“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.”

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.

The Lie of Mental Illness

The decades-old medical model of mental health says that “you” and “I” are unrelated, and that if a health expert diagnoses “you” with a mental illness—as being “mentally ill”—that has nothing to do with “me.” One of us is well, the other unwell.

Biology is the culprit, this model says; a person’s DNA has “caused” their mental illness. Unfortunately, this also often means that these “illnesses” will “run in the family”—a person has likely “inherited” the “mental illness” of their ancestor. We are the victims of our biology.

All hope is not lost, however, because treatment is available for this “ill” person. Diagnosis is crucial, of course, by way of The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), since only by naming the illness can experts then enact the remedy through psychopharmacology. The best anyone can ever do is to understand their mental health concern—the name of what they “have”—then take their medication.

I do not believe in the medical model of mental health. It frightens me; it reminds me too much of my own experience as a gay man who was medicalized by a system of so-called “experts” all hell bent on diagnostic criteria, then drugging my sexuality away with extreme psychiatric medication. To me, there is little difference in what is happening today with the diagnosis of, oh, let’s say, “ADHD,” and psychiatry’s diagnosis of my own “illness” as a gay man. What has changed, in the years since homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973—from a moment in time when the guardians of the gate of mental health “decided” by popular vote that gays were no longer mentally ill—is psychiatry’s influx of “diseases,” as all neatly categorized in the DSM, and their remedies in the form of an over-saturation of psychopharmacology—but the methods of diagnosis (i.e. labelling), treatment, policing and evaluation, has remained consistent.

“Mad in America” is a non-profit organization devoted to “rethinking psychiatric care in the United States and abroad,” which includes publishing an online webzine with “news of psychiatric research, original journalism,” and a forum a international writers—“people with lived experience,” among them, psychologists and psychiatrists. Lawrence Kelmenson, MD, a psychiatrist, begins one such recent article by writing that, “As modern psychiatry grows larger and larger, it becomes hungrier and hungrier for more clients. Its formula is to invent fake ‘illnesses’ that everyone meets criteria for, and to lure people to seek fake ‘cures’ that really make them permanently ‘ill.’ But there is a more pervasive, ominous, and subtle way that U.S. adoption of the medical model has spread ‘mental illness’ and drug addiction.”

“Mental illness,” I really do believe, has fast become the cancer of the new Millennium, and we are all at risk of being labelled “sick” because, not unlike physical diseases, mental illness also springs from our genes, attacking us in its infancy.

No longer do people feel “sad” or “depressed”—now they are all “mentally ill”; they are “bipolar.” To even admit to feeling “blue” shows signs of heredity. “Are you taking anything for it?” has become a question that I have heard all too often. Just recently, I ran into a writing friend in a local grocery store, and after telling her that I’d been feeling “a bit depressed”—following years of receiving literally hundreds of rejections on my memoir manuscript (some quite scathing in their comments), to finally getting it published (to my rejoice), but now experiencing the “down” effect on this seemingly endless roller coaster ride called Book Publication—she asked me if I was “taking anything for it.” For a moment I just stared at her, gobsmacked. She has to be kidding, I thought. “I’m on a great new antidepressant,” she said. “You should take it.”

Why should I take it? was the question that plagued me, as I left my friend in the frozen food section. What is wrong with feeling sad, or depressed? It is normal to feel the way I feel, after going through what I’ve gone through.

Why didn’t my friend ask me, instead, more about how I was experiencing this depression? As depth psychology has shown us, aside from a kind of depression that is driven by biological sources, which no doubt does affect a certain amount of people, there are all sorts of other reactive depressions that are the natural result of complex life situations—acute traumas, the passing of loved ones, prolonged illnesses, or any number of other events. Probing questions about such occurrences, how they affect us emotionally and the ways in which we face deep personal troubles and crises, seem to have been largely replaced with advice about “which medication to take.” Mental illness, like an omniscient third person, is now the culprit.

In his The New York Times’Op-Ed, published May 11, 2012, Allen Frances, former chairman of the psychiatry department at Duke University School of Medicine, and leader of the task force that produced the most recent DSM in 2013, wrote that The American Psychiatric Association has come dangerously close to turning “the existential worries and sadness of everyday life into an alleged mental disorder . . . The DSM has become the arbiter of who is ill and who is not . . . The DSM-5 promises to be a disaster . . . it will introduce many new and unproven diagnoses that will medicalize normality and result in a glut of unnecessary and harmful drug prescription . . .”

