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There’s a great documentary about something similar to this, the pray away the gay movement which is essentially this same thing. It’s Pray Away and it’s on Netflix. It’s fantastic and goes into how many people who are in this super anti-LGBT sphere are in fact members of the community just in deep repression.
Conversion Therapy is torture. And there’s different intensities of it. I once had a super catholic girlfriend, literally majored in theology at a catholic school in Virginia. The entire time we were together she refused to go to communion or engage in church rituals. Not because she thought the church was shit to queer folk, but because she personally believed that being queer was a sin and that if you are gay you have to be celibate. She genuinely believed that our relationship was inherently sinful, she was constantly trying to “save me” the entire relationship too. Now, she never went to a place to be “converted”, but she was home schooled and was almost always around bigoted Catholics, she believed in the church and what priests and her parents told her so much that she literally majored in it. Just being in a religious community that is bigoted is conversion therapy. It makes you believe the things others say, makes you hate yourself because you’re queer, makes you desperately pray to god to fix you. That is just as much a conversion therapy as being forced to go to a place to “convert you” is.
Fuck this guy and what he’s done, I hope he knows the harm he’s caused the community and that he knows some of us will not forgive him.
Fantastic article. Reminds me of a letter that Gandhi wrote to German jews, saying that if they simply were respectable to their oppressors, if they simply were always kind, that the Germans would naturally feel bad for them and stop being so antisemitic. It’s all bullshit. My family insists on respectability politics, and a lot of people in my area do too, although that’s not surprising since I live in a red state. Even have had people at pride say that we shouldn’t pay attention or counterprotest the bigots that yell slurs at us and call us pedophiles. I’ve done away with respectability politics in my own life but I hate having to have family lecture me on why me being disrespectful will simply make the Nazis stick around longer, that really all we need to do is ignore them and they’ll go away or stop being so Nazi. It didn’t work for Jews in the 20s and 30s in Germany, and it won’t work now. Again, great article, I’m gonna share it with my family even if they end up still disagreeing.