“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.

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.”

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. 

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.

“Consensual Conversion Therapy”

Recently I gave a talk to a group of people about conversion therapy, based on my beliefs after having lived through six years of it, and then I read an excerpt from my book, The Inheritance of Shame, at the end of which a 60’s-something looking man in the audience, a psychiatrist, asked me a question about what he termed “consensual conversion therapy.” He said a colleague of his, another psychiatrist, had treated a male adult with “same-sex attractions,” who he said had asked for “conversion therapy” because he did not want to live as a gay man—he wanted “a conventional heterosexual life.” The psychiatrist in the audience said that his colleague and this patient “embarked on the conversion therapy by mutual consent, and by all accounts the therapy was a big success,” so he wanted to hear my thoughts—what did I think of the idea of “consensual conversion therapy”?

For a moment, after this psychiatrist’s question, I just stared at him, horrified, speechless. He was sitting near the back of the crowded room of about 40 adults, all of whom were looking at me, waiting for my response. 

Considering I’d just finished talking for about 60 minutes, and my views on the practice of conversion therapy were about as clear as I could have made possible, I almost didn’t know how to respond.

A moment later I started by saying, “As I said in my talk”—and then I repeated my position, which is that I believe so-called conversion therapies turn a person’s desire to belong into a desire to change one’s sexuality; the locus of attention, therefore, no longer remains on the hatred or intolerance, the ignorance, but on the person whose sexuality is now under direct attack. Killing, I repeated (since I’d said it moments earlier in my talk) turns out to be as easy as “therapy.” The fact that this man had “asked” for the “therapy,” as far as I was concerned, does not make it any less abusive, or unethical for the doctor to have agreed to it and done whatever he did to try and “change” this man’s sexuality; in fact, people engage, seemingly “voluntarily,” in abusive relationships all the time, but that doesn’t make them any less abusive.

I’m not sure this psychiatrist in the audience really heard me, or maybe he didn’t like my response, because he repeated his question. 

“This patient,” he said—“he wanted conversion therapy; the therapy was consensual; it was a success.”

I honestly didn’t know how better to state my position, but repeated another point from my talk—that I believed these “therapies” confused the “map” of someone’s sexual identity for their “territory” of desire—and anyone, if they wanted it bad enough, could change their life map; but that would never change their inner territory, their essence. “A map is not the territory it represents,” I said, repeating the famous lines that I’d said minutes earlier. What sort of “success” could come from any of that?

By the look on this doctor’s face in the audience I am convinced he did not really like, or appreciate, or “get,” what I was saying, but the question, as far as I was concerned, was answered, and so we moved on.

Conversion therapy induces cognitive dissonance, since the person undergoing treatment will undoubtedly end up in a state of mental and emotional incongruence—living according to the map of heterosexuality, while simultaneously experiencing same-sex attractions; and if there is one common trait with nearly anyone who has ever discussed their years in these treatments, whether or not they “asked for it,” it is that they leave treatment dissociated, depersonalized, and deeply depressed, if not outright suicidal. 

If someone asks for conversion therapy, the “helping professional” should absolutely decline—in the same way that they would hopefully decline if the patient asked if they could engage in a “consensual sexual relationship.” Then the “helping professional” should tell the person seeking “help” that instead of conversion therapy, perhaps they should address their feelings of internalized homophobia.

To Ban or Not to Ban

A journalist, let’s call him Sam, called me recently to discuss my experiences in conversion therapy because of a possible ban of the practice in my hometown of Vancouver, Canada. Sam asked if I thought these kinds of bans were even necessary today, since he said he hadn’t found much information on the internet to suggest that conversion therapy still occurred, much less locally, in Canada. 

First, I answered to Sam on the phone, the fact that cursory Google searches for labels like “conversion therapy” do not result in many hits from actual organizations or practitioners claiming to endorse it does not mean it isn’t still occurring; in fact, one of the most common misconceptions I’ve encountered, I explained to Sam, is that many people tend to think conversion therapy is always an actual thing that can be quickly identified, or found, so that it can be eliminated or prevented. How do you “find” homophobia, or transphobia? How do you “find” ideology, hatred or prejudice? Especially when it's behind closed doors in a therapeutic relationship between two people in privacy—can fear ever be “found”?

Conversion therapy begins with the thought that gay and trans people are somehow ill and need to be “fixed.” Thoughts carry into beliefs that are then projected outward into systematic acts of oppression by “helping professionals,” whether religious or secular, who are in positions of power over the vulnerable. Shame is the breeding ground on which these kinds of “treatments” thrive, I told Sam, and shame is fostered by silence. Few, if any, will ever admit to practicing anything remotely called “conversion therapy”; in their minds, “conversion therapy” likely doesn't even exist. Instead, they are trying to “help.”

Sam went on to ask that if practitioners aren’t openly admitting to practicing conversion therapy, how can we expect to regulate them; and if they can’t be regulated, the question remains: why are these bans still worthwhile?

These are all good questions, I told Sam, and ones that I’d been repeating to many people for a long time. However, I reminded Sam that all of these concerns are the exact same “problems” that any jurisdiction would likely face, and about 30 U.S. cities / counties, 10 states and D.C., even the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Ontario, have all banned the practice of conversion therapy, even though regulatory policies against the practice already exist in nearly every national and international health organization. Obviously, further preventative measures are still needed. Just as morality cannot be legislated—despite laws against sexual abuse or rape, some go right on sexually abusing and raping—no ban against something as elusive as “conversion therapy” will ever prevent every act of hatred toward gays or trans people, but it is a start.

