? How is a person’s “will” even gauged? 

While a helping professional could, conceivably, act in a way that is considered coercive, what I know to be true is that LGBT clients will also, always, bring to the helping relationship their own history of having had already been coerced by a lifetime of messages, not all of them explicit, that said they would never be able to be themselves but would need to “change” in order to be accepted, even loved. Conversion therapy is not just any kind of therapy; in fact, it is not any kind of real therapy at all, and so the world in which these people exist, prior to seeking help, must also be considered. In its current wording, the proposed ban would be akin to banning slavery for minors but not explicitly for adults because some “could conceivably defend the right in a court to consent to this kind of activity.” Like slavery, the LGBT adult could only ever defend the right to consent to this kind of activity because of society’s earlier oppression over them. The fact that anyone, including adults, would seek out or fall prey to conversion therapy today speaks to society’s pressure of conformity over LGBT people—they have internalized their oppressors’ messages and now go about the business of oppressing themselves. Bill C-8’s focus on “consent” and “coercion” instead of on conversion therapy’s fraudulence and harm, is misdirected and fails to recognize the antecedent impact of homophobia and transphobia on the lives of all LGBT people everywhere.

★★ 

Over the years, many people have asked me how I could have sued my former psychiatrist for a therapy that I, myself, presumably consented to, especially as I was 24 years old, a legal adult, when I first met him. This issue of “consent” was one of the first questions my lawyer asked me when we initially discussed a possible medical malpractice suit: Did I “consent” to the therapy? Did I “choose“ it? 

For those who have the time, reading my book, The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir, may answer this question. I’d by lying if I said I didn’t write my book, at least in part, to try and answer it even to myself. 

Now that I am a good many years on the other side of the trauma of that experience, I can safely say that even the suggestion that I may have ever consented to or chosen, of my own free will, the kind of treatment that the doctor ended up using on me is completely blind to the potential practices of trying to change a person’s sexual orientation (as, I think, it would also be for others, trying to change their gender), the vulnerability of anyone who seeks therapy, for whatever reason, and the power differential implicit to all therapeutic relationships. 

People typically reach out to a helping professional during a time of crisis. In a best case scenario, clients are able to explain their life situation and the reasons for seeking help; in a worse case scenario, which is far more common, they are too emotionally distraught to articulate much of anything. Maybe they know enough to say they need some guidance; maybe they’ve been forced into treatment by life circumstance beyond their control—a breakdown, a divorce, etc. It would not be uncommon for the deeper issues that drove the person to seek help to take months, even years, before unfolding. 

For myself, I had not approached my psychiatrist in order to change my sexuality. During our first meeting, I told the doctor I was gay but that my parents had rejected me because of my sexuality. I also explained that I’d been sexually abused as a child but had never dealt with the abuse. Depressed, suicidal, anxious and with persistent insomnia, it is no exaggeration to say that I was in the “worse case scenario”—too emotionally distraught to articulate much of anything, except to say that I needed help. If my “will” desired anything, early on, it was simply to feel better; the rest I left up to the doctor, the medical professional. 

I began the psychiatrist’s treatment model, a form of primal scream therapy. One by one, over a period of months and then years, the doctor introduced various practices into my therapy: a sedative and an antidepressant for insomnia and depression; various causation theories, including the explanation that my history of sexual abuse had created the false identity of homosexual. My treatment’s goal, the doctor explained, would be to face that trauma through repeated “primal” regressions in order to heal and thereby revert to what I was prior to the abuse: a heterosexual. This one tactic alone, the doctor’s ideological interpretation of what he thought it meant for me to be gay, redirected my treatment on a trajectory that I could never have anticipated or fully understood at the time. 

Eventually, the doctor explained that everything we were doing in my therapy—primal regressions, near-fatal doses of various prescription medications, weekly injections of ketamine hydrochloride, reparenting techniques, aversion therapy—would all help “correct the error” of my homosexuality. 

One main question I’ve been asked over the years is why I stayed in this “therapy.” The question itself seems to lack any great insight, or empathy, into what could possibly compel a person to remain in an abusive relationship, a dynamic that is not, of course, restricted to domestic partnerships. Conversion therapy is an abusive relationship: its perpetrator is the person in authority; the victim is the vulnerable person seeking help. While minors may be forced by a parent or guardian into one of these treatments, the kind of “force” that compels an adult into, or to stay in, this kind of situation is often related far more to their own internal belief in the lie that their sexual orientation or gender identity is somehow “broken,” and needs to be healed. Their own apparent “choice to stay,” however, does not make the subsequent treatment any less coercive, or dangerous. In my case, the doctor introduced all of his practices into my therapy over a period of years. The last thing I thought about was whether or not we were engaging in a form of conversion therapy; instead, we focused on healing past trauma. Long before I met the doctor I had been raised to believe the lie that sexual abuse could make a person gay, and so by the time I was deep into treatment I accepted as truth what turned out to be the false promise of “correction.” 

Over the years, my psychiatrist produced various forms that he told me to sign and so I did—through the haze of my medicated stupor—and he later then used as evidence during my malpractice suit against him several years after leaving treatment. On paper, I had “consented”—not to the practice of conversion therapy, words never mentioned on the forms, but to his use of some of the medications and the re-parenting techniques in order to treat my “official” diagnosis and reason for therapy: depression. Consent was definitely lost along the way, but even at the start of that relationship it is difficult to know how true consent could have ever been given while under the influence of medication and such distress.

To this day I still believe the only thing I had consented to was the doctor’s invitation of trust—his claim that he knew the best way out of my misery. The level of betrayal I experienced after leaving his care, withdrawing from the last of the medications, gaining back some semblance of sanity and realizing the full extent of our malevolent pact, left me shell-shocked. 

In 2020, the most publicly known “change“ treatments are through faith-based or religious organizations, which often describe their practices as “helping” homosexual or transgender people. Many times the goals are overt, as in the memoir Boy Erased, when a young person knows beforehand that the treatment’s aim will be to change their sexuality—indeed, the client (often, but not always, a minor) or their guardian seeks out treatment for this purpose. Other times, as in my case, and, I believe, probably the case of many other adults, the ultimate plan of the therapy can remain covert—clients may be lead down a path not of their own, initial, intent, or else a history of trauma is erroneously conflated with their struggle over sexual orientation or gender and the therapy becomes implicitly homophobic or transphobic but remains opaque to the client, who remains trusting that the helper has their best interest at heart. 

In these cases in particular it is important to remember that conversion therapy is ideology—it is a belief in the brokenness of people by virtue of their homosexuality or trans identity, and speaks to the intent of the practitioner in their goal that the sexuality or gender of the client can then be “cured,” “corrected,” or “healed” through various therapeutic or religious interventions. Practitioners never refer to themselves as practicing anything remotely called ”conversion therapy”; not all who end up going through one of these treatments always understands that they are undergoing something called conversion therapy; they certainly don’t always label it that way. What is true for us all is that when we feel bad and seek help, we trust that our helper will not hurt us even more. 

