Those of us hooked on Downton Abbey were somewhat relieved last season when writer, Julian Fellowes, eased up a bit on Thomas, the wicked gay under butler. But the “conversion” of Thomas to a more empathetic character came at a price. When the meddling manservant returned from a trip to London looking pallid and clammy, some of us knew instantly what had happened.
Equally, when we watched the decline and fall of one of Britain’s greatest unheralded World War II heroes, as portrayed in the biopic The Imitation Game, we cringed with horror. We were witnessing the painful unraveling of a gay man trying to “turn” straight. Back then, it was known as chemical castration, and it is what both WWII codebreaker Alan Turing, and Downton’s fictional Thomas, underwent.
The chemicals and the castration may be behind us, but efforts to “cure” gays and lesbians from their ill-advised “choice” to be homosexual persist. It’s just called by a more benign sounding, and totally inappropriate name; conversion therapy (or sometimes reparative therapy.) As advocates for a ban point out, no one truly gets converted or repaired and the procedure is far from therapeutic.
Arguably, conversion therapy is just as dangerous and cruel as chemical castration, the subtle difference being that it inflicts psychological rather than physical pain and damage, even though, as in Turing’s case, suicide is too often still the outcome.
Just ask the resilient Ryan Kendall, a conversion therapy survivor and now one of the most compelling voices calling for a ban. At 16, Kendall ran away from home, got a legal separation from his parents and endured a decade of homelessness, depression, suicidal ideation and drug abuse. All of this was to escape enforced conversion therapy which invites “every kind of quack,” Kendall told me while warning that “parents should never send a child through something like this.”
This was never more appallingly exemplified than by the experience of conversion therapy survivor, Sam Brinton, whose “therapist” told him when he was still a child that he already had AIDS but that it would go away if he converted to heterosexuality.
On the legislative front, Kendall thinks little if anything will change while both the House and Senate are controlled by the GOP. “The GOP doesn’t care if conversion therapy kills people,” he says bluntly. “We will make no progress on this or anything while Congress is controlled by the GOP. Zero.”
Despite such pessimism, Kendall was active in support of Representative Ted Lieu’s (D-CA) Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act which was introduced on May 19, although Kendall adds that “now we are just waiting to see which committee will kill it.”
Lieu, who is straight, but who authored the bill that got conversion therapy banned in California, which Kendall also worked on, describes the practice as “abuse.” When we spoke outside the Supreme Court in June, Lieu explained that he chose to challenge conversion therapy specifically as fraud because “it is fraud to try to purportedly cure someone of a medical condition that doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as being heterosexual or being homosexual that equates to a medical condition. It’s just being a human being,” he said.
Lieu is still seeking co-sponsors despite the potentially dim prospects of passage. “And it will pass, eventually,” added Kendall. (Attorney Sanford Jay Rosen introduced an amicus brief on behalf of survivors of conversion therapy in Obergefell vs. Hodges.)
In April, the Obama White House agreed to support “efforts to ban the use of conversion therapy for minors.” Conversion therapy has already been ruled illegal at the state level in California, New Jersey, Oregon and the District of Columbia and is pending in Illinois. It has been repudiated as harmful and ineffective by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), American Medical Association, and American Academy of Pediatrics, among others. The APA states that: “altering sexual orientation is not an appropriate goal of psychiatric treatment.”
A major nail in the conversion therapy coffin came in July 2013 when high profile exponent, Alan Chambers, president of Exodus International, America’s largest ex-gay Christian ministry, shut down his operation and admitted he was wrong. In an April 2015 article for Religion News Service, Chambers wrote: “For too long, same-sex attraction has been categorized as sinful and in need of repairing. Such stigma has caused LGBTQ people crippling shame and fear. As a child I experienced and as an adult I perpetuated that stigma. I profoundly regret my support for and promotion of reparative therapy.”
Kendall was reunited with his parents after an appearance on Anderson Cooper 360. But his father died in January 2015 and he notes, “I’ll never get back that time we lost. The damage can never be fixed. I was just fortunate I was able to reconnect with him.” It is a story repeated over and over, but often with a less happy ending. More typically, there are sorrowful parents weeping at grave sites, regretting too late their failure to accept their own children for who they are.
And who they are starts at birth, suggests the catchy #BornPerfect Campaign, a project of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. The campaign aims to end conversion therapy in four years “by putting the industry out of business,” said Samantha Ames, the campaign’s coordinator and staff attorney, when we talked recently by phone from her San Francisco office. Ames hopes to see other states like Massachusetts and New York ban conversion therapy before the end of the year, after which the campaign will set its sights on more challenging arenas like Utah, Texas and Michigan. But the strategy extends beyond the legal and the legislative.
“The states bills are a vehicle for education,” Ames said. And that education, she says, has to extend to religious communities, which is why #BornPerfect has a strong stable of allies from the faith community. “We find a lot of religious trauma in the LGBT community,” she added.
Ames likes Lieu’s fraud approach because, as she explains, “the advantage of consumer fraud is you can go after individual practitioners.” State bills can only cover licensed institutions.
The fraud approach was given a powerful boost in June when the Southern Poverty Law Center won its case in New Jersey Superior Court against a conversion therapy group, Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing. The jury found the defendants guilty of fraud under New Jersey’s consumer protection laws. The case involved firsthand accounts by survivors.
Both Ames and Kendall agree that personal survivor stories are the most powerful strategy for change. Ames admires individuals like Kendall because, she says, “when you go through a childhood trauma like that it can take decades before you can talk about it.” The headlines are more frequent now — take the suicide case of transgender teen, Leelah Alcorn, who was forced into conversion therapy. But, Ames says, “survivors have been telling their stories for years. It’s not the stories that are new. It’s that more people are listening.”
Kendall is more than just a survivor of trauma. He has dramatically turned his life around, getting a degree in political science at New York’s Columbia University. When we spoke, he was about to enter law school at UCLA. Similarly, survivor Brinton, the son of Baptist missionaries, who described landing in the ER numerous times after being beaten by his father, is now a graduate of MIT and a spokesperson for #BornPerfect. His five suicide attempts are behind him but sometimes the retelling of his story, which he does often, overwhelms him emotionally.
“Telling our stories, those personal stories, is the only tool I’ve ever encountered that can change people’s hearts,” Kendall said. “It’s a human tragedy. That’s why we are dedicated to ensuring that every LGBT child will know they were born perfect.”
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