All that said, not all proposed bans have been successful; as it turns out, one such bill in New Hampshire failed to pass just recently because opponents believed that “conversion therapy” was not a concern where they lived (funny how that works: shame from these treatments fosters silence, and because of silence the opponents claim the treatments don't exist); that actually banning these so-called “therapies” might prevent minors from wanting to openly discuss their “unwanted” same-sex attractions with counsellors; and that many “former” homosexuals (known colloquially as “ex-gays”) have claimed to have actually been helped by these “therapies,” living out their lives now as heterosexually married or at least coupled in opposite-sex relationships. Once again, as in past, such opponents confuse these types of coercive treatments with safe, honest, and emotionally fulfilling discussions around sexuality and gender, both of which are of course complicated issues and well deserving of serious attention. Banning conversion therapy in no way prevents such discussions. Torture is never “therapy,” and conversion therapies torture people, through various shame-based approaches, into trying to become who they’re not. In terms of apparent “success rates,” the director of the sexual orientation and gender diversity office at the American Psychological Association was quoted to have said in a follow article in The New York Times: “Even if someone agrees to behave differently, it doesn’t change who they are.”

Sounds simple enough, and I couldn’t agree more.

I’d also add that even if a gay person changes the “map” of their sexual identity—engaging in opposite-sex partnerships—it will never change the “territory” of their underlying desires. I call myself a gay man but I could also call myself a heterosexual man and even go about having sex with a woman if I wanted; I could change my behavior—but would any of that change my underlying sensibilities and desires? Is what I do or how I present myself to the world always the same as whoI am and know myself to be? Of course not. People live a lie all the time. All that sort of contradictory, duplicitous, behaviour would do for me personally is betray who I know myself to be and thrust me back into the state of dissonance and inner turmoil that I also struggled most of my early life to escape. To live my life as truthfully and as honestly as possible is what will bring me peace: this much I know for sure. A map may not be the territory it represents, but to align my authentic self, my territory, with my outer behaviour, my map, is my objective.

Bans against “conversion therapy” hold great value, I told Sam, finally, since they set a tone and create a precedent, thereby possibly preventing these kinds of “therapies” from recurring again; they also bring the issue out into public scrutiny, which is already a step forward. People don’t discover who they are simply from within; people discover who they are, and also who and what they’re not, by what they encounter in the world outside. Bans against conversion therapy send a clear message to all by destabilizing the belief system—which is of course just that: a belief system; it is not Truth—that says gay or trans people are somehow “broken” and must be healed. Bans like the one proposed in Vancouver and already passed in numerous other jurisdictions tell us all that there is nothing wrong with being gay, or lesbian, queer or trans. Bans like this tell us we are valued, and protected; that when we, as LGBTQ people, are depressed or unsettled, struggling with feelings of displacement or alienation from family or our religion, that this very alienation and displacement is not as a result of our true nature, but as a result of being shamed and dejected, silenced, of being subjected to people promoting hatred and intolerance in the name of God, which in my mind is never godly—maybe even as a result of trying to change ourselves, through extraordinarily twisted and counterintuitive measures, into something we are not. Trying to change our sexuality or gender in order to feel less alone and “normal” is antithetical to what we truly desire and ultimately need, which is to be accepted and valued, loved, for who we are. If bans like this can prevent even one LGBTQ person, who may still believe there’s something inherently wrong with them simply for being themselves, from falling under the spell of even one “practitioner,” who may still believe there’s something wrong with them simply for being LGBTQ—then that ban, as far as I’m concerned, will have succeeded triumphantly.

To Ban or Not to Ban may be the question for lawmakers, but the underlying issue, at least in my books, remains helping to prevent immeasurable harm while fostering lives lived in honesty and integrity, or perpetuating institutionalized hatred by turning a blind eye for the sake of maintaining a lie.

Book Pitches, or Beyond Gay Politics

One of the many interesting but perplexing things that happens when publishing a book is the actual story of the book gets reduced, out of necessity, to its barest elements, known as a “hook” or “pitch” while the writer is still marketing the manuscript to publishers, and then while the distributor, after the book’s publication, continues marketing it to book sellers, even as the publisher tries to garner interest from media. “What, in the least possible words, is this book about”? If an author can’t summarize his story in a few words or a sentence—say, if he was suddenly standing next to a publisher or an agent at a party and he wanted to pitch his book—then he’s definitely not ready to market the manuscript. Of course, reducing any book to a catchy “be-all-and-end-all” can often mean figuring out which parts of the story are topical, or newsworthy. In a literary marketplace overwhelmed with evermore books each week, why would a reader pick up this particular new book (in a bookstore or online), invest their hard earned money and then days if not weeks reading it to the end? What makes a media outlet choose to cover one book over another?

While pitches no doubt start out being helpful, they can also have the unwieldy effect of backfiring on the author in that he starts to believe that this savvy summary is really what his book is all about. In the case of true-life memoirs, the memoirist runs the risk of starting to view his own life—at least those parts of his life he has traversed in the memoir—through the rather narrow lens of that pitch. Not only does his book get reduced to a newsworthy hook, his own life, it seems, now becomes reduced to the banal.

“Conversion therapy”—the practice of attempting to “change” sexuality from gay to straight—was not a term that I used, or even heard very often, when I started writing my book in 1997. The truth is, for the longest time I had great difficulty figuring out what the pitch of my book could be, in the same way that I’ve often had trouble summarizing the trajectory of my own life—was my book a “coming out” story complicated by “psychiatric abuse,” “generational trauma,” “childhood sexual abuse,” “religious dogmatism,” or “cultic manipulation”? Obviously, my book was about the trauma of one man who falls victim to a sociopathic psychiatrist hell bent on trying to “change” his sexuality. All of these “hooks” seemed accurate enough, though not particularly topical, but it wasn’t until working with an agent in 2007 that the label of “conversion therapy” took hold. In 2007, however, “conversion therapy” was still rarely, if ever, covered in the media, and so my agent’s letter to potential publishers, which mentioned my years in “conversion therapy,” was met with horror and bewilderment, as if I was writing about a fiction that most of these big wig publishers could not even fathom still existed. Hadn’t gay politics “eliminated” such “barbaric therapies”? Wasn’t this all part of a bygone era—together with the lobotomies of the 1950’s? Did this topic have any relevance at all anymore, to anyone? In their eyes, my book was not at all topical (translation: unsellable).