Adults are even more likely than minors to initiate a helping relationship, both secular and faith-based, but that does not prevent them from becoming susceptible to the influence of the practitioner. “The patient enters therapy in need of help and care,” writes author Judith Herman, M.D., in her book Trauma and Recovery.

“By virtue of this fact, she voluntarily submits herself to an unequal relationship in which the therapist has superior status and power. Feelings related to the universal childhood experience of dependence on a parent are inevitably aroused. These feelings, known as transference, further exaggerate the power imbalance in the therapeutic relationship and render all patients vulnerable to exploitation. It is the therapist’s responsibility to use the power that has been conferred upon her only to foster the recovery of the patient, resisting all temptations to abuse. This promise, which is central to the integrity of any therapeutic relationship, is of special importance to patients who are already suffering as a result of another’s arbitrary and exploitative exercise of power” (1992, p. 134-35).

Indeed, implicit in all of these relationships is the fact that the client is vulnerable to the innate power differential of that relationship. For this reason alone, the proposed legislation’s use of the word “will” seems entirely redundant—as a client in one of these relationships our will is already broken, or at least we experience it that way, which is why we have sought help, although our perceived “brokenness” can also be worsened significantly or taken advantage of by the tactics of the practitioner. 

Another way of looking at it is that the new law’s reference to the word “will” makes it sound as if there will be times in these relationships when the client is not vulnerable; when they are not consenting to whatever treatment the practitioner enforces; when in fact they have complete and autonomous agency—control over their “free will”—while also under the influence of whatever messages from their history may have groomed their belief systems, and then, of course, other powerful dynamics that will arise in the course of treatment (e.g., the medications, in my case)—a suggestion that is entirely false and does not adequately reflect the reality of the helping relationship. 

Similarly, Justice Minister Lametti’s reference to the word “coercion” makes it sound as if the act of conversion therapy could be anything other than coercive—that there may be some forms of conversion therapy that could be considered non-coercive—and of course that also is not true. All forms of conversion therapy—all treatments aimed at changing or suppressing a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity—are inherently coercive in that they exist solely because of some LGBT people’s pre-existing confusion and vulnerability around their sexual orientation and gender identity, which is directly attributable to society’s earlier coercion over them. This is true regardless of whether or not the client seemingly “consents” to treatment, and it is disingenuous to imply that in certain cases it could be otherwise. 

One argument against any kind of legal ban on conversion therapy today is that some who oppose these bans state that in a free and democratic society adults should retain the right to “choose” these treatments, if that is what they want. What I find most troubling about this argument in particular, and by government’s apparent concession to it, is that these adults’ “right to choose” to live any way they please, even to think anything they want, does not mean that practitioners should be given free reign to reinforce these treatments through their own programs or tax exempt organizations. Adults have the right to think and do as they please, even to discuss those thoughts in the privacy of their own lives—a person who is attracted to members of the same sex can “choose” to live a celibate life or to marry a person of the opposite sex, for instance, if that is what they want. Helping professionals, conversely, absolutely do not have the right to practice, advertise or charge a fee to anyone, regardless of that person’s age, for a kind of treatment that is proven to be fraudulent and can cause harm. Consenting adults can think and do as they please, so long as they do not cause harm to others. Helping professionals—and in this definition I include all faith leaders—are bound by a code of ethics that says, “First do no harm.” I think someone named Christ even went so far as to say: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

★★ 

For years I had hoped that a federal ban on conversion therapy would be an answer to what I experienced 25 years ago. On some level, I suppose all of my advocacy has been like a fight to win back the life that was stolen from me—that if I could use my own past to help prevent the recurrence of similar forms of abuse on others today, then all of my experiences would not have been for nothing.

But the way it’s written now, this new ban is not any kind of answer, at least not a helpful one, to what I experienced: it would not have prevented the kind of treatment that I went through before; it would not have held my former psychiatrist accountable for his efforts to try to change my homosexuality; and I doubt very much that it will help protect others from going through anything similar today. 

For years I had thought that any federal ban on conversion therapy would be better than no federal ban on conversion therapy, but now I’m not so sure. The way it’s written now, this new law sends the message that some forms of conversion therapy are coercive, while others aren’t; that conversion therapy is both a dangerous practice for some, but not for others—it sends the message that conversion therapy could be anything other than inherently coercive, or dangerous. 

The way it’s written now, this new law sends the message that there are situations under which an adult could reasonably “consent” to enter into a form of conversion therapy; that there will necessarily be a moment in the helping relationship when the adult client has enough clarity of mind or prescience to consent to what may later turn out to be a form of conversion therapy; that it is even possible to consent to what has been shown and proven to be a fraudulent and harmful practice; that it will ever, ultimately, even be helpful for an adult to consent to more of the same kind of coercive practice over their sexuality or gender that led them to seek out the professional or spiritual intervention in the first place, not to mention that it could ever be morally or ethically appropriate for that professional to then perpetuate the same kind of coercion over their client that brought them into treatment initially. 

The way it’s written now, this new law sends the message that the “force” that may drive a client into one of these treatments will always be from another person—rather than from the lies around their sexuality or gender that they’ve been taught for years, probably their whole lives, to believe as true.

The way it’s written now, this new law sends the message that the adult client will always even know that what is happening to them through the course of their emotionally-charged, mentally-fatiguing, and spiritually eviscerating treatment is conversion therapy—and that is just not true. None of this is necessarily true. None of it was true for me, so by the law of averages I know it will not always be true for others. 

The fact is, the way it’s written now, this new law will not protect all LGBT people from the experience of conversion therapy; the way it’s written now, this new law will actually embolden, if only inadvertently, so-called conversion therapy as a valid form of treatment that would be both outlawed and allowed—and that message alone will make these forms of hatred and ignorance prevail.

Conversion therapy is an expression of homophobia and transphobia from within a helping professional environment, it is institutionalized torture, and so the aim with a ban should be to break down and obliterate systems of prejudice and injustice that have targeted and caused undue suffering to countless individuals—not simply to win incremental gains from within the structures of oppression. Conversion therapy is a lie that those who practice, perpetuate, and those who fall prey, forget, and so the aim with a ban should be to firmly and resolutely destabilize and eradicate orders of hatred and intolerance—not simply to pick and choose which kinds of bigotry may be less harmful than others or under what circumstances some people could reasonably “consent” to bigotry. That some adults could still “defend the right in a court to consent to this kind of activity” is not the point; the point is that the very thing these adults would consent to is what a ban on conversion therapy should seek to abolish. 

Darkness Lurks

Lately I’ve been watching a lot of horror movies on Netflix. Isolated, at times quarantined due to COVID-19, I have resisted all better judgment to the contrary and submerged myself in one movie after another. And always very late at night. Call me crazy; or maybe there’s far more to it than that.

I’ve never been a fan of gratuitous violence, so my perception of most “modern horror” movies has often left me lacklustre, but here’s what I’ve learned lately about the content of many of today’s horror movies: most are about trauma. It’s curious to me why they would all fall under the genre of “horror,” but I suppose there are few things more terrifying, more horrifying, than incidents of trauma, as Stephen King probably knows all too well. “Trauma movies,” as a genre heading, likely would also not get as many clicks.

