Brian Nesbitt’s therapist made a suggestion in one of their sessions: put a rubber band around a wrist. Every time he had self-destructive thoughts he should snap it so it stung. “That was supposed to help curb my desires,” he said.
But Nesbitt was not aiming to give up smoking or quit alcohol. He was trying to think himself straight. Whenever he had sexual thoughts about a man he needed to flick the band against his skin. Another time, the therapist made a strange request: close your eyes and turn yourself on.
“I fantasized about this guy I was attracted to and I started to get a little bit aroused; he’s having me kind of voice these fantasies out loud,” Nesbitt said. “Basically all of a sudden my nose just became on fire. What had happened was ... he broke an ammonia capsule underneath my nose and now all of a sudden I’ve got this burning sensation, my eyes and nose were watering.”
The aversion tactics failed, as did the exorcisms performed by members of a Church of Christ near Fort Worth. “I was just sitting there, they were all laying hands on me and trying to cast out a demon and all this stuff and I remember just thinking: this is the most ridiculous bullshit I’ve ever been through in my life,” Nesbitt said. “The only thing they managed to exorcise was my faith.”
Conversion therapy, also known as reparative or ex-gay therapy, has been widely discredited as unethical and ineffective but it persists in many parts of the country, usually through churches, and is a battleground issue for gay rights campaigners and those who argue that banning it would curtail religious freedom.
As some conservatives seek to push back against recent advances in rights for gay and transgender people, a move is under way to add an implicitly pro-conversion therapy plank to the Republican party platform that will be approved at its convention in Cleveland next week.
Bryan Christopher, the Texas-born author of Hiding from Myself, a memoir about his experience with conversion therapy, said the GOP’s platform plans are “very troubling. I think it’s a backlash from gay marriage and gay rights and gay equality, they’re really doubling down and the ‘ex-gay’ platform is one of their ways of rolling back,” he said. “I think it shows that we’re not as far [along] as most of us like to think we are, there’s still a lot of work to do in changing hearts and minds.”
Last month a California court heard a challenge from a minister to the state’s first-in-the-nation ban (enacted in 2012 and effective in 2014) on licensed therapists attempting to change the sexual orientation of under-18s.
The practice gained fresh attention in June when a GoFundMe page was set up to raise legal fees to extricate Sarah, a 17-year-old, from a “pray away the gay” camp in east Texas where she was allegedly sent by her parents against her will.
The “Save Sarah” campaign raised $64,218. Her parents told the Austin American-Statesman that this was a misrepresentation of why she was there, while the facility, Heartlight Ministries, issued a statement five days after the page’s creation denying that they provide conversion treatments or held Sarah against her will, adding that she had left.
Now 45 and an atheist, Nesbitt spent three years in the mid-1990s seeing the Dallas-area therapist, who he said was later convicted of sexually assaulting another client. Nesbitt, who works in corporate audio-visuals, still lives in the region.
“When you’re a kid and you’re growing up and you can’t tell anybody what’s going on and what you’re dealing with and you get all these messages that you’re an abomination, it’s evil. It really does take a toll on you,” he said.
He recalls a boot-camp type weekend at a retreat about an hour from Dallas where participants underwent intense physical activity, “then they really try to break you down emotionally,” that was particularly tough and caused him to question not only whether he could change, but whether he should want to.
The bizarre and painful experiences turned him away from the process, he said, as did becoming friends with a gay man who was happy after taking the contrasting path of coming out and accepting his sexuality.
Raised in a religious household, Sean Sala, 31, said he was in his late teens when he went to Living Hope, an “ex-gay” ministry in the Dallas region then affiliated with Exodus International, a network which shut down in 2013 and apologised for directing “years of undue judgment” at the gay community.
“There was a room full of teenage boys who don’t want to be gay. The group leader would want to know how many times we masturbated during the week and additionally they wanted to know what we were thinking,” Sala said. Lesbians were told to wear makeup on the basis that they would feel more feminine. “There was no place in my brain at all where I believed that being gay was OK,” Sala said.
A US navy veteran and now an LGBT activist, he spent four to six months in the group but their tactics began to alarm him. “One of the group leaders prayed and said: ‘I really feel like you have been molested but you’re just suppressing it.’ And I have never been molested in my life. So I would tell them, ‘I’ve never been molested, incorrect.’ And then it turned into a narrative where in order for me to even participate I would have to admit that I had been molested.”
Ricky Chelette is executive director of Living Hope, which describes itself as offering “support and resources for leaving homosexuality”.
“I couldn’t because of confidentiality tell you whether or not he was involved in what we did nor not,” said Chelette, “but I mean that would not be something uncommon, to talk with people about.
“Obviously they come to us and they willingly come to us asking for help with a conflict between what they believe is their sexual practices and their faith. And so I could foresee someone asking about that or him stating something about his masturbation habits or something like that. But we’re just a discipleship ministry, we’re not a reparative therapy group in any way…
“We’re just a discipleship group that helps people to deepen their Christian walk and their faith and those are the kind of questions that I think would come up in any sort of accountability group that men would be doing.”