With a surge of new laws, beginning in 2013, banning “conversion therapy” in the U.S. and even in Canada and other countries, the subject seems to have now formed part of a cultural vernacular, appearing regularly in the media and even in several television documentaries. At the same time, as helpful as the pitch of “conversion therapy” has been in the marketing of my book, continuing to talk about my story (i.e., my life) as being primarily about this one topic does run the risk of adding an expiration date to its relevance, not to mention continuing to reduce my life to the banal. If and when “conversion therapy” becomes universally outlawed (as it’s already been universally discredited), will the book (and my life) retain any lasting merit? Will my life (and the book) still sound “topical”? In the elusive conveyer belt that today’s social media has become, what happens when the apparent topicality of a book becomes culturally passé? Does a life end up in the $1.99 bin?

“Conversion therapy” is, after all, not a wholly encompassing description of the story that I have documented in my book; “conversion therapy” itself is a label that describes a whole spectrum of “therapies” or practices, and so in theory, depending on their life circumstance, each and every person who ends up in one of these “treatments” would have a very different story to tell. Relying on the label of “conversion therapy” to describe my book is actually not so unlike relying on the label of “gay man” to describe who I am as a person. The label of “gay man,” I really do believe, is part of the collective gay identity politics that has flourished in the post-Stonewall era (to escape the “closet,” create just laws, combat homophobia, etc.), but has done so often at the expense of the individual, the subjective. Telling people that I am a “gay man” says little to nothing about my inner struggles, my feelings and sensibilities, my lingering “bad” affects, like shame, that the gay movement claims to have liberated me from; and telling people that my book is about “conversion therapy” says even less about its underlying narrative.

Over the last several decades, “gay people” on the whole have made great strides in not remaining invisible; but I’m not so sure that this collective “gay person” that advanced our visibility has done all that much in furthering the subjective or inner lives of people who call themselves “gay.” I tell the world (usually starting with my family and friends) that I’m “gay,” and for a short time I am elated because I think the whole world now “sees” me—I am “free.” But am I, really? So, the world now knows my sexual-object attraction is not for the opposite sex—but is that enough? On some primal level, a large part of me still feels unseen, remains unexplored or concealed—“closeted,” under a different guise.

In his 2012 book, How to be Gay, author David M. Halperin clarifies further:

…the transformation of homosexuality from sexual perversion into a social identity, and the political requirements of gay pride, have tended to militate against any serious gay inquiry into the inner life of homosexuality—especially those non-sexual dimensions of it that gay people are still unsure or nervous about. Gay subjectivity, and the distinctive cultural practices that manifest it, may now have become just as disreputable, just as taboo, as queer sex. One name for this strategic avoidance of gay subjectivity, for this refusal to explore it, is, quite simply, “gay identity.”

Existentially, summing myself up as “gay” says little about who I am—I call myself “gay” so that I am not subsumed into the heteronormativity that pervades the world around me; but then I look at myself through the lens of that narrow label, “gay,” and still I don’t see my whole being—or if I think I do, then really all I’m seeing is a projection of the collective. I see a cliché, a life reduced to the banal, a pitch. I am trapped once again.

Years ago, one of my brothers, a businessman, told me that he didn’t have “much use for gays.” Considering that my brother already knew, at this point, I was “gay”—his comment left me flattened. How could I even respond to such a remark? What did he even mean? And why would he say this to my face? I never asked, and I never found out (“don’t ask, don’t tell”); instead, in the moment, I just stared at him, confused, dejected. Now years later, I can see that what my brother did with me was similar, on some level, with these literary pitches—he’d reduced all “gay” people (and me, by extension) to their barest elements, so that in his eyes we had no other story, hidden narrative or sensibility, than the universal “gay.” This is the risk of identity politics: in increasing visibility, we run the risk of being reduced to the banal and remaining invisible on some other level. Our identities are now public, but our hearts get stuck in limbo, still closeted.

As in life, the trajectory of any memoir is often messy and non-linear, rarely neat, and hopefully never shallow, and reducing it all in the form of a pitch, useful as it may be for marketing, does little in explaining what a book is really all about. A book is about so much more than its pitch; and a life is about so much more than any identity. My own mother lived through and escaped from three years in a communist concentration camp in Europe, and so the one thing about “liberation” that I’m certain about is that it does not exist, not really. Our bodies may escape the tyranny, but our souls carry on with scars. The walking wounded need to talk, even as they go about their newfound freedom.

Today, I am far more interested in talking about the kind of shame that’s governed my life, instead of avoiding the topic entirely because “gay identity politics” tells me I’m not supposed to have felt it anymore. I am more interested in taking about what it was like to experience sexual abuse as a child, a male child, and then to live through the disorientation of discovering that I was sexually attracted to other males, the same gender as my abuser—I want to talk about this issue, even though my sense is “gay identity politics” would rather I keep quiet. I am more interested in talking about what it was like to grow up as a survivor of trauma survivors, or about being Catholic and fearful that there was causality between the sexual abuse and my emerging sexual desires, and then to fall into the erroneous belief system, as promulgated by the then culture and even my own family, of thinking that if I healed from the trauma of abuse, I might also revert to some kind of a priori attraction toward females. Where do such twisted lies, born from trauma and fed by cultural misinformation, lead a person in their life? “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” 

These (and more) are the kinds of issues that walked me straight into the barrel of a loaded gun—otherwise known as “conversion therapy”—and so these are just some of the issues, which step far beyond the boundaries of gay identity politics, that I need to talk about today. As important a topic of “conversion therapy” is, both politically and sociologically, on a personal level I have so much more to say. “Coming out,” in fact, demands so much more than telling people I’m gay, and discussing my book’s underlying issues necessitates so much more than repeating the potentially banal pitch of “conversion therapy.”