How we’ve all been traumatized and what happens to our inner demons certainly does make for the most hideous viewings, as I was reminded even last night while watching The Invitation, or Gerald’s Game a few nights earlier. We don’t have to think too closely on the specifics of our own particular histories—I suppose that’s the point; that’s the allure of watching a good “horror” movie in the comfort and relative safety of our homes, all snuggled up cozy under a duvet, or even sitting in a crowded theatre, munching popcorn, scared witless. We return to horror but are safe from horror. In our own limited ways, we exorcise ourselves of demons. But they’re never really gone. They never leave us entirely.

Demons have a way of leaving behind their residues. Like “burnt toast,” the character Dick Halloran says to young Danny in King’s The Shining. And they all speak to us in a language often only we, their survivors, can understand. Growing up, trauma had never been a foreign concept to me personally. Both my parents had survived World War II—my mother, after escaping three years in a communist concentration camp in the former Yugoslavia, my father, an orphan, after fleeing communist Hungary—yet they’d also never wanted to talk much about their “former lives in Europe.” They’d silenced themselves, or maybe were silenced because they did not have the emotional vocabulary to talk about their traumas. As an adult, I can now understand that they also did what they needed to do in order to survive.

As a child, however, my parents’ lessons cascaded down to me and preempted even the possibility that I could ever talk about my own childhood abuse. I, too, had been silenced, and then I learned to silence myself. Six years of a form of “conversion therapy” silenced my sexuality, and I’d felt silenced while fighting for legal vindication. No one, however, could silence my word. Silence equalled death, so I wrote my book, The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir, to find my voice, speak up and out, not die silent. I wrote to resist invisibility, and shame, the lies of these “therapies.” Words helped me heal, and each one was the truth.

Or at least this is what I tell myself, now; this is my narrative. The “story” of my past.

According to Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D., in his 2014 book The Body Keeps the Score, a new generation of antipsychotics are the top selling drugs in the United States, with $1,526,228,000 spent on Abilify (a 2014 figure), one of the many available. I wonder how this figure has grown these last six years. In 2014, half a million children in the US took antipsychotic drugs, which are often used to make abused children more manageable, less aggressive, even as they also decrease motivation, play, curiosity, and stunt the development of well-functioning and contributing members of society. Where does the experience of trauma go when it is stunted by medication, wiped off the screen of our conscious minds? One has only to look at the rise in graphic violence in television and film, with movies about zombies or cannibalism, “torture porn,” as it is now referenced, even the current plethora of “horror” films, and we can see how a projection of what’s been erased, through medication and other means, is potentially played out around us. What we cannot contain we project. More than a few wars, I’m sure, have been started by men with demons that needed to be projected. The doses of medication that my former psychiatrist prescribed far exceeded any kind of approved or recommended levels, but I did as I was told, because my doctor was the expert. Or at least that’s what I thought.

Somewhere deep beneath all words, maybe near the bottom of the sea inside, the timelessness of my own particular traumas has remained, coded into my cells. I often think now that it doesn't matter an iota what we tell ourselves about how we have or have not survived; our past shows itself, regardless. On one level I can say that I have healed a great deal; on another level I am drawn to the darkness that also repels. I return to what I escaped, not in reality but figuratively, ceaselessly. Even to this day I still dream about the doctor who practiced this “therapy” on me. I am crying in my sleep, afraid that I will never escape. I am trapped, still, to this day. Trapped by the limitations that the past trauma has imposed on my present days. For anyone who has ever been the victim of sexual assault or rape, we know that the assault did not end when the physical incident concluded, “in the past”; it lives on in the body of the person who was traumatized.

I struggle with suggestions that traumas of the past can be fully healed. Spoiler alert: I don’t think they can. We can learn; scar tissues form and conceal abrasions, physical and emotional, psychic, and spiritual—but the point is there are demons. They linger, and often in the dark. I can never get back the years that were stolen from me, not just from this “therapy” but also as a result of the childhood sexual abuse. All the years of depression and suicidal thoughts, eating disorders and body dysmorphia, unreasonable fears, staring into faces at schools or in places of employment but fighting to breathe through waves of panic. And then the sex. Sex has never been easy, even to this day. Sex will likely always resurrect the past, take me back to the therapy, what the doctor did to me to silence my sexuality, how the man who abused me as a child left me decimated. My childhood night terrors started not long after that incident in my elementary school, and in all of them I fought to escape life through an invisible hole in the air. I wanted death, or what came before life. I wanted peace.

Here’s another thought I can’t escape: if many of today’s most popular horror movies are about trauma, and the popularity of these movies has never been higher, what does that say about the people who are drawn to these movies as a form of entertainment?

My days today are highly functional; I work, play, have friends, family; I shop, cook, eat, clean, iron, read, write, watch films, listen to music, exercise, discuss interesting topics and try my best to be good, and moral, to not succumb to the darkness. But I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t lurk.

How to Make Chicken Goulash (“Paprikás Csirke”)

Not that long ago, I found some old paystubs from my father’s job as a mechanic in a saw factory where he worked for over 25 years, until his retirement in 1990. The particular paystub was from 1972, and his hourly earnings were $3.26.

Three dollars and twenty-six cents an hour.

My parents had five children and a mortgage. My brothers and sisters and I all went to private schools. We had piano lessons, always a fridge full of food, our own bedrooms, clean clothes and toys, roast beef dinners every Sunday, and colourfully wrapped presents for each of our birthdays, Christmases and Easters, every year. Looking back today, I don’t know how my parents did it.

One of our “special” meals was Chicken Goulash, or Paprikás Csirke, my father would always say in his native Hungarian. It’s also the first meal I ate when I arrived into Budapest, Hungary, in 2004, a trip I will always cherish because it’s when and where I started to write my book, The Inheritance of Shame. I’ll also never forget that first meal in Budapest. I’d arrived by train, late night. Thrilled beyond words to be in my father’s birth city, the rapturous Budapest, I had failed to notice that the restaurant I’d chosen for my inaugural meal did not accept Euros, only Forints. At the end of my meal, several glasses of Bulls Blood later and not speaking a word of Hungarian, I went about trying to pay for my meal when the waitress, not speaking a word of English, tried to explain something that I could not hope to understand. Finally, the couple in the adjoining table, speaking both languages, translated for us both. Reluctantly, the waitress explained in Hungarian to the couple, who explained in English to me, that I could go in search of a bank machine, as long as I left my belongings in the restaurant, which by then was also closing 15 minutes later. So that’s what I did, frantically. I left my belongings with people I did not know in a restaurant that was about to close in a city whose language I did not speak while I ran for blocks in search of a bank machine, which, at least in 2004, the year Hungary joined the European Union, was still far less common than in North America. Finally, blocks later and panting like a dog out of breath, I found a bank machine, withdrew the Forints, then ran the blocks back to the restaurant, paid my bill and went on my merry way. Such was my introduction to Budapest.

As for Paprikás Csirke – though labor intensive, the payoff is definitely worth the effort. Served over egg noodles is great, but for a little more effort (and even great pleasure), you can make homemade potato dumplings, or “Nockerl,” as we called them at home. Finally, Cold Cucumber Salad is the perfect side dish.

