Conversion therapy and other acts of lunacy

For the first time in a long time I looked at my counter’s stats this morning. What interests me about the stats is the search terms that bring punters to my blog. Usually I have a quick giggle at the weirder ones (such as “shorts pissings”, “why gay.com slows computer”, “4 foot fibre optic virgin mary”) or I sign over the ones that make me sad (“my life seems empty”, “sick of this s[h]it life”), but on occasion I find one that gets me really mad. And l found one such search term this morning, about three quarters down the page that got me intrigued, and a little bit mad: “conversion therapy places”. [I warn you now, this is a heavy post so if you’re in a light mood I recommend reading this another day.]

I followed the link to the search engine page and found that the link led to an entry from many months ago where I was talking about using two cross-over network cables together (which effectively makes one straight-through cable and renders them useless). Liz made the comment that you shouldn’t try to make things straight (thankfully her grandmother, who was in our presence, didn’t get the joke) and I said in the post that this proves conversion therapy is a crock of shit. Boom-boom, end of story.

I’ve actually done quite a lot of reading on the concept of “reparative” and “conversion” therapy. I use the quotes around the words because I think they only apply very loosely to the reality of conversion therapy and the misery it brings with it. Before I came out to Sister I looked into it because I thought there was a very real possibility of her insisting I seek out this kind of “help” to “cure” my homosexuality. I was lucky and she has never preached to me on the issue. I think it’s partly because she knows I have read so much on these things that she’d have a hell of a fight on her hands, but even so I do respect her for leaving me to live my own life, when it clearly goes against many of her beliefs.

I wasn’t so much angry that someone had come to my site hoping to find information on conversion therapy—they surely would have taken one look around and then left quick smart—but after seeing some of the other links on that search page, I was more pissed off at the mere existence of these lunatics. Ironically, my discussing it will only ensure it happens more often.

Five pages caught my eye, four (long) articles and a blog entry. The articles (for anyone who is interested) are: Mission Impossible: why reparative therapy and ex-gay ministries fail from the Human Rights Campaign, Conversion Therapy Revisited: parameters and rationale for ethical care by NARTH (National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality, who set up their organisation under the guise of a reputable charity with the express purpose of promoting conversion and reparative therapy…a bunch of crap-merchants if I ever I saw one), Deconstructing Reparative Therapy: an examination of the processes involved when attempting to change sexual orientation from the Clinical Social Work Journal, and “Reparative” Therapy: whether parental attempts to change a child’s sexual orientation can legally constitute child abuse from the American University Law Review.

The blog entry was about a sixteen year old kid who had been sent to an ex-gay group called Love in Action against his will (another bunch of crap-merchants, you can tell straight away by the name; google them if you want a fun look at whacky fundamentalism), who published the rules of the organisation on his blog. The links to his blog are now dead, since this all happened in 2005, but I was able to track down a copy from elsewhere on the net, and I also found this really interesting blog post about Love In Action and how love and hate play out when it comes to these things. I also found a wholly annoying article outlining LIA’s stance on what homosexuality is and how it needs to be cured.

The last article boils being gay down to ineffectual upbringing and/or some kind of failure on the part of the father or mother. I didn’t read the entire article; I ended up skim-reading it because it made me so mad. The thing is though that the ineffectual upbringing outlined in painful detail in this article doesn’t fit in with my experience of growing up. My father wasn’t distant and was always there as a “male role model” in my life. My mother didn’t smother me or overdo it with her “feminine influence”. I don’t fit the mould of the religious-right’s definition of what makes a homosexual. That gives me hope. It gives me hope because it means there must be other exceptions to their “rules”, and after a point they will no longer be rules anymore.

So that’s all I’m going to say on it. I realise I haven actually said anything substantive, that I’ve merely given a list of files and articles to read, but I figure there isn’t much I can say on the subject that hasn’t been said in those articles I read this morning. If you’re in a hurry and don’t have time to read them, or if you don’t want to read them (which I totally understand cos they’re big and long and depressing), here’s the short version:

Being gay is not a choice, it is innate. As such conversion therapy is a false therapy peddled by the neo-con religious right which seeks to change a person (whom they believe is not innately gay, but an individual who suffers from same-sex attraction, which is seen as unnatural and due to an inadequate upbringing in some way) from being a homosexual to a heterosexual through dubious psychoanalysis, sheer will power and prayer. It is denounced by all major psychological bodies around the western world as being an inappropriate therapy in any circumstances.