Religion as a Front for Tyranny

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

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

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

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. 

“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.”

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.”

The Problem with Stereotypes

In her remarkable TED talk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie commented that, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.”

As a gay man, or maybe just a man who is gay, I worry about stereotypes, the incompleteness of their single story. I loved Judy Garland, a legendary gay icon, long before I felt any stirrings of same sex desire. How was that possible?

Before I’d even given much thought to the fact that I might be “homosexual” (a much more likely and common label, rather than “gay,” when I was coming of age in the mid-1970’s), I adored all things related to Barbra Streisand.

Every weekend as a young boy, I spent hour after hour in the downtown main branch of the public library, scouring through newspaper clippings and old magazine articles and microfiche about the film The Wizard of Oz.

I joined “The International Wizard of Oz Club” when I was 12 years old.

Instead of studying English, Mathematics, or Geography, every night after dinner I pasted articles about the film in my leather-bound scrapbooks, or wrote reviews of the film for an imaginary newspaper, of which I was its sole writer, editor, and reader.

From my meagre weekly allowance, I purchased every LP that I could find about “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”: several editions of the film's 1939 soundtrack; storybook versions of the novel by L. Frank Baum; even “sing-alongs” with far less talented singers than the illustrious Ms. Garland.

Because the film was shown only once a year on television, and at some point I just could not bring myself to wait another long and dreary year before hearing every magical word and note, I recorded the entire film on my portable Panasonic cassette recorder, then listened to it each night as I drifted off to sleep, the recorder positioned just inches from my ear in bed. My two brothers lying feet away, needless to say, were not impressed.

But for years, “Over the Rainbow” lullaby’d me to sleep, especially after my eldest sister, Kriska, ran away from home. My heart had been broken into unmendable fragments. Listening to the tornado, or the munchkins, or even the Wicked Witch of the West, distracted me from my palpable grief.

The Wizard of Oz became such a focus in my young life that, years after coming of age, I often joked with friends that I wondered if I was gay because I loved The Wizard of Oz, or if I loved The Wizard of Oz because I was gay. I honestly didn’t know anymore. How was it possible that I loved both Barbra and Judy long before I knew that they were gay icons? Sometimes I think that if I’d known, I might have listened to AC/DC, like all the other boys in elementary school, just to see if it would have made a difference.

One of the problems with stereotyping myself as a gay man is, as pointed out by Adichie, it does not tell the complete picture. I love women, and have enjoyed being sexual with women. I cannot, in good faith, however, label myself as “bisexual.” If I am anything at all, the incomplete label of “gay” is likely what I am. At the same time, I do wonder if the very cultural oppression that I’ve encountered in my life against my homosexuality has also, ironically, helped reinforce my self-identifying as “gay.” To the degree by which I’ve felt myself, or at least my sexuality, oppressed, marginalized, or silenced, I have had to push back twice as hard, shout out twice as loud, in order not to let that part of me be killed. Today, as a 52 year old man, I really do think that my same sex desires are innate and healthy, that they make up all of who and what I am as a whole, sane, human being; but I do sometimes think about the fact that, had it not been for the kind of institutionalized homophobia and heteronormativity that I’ve run up against—from the Church and psychiatry, to be exact—I might have “turned out” more, well—not gay. Or maybe I would not have felt such a need to label myself at all, to prove the point of my homosexuality, and would have just enjoyed the freedom, which is my birthright, to explore my sexuality naturally. 

Oppression can kill, and surviving can sometimes mean killing something deep inside of us in order to help another part grow stronger—to survive at all. I have no regrets, but I don’t see the labels of “gay” and “straight” as telling a complete picture. Life is much more complicated, and far less stereotypical.