3 - 4 large onions, chopped
A whole chicken, cut in pieces
3 - 4 red bell peppers, washed, cored and quartered
2 large carrots, peeled and quartered
2 celery stalks, quartered
1 parsnip, peeled and quartered
1 tomato, quartered
Several cloves of garlic, minced
Chicken broth
3 - 4 heaping Tbls Hungarian Paprika
Caraway seeds (optional)
Worcestershire sauce
Soya sauce
Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO)
Salt and pepper to taste
Sour cream
Flour

Cut the chicken into pieces, wash, pat dry, set aside.

Chop the onions and sauté in EVOO over a medium heat for at least 20 to 30 minutes, or until well caramelized. Add the garlic and roast; add more EVOO and the paprika, then the chicken pieces, searing on each side. Do not burn. Add all the vegetables, seasoning, and a little bit of stock. Cover and steam a few minutes, adding more and more stock until all the chicken and vegetables are just barely covered. Bring to a boil; turn down and simmer, stirring often, until chicken falls from the bone, about 1 hour.

To thicken sauce before serving, add sour cream and a few tablespoons of flour to a serving Pyrex dish over heat. Once well mixed, add sauce and chicken to the sour cream mixture.

Dumplings (“Nockerl”)

6 Eggs
8 - 10 Tbl Flour
2 tsp salt
Water

Beat eggs lightly, add salt and flour. Mix well. Slowly add a bit of cold water, then more flour, until very thick and smooth. Bring a pot of water to a rolling boil. Add salt. Spoon one teaspoon of batter into boiling water, and repeat, one at a time, moving quickly in order to use up all batter within a minute. Bring dumplings to a boil and cook for about 5 minutes (dumplings will triple in size once cooked). Drain and add a bit of melted butter. Serve with the chicken goulash.

Cold Cucumber Salad

Long English Cucumber
Dill
Sour Cream
Salt

Slice the cucumber thinly. Salt well and sprinkle with dill until well covered. Refrigerate for at least an hour. The cucumber will release a lot of juice. Before serving, add sour cream (or half sour cream and mayonnaise). Sprinkle with paprika. Serve as a side dish to the Goulash and Dumplings.

Religion as a Front for Tyranny

It is often criticized that bans on conversion therapy are “anti-religious,” that they impede on citizens' freedom of religion. To this claim I quote Margaret Atwood from the Introduction to her novel The Handmaid's Tale: “It is against the use of religion as a front for tyranny; which is a different thing altogether.”

Bans on conversion therapy are not, in and of themselves, anti-religious; bans on conversion therapy, especially those that operate through some kind of religious organization, do not, in and of themselves, threaten anyone’s freedom of religion. I, myself, having experienced conversion therapy and now advocate for these types of legal bans, still strongly believe in the value of religion and “faith.” But “conversion” practices that are enforced by religious organizations use religion as a front for tyranny; which is a different thing altogether. Religion, for these organizations and the people who run them, is erroneously conflated with opinions of ignorance and hatred, and so any opposition to what they say or do around issues of sexuality or gender are understood to be opposition to religion. It is not.

Opposition to religious organizations that enforce conversion treatments is opposition to their use of religion as a front for tyranny. The difference is subtle but vast, and I sincerely hope that all governments, both local and federal, currently or in the future considering any kind of legal ban on conversion therapy, understand this difference. Religious-based organizations that enforce any kind of conversion treatment tyrannize people into conformity; legal bans of their treatments oppose this tyranny, not religion.

Map and Territory

In her seminal book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), philosopher Judith Butler claimed that gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original. Her position mirrored that of the Polish-American philosopher Alfred Korzybski’s about the endless mapping of maps which all seem to point to some unknowable territory, and also to Gregory Bateson’s, in his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), regarding the confusion between the map and the territory, and the essential impossibility of ever really knowing what the territory is:

We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out . . . and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. […] Always the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum (pp. 454-455).

In the case of Butler’s theory on “performativity” the question was of gender, the fact that there is no original to the representation of it today. If we push the question of “homosexuality” back, what we find is a similar “infinite regress” for the mental world of the social construction of homosexuality as identity is but a series of maps without territory. We can never really know the “Ding-an-Sich” (the “thing itself”) cautioned Immanuel Kante two centuries ago, yet this is precisely what we have said in self-identifying as homosexual: not only that we have found in the word, which is but a map, the thing itself, but that we are that thing, we are the word. “[T]o describe something as seamless as lived experience, one needs categories,” David Valentine once wrote. “Yet a danger arises when those categories come to be seen as valid descriptions of experience rather than as tools used to apprehend that experience” (2004, p. 217).

The problem, Korzybski explained, was in our patterns of thought, or orientation, which was based on an Aristotelian dualism, what Monique Wittig called the “categories of opposition” (1990, p. 5): light/dark, even/odd, new/old, straight/curved, good/bad, woman/man, white/black. As pointed out by Bateson, when presented with the question of the map/territory confusion in the question, “‘Do you ask what it’s made of—earth, fire, water, etc?’” or the question, “‘What is its pattern?’” (1972, p. 449), Aristotle chose a system of patterns (maps) over essentiality (territory). The word “homosexuality” answers a question about a person’s patterns (map), not about what they are made of (territory).

Korzybski, through his theory of general semantics and “the denial of the ‘is’ of identity” (1933/1958, p. 11), sought to re-orient the individual to a non-Aristotelian way of thinking in order to avoid such map/territory confusions. According to Korzybski, in the Aristotelian orientation words are understood primarily through their “intensional” definitions, whereas in a non-Aristotelian orientation they are understood through their “extensional” definitions. Logicians use the terms “intension” to describe the assumed intrinsic meaning of words, and “extension” to describe the objects that those words refer to in the material world. Different philosophers or mathematicians have distinguished intension and extension from one another in different ways, for example, through the words “sense” (for intension) and “meaning” (for extension), or semantic and pragmatic, respectively, or even a priori and a posteriori types of knowledge. 

While an intensional definition of homosexual might be a person who has sex with or is sexually attracted to members of the same sex, an extensionally defined homosexual, conversely, would need to point to every single person in the material world (past, present, future) who has or might ever have sex with, or erotically desire, members of the same sex—an impossibility, considering that some, perhaps many, of these people might never admit to such a thing, or even recognize, within themselves, said desire since it would likely fall outside the map of what they believe to be “a homosexual.” In fact, the material world contains no such “thing” as a homosexual because by its very definition the word, having been imbued with meaning, is solely intensional.

We live in a map-oriented, intensionally-defined culture. People conflate words with the objects that those words point to. The surrealist painter Rene Magritte understood this when he painted a picture of a pipe with the captioned phrase, “This is not a pipe.” George W. Bush, former President of the United States, would never have been able to induce much fear by projecting images of an Iraqi mother coddling her infant child, but he could and often did talk about “The Axis of Evil.” Likewise, right-wing fundamentalists, while debating the “issue” of homosexuality, do not speak about one’s next door neighbours named John or Frank or Sally and Heather, but they can and often do talk about an intensional definition of homosexuality, “The Homosexual,” to great effect.