From Plan A to Plan D: Stop Having Sex

During a recent media interview about conversion therapy, the reporter I was speaking with on the phone cited a known religious “ex-gay” organization operating out of Vancouver, Canada, where I live, and said that its leader claimed they were “not practicing conversion therapy,” but merely “helping homosexuals to not have sex,” to “remain celibate.” The reporter then asked me what I thought about this statement.

I’ll admit that in the moment, I had trouble articulating my full horror. Nevertheless, I told the reporter what I know to be true, which is that few, if any, organizations today would even admit to practicing “conversion therapy,” so in this sense it was not surprising to me that they would deny practicing what is now considered to be a universally debunked form of “therapy” to change sexual orientation. My former psychiatrist would have never admitted to practicing “conversion therapy” on me throughout my own six years of “therapy,” yet that is precisely what he was doing.

“Conversion therapies,” I know from experience, occur across a spectrum of experiences, and can range from electric shock treatment and aversion therapy, to the more benign “talking therapy,” and all of them outwardly geared toward “changing” sexual orientation—though even this language obfuscates their real intent, since in truth they are technically less about “changing sexual orientation” than they are about “stopping homosexuality” (do they ever try and “change” heterosexuality to homosexuality?). Thrown into the mix by many religious “ex-gay” organizations is an effort to try and realign a person’s apparent “gender confusion” in order for them to live “according to scripture” (males being masculine; females being feminine; both sexes coupling only in heterosexual marriages). The magic (toxic) ingredient in all of these “treatments,” whether one wants to call them conversion therapies or not, is shame. Shame about one’s homosexuality or gender identity is what leads people (or causes parents to send their kids) to these treatments; shame is what imprisons them.

With the demise of Exodus International, the world’s largest “ex-gay” organization, and virtually every leading medical and mental health organization now denouncing all forms of conversion therapy, many of these organizations have subsequently reframed their methods from claiming to “change” sexual orientation to the softer but (in my opinion) no less onerous “helping homosexuals to not have sex.” Nomenclature changes; shame remains.

Helping anyone to not have sex specifically because they are gay is not the same as not having sex because, oh, let’s say, a person chooses to not engage with anyone on a sexual level, gay or straight. At various times in my own adult life (er, during my post-conversion therapy years) I have remained celibate—or maybe just single with no sex—because I chose to focus my energies elsewhere (or I just couldn’t deal with the whole “dating scene”). But at no time during any of these times has my choice to not have sex been precipitated by the belief that to be gay or homosexual is a sin and I should therefore not act on those desires—that I should “love the sinner” (myself), but “hate the sin” (sex with other men). Shame was never driving my choices.

I have never heard of any organization that “helps heterosexuals to not have sex” specifically because their “heterosexual sex” was immoral. Hiding behind the religious veneer of “no sex before marriage” never cut it for me either. Recent same-sex marriage laws have obviously complicated many religious arguments, since previously they would have simply forbidden “sex outside marriage,” therefore de facto precluding all gays from having sex. Now that gays can marry in Canada and the U.S. and in many other countries, forbidding sex outside marriage no longer necessary prevents or precludes gays from having sex—they can simply first marry. But that doesn’t solve the “religious problem.” What to do about all that “gay sex”?

No longer strapping gay people into chairs and shocking them with electricity but merely “helping” them to not have sex may sound like progress, it may no longer sound like conversion therapy, and therein lies the rub. Looking for something called “conversion therapy,” or that anyone admits to being called “conversion therapy,” will always shield the culprit. When we talk about conversion therapy we are talking about an ideology, not any one “type” of treatment. All of these scenarios, and more, are bound by the same awful shame, and the same shameful ideology, which says that being gay is a sin or disease (abnormality, error, etc.) and should be “changed,” or at least not acted on. In other words, if you can’t change ’em, at least make sure they stop having sex.

From Alberta’s Minister of Health

Yesterday I received a letter from Alberta’s Minister of Health, responding to an email I sent in support of the Lethbridge Public Interest Research Group’s “petition and a letter writing campaign directed to the government of Alberta, Canada, asking for conversion therapy for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, and asexual people to be made ineligible for Alberta Health Care funding.” Minister Sarah Hoffman, who is also Deputy Premier of Alberta, writes:

Thank you for your email regarding banning conversion therapy.

The Government of Alberta shares your opposition to the use of “conversion therapy.”

In regard to funding such a practice, we do not support this and we will not. Alberta Health covers insured medical services as outlined in the Schedule of Medical Benefits (SOMB). Benefits for these services are provided through the Alberta Health Care Insurance Plan (AHCIP).  The SOMB does not list conversion therapy as an insured service that is billable and covered by the AHCIP.

The Government of Alberta is committed to ensuring health care services in Alberta are delivered safely and effectively by competent health care practitioners. Through the Health Professions Act (HPA), we delegate to professional colleges the authority to govern their members in a manner that serves and protects the public interest. The HPA provides the legal framework for colleges to establish, maintain, and enforce a code of ethics and standards of practice for their members.

Early in this term of government, Alberta Health staff met with several regulatory colleges, whose members perform psychosocial interventions, to determine their perspectives and positions on conversion therapy. They were assured that these colleges are not aware of any of their regulated members performing conversion therapy, and have accountability mechanisms in place to discipline members if they were to learn otherwise.

If you are aware of this practice happening, please do not hesitate to contact my office or the relevant regulatory body of the HPA.

