In a new survey of people who have undergone a controversial treatment seeking to change their sexual orientation, a gay man described his eight-year marriage to a woman as a "scam." Another survey respondent reported self-hatred, isolation, depression and flashbacks enduring long after the therapy was concluded. A third described an attempted exorcism.
These are just a few of the hundreds of responses from those who shared their experiences with "conversion therapy," or the gay "cure," in this apparently first-of-its-kind survey. Released Thursday, the survey was conducted by Jallen Rix, an author and facilitator at Beyond Ex-Gay, a support group for people who have endured the treatment.
Although efforts have been made for decades to change the sexual orientation of gay men and women, the practice has been under increased scrutiny in recent years, as the majority of mainstream professional mental health associations have spoken out against it, and lawmakers have sought to ban it. In California, the first and so far only state to prohibit licensed therapists from trying to change the sexual orientation of minors, that legislation is now being challenged in two lawsuits that argue the ban is an unconstitutional infringement on free speech and parental rights. Rix -- who spent eight months in college attending meetings of a so-called ex-gay group and trying to become straight -- hopes that the survey will insert what he and his colleagues at Beyond Ex-Gay say is a largely absent voice in the debate: patients who have suffered from the therapy.
"Without the voices of ex-gay survivors telling what really happens in these environments, hyper-religious ministries and therapists like this get away with saying that they're healing people and changing people -- and, in fact, they are not," Rix told The Huffington Post.
