“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.

Apologies

On November 28, 2017, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered an impassioned, historic speech before the country’s House of Commons in Ottawa, formally apologizing for the federal government’s “systemic oppression, criminalization, and violence against the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and two-spirit communities.” Trudeau was referring of course to the time, in the not-too-distant past (throughout the Cold War era, though as late as the 1990’s) when thousands of LGBTQ2 Canadians were systematically purged from federal jobs and active service in the military simply because of who they were.

I was eating dinner with my 93 year-old mother at the family home, where I was born and raised and where my Catholic European mother still lives, when the segment aired on the evening news. My mother, who would have normally turned the volume down on such issues, said nothing, and did not touch the remote control, as Trudeau delivered his speech.

It is with shame and sorrow and deep regret for the things we have done that I stand here today and say: We were wrong. We apologize. I am sorry. We are sorry.

When Trudeau said the word “shame” I thought of my book, whose title is The Inheritance of Shame, and I had to look away, overcome with emotion. I thought for sure I’d start to cry, and not just with a trickle of tears but with a full on wail of grief. Somehow, I didn’t. 

After the news, as my mother drank her evening coffee in the living room, she asked a series of surprising questions.

“Can you please explain this acronym ‘LGBTQ2’ to me?” she said. “I understand lesbian and gay, but . . . how can a person be bisexual? You are one or the other, no?”

I wondered how much my mother really wanted, or needed, to hear. Should I talk about sexuality occurring across a spectrum, and that more people than would often care to admit are truly “bisexual”? 

“A lot of people are not necessarily gay or heterosexual, they are attracted to both genders.”

My mother looked unconvinced.

“And what about this word ‘queer’?” she continued. “At one point all of these people were called ‘queer.’”

“In a disparaging manner, yes. But the word today has been reframed in a positive light; it’s now more of an umbrella term to describe a lot of different sexualities, even heterosexual people who are considered allies.”

For a moment I heard the dialogue between my mother and I, as if outside the conversation, and I wanted to laugh. Even still, I felt tense, on guard, prepared to perhaps still defend myself against an onslaught of moralizing judgments, which had been the history between us.

“And I don’t understand transgender. Or is it transsexual? Isn’t that the same as homosexual?”

“Transsexuals or transgender people have nothing to do with sexual orientation. One is about gender identity or expression, the other about sexual desire. A person could be transgender and also homosexual.”

“And what is this ‘Two-Spirit’?”

“'Two-Spirit’ are the Indigenous communities.”

From the look on my mother’s face I could tell that she had reached the point of over-saturation, and the entire subject quickly waned.

“I'm just too old fashioned, I guess,” she said, shaking her head. “In my day, men were men and women were women and they got married and that was all there was to it. I loved being a mother. There was no greater joy. I’m proud to be a woman. I don’t understand what’s wrong with ending it at that.”

I left my mother’s house later that evening still thinking about the Prime Minister’s “apology.”

Though I’ve never faced any systematic attacks on my sexuality by the country’s federal government, I was born and lived the first few years of my life at a time in history when homosexuality was still a criminal offence in my own birth country.

A criminal offence.

I was already nine years old before homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness and removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM. 

Today, I have to wonder what it must have been like for me as a child in my family home, or in the school playground, or during Sunday Church sermons, when homosexuality was still considered the worst of all crimes against humanity. As I neared puberty in the mid-1970’s, how must I have experienced the palpable dread of knowing that I was “becoming” what there was no greater shame in being: a homosexual. What must that have been like for me, or others like me, as my own body was like a runaway train that I could not stop from nearing a cliff of my own undoing: toward eternal damnation, or at least toward social ridicule and familial and religious alienation? Where do we turn when the shame of who we are, or what we’ve been told we are—or what we have become because of some injustice committed against our person—cuts so deep, like a vein cast through our very soul, that even sleep provides little respite? When mornings bring us back to ourselves, and our ever-present elusive shame, what then? And what happens to all that shame once we learn to view ourselves more humanely, when we finally do begin to “heal”? Does knowing differently really mean that the shame is expunged from our soul?

Shame, I’ve learned, is definitely learned and inherited, and while apologies from those who’ve wronged us in some substantive way truly matter, since they recognize and validate harms committed, they do not necessarily undo damage caused by the acts inflicted. Apologies do not necessarily rid survivors of their own shame. Apologies matter, as even the recent #metoo outrage demonstrates, but even after receiving such apologies survivors must still face the lifelong impacts of their own personal shame or guilt. Like my mother, I’d like nothing more than to “end it at that.” But I also recognize that this “inheritance” lingers on, like the gift that goes on giving, rippling through my life, and every day I am faced with it yet again.