Thank you again for writing and for your advocacy on this important topic.

Sincerely...

In essence, the Minister is saying that they believe conversion therapy is not happening in Alberta because no licensed therapists admit to practicing it, and the province does not fund it.

Okay.

This kind of language reminds me of when my former psychiatrist, who treated me for six years in an effort to "change" my sexual orientation, and I appeared before British Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons’ ethics committee. At one point near the start of the two-hour hearing, the chair of the committee asked my psychiatrist if he had ever treated my homosexuality in an effort to change me to heterosexuality. To which he said: “How could I treat a patient for something that hasn’t been included in the DSM since 1973?”

Everyone's language becomes a game of chess. Human chess.

The “problem” with Minister Hoffman’s diplomatic response, and I suppose even the well-intentioned Research Group’s original petition and letter writing campaign, is they do not go far enough, they do not address the underlying problem, which is that any therapist practicing “conversion therapy” today would never actually bill an insurer for anything even remotely called “conversion therapy.” As a survivor of one of these “treatments,” I can say without hesitation that my own former psychiatrist billed British Columbia’s Medial Services Commission for six years of depression—which I was. I was depressed when I sought his help after coming out as gay and being rejected by my family at the age of 23. By the time I met him I’d been depressed for most of my life, because I’d also been sexually abused as a child and had never fully confronted the trauma of that abuse, let alone mourned the loss of my childhood. The doctor’s “treatment” for my depression, however, was to tell me that the sexual abuse had “caused” me to turn out gay, that my homosexuality was “an error in need of correction,” and then to prescribe near fatal doses of various psychiatric medications and inject me with ketamine hydrochloride for the next several years, all the while reframing my history of trauma as I underwent his treatment plan of intense primal scream therapy in an effort to revert to my (his words) “innate heterosexuality.” Words like “conversion therapy” were never mentioned, and certainly they were never considered as part of his billing cycle. Believing that therapists won’t practice conversion therapy—that they won’t treat their gay or trans patients in an effort to “change” them—because it’s been deemed ineligible for funding seems to imply that there is a thing or product actually called “conversion therapy” that can be removed from the marketplace, like a prescription drug or a tainted food, and therefore withdrawn from public consumption. It's a lie.

I honestly don’t know anymore when politicians write letters like this if they are being purposefully obtuse, or if they really just don’t get it. Do they honestly think that medically licensed doctors (especially, not to mention other kinds of “therapists”) would even try and bill a government-funded insurer for something called “conversion therapy,” which isn’t even included in any chart of approved medical “services”—and that as long as they don’t bill for something that isn’t included in these charts it isn’t happening?

Laws must be created banning the practice of conversion therapy, because only laws will help—not guarantee, but at least help—dissuade a therapist from telling their patient that “we can fix your sexuality” (or some version of that line). No law is foolproof—people commit acts of inhumanity, rape and battery, all the time, no matter the law. But what options do we have? Not funding conversion therapy is a no-brainer; but conversion therapy is abuse—any survivor will tell you it is torture—and must be made illegal.

In Response to An Article About Banning "Conversion Therapy"

In his June 23, 2017 article, “It’s easy to talk about banning gay conversion therapy. But how to do it –and where’s the evidence,” writer Peter Ould, a Church of England Priest and statician, argues that there is no “substantive evidence” of harm to these “therapies.” Where is the “X causes Y” hypothesis about their danger? he argues. Where is the “clear path of evidence”? How can these “therapies” ever be outright banned, he asks, since their methods are so varied and insidious? How is it possible to ban not just one treatment model but an entire mindset? At one point in his article, Ould calls out Jayne Ozanne, a high-ranking activist in the Church of England General Synod and a survivor of “conversion therapy” who has argued against the practice by labeling it “spiritual abuse,” because he says she has no “qualification in the area of mental health.”

Ould suggests “track[ing] people through particular experiences” in order to “compare their mental health before and afterwards,” and to determine “whether harm is caused by certain actions,” namely, the various means by which these “therapies” seek to “change” sexuality. He cites one study, gleaned from the participants of a religious form of “ex-gay” therapy, which he claims offered “no statistically significant evidence of harm.” He concludes, therefore, that individuals such as Ozanne—and by this I have to assume he means all survivors of “conversion therapy”—can offer nothing more than an “unqualified anecdote.”

In discussing the probability of harm caused by these “therapies,” he references the emergence of autism following vaccinations as one example of how consecutive events does not in itself signify causation. In other words, if a person leaves “conversion therapy” depressed, or suffering through any other “mental health symptoms,” there can be no way of verifying that it was the therapy itself that caused these issues—perhaps the person was prone to depression prior to entering treatment.

Ould even points to authorities that have attempted to distinguish between the therapeutic intention of “conversion therapy,” and the therapists who enact such “cures,” claiming that perhaps it is not the therapy itself that causes harm but the “generic abuses of practice,” such as a therapist’s boundary violation. Maybe, in this thread of logic, an ethical therapist could proceed confidently, without threat of serious harm to the person whose sexual orientation is being “changed.”

In a somewhat abrupt about-face to his argument, Ould goes on to ask whether treatment that produces “no statistically significant change” to sexual orientation is reason enough to ban these therapies. Should they be banned simply because “they don’t work,” because they have “a low success rate,” much in the same way, he writes, that Alcoholics Anonymous doesn’t always “work”?

Ould concludes his argument, and article, by stating that these are “all complicated issues and deserve serious engagement,” such as “proper longitudinal studies”; he discourages the use of “soundbite, anecdote and emotion,” and to “move the debate away from relying on self-reported harm which is a nebulous concept,” in favour of “rigorous and consistent research, applying proper scientific standards.”

