From Aversion to Conversion

For those of you who don’t know, the cause of LGBT has come along way in recent years. In nine states plus Washington DC, folks who can wear each other’s clothes (barring differences in size, of course) can marry. That is, I think, big news.

Some of us, however, have been content to stay behind. In fact, burrow just a bit deeper into the past. No, let’s be honest. There are folks who are so intensely threatened by gay people that they would do anything up to a public stoning to be rid of us.

In the 1970’s, when I first began to deal with being gay (I had known since childhood) a crucial event had just taken place. Drag queens in a bar in New York got raided. Did they run? Nope—they stayed and fought.

Stonewall—the first glimmer of light into what was hitherto an utterly dark picture.

So I didn’t do what I would have done a decade earlier. I didn’t find a shrink, pay him or her 100 bucks an hour, and embark on the question of what my smothering mother Franny (many good qualities she had, that mother of mine, but smothering? Nah!) or my distant father (closer to the mark!) had done.

I went to the library and read.

Any book published in the previous five years had a message—it’s OK, you’re OK, hang on. Anything older than ten years was completely the opposite—you’re sick, seek help.

So I came out, dragging a lot of other people out as well. No, not other gay people, but other people who came to understand—being gay was no big deal.

On the day of my mother’s memorial service, I found myself at a table with the wife of my cousin, who was busily chatting with Raf. They were getting along like a house afire—virtually calling each other sister!—talking gardening, recipes, fashion. Having a wonderful time!

The same woman who homeschooled her children to keep the filth of evolution out of their innocent ears. Whose daughter had once written in the Christmas letter, “Mom is having some health issues but she and the Lord are resolving them.”

One felt a bit sorry for the Lord.

So we’re all in a better place, right? Thirty years ago, I would say to Raf, “hey, your Mom called today….”

“She say anything this time?”

“Nope, complete silence again….”

She would call every half hour, not say a word, and then, when Raf picked up, would speak.

“Mami, Marc said you called,” said Raf one day, tired of it all….

Right. Last week I cashed the birthday check she had written out and given me, with many kisses and endearments.

Well, I’m sorry to report that the progress has been less than 100% pervasive. And a federal judge in the state of California has upheld temporary injunction on a ban on conversion therapy.

Conversion therapy?

Yes, it’s still going on, still practiced, and no—nobody respectable believes in it. Here’s a choice description of the therapeutic methods, drawn from a lawsuit in November in New Jersey.

The therapy techniques described in that lawsuit included having participants strip naked in group sessions, cuddling and intimate holding of others of the same sex, violently beating an effigy of their mothers with a tennis racket, visiting bath houses "in order to be nude with father figures," and being "subjected to ridicule as 'faggots' and 'homos' in mock locker room scenarios."

It’s almost impossible to know which is greater—the ridiculousness of the techniques, or the sadness of men who would willingly consent to them, so horrified are they of their sexuality.

But wait—it’s not people willingly choosing to undergo this “therapy.”

The California ban applies only to minors under the age of eighteen.

Kids.

Dragged to the camp or the counselor’s office by their parents.

Here’s the judge’s reasoning:

U.S. District Judge William Shubb ruled Monday that the ban Gov. Jerry Brown signed earlier this year could offend the First Amendment rights of therapists to express their opinions about homosexuality.

And here’s mine:

The guy who cuts my hair has a license. The person who sprays perfume on ladies in Macy’s has a license. The person who drives me in his taxi has a license. When in God’s name are we gonna get rid of quacks who are messing around with the most vital thing any of us possess—the mind? 

Fifty years ago, it was aversion therapy—people looking at homoerotic images and receiving electrical shocks in the nether regions. Or being given emetics, so as to associate looking at men with puking.

It’s as wrong as it is vicious. Don’t believe me? Here’s the big boy himself, Sigmund Freud, on the subject:

"I gather from your letter that your son is a homosexual...it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. By asking me if I can help [your son], you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place. The answer is, in a general way we cannot promise to achieve it. In a certain number of cases we succeed in developing the blighted germs of heterosexual tendencies, which are present in every homosexual; in the majority of cases it is no more possible. It is a question of the quality and the age of the individual. The result of treatment cannot be predicted."