When 2012 United States Presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann, an Evangelical Christian, referenced homosexuality as “personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement” (Stolberg, NY Times, 2011a), her intensional use of the word “homosexuality” was not a dialectical rendering of meaning based in history, reason, fact, or “proper evaluation,” or else she might have more accurately said that oppression causes personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement. To paraphrase Wittig from “The Category of Sex” (1982), it is oppression that created homosexuality, not the contrary. Bachmann reversed cause and effect so that instead of oppression it was now homosexuality itself that had caused victimhood. Bachmann’s words capitalized on a “similarity of structure in the map-territory relationship” through a “deliberate, professionally planned distortion” of the intensionally-defined word, homosexuality, which “results only in breeding fears, anxieties, hates, etc., which disorganize individuals and even nations” (Korzybski, 1933/1958, p. ix).

As maps, Bachmann’s words carried no meaning outside of their insular ideology: they did not point to any territory in the material world but became their own referent, “the thing in itself.” It should come as no surprise that her husband, Marcus Bachmann, PhD., has long operated Christian counselling centres that advocate conversion (“pray away the gay”) therapy, since conversion therapy, simply stated, operates in maps, not territories. That millions worldwide believe what the Bachmanns and others just like them still to this day have to say about homosexuality speaks to the power of the intensionally-defined word. As Wittig noted: “Meaning is not visible, and as such appears to be outside of language” (1983, p. 68). Always one must look beyond words, or trans-linguistically, to find meaning. For advocates of conversion therapy, however, the intensional word is now “the thing.”

Harm of Hatred

I am a 55-year-old gay man and I am of a generation that remembers the beginning of AIDS, and even before it was named what it’s become, when there was only fear and panic, threat of extinction in the midst of the Cold War. Something about those days, pre-1985, still aches deep inside. I want it all to end, and I want to live—to accept what is, what and who I am. But my heart is bruised and the pain lingers on, like an echo that won’t quite die down toward complete and restful silence.

I spent years writing a book, a memoir, about some very personal experiences with a psychiatrist, my “coming out” and familial relationships, but what I did not explicitly state in it was that AIDS drove many of my decisions early on in life—my fear of self, my fear of contagion, my fear of sex, all related to the spread of a disease, a plague, that at the time seemed synonymous with what it meant to “be gay.” Even to this day I cannot shake off the absurdity of that belief because at the time it was all-too real, it was cultural, and it was everywhere, no matter how much some of us (and I) resisted it. In more recent years I’ve learned not to fear myself, sex as an expression of desire and, at times, love, but I also wonder how much of those toxic messages from my formative years still plague me to this day. 

Over the last decade or so my family doctor has been wanting me to get an HIV test, not out of any particular concern other than as a precautionary measure, along with all other blood work, and while I know it’s completely irrational, each time he’s given me the requisition for the test I’ve placed it under a pile of books in my home and ignored it as best I could. Each time I found it again, and then again, and I thought about the test, I felt that old fear and panic rise up. Anxiety, at times, has overwhelmed; it has crushed me into depression. All the reports and even friends tell me that “AIDS” is no longer a death sentence, and while I know this to be true, shame from those early years, fear of death and familial estrangement as a direct result of contraction, of contagion—of the erroneous conflation of homosexuality and disease—have so deeply burrowed into my being, infected me, that I am not sure I will ever be able to free myself from their poisonous messages. I try, and then I fail, and I try again, each day.

Finally, just a few months ago, I asked a friend if he would come with me to the lab, as a support while I received the test. There was no real reason for my fear, as I’d been abstinent for years—again, likely as a result of ancient fears—but none of that mattered. The relief I felt after my doctor’s office told me, weeks later, that “of course you’re negative” hardly even reassured. It is one thing not to be infected, and as I’ve learned, it is another thing entirely not to feel the shame and fear of my youth. I try, and then I fail, and each day I try again.

I do not think, it all honestly, it was ever “AIDS” that drove me into bad decisions, or even into the fear of self and sex, but the harm of hatred, and ignorance, and sadness over my own lost youth.

How to Make Palaschintas (Hungarian Crepes)

All cultures and nationalities have their own version of the crepe, or dessert pancake—and for Hungarians, it’s the palaschinta! As a child at home we always ate our palaschintas as a main course, even though it’s more of a dessert (you can make savoury versions, but we always ate sweetened palaschintas). Sometimes we’d start with homemade vegetable soup as an excuse to put something of nutritional substance in our stomachs first, but the soup was always just a reason to get to the main course: palaschintas.

Start by beating eggs in a mixer over medium; add the flour, sugar and salt and continue beating on low—you’ll get clumps if you add the milk too soon, so stick with the eggs and four first. Also, I always use 2% milk—I would not recommend trying to save calories by using skim milk (in fact, I sometimes add a bit of cream to richen it up even more). Once you have a well-mixed consistency, add the milk a bit at a time, then the vanilla at the end. I like to leave the batter sitting, covered, on a counter for at least an hour before flying, so it will also thicken up a bit over time. The final batter should be velvety, but not too thick.

For the frying, I’ve always used Crisco—some may want to use butter, but be forewarned: butter burns much more rapidly and Crisco actually adds really nice flavour. Add about half a teaspoon of Crisco to a crepe pan over medium heat, then a large ladle of the batter as soon as the pan starts to heat. Quickly tip the pan in all directions to spread evenly. Within about 20 seconds, flip the palaschinta or use a metal knife to gently lift and flip, careful not to tear. Add a bit more Crisco and continue frying, no more than 20 or so more seconds. Slide the palaschinta out of the pan and onto a plate. Continue until all the batter is used.

Spreading jam in the finished palaschinta before rolling up is already mouth watering enough (I’d recommend apricot, strawberry or raspberry jams, but any flavour, I’m sure, will please), maybe even with a tablespoon of ground walnuts, but the typical Hungarian filling is made with cottage cheese. For those who already like or even love cottage cheese—I’d say they’ll go nuts over this filling; for all those who may not even like cottage cheese, I’d recommend to just, please, give it a chance: it may change your life.

Separate one egg; beat the white until light and frothy, and set aside. In a separate bowl, beat the yolk and sugar until thick and lemony. Add the cottage cheese to the yolk mixture and continue mixing on low, then add the raisons and enough grated lemon rind to brighten and flavour. Fold in the egg white at end.

Since the filling has raw egg it should be eaten within a few days. Fill, roll up and refrigerate any leftovers, although I doubt they’ll last the night.


Palaschintas

6 eggs (organic, if possible)
6 to 8 heaping tablespoons of flour
Milk (I use 2%)
1 tsp salt
1 Tbl white sugar
1 tsp vanilla
(makes about 15)

Cottage Cheese Filling

1 egg, separated
500 gram-container cottage cheese (2% is best, organic if possible)
2 Tbl white sugar
Half-cup raisons (I always use black raisons)
Rind of 1 large lemon

How to Make Hungarian Goulash

In times of crisis, I say Cook!

Everyone has their favourite or most comforting childhood dish, and for me it's Hungarian goulash.