At the outset, I must admit that in considering everything Ould has argued, conjectured, and concluded, I was left confused, saddened, and angered. Part of me doesn’t want to even give Ould’s argument my time of day, much less mentally tread through the murky waters of his obfuscated logic. I have to think of Escher's sketches of staircases folding in on themselves to the point that we don't know which way is up from down. In fact, for every article like Ould’s there are 10 more just like his coming up the rear, all written on the (cloaked) presumption that there is nothing inherently wrong or harmful with “conversion therapy”—that it is “innocent until proven guilty.” I can’t, nor do I even want to, respond to all of these kinds of articles. Yet here I am, wondering to myself why, in 2017, it would even be necessary to conduct “longitudinal studies” or “rigorous and consistent research” into these so-called “therapies,” let alone conjecture about their supposed “harms”?

Even hypothesizing that there might be a difference between the practice of “conversion therapy” and the therapists who enact it—that it might not be the “therapy” itself that is unethical but an “unethical” therapist’s use of this kind of “treatment” model—is, to me, like saying there might be an ethical way to rape someone. Or that it might not be the rape itself that is unethical, but the means by which a therapist rapes a person.

And finally, if being a gay woman who actually underwent “conversion therapy” does not bestow upon Ozanne a fundamental “qualification” to speak out against the harmful effects of such treatments to her own “mental health,” I am not sure what will. Why must we wait for so-called “experts” to tell us about ourselves? How can one person’s testimony about something as personal as sexuality ever be reduced to “soundbite,” an “anecdote”? Why should talking with emotion about such emotionally-charged issues as depression and thoughts of suicide be “avoided,” rendered “a nebulous concept”?

I spent most of the first two years after my own six years in “conversion therapy” alone, wandering streets shell-shocked, ghost-like, practically catatonic. It is not so much that I was suicidal—as I thought I was already dead. How could anyone not notice the hole that had been blasted through my gut, I often wondered at this time, if I thought anything at all. Mostly, my mind was frozen, unable to process or think through what had happened to me in the “therapy,” find words to explain my experience. Neat, convenient labels like “conversion” or “reparative” therapy might have helped me encapsulate my personal nightmare, but they were all still foreign concepts to me back then. All I knew in 1995, and in 1996, in 1997, was that I’d spent six years actively believing that I was changing my sexuality from homosexual to heterosexual—not just theoretically, but experientially, that I was actually becoming a heterosexual man, or at least was returning to my “innate heterosexuality” (my former psychiatrist’s words). Yet here I was on the other side of treatment and nothing about my homosexuality—the erotic desires within my body—had ever been altered or changed. What had I been doing with myself those six years? How could I have believed this kind of lie about myself? No doubt I was only just beginning to mentally thaw out, or deprogram, from the “therapy,” to separate the lies from the truth. Eventually, I found a few words, and then several more, that seemed to accurately reflect my truth.

The World Health Organization has written that, “‘Reparative’ or ‘conversion therapies’ have no medical indication and represent a severe threat to the health and human rights of the affected persons. They constitute unjustifiable practices that should be denounced and subject to adequate sanctions and penalties.”

The American Psychiatric Association has written that it “opposes any psychiatric treatment, such as ‘reparative’ or conversion therapy, which is based upon the assumption that homosexuality per se is a mental disorder or based upon the a priori assumption that a patient should change his/her sexual homosexual orientation.”

The American Psychological Association has written that, “mental health professionals should avoid telling clients that they can change their sexual orientation due to a lack of evidence that such change is possible and the potential for such efforts to harm the patient’s mental health.”

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry; the American Academy of Pediatrics; the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy; the American College of Physicians; the American Counseling Association; the American Medical Association; the American Psychoanalytic Association; the American School Counselor Association; the American School Health Association; the National Association of Social Workers—all of these leading health organizations have denounced any effort to “change” sexual orientation, and reaffirmed that attempts to do so could result in serious health risks.

“Conversion therapy” occurs across a spectrum of homophobic experiences—albeit, as an extreme example—much in the same way that “living in the closet” did for many people just one or two generations ago. Nothing much has changed in this respect, since the primary goal of both “conversion therapy” and “the closet” is to eradicate homosexuals off the face of the planet, or at least to hide them away from the rest of the so-called “straight” world. While “conversion therapies” have no doubt left countless victims in their wake, “the closet” enacted (and enacts, still, for many, to this day) a similar fate of trauma through threat of shame or fear of retribution, religious and familial persecution, rejection, condemnation, isolation, even, in decades past, criminality or psychiatric diagnosis and institution.

It took me several years to understand that I had left the “therapy” dissociated and depersonalized, but this is precisely how conversion therapies “work”: the patient dissociates themselves from everything they believe is “gay” or “homosexual,” and in so doing, separates themselves from their own desires. “Homosexuality” becomes not so much what is within, but what is outside—“the gay world,” even “gay sex,” that they can then “leave behind,” or “move beyond.” It doesn’t matter an iota that their desires, their own same sex desires, remain within. As long as they don’t act on those desires, and only “act heterosexual” in the outside world, all is well. “Conversion therapies” promote mental illness, or at least mental un-wellness, because they necessitate dissociation, depersonalization, and compartmentalization. “All is well” until all comes crumbling down. And the fact that some, even many, people claim to have “changed” from gay to straight—that they are able to live out their lives in a permanent state of dissociation—does not make it any less harmful. It only makes it all too sadly common.

If Ould, or anyone like him, requires “evidence of harm” of these “therapies,” or, for that matter, a life lived “in the closet,” he should look no further than to generations of people who have spoken, written, cried out about and even marched against the crippling effects of living in shame, cut off from their true selves, particularly during the immediate post-Stonewall era—because that is precisely what “conversion therapy” promotes: lies, shame, dissociation, inauthenticity, not to mention a host of other forms of suffering. Take your pick. For “evidence of harm,” Ould, and others, should start by reading any one of the thousands of books written over a period of decades by any number of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or queer people whose lives were left decimated by the fall out of homophobia or transphobia.

