How to Make Chicken Goulash (“Paprikás Csirke”)

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

Three dollars and twenty-six cents an hour.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dumplings (“Nockerl”)

6 Eggs
8 - 10 Tbl Flour
2 tsp salt
Water

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

Cold Cucumber Salad

Long English Cucumber
Dill
Sour Cream
Salt

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

Harm of Hatred

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Apologies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My mother looked unconvinced.

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

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

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

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

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

“And what is this ‘Two-Spirit’?”

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

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

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

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

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

A criminal offence.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.