Stewing beef is the best to use; resist the temptation to buy more expensive cuts of meat, thinking that the more money you spend the better the result. Not true! Stick to stewing beef, which is typically already cubed when you buy it in your grocery store or butcher (you may need to cut each piece in half, as they are usually a bit too big, though). Chop your onions and sauté in extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) over a medium heat for at least 20 to 30 minutes, or until golden and well caramelized. Do not burn, which may mean adding a bit more EVOO as the onions reduce in volume. Just before the onions are ready, add the chopped garlic, roasting for about one more minute. At this point I usually remove most of the onions so the meat can have direct contact with the oil. Add more EVOO and the paprika; roast for a moment, then add the beef and sear on all sides, turning every minute. Add back all the onions, then the vegetables. When I made goulash like this in Europe, my 80-year old aunt said that Hungarian goulash never had vegetables "in the old world." I don't care; eventually they all cook down and add tons of flavour. Add the caraway, beef broth, soya, Worcestershire, a shot of ketchup. Bring to a boil. Turn down and simmer. The trick is to cook the goulash slow and long. If you like, near the end you can add a peeled potato to thicken.

A bowl on goulash on its own is perfect, maybe with some fresh crusty rye bread. Growing up, we always ate our goulash over roasted macaroni. Caramelizing the pasta, as opposed to straight out boiling it, adds a richness to the flavour that you just can't beat. 

Melt butter in a large pot over a medium heat. Add the macaroni and at least one teaspoon of salt. Turn the pasta in the melted butter for about 5 to 8 minutes, slowly roasting, until golden in colour. Add just enough boiling water to barely cover the pasta; cover and reduce to minimum for about 15 minutes. When done, fluff the macaroni and serve with the goulash.

3 - 4 large onions, chopped
Stewing beef, chopped in bite-sized chunks
3 - 4 heaping tablespoons of Hungarian paprika
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
3 - 4 red peppers, washed, cored and quartered
2 large carrots, peeled and quartered
2 celery stalks, quartered
1 parsnip, peeled and quartered
1 tomato, quartered
Several cloves of garlic, minced
Beef broth
Caraway seeds (optional)
Worcestershire sauce
Soya sauce
Ketchup
Salt and pepper to taste

Speaking Only For Myself

Speaking only for myself, the legal banning of conversion therapy always makes me personally think of the deeper issues that have pervaded my own life struggles. Like self-acceptance. I think that when people struggle with their homosexuality, for instance, what they’re really struggling with is their perception of what it means to “be homosexual,” what it means to “be gay.” This has certainly been the case for me. To be one’s self is the most natural thing in the world, but when we end up thinking (or have been culturally groomed to believe) that we are the projection of other people’s prejudices, that’s where it gets complicated. It’s like being trapped in a fun house of mirrors and all we can see are the distortions of who we are; we can never really see our true self.

I’m not so sure that social media actually helps in times like this because we end up being bombarded with varying opinions and distractions, and in the midst of so much chaos it’s next to impossible to find our own beliefs, to know our own true self. I know for myself that it feels as though social media constantly pulls me in too many directions and most have little to do with “me.” I think in many respects the struggle to find “my self” was easier before social media, before the internet, when all I had was my own broken heart. I’d like to think that the support I’ve received from others through social media somehow lifts me up, and of course many times it does; it has. But just as often it has pulled me down. More and more I find it harder and harder to hear my own thoughts, to be alone with myself, to discover what I, alone, believe, as opposed to which side or corner of the larger conversation I best belong. I’m not sure how to resolve this struggle for authenticity. I fear time is running out. Life will of course one day end, absolutely and forever, and what I most want to discover before it does is who I am. Most days I have no idea who I am. Each morning I rush to work and I do what others tell me, what’s expected of me, sometimes managing to assert my own individuality and make decisions but mostly ending up feeling like a cog in a wheel. All of it helps pay the rent and buys me food and so I hate to complain or seem ungrateful, but sometimes, at the end of my days, or even each morning, as I drink my four cups of bitter black coffee and set out on the roller coaster ride yet again, panic strikes my heart. I’m running out of time. What have I done with my life? Is this all there is?

I am a 55-year-old gay man and I am of a generation that remembers the beginning of AIDS, and even before it was named what it’s become, when there was only fear, and panic, threat of extinction in the midst of the Cold War. Something about those days, pre-1985, makes me still ache inside. I am bruised in my heart and the pain lingers on, like an echo that won’t quite die down toward complete and restful silence. I want it all to end, and I want to live. I want to accept what is, what and who I am, but am always on the search for what others believe, how they can validate me. If only I could validate myself, so I’d stop needing others to reaffirm my own existence. The life I’ve lived. 

Pride and Prejudice

On June 17, 2018, CBC journalist Wendy Mesley interviewed me for her Sunday morning show, “The Weekly,” about gay conversion therapy in Canada. Within a day of that interview, a link to my segment appeared on several websites, including, of course, on CBC’s site for “The Weekly.” 

That is—until just the other day.

Now when I search for my name on “The Weekly” site, nothing is found. If I search on the CBC main site, the June 17 episode is listed with the heading: “Gay conversion therapy in Canada,” followed by a summary: “Is gay conversion therapy growing in Canada? While there is much to celebrate during Pride month, there are faith-based groups in Canada planning events this summer that, LGBT activists say, are practising a version of ‘conversion therapy,’ which purports to change sexual orientation. Wendy Mesley talks to author Peter Gajdics about the influence of the controversy ideology.”

However, clicking on the body of the above paragraph brings up only an error message: “Sorry, we can’t find the page you requested, please try again from the homepage.”

Mesley had opened the actual segment, called “Pride and Prejudice,” by mentioning a man named Michael Carducci, from a U.S.-based organization called The Coming Out Ministry, who the 7th Day Adventist Church in Canada had invited to Nova Scotia to speak about being “freed from the chains of homosexuality.” She played a short video clip of Carducci: “Before I was even conscious,” he stated, “Satan began tying knots through the rope than became my life. I thought that God had made a mistake and I’d pray at night that I would wake up the next morning and I would be a girl.”

Mesley went on to reference another organization, called Journey Canada, based in Vancouver, B.C. She showed the image of one of their website pages, highlighting a section that read they offered “sound biblical teaching for the relationally and sexually broken.”

She showed a map of Canada, and said that Journey Canada was “big and growing, with ministries in 42 cities, offering retreats across the country. Last year, it raised over $600,000 in donations.”

Mesley continued: “LGBT activists say the group’s approach sounds a lot like conversion therapy—the idea that homosexuals are broken, and can be fixed with spiritual intervention.”

She then introduced me onto the program.

She mentioned that I had helped “persuade” the city of Vancouver to ban conversion therapy, and she asked for my thoughts about these faith-based groups and ministries in Canada. 

“It’s the same ideology of what I went through,” I said, “which is ‘love the sinner, hate the sin.’ It’s a shame-based approach to who a person is. ‘You are not to be, you are not to experience, you are not to desire these feelings in your body and in your mind,’ and so you do anything to exorcize yourself of them. That sets up a person for years of suffering and prolonged distress. This is torture.”