Asked if he believed some of the people he has worked with have changed from being gay to straight, Chelette said: “If you mean by ‘straight’ they’re no longer doing the gay practices that they may have been doing before as in hooking up with people or having sex with other people of the same gender, yes, we’ve had people that have done that.
“But if you mean ‘straight’ by ‘they have a ravenous appetite for women’ then I would say that’s probably not healthy either way, and we have had people who’ve come through the ministry that have desired to have families and be married and some of those have succeeded in accomplishing that.“
Sala said that his efforts to become straight caused long-lasting trauma that made him want to end his life. “I wanted to die so much that I felt like every time I thought about dying it was like opening a Christmas present,” he said. Only when about to get a loaded gun from a friend’s closet did he experience what he described as a spiritual realisation that nothing about him needed to change.
The White House announced in April 2015 that it supports a ban on conversion therapy for minors and the Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act was introduced in Congress, but it has not passed. In the absence of a nationwide law, opponents have adopted various strategies in attempts to stymie practitioners.
In February this year the Southern Poverty Law Center, Human Rights Campaign and National Center for Lesbian Rights filed a consumer fraud complaint with the Federal Trade Commission alleging that a Virginia-based group called People Can Change (PCC), which runs programmes such as a Journey Into Manhood is deceiving customers by claiming that conversion therapy works.
“The practice is based on the false premise that being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (‘LGBT’) is a mental illness or disorder caused by a developmental deficiency, trauma, and/or unmet emotional needs,” the complaint states.
“There is substantial competent and reliable scientific evidence that conversion therapy, including the methods employed by PCC, is ineffective and can and often does result in significant health and safety risks to consumers of those services, as well as economic losses – exactly the types of injuries that are at the heart of the FTC’s mission to protect consumers from harm.”
People Can Change said on their website that the complaint “is an attack on our first amendment rights to free speech, free assembly, and free exercise of our faith. We deserve as much respect as anyone who is ‘out and proud,’ and frankly, we deserve to be left alone to live our lives as we see fit.”
The organisations are waiting to hear if the FTC will investigate. “Our hope is that they will establish a broad federal rule that will apply to any conversion therapy provider anywhere in the country,” said Scott McCoy, senior staff attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Last year a group called Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing was ordered to pay $72,400 in damages to former clients after a New Jersey jury decided it committed consumer fraud when it claimed gay people could be “cured” through methods including telling participants to beat an effigy of their mother with a tennis racquet and stripping naked in group sessions.
Conversion therapy for minors is banned in five states and Washington DC. In May, Vermont became the latest state to prohibit it. Local laws are also being explored and enacted by cities. Miami Beach passed a ban for minors last month while activists in Dallas are hoping the city council will approve an ordinance later this year, but acknowledge they face an uphill task at the state level. “The leadership here in Texas is not exactly friendly to LGBT people or issues,” said Rafael McDonnell of the Resource Center, an LGBT community centre in Dallas.
An attempt to ban conversion therapy for minors in Texas failed to make it through the legislature during last year’s session. In the face of growing opposition to the practice and recent advances for LGBT rights, the Texas Republican party has reiterated its support for conversion therapy and its opposition to gay rights.
The Texas GOP signalled its backing for conversion therapy by describing it as legitimate and efficient in a plank of its 2014 platform and re-affirming it in its latest manifesto, adopted by party members in May.
It calls for overturning last year’s US supreme court decision legalising same-sex marriage nationwide and states: “No laws or executive orders shall be imposed to limit or restrict access to sexual orientation change efforts for self-motivated youth and adults.”
It also says that “Homosexuality is a chosen behavior that is contrary to the fundamental unchanging truths that has [sic] been ordained by God in the Bible, recognized by our nations [sic] founders, and shared by the majority of Texans.”
Nesbitt believes that the massacre of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Florida last month adds urgency to efforts to end a practice founded on the idea that being gay is a form of sickness.
“In the wake of Orlando I think it’s more important than ever to get our message out there and to fight against these sorts of things, because that’s one of the major problems with the whole reparative therapy movement,” he said.
“That if reparative therapy works, if it’s a healthy thing to do and it can be done… then homosexuality is a choice. And if it’s a choice then it’s a lot easier to demonize it.”
Recalling how believing that he was a sinner made him depressed, Nesbitt said he “was buying all that hook, line and sinker and of course it makes you feel like you’re a failure. The reality is that I’d known I was gay since I was probably ten years old, it’s not something I chose, it’s not something that was developed out of some terrible event in my childhood, it’s just another part of my personality, just another part of who I am.”
- This piece was updated on Friday 15 April 2016, to include comment from Ricky Chelette, executive director of Living Hope