Our conversations, I fear, are already being reshaped by the “new normalcy” of mental illness. People seem less and less inclined to ask the “old” questions about feelings. As future generations come of age, they obviously won’t even have the frame of reference to remember that there was a time, in the not-too-distant-past, before the world of “mental illness” and its psychopharmacological cures, when the remedy to feeling “down” was human relationships. People actually talked about their feelings—and not on-line but face-to-face; they sharedstories, and hugged, and the simple but palpable recognition that what is in me is also in you, actually helped. When you don’t even remember anymore that there are other questions that can be asked, what happens then?

It frightens me to think that it’s all just a matter of being easier to talk about “mental illness” and psychopharmacology, than real human feeling. And not just to talk about feelings, but in between all our texting and emailing, to actually feel them. Perhaps we’ve become a lazy culture, generation upon generation, with talk of this diagnosis or that diagnosis, this drug or that drug—even this side effect or that side effect (and which drug will help with the side effects resulting from the other medications) becoming so much easier and black-and-white, than the murky waters of our complicated emotions.

But being alive is not a black-and-white affair, and neither should it be. Feelings are not Conservative or Liberal, GOP or Democrat. Struggling through emotions is, at least in part, what it means to be alive. Psychopharmacology, I’m convinced, is robbing us of our humanity. Agency has been replaced with the prescription pad.

Meanwhile, I sometimes wonder about all these mass shootings, their alarming increased rate of frequency, the role that this mental health + psychopharmacology paradigm has perhaps played in these killers’ actions. I also do not think there is any accident to our culture’s increased fixation on “torture porn”—graphically violent films that are also often laced with sexual brutality. An industry plagued with controversy over sexual impropriety (to put it mildly) produces fodder to their masses, then stands back bewildered, along with everyone else, when violence erupts. How can a movie like Jigsaw actually earn close to 20 million dollars in just one weekend? I thought recently. How is it possible that this kind of inhumanity is considered “entertainment”? Even the mere idea depresses me. In considering these “torture porns,” I remember the more benign horror movies of my adolescence, like John Carpenter’s Halloween or even Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist, with mild nostalgia. At the same time, I can also see how the ante has been seriously “upped”—it needs to be upped. There is no end to the well of human misery, and what we no longer feel must always be increased to penetrate our deadening senses. What we will not face, we will project, I keep thinking, as I witness depictions of extreme violence in our media; and I suppose that also means that what we medicate away will sooner or later show up by some other means through our projections on the screens of our lives. We need to see it outside, because we will not look at it within. 

Medicating it away—whatever “it” is—does not mean that it has gone away. I fear that this will all get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

Difference Matters

One of my siblings and I recently “ended up” talking about issues of sexuality—and I do use that term “ended up” purposefully, because sexuality is a subject I have vehemently tried to avoid with my siblings over the years, considering our highly acrimonious history. But on this recent occasion, my sibling mentioned that they preferred not to talk about someone as being “homosexual or even heterosexual,” because, as they continued,  “We’re all just the same anyway. After all, I don’t need to know what goes on in the bedroom of a heterosexual person either. I don't need to know that someone is gay.”

I suppose my sibling’s comment was meant to be a (very loose) sign of solidarity (although I am likely deluding myself on this account), but I interrupted the flow of our conversation just the same and said that, “No, homosexuals are not the same as heterosexuals; gay people have lived a completely different life trajectory than the average straight person, if for no other reason than our culture is highly heterosexist, and there is still very good reason to ‘come out’ and declare oneself gay. Visibility matters; you do need to know that someone is gay. Besides, you can’t make me the same as you no matter how much you try. We’re not the same, and the difference is not just a matter of who I sleep with.”

My sibling said nothing—as I pretty much figured—and then we moved on. Hopefully, though, my point was taken.

Again, I’d like to think that my sibling meant well, but I couldn’t help think that their belief system—which is, I’m sure, shared by a good many straight, and even gay, people—is yet another form of shielded homophobia. “I accept you, so can you please just stop talking about it already?”

No, I can’t stop talking about it. And neither should anyone else. 

Moreover, I honestly don’t think gay people and straight people are the same—and why should they be? What’s wrong with being different, in recognizing our differences, and in not wanting to assimilate? I often worry that some people think that legislating same-sex rights means that gays and straights will therefore all be “the same”—that the end goal should be some sort of homogeneousness.

“Equal” under the rule of law does not make us all the same. And neither should it. We are not the same. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms speaks about “equality” under the law, The Constitution of the United States about “equal protection”—not about being “the same.” 