Mesley told me how both Journey Canada and The Coming Out Ministry state they are not involved in conversion therapy. “So I’m just wondering,’ she asked me, “is it conversion therapy?”

“I think a lot of these ministries change their language,” I said. “They’re much more subversive and subtle, so now they talk about ‘helping the homosexual.’ But it’s the same ideology; it starts with the same lie, which says a gay person, a trans person, is inherently broken because of their homosexuality or trans identity, and so they can ‘help them’—help them overcome this brokenness.”

Mesley asked me if I thought there was a “resurgence” of these types of “treatments, or healing, as they call it.”

“I don’t think it ever went away,” I said. “Conversion therapy is an umbrella term and these types of treatments happen subversively under many labels. Of course, people who practice them don’t refer to themselves as practising conversion therapy, so, the nature of these treatments is they’re very hidden. They’re covert.”

Mesley referenced the legal bans emerging in Canada—by legal statute in Ontario and health regulation in Manitoba (2015), and the recent city-wide ban in Vancouver. She asked me if I thought these bans were enough to “stop it.”

“No, it’s not enough to stop it. I’ve said to everyone, including through City Council [in Vancouver] in the process of getting the ban through, that these bans won’t stop them, because the nature of these treatments are they’re covert and subversive—but it’s a definite step in the right direction.” 

Mesley mentioned the obvious discrepancy in the language used by these organizations, since they state they don’t want to “change” people, but “then go on to say they are able to help people reconcile their faith with their physical desires, and to bring those together. And they end up happier. They end up with less desire for the same-sex person.” 

“When we’re talking about faith-based organizations in particular,” I responded, “you’re talking about wanting to belong, you’re talking about wanting to stay with your church, your community, your family, for sure, who’ve raised you with this faith. To lose contact with your family and your faith is enormously distressing. People have killed themselves over things like this. And so, when you’re faced with this, of course, sometimes you choose to stay with your faith, and you do whatever you need to do to suppress . . . the desires, your same-sex feelings.”

In closing, Mesley mentioned that CBC had contacted Journey Canada to ask them to respond to these concerns, and they had declined to comment. Then the interview wrapped.

For several weeks the interview, as a stand-alone segment, was available on-line. Now it is gone. For some reason, it has been severed. It is also not searchable.  

Why?

I emailed the producer of the show. He and I had spoken several times in the days leading up to the interview. Even as recent as July 4, this producer had emailed to ask for more information about Journey Canada’s “methodology.” I was happy to tell him what I knew, and he responded again and thanked me.

But now, he would not respond to my email, or even a voice mail that I left on his personal cell.

Fortunately, I was able to retrieve a lingering copy of the stand-alone interview,

Vancouver, Canada, Bans Conversion Therapy

On June 6, 2018, City Council in my hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia, unanimously approved a motion to ban conversion therapy in the city limits, making Vancouver the first city in Canada to pass such a law. I was one of three speakers who appeared in-chambers and addressed Council in support of this ban. In five brief minutes I detailed my history with this “therapy” and my reasons for approaching the city’s LGBTQ2+ Advisory Committee in 2017 with a recommendation for some kind of public statement denouncing these treatments, or better yet, an outright ban. I was thrilled when the Committee invited me to help them draft the motion that was later approved and submitted to Council for consideration. “Conversion therapy is a problem of ideology,” I told Council on June 6, “not nationality”—so Canada must do its own part in preventing these treatments from continuing. Legal bans are an important step forward.

I have written elsewhere about my frustration around the city’s delay in considering this ban, but I have to say how proud I felt when several Councillors voiced their shock that these “pseudo-scientific therapies” are continuing at all, with anyone, anywhere. When I first approached the Committee last year, I had sincerely hoped a ban in Vancouver would be for all, adults and minors alike, since experience has taught me that even adults can fall prey to these forms of institutionalized hatred, which are every bit as harmful no matter what the person’s age. I was disappointed to learn, only a few days before Council’s meeting, that the motion had been rewritten to cover only minors, although, again, the fact that the motion was even being advanced seemed promising. All this to say that when one Councillor suddenly introduced an amendment so that the motion would ban conversion therapy “outright”—not only for minors but also for adults—I almost burst into tears. “This is a fraudulent practice,” another Councillor stated. “Not only is it cruel and dangerous, it’s fraudulent, so legally, we should be fine in preventing it happening to anyone.” At no time during the two-year complaint against my former psychiatrist through the College of Physicians and Surgeons, nor the four-year medical malpractice suit I filed against the doctor, did I feel so vindicated as when I heard these Councillors voice this kind of unequivocal support.

The City’s motion on conversion therapy is available to view on-line (personal remarks begin at 11:11). Maclean’s published my Op-Ed on the topic that same day. PBS NewsHour covered the story, as did CBC, 1130 News, The Georgia Straight, and The Star Vancouver (among others).

When people talk to me about “moving on” in life and “not looking back,” I often wonder if what they’re really saying is they want me to be happy, and they just don’t know how I could ever be happy when past trauma, like with what I experienced in this treatment, still seems to impact my life today. Their comments seem to suggest that I am perpetuating the trauma by facing it square-on—talking or writing about it continuously—rather than by turning away in an attempt to save myself more suffering, “the memory of it all.” I understand these sentiments. I think we all, on some level, simply want to be happy. No one chooses to be traumatized; but when our bodies and internal sense of self are violated, shattered seemingly beyond repair as a result of some kind of incommensurable trauma, and struggling afterward even with the daily tasks of shopping, cooking, and feeding ourselves, not to mention holding down a job and caring for loved ones—when faced with the very real impact and devastation of trauma on our daily lives, I really do believe that conscious recognition of what we’ve lived through and survived helps us to heal. The act of “healing,” of course, is ongoing; there will likely never come one final moment when we return to who we were “before.” Healing is a deliberate act of agency; we may need to nurse ourselves to this end in perpetuity. We certainly do not heal by turning away and betraying our past, but, I think, by embracing, with compassion, what we’ve survived. When we see ourselves, wholly, we recognize others; when we’re blind to our own suffering, anyone else’s becomes intolerable.

To be heard and recognized by our government officials is a deeply meaningful, and healing, experience.

“Anecdotal Accounts”

Every day, dozens of articles about “conversion therapy” appear in media throughout the U.S. Americans seem to “get” the fact that these “treatments of torture” (as I like to call them now) are anything but “therapeutic,” that nothing about a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity ever gets “converted” or “repaired.” I remain bemused that in my home country of Canada, where my own six years of so-called “therapy” occurred, media coverage still remains sorely lacking—as if we’ve someone conquered the problem of ignorance and hatred north of the border. “Conversion therapy,” I’ve long believed, is a problem of ideology, not nationality.

But anyway, in one of these recent articles written by Susan Miller of USA Today, titled “Record number of states banning conversion therapy,” a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, a man by the name of Peter Sprigg, is referenced to have said that there are only “‘anecdotal’ accounts of conversion therapy being harmful.”