Read their struggles. Hear their voices. Remember their legacies.

Ould is looking for “statistical evidence” about the supposed harm caused by “conversion therapy,” yet the world has already offered up literally thousands of books from which we can all locate such proof. Evidence of the breathtaking cruelty of, and consequences from, years of deceit, rejection, and shame can be found in real life writing—not anecdotal or nebulous emotion, but hard-won testimony. Millions of words contained in thousands of books have already been formed out of the mortar of tears shed from living a lie, trying to become what one isn’t, while hoping for a better life, one lived in truth, and authenticity, wholeness, free from shame. Evidence of the same awful intention of these “therapies” can be found in the tombstones of books left in the wake of lives lost to AIDS. If words spoken to us from these graves cannot help us out of the madness of twisting people into something that they are not by means of sexuality abuse, identity assault, and spiritual torture—which is what I have now learned, first hand, these so-called “conversion therapies” to actually be, beneath their convenient euphemisms—then I am not sure what will.

Sexual Abuse ≠ Gay

I’ll never forget a dinner I had with my family, in 2001. We were all—siblings, spouses, and my parents—at a swanky downtown restaurant in honour of my parents’ 45th wedding anniversary. After a few glasses of very expensive red wine, I leaned over and I asked my sister-in-law sitting next to me if she’d ever considered the possibility that one of her two sons, both of whom were under 10 at the time, might turn out gay. Without so much as blinking she told me that she knew they weren’t gay because they’d never been sexually abused. Her words really shook me, because it struck me that this was the exact same logic—ideologically insular, pointing to nothing in the real world that validated its flawed argument—that had led me right into the hands of a sociopathic psychiatrist and his plan to "change" me from gay to straight while I was in my 20's and early 30's. According to this licensed doctor, since sexual abuse had "made" me gay, healing the trauma of the abuse would inevitably revert me to my underlying "base heterosexuality."

But at this dinner in 2001, already six years out of that "therapy," I questioned my sister-in-law's logic. And in response she asked me, clearly rhetorically, if I had ever been sexually abused (by this time she, and everyone in my family, knew that I'd been abused). I told her I didn’t think the abuse had "made me gay." She looked genuinely surprised. What about all the gay people who have never been sexually abused? I said. What about all the straight people who have been abused? She herself had been sexually abused as a child—a fact we had all known for years. But none of that mattered. None of that seemed to factor into her argument. She remained convinced that sexual abuse caused a person to be gay. I left the restaurant in disbelief, angry and really saddened, reminded of all the years that I had believed this lie about myself, what I’d done to myself as a result of that lie. So many years of suffering.

It was easy, as a confused teenager, to think that sexual abuse from my childhood had "made me gay." I was raised in the 1970's to believe that Homosexuals Recruited Children. Anita Bryant's voice prevailed. The one and only time my mother and I talked about the sexual abuse was when she told me, I think I was 11 or 12 at the time, that dirty old men kidnapped little children and made them do really bad things that turned them toward a life of perversity. We were in the kitchen, sitting at our blue metal Arborite table next to the window. What could I say? She stared at me. Her words freaked me out, because they seemed to come with a dire threat or warning: beware what you've become. 

Despite much progress and education, I still see glimpses of this old lie slipping through the cracks of our current culture. Many right wing zealots and ideological liemongers, which of course includes the likes of Anne Coulter, often do point to a history of sexual abuse as the "reason" why some "choose homosexuality" (interestingly, they never mention all the straight men who've been sexually abused). But it's not only the right wingers. Gay men silence themselves. Years ago, after my six years in this "conversion therapy," for a short time I was employed as a gay outreach worker, where I met literally hundreds of men ("Men Who Have Sex With Men," we were told to call them) who confided in me that they had a history of sexual abuse, but that they'd never told anyone because of their fear that they'd be told the abuse had "made" them gay. This, to me, is tragic. Voices of distress: snuffed out, and all because of the fear of intolerance and ignorance. What happens to all that suffering, when it turns back into the soul of a human being? Where does it go? In the case of a lot of the gay male survivors that I met, that very suffering turned into sexual addiction: using the compulsive behaviour—which, to at least some degree, was the result of the abuse—as fodder to engage in even greater acts of self-flagelation. It does not help that gay culture often reinforces some version of the belief that More Sex is Always Good Sex. Sex, for many gay men, may still be a political act of resisting oppression (which I would applaud), but in the case of survivors of sexual abuse, more sex is not always necessarily good sex.

All abuse survivors struggle, at one point or another, with whether or not to disclose their history of abuse to anyone, and yet I doubt very much that straight men worry that their abuse "made" them straight. They likely do not confuse or conflate their attraction for women with having been sexually abused.

One argument that I've heard repeatedly expressed against the proposed legal bans on "conversion therapy" is that outlawing these "therapies" would dissuade licensed therapists from freely exploring various issues of sexuality with their patients—take for example, a history of sexual abuse. Lawmakers, these arguments profess, do not have the right to intercede on what amounts to very complicated and complex therapeutic relationships. 

This is an ironic position to take, considering that, by their very definition, "conversion therapies" aim to "change" a person's sexuality to the desired outcome of heterosexuality, or at least to guide them in one direction only. Throughout my own six years of "therapy," my former psychiatrist's goal became to "guide" me toward my "innate heterosexuality." "Primal doesn't lie," he'd say, after my regressions on the mattress where I'd talk (scream) about "hating homosexuals," or "hating gay sex." My own words "proved" that I really was straight, he'd tell me afterward, which did nothing but confuse me even more. Of course, we never discussed the fact that I'd grown up learning to hate, and fear, homosexuals, and by extension: myself. We never discussed that I'd gown up being taught that sexual abuse "made" homosexuals, and that, by extension, I'd learned to hate my own flesh. How can you not hate yourself, body, mind, and soul, when your most primal urges are the result of sexual violence? How could I not Hate Myself when these were the Lessons Of My Youth?