I also worry sometimes because as laws change and gays are granted equal status under the law, some people may think that means the fight is over; that once “the political” has been achieved, there is nothing left to fight for, to even talk about. 

The political will never be the personal, and on a very individual, personal level, there will always be endless stories of sexuality. Gay people wrestle with all sorts of issues—as do straight people—not only about whether or not to “come out,” if they can legally marry, adopt children, serve openly in the military. All people share the same humanity, but we are also not all “the same.” We are all different, and our differences must be voiced, and celebrated, seen, and never assimilated.

Difference matters.

5 Things I’ve Learned About Sexual Violence

In the wake of the allegations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, several famous people, and many more less famous people, all have stepped forward about their histories of sexual assault; some have even spoken openly, for the first time, about their histories of childhood sexual abuse. #Me too, many have written on Twitter, joining a chorus of survivors.

It takes no small amount of courage, strength of character, and conviction to speak openly about one’s history of sexual assault, whether as an adult or a child. But it’s never easy. As a 52 year-old gay man who was sexually abused as a child, I still never find it “easy” to talk about any of these issues, even though I’ve now written an entire memoir about just that. “What will they think of me?” is the question that taunts, like a devil on my shoulder, when I think about what I’ve said openly to the world through the act of writing and publication. “Good God, I must be crazy...”

No amount of celebrity or stardom will ever shield a person from the deep sense of shame and betrayal they felt while, and also after, being sexually assaulted—as well as the guilt at not “speaking up” when the violation first occurred. In many respects, “survivors” are without race, nationality, religion, gender, sex or sexual orientation, because shame and guilt are universal experiences that plague us all, regardless of our so-called “differences.” What I know to be true today is that speaking openly about a history of sexual assault does, indeed, help us heal, if only because the dark silent night of guilt, shame, and betrayal is brought openly into the bright sound of day through the voice of the person who has survived. Make no mistake: sexual assault is never about “sex.” Sexual assault is about power; it is an act of violence, and it fractures the soul of the survivor long after their body “heals.” If Silence = Death, then Voice = Life.

Meanwhile, I’ve learned a few things through my own experiences:

1. No one who has ever been sexually violated is ever “guilty” of anything, and they definitely have nothing to be ashamed of.

2. Shaming myself over not speaking up sooner about being sexually violated will never help me heal; all it will do is make the shame I already do feel that much worse. If “now” is not the right time to speak, then that’s okay too. I need to be patient with myself, and then speak when I am good and ready. Not a moment sooner.

3. Some things are real whether another living soul learns about them or not. No matter if I talk about the abuse today, or in five years from today, time won’t change the fact that it happened, that it was real, and it was wrong.

4. Shame is never who I “am.” Shame is like a filth that covers, that crushes, that we sometimes even forget we once lived without, but that we can wash away. We do this, slowly, by talking.

5. We are all in this together.

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.

The Writing Life: Lessons Learned Along the Way

Most of the time I feel embarrassed at how long it’s taken me to write my book, and then to find a publisher. Half the time I don’t want to tell people that I started writing my book 20 years ago (in May 1997). I hear about people writing books in one or two, maybe three years, and I think, What’s wrong with me? I can’t be a real writer; real writers write much faster than me, they produce books.

But then I remember the process, all the lessons learned along the way. Memoir writing, at least for me, has been complicated by memory, and the fact that as I’ve aged, and learned, and forgiven, my memory of past events, or at least the meaning I’ve placed on them, has changed, and so the writing needed to change along the way. In a sense, I was constantly playing “catch up” with how I viewed the past, and then trying to integrate those lessons into the very book I was writing in the first place.

There have also been many “lessons learned” about the business of book publishing. I recall Ayn Rand, in her book, The Art of Nonfiction, making the distinction between the subconscious act of writing and the conscious act of editing, reaffirming that the two are very different streams of logic and should not be confused or overlap—we do not use the same parts of our brain for writing as we do for editing, she claimed. Over the years, I’ve found that a similar logic applies to the act of writing a book, and then seeing it through to trade publication. Though intimately connected paths, each has been a very different process for me, presenting separate though interconnected life lessons. Where the former process of actually writing a book has been, out of necessity, a solitary endeavour in which I’ve faced only my own worst critic (me), the latter process of seeing a book through to publication has demanded the best of my social and public persona, as well as finely tuned business skills and enormous self-determination—or, as some might call it, “sheer dog-headedness.” Rejections from literary agents and trade publishers along the way have devastated. In the face of so much harsh criticism, or rejection—or worse: silence—how or why to continue fighting the good fight toward trade publication often became my burning question.