Statements like these make me seriously crazy. How many “anecdotal accounts” from trauma survivors does it take for others to hear that they were duped into believing lies about who they are, and that various forms of torture (take your pick) will never “change” their sexual orientation or gender identity? What kind of human being actually believes that snapping elastic bands against a wrist, or delivering currents of high voltage electricity into a person’s body, or forcing them (as in my case) to undergo aversive treatment or take fatal doses of several different kinds of psychiatric medications—that any of these “treatments” will have the slightest impact on sexual desire or gender identity, except to make the person deeply ashamed, depressed, or suicidal? Sadly, such is the world of blinding denial, quackery, and cruelty. After my own “therapy” ended, I understood all too well that these kinds of treatments are acts of criminality, that they are human rights violations.

I wrote my book, The Inheritance of Shame, to bring a strong and sustained voice to the dialogue about the dangers of “conversion therapy.” My book, my voice as a survivor, is not “anecdotal.”

Weapons of Mass Destruction

A few afternoons ago, as I was preparing for an evening reading from my book, The Inheritance of Shame, in the background in my apartment I was also listening to several radio interviews, most of which were like white noise as I concentrated on writing short introductory comments to my chosen excerpts. For some reason, though, suddenly I began hearing the radio host’s interview of an American woman who’d fought in the Iraq war. The woman said she grew up believing lies that her government had told her, which later informed her choices to fight in a war that also turned out to be based on more lies. The radio host cut back and forth between the interview and several audio clips of President Bush Jr. making jokes about “not finding any weapons of mass destruction” long after sending his troops into a war based on what he’d earlier said was informed by “intelligence.” The woman said that she fought in this war, but over time began asking herself what the war was really all about, and why she was killing innocent people. None of it made sense to her, and she learned to see that many of her life choices had been based on lies. When the host asked the woman for her main message to people today, the woman said that she needed to resist the lies and speak her truth—even if it was to just one other person.

“Speak your truth,” she said, “even if it’s just to one other person.”

I started to cry—the last thing I’d expected, while preparing for my evening, but this women’s message could have easily been my own. Conversion therapy is nothing if not a war against a person’s sexuality or gender identity, “weapons of mass destruction” are the various ideologies that form the basis for these “treatments,” all of which are based not on intelligence but on lies, and when we actually “volunteer” for this kind of war, the war against who we truly are, we are fighting a losing battle and will suffer through its lasting impact—a sense of being “shell-shocked,” for years to come.

Later that night I attended my reading at the event sponsored by Simon Fraser University’s Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. Ten people showed up. Of course, I’d hoped for more, but the evening progressed smoothly—I read several passages from my book; talked about my current understanding of these “treatments of torture”; and answered several questions from the audience.

“Speak your truth, even if it’s just to one other person.”

And then if you happen to speak your truth to ten people, remember that’s even ten times better.

Good Times / Bad Times

In 1985, when I was 21 years old, I wrote to the author James Kirkwood. I had recently devoured his novels, There Must Be A Pony!, Good Times/Bad Times, Hit Me with a Rainbow, and P.S. Your Cat Is Dead, and I just had to make contact with this literary genius all the way on the other side of North America in some place otherworldly like New York. I remember I wrote out my letter longhand, then typed it on my father’s Remington Steele. I couldn’t imagine that someone as important as James Kirkwood, who had also won a Pulitzer Prize for co-authoring “A Chorus Line,” would actually write back to me, but that’s exactly what he did—on November 16, 1985.

“What a wild last name you have,” his letter began (although he also misspelled it, “Gadjics”), after which he thanked me for writing. I loved that the “W” dropped at various places throughout his typewritten letter—a sign of the times, like a reminder of our frailty, that’s since been lost to the uniformity (and monotony) of computers. I can’t remember much of my letter, but I must have said something about my conflicted feelings around sex, or sexuality, or identity, because in his third paragraph, Kirkwood wrote:

“Everyone has identity crises, but just remember no matter what’s going on in the outside world, it’s our task to create our own happiness. I think we should do everything possible to not expect outside influences to provide joy—although at times, they certainly do. Day by day, we should try to figure out how lucky we are to be alive and (relatively) sane.”

I also must have told him that I was an aspiring writer, because he closed the letter by encouraging me to:

“. . . press on with your writing career. If you want to write enough, you can write. I really do believe a lot of it is just plain will power, as long as you have the imagination to go along with it.”

His words couldn’t have been truer—especially around the will power. Somewhere between my 300th and 500th rejection for my first book, The Inheritance of Shame, I felt like I was being devoured by rabid dogs, although it’s not so much that I wanted to give up as I thought I wasn’t going to make it to morning. Rejections, I’ve learned, sort of feel like being annihilated, bit by literary bit, and I guess it’s true that what’s largely kept me going is this thing called “will power”—some higher, or deeper, belief or desire that transcends words but that also picks me up and sends me on my way come morning. Life wants to keep living.

Kirkwood’s letter was so deeply inspiring to me that I wrote him again—about two years later, after a few of my poems had been published in my college newspaper, and my first one-act play, “Killing Maggie Cat,” had been filmed for community television (with me directing). As this was long before the days of computers, and I was never a fan of smudgy carbon copies, I did not keep a copy of my letter; but in his response, dated January 24, 1988, he does quote part of my own letter back to me: “I love the sentence,” he writes about my own words, “‘When I read your books, I feel like there is one other person in the world that has understood . . . what has made me sad.’” I can’t quite remember what made me sad in 1988, other than life in general and the daily toll of trying to live as a heterosexual when I knew that none of my family would ever accept me for who I really was: a homosexual. But Kirkwood’s comments brightened my life immensely, and he even went on to tell me about his current writing projects, a novel that I understand was never published, called I Teach Flying, and (as he wrote) “. . . another play which has been optioned called ‘Stagestruck,’ and I am also half way through a nonfiction book to be called Diary of a Mad Playwright.” His closing has always warmed my heart:

“So you keep all your crossables crossed for me and I’ll do the same for you and I’ll be in Scotland afore ye. A warm embrace—”

For the next few years, as things went from bad to worse for me, I imagined that any time soon I would fly to New York and arrive on his doorstep, since his address was right in the header of his letters, and we would become lifelong lovers. Inseparable. This was long before the days of celebrity stalking, and my fantasies had less to do with him being famous than it did with finally connecting with another human being who seemed to understand my struggles.

When I learned that Kirkwood had died of AIDS, years later, it broke my heart. I couldn’t talk about his letters to anyone, because I knew that if I did I’d start to cry. So many talented artists, so many human beings generally, wiped out by a tragic illness made all the worse by ignorance and hatred. I still feel like crying when I think about it, and also how close I came to becoming a statistic myself. The pain of it all is sometimes still too sharp to contemplate, so I mostly keep the memory at a safe distance. But when I look at Kirkwood’s letters now, as I do from time to time, framed and hanging close to where I write each early morning, and late every night, I think of him and his kindness. He told me that my “warm words” were “very encouraging” to him; and yet it is his words that swim back to me today and each day, decades letter, encouraging me to “press on.”

“If you want to write enough, you can write . . . a lot of it is just plain will power, as long as you have the imagination to go along with it.”