Learning to love oneself is not easy, because often it can mean unlearning a lot of what we've been taught to believe about ourselves, even from people we dearly love, then starting again.

Waiting for Laws

Writing a blog scares me. I can't stand the feeling of pressure, writing a new blog once a day, or once a week, even every other week. I'm a single guy and, like most writers, I work a full-time job, plus I need to shop and I like to cook; exercise; walk a lot; read books; do my laundry and iron all my clothes every week, especially my bedding; see and cook for my elderly mother; and then there's my first book that was just published and I'm trying to still pitch interviews, and reviews, and of course I'm writing a new book. Who has time to write a blog?

But then I lie in my lavender-scented Epsom salt bubble bath to try and relax, to try and not think about all the things I don't have time to write about in a blog. 

Like laws banning "conversion therapy." Canada's banned it in two provinces, Ontario and Manitoba, except that in Manitoba it's not really a ban so much as a health regulation, deterring licensed therapists from practicing "conversion therapy." Does anyone actually think a licensed therapist who wants to practice "conversion therapy" is going to admit to practicing "conversion therapy"? Or even bill the province for "conversion therapy"? Please. A "regulation" like this is less than ineffective; in my mind, it's an insult. I understand Alberta's Lethbridge Public Interest Research Group, a "student-funded, student-directed, not-for-profit organization" is now spearheading a movement to ban the practice in their own province, but even there I understand they're meeting opposition from lawmakers with remarks that "conversion therapy doesn't happen in Alberta."

Oh, really?

Since my own six years in a form of "conversion therapy" in my native British Columbia, I've approached a number of politicians to try and bring about a law or even a public statement, just something, opposing this form of torture. Granted, the first time I approached a sitting MLA (Member of Legislative Assembly) in my West End neighbourhood of Vancouver, I was in the middle of suing my former psychiatrist for the treatment, so it was probably not the best time. Still, I'd hardly made it through the MLA's front office door and explained my history with this doctor when I was told, point blank, that they could not help me. Did I mention the MLA was a gay man? 

Flash forward, and about six years ago I approached the new MLA, again in my West End neighbourhood, once again explaining that I'd lived through six years of "conversion therapy" in British Columbia, that I'd filed an ethics complaint against the doctor with BC's College of Physicians and Surgeons, that I'd even sued the doctor, and had spent the last (at that time) roughly 15 years working on a book about the whole ordeal. I was approaching him, the MLA, now, I said, in the hope of sponsoring a private members bill, banning the practice of conversion therapy in British Columbia. 

At first, he seemed genuinely interested; he thanked me for bringing this "very serious community issue" to his attention; he told me that we'd meet again. Weeks later, I called and he said he had no time to help, but that if I did some "research" on my own, I could send it to him by email and he'd "look into it." Oh, did I mention he was also a gay man?

Then this year, in 2017, in anticipation of my book's release, I approached the city of Vancouver's LGBTQ2+ committee, which is tasked with making recommendations to the City of Vancouver about issues affecting Vancouver's LGBTQ community. I asked them to consider recommending to the City that they take a public position against "conversion therapy"--not even banning the practice legally, just simply taking a public position against the practice.

I waited months, but heard nothing. Then one day, I spotted a City Counsellor in my neighbourhood grocery store. Without thinking (or else I'm sure I would have shrunk back in fear), I approached him, introduced myself, told him about my email to the City's LGBTQ2+ Committee, and what I'd proposed. To which he said he knew all about my email already. We chatted next to the cucumbers, I think. He told me he knew of several "religious conversion therapies" that were happening right here in British Columbia. "They're a menace to our community," he said. "They're crazy." He seemed to know much more about these "therapies" than I did. He handed me his business card. He told me to follow up with the Committee. Oh, did I mention he is also a gay man?

I followed up with the Committee again, weeks later. I cc'd the City Counsellor.

Finally, six weeks later, they invited me to their next meeting, six weeks after that. I prepared a briefing note about "conversion therapy" in Canada, and in British Columbia, and my own history with the therapy, even detailing all the laws that have been passed banning the practice in various U.S. states and cities. There was precedent to my proposal.

At the meeting, I talked for a good 40 minutes, answered questions; everyone seemed very nice and eager to Stop. The. Big. Bad. Wolf. of Conversion Therapy. Some of the Committee members hadn't even been born when I was in my own therapy. I'm not sure how I felt about that, but I felt old.

I left, then heard nothing. Weeks passed. I emailed again, thanked them for inviting me to the meeting, to which they responded and said, "Oh, we were just about to email you. We will follow up with you next week, and invite you to join a sub committee about banning reparative therapy in British Columbia." 

Weeks wore on; now months. Still no word. I don't care anymore. No, that's not true. Yes it is. Not it's not. I don't know anymore. I'm tired, and I'm mad. I can't stand the waiting. I can't wait for politicians, or committees. Bureaucracy makes me crazy. I can't stand trying to make my point that "conversion therapy" is dangerous, that it causes harm, that it hurts people, that it hurt me. I take it all far too personally. The issue is a very personal issue to me. Frankly, I don't know how it is I'm still alive today. The medications that the doctor prescribed to try and "kill" my sexuality (my homosexuality) nearly killed me. I overdosed. I should have died. Thankfully, I didn't die. I'm alive. I try and make a difference. I wrote a book. I spent a very long time writing this book, The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir, to try and "get it right." Maybe someone will read it. Maybe it will help one kid. Maybe one parent will read it and think twice about sending their gay or trans kid into "conversion therapy." I hope so. I really do. That's my prayer.