Years ago, friends and even some industry folks told me to maybe think of “self-publishing” my memoir. Wouldn’t it be easier? they’d say. Then I could control everything—no more waiting for publishers or agents; I could do it all myself. I suppose at some point I made a conscious decision not to self-publish, because I knew that a large part of what I dreamed of achieving was the process itself of engaging with the book publishing business. Learning the do’s and the don’t’s of that very business has been long and arduous, and continues, of course, to this day. Initially, I had no idea what was even meant by a “query letter.” What needed to be included in such a letter, and how long should it be? How or where would I find a listing of literary agents, and should I send the same letter to agents as to publishers? What is the best way to track all of their responses? And if they don’t respond to my letter, how long should I wait before following up—a month? four months? a year? ever? What if an agent or editor asks for select chapters, but then requests changes that seem inconsistent with my own personal vision? What then? Do I cave in and do as they want? Do these “experts” always know best?

These (and many more) were only some of the early logistical questions that I asked myself, but then I also learned that I needed to take care of my heart. What happens to my spirit when no one—not one agent or publisher—responds to what I thought was a finely crafted book that I’d spent years of my life “perfecting”? How do I get out of bed each morning (not to mention shop, cook, and feed myself, launder and iron my clothes, pay my bills, even work a day job, etc.) when no one seems to hear or care about what matters most to me? And when I do finally hear back from agents and publishers, maybe six or twenty-six months later, but all they offer is “advice” that seems to just contradict earlier feedback from others, how do I integrate or learn from the best while leaving the rest? What is “the best” kind of feedback? And how do I retain my own sense of integrity while wanting to please the very people that seem to hold the key to my success? When so much of what sells nowadays seems to rely on fad, or fashion, or what’s “hot” in the rapidly changing (fickle) headlines, how do I stay true to myself, my own best instincts, while also trying to appeal to the masses? Should I even care about the masses? Time and again, films and books that were seen as unmarketable suddenly break out and hit the big times. No one could have predicted their success, then a hundred others try and copy their apparent formulas toward even bigger successes, oftentimes failing miserably. Do I follow the tail that wags that dog, or is it my own sense of authenticity I should be following? Who am I anyway, and what about my parents, and their parents? How do they still impact what I think, feel, and write, today? How do I write my most considered, best self, free of cliché and banal sentiment? What is that process all about? And how do I separate my “self” from my “book,” like a parent from its offspring? Who will sit with me, night after long and lonely night, after I send my book out into the world, then suffer through separation anxiety? So, my book is now published, and I am lonely and alone, childless, staring at the blank page, ready and willing to birth another. I can no longer edit or nurture my finished book. Or can I?

What happens after publication?

Prune Pockets

“Prune pockets,” a traditional Austro-Hungarian recipe, was one of my family’s favorite comfort foods when I was a child, growing up in the late 1960’s and 1970’s. My mother, a native German who was born and raised in the former Yugoslavia, told us that her mother, as well as her mother’s mother, made prune pockets “in the old country,” and I know my father, born in Budapest, Hungary, also ate them as a child. Basically, the dough is a potato gnocchi formed into pockets and stuffed with sweetened prunes, then boiled in salted water and finally browned in breadcrumbs and butter. Does anything sound more delicious or comforting? When I just can’t deal with life, or my next writing project, there are always prune pockets. Just be forewarned: one is never enough.

Prune Pockets

1 russet potato
1 whole egg
1 - 2 cups all purpose flour
25 - 30 prunes
Sugar
Salt
½ to ¾ cup bread crumbs
Butter

Boil prunes in sugared water, roughly 20 minutes. Remove from heat and cool; drain and remove pits. Separately, boil potato in the skin, roughly 15 minutes; peel. In same bowl, mash potato, then add egg, flour and a pinch of salt. Knead into dough, and roll out on floured board and cut into squares. In center of each, add 2 - 3 prunes and a teaspoon of sugar. Pinch opposite sides of square up to seal in prune and create pocket. Place all pockets on a floured surface to prevent sticking. Bring a large pot of salted water to boil. Drop each pocket in water; stir gently, to prevent sticking. Return water to boil, cooking another 2 - 3 minutes. Remove pockets from water with slotted spoon. In a large frying pan, brown bread crumbs in butter until slightly golden. Add pockets to bread crumb mixture and fry evenly, turning to prevent burning, until crispy and browned. Serve by sprinkling sugar over each pocket before eating. Makes roughly 8 prune pockets.

