I would say that it did, just to make the pain go away.

I was supposed to associate those images with the pain I was feeling to once and for all turn into a straight boy. I was forced to watch clips on a television of gay men holding hands, hugging and having sex. The therapist ordered me bound to a table to have ice, heat and electricity applied to my body. and AIDS.īut it didn’t stop with these hurtful talk-therapy sessions. I was told that my faith community rejected my sexuality that I was the abomination we had heard about in Sunday school that I was the only gay person in the world that it was inevitable I would get H.I.V. My parents were Southern Baptist missionaries who believed that the dangerous and discredited practice of conversion therapy could “cure” my sexuality.įor over two years, I sat on a couch and endured emotionally painful sessions with a counselor. In the early 2000s, when I was a middle schooler in Florida, I was subjected to a trauma that was meant to erase my existence as a newly out bisexual.