The potato dough can also be rolled out and cut into “fingers,” then boiled as above and fried in bread crumbs and butter until browned. Serve as a side dish instead of potato.

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.

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.

Gays Cross Borders

With President-Elect Donald Trump and his running mate, Vice President-Elect Mike Pence, about to take office, much has been said about, among other issues, each man’s policies and opinions affecting LGBTQ citizens. During his first successful run for congress in 2000, for example, one of many statements Pence added to his website under the heading “Strengthening the American Family” included, “Resources should be directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior.” Taken from within the context of Pence’s other anti-gay rhetoric, as well as his subsequent 2015 “religious freedom” bill, which would have allowed businesses to deny service to gays and lesbians based on religious beliefs, it is not difficult to interpret Pence’s comments as endorsing the practice of “conversion therapy”—that is, therapies aimed at trying to “change” a person’s sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual.

The fact remains today: every leading psychological and psychiatric organization has denounced conversion therapy, and laws banning its practice on minors have been passed in recent years both in the United States and in Canada. In 2015, President Obama condemned the practice of these therapies, and up until the recent election at least, efforts were well underway to classify conversion therapy as a fraudulent practice and illegal under the Federal Trade Commission Act. As someone who has actually lived through the experience of “conversion therapy,” I find it deeply troubling that the next Vice President of the United States would have ever endorsed therapies that the World Health Organization has said, “lack medical justification and threaten health.” The Offices of the President and Vice President of the United States of America set the tone on the world political stage. Even affirming the notion that “gays can change” potentially strengthens a kind of homophobic ideology that gives rise to violence against gays everywhere—between doctor and patient, teacher and student, parent and child, classmates and friends—and not only in the United States of America. Gays cross borders.

The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir, forthcoming on May 16, 2017, by Brown Paper Press, is about my own six-years in this therapy and, later, medical malpractice suit against my former psychiatrist for treating my sexuality in an effort to “change” me from homosexual to heterosexual. In our relatively pro-LGBTQ, culturally sophisticated Western world, many people may not believe that these kinds of therapies actually still exist. The truth is, I had not initially sought help to try and change my sexual orientation; rather, I began psychotherapy with a licensed psychiatrist after coming out as gay and being rejected by my family. I was young, depressed, and isolated—as so many young gay people often are—and in need of help. I trusted Dr. Alfonzo. 

Homosexuality itself was declassified as a mental illness and removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1973. Despite such progress, many forms of conversion therapy, usually bible-based (“pray away the gay”), have persisted through the years. My own treatment was neither religious-based, nor endorsed by any specific psychiatric community: instead, Dr. Alfonzo simply took it upon himself to try and “cure” me of what he considered to be the “error” of my homosexuality—he prescribed massive amounts of multiple psychiatric medications, used aversive techniques, and generally contextualized my entire life history (my “problems”) in an effort to convince me that I really was heterosexual. 

“Conversion therapy,” as an umbrella term signifying a vast array of therapies aimed at “curing homosexuality,” was actually created decades ago by, and from within, an anti-gay-rights movement aimed at affirming and endorsing psychiatry’s long-held belief of homosexuality as a mental illness in need of “change.” In other words, though the American Psychiatric Association’s official policies may have changed, its homophobic legacies have lived on in the hearts of some who still treat gays as “disordered.” Changing laws or official policies is not the same as changing hearts. The term “conversion therapy” is, in truth, a misnomer—since nothing, in reality, is ever “converted” during the course of these treatments. Even the alternately used term “reparative therapy” inaccurately describes what I now consider to be more like a psychic lobotomy, where the “surgeon” probes into the psycho-sexuality of the individual, cutting and scarring their way toward the establishment of a different sexuality, while the “patient,” severely undermined by lifelong messages of heteronormativity, becomes co-conspirator in their own loss of agency. Patients of these therapies who do claim to have “changed” their sexual orientation typically later admit to mean that they have merely learned to control their sexual behavior—they “become” heterosexual in as much as they learn to partner with a member of the opposite sex. For “ex-gays,” words like “homosexual” and “heterosexual” are less descriptors of erotic desire as they are mutable social identities. “Change,” for ex-gays, is taxonomical.

The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir is a personal story about my own, honest experience in one of these kinds of “therapy,” but its themes are universal: generational trauma, childhood sexual abuse, powerlessness in the face of adversity, self-acceptance, identity, the resilience of the human spirit, and the recognition that we have within each of us a core essence that cannot be killed, or “changed.”