Shame About Being Gay
February 26, 2019
I just read the KUER web story about the Utah bill to ban conversion therapy for minors. This excellent article, written by Daysha Eaton, focuses on Arturo Fuentes who underwent various types of conversion therapy for a number of years before coming to accept his sexuality. I highly recommend the article.
https://www.kuer.org/.../we-can-cure-one-mans-troubled...
Every time I hear or read another story of this kind my heart aches a little more for the many people who’ve suffered like Arturo. My grief comes both from feeling like a perpetrator as well as a victim.
Although I abandoned all aspects of conversion therapy over 6 years ago, I did practice some aspects of it for a very long time. It’s been many more years since I believed and taught some of the most dehumanizing theories about being gay—but I did teach them. So I have been a perpetrator of the very kind of harm Arturo experienced. And I have such remorse for that. I wish I could embrace every person who was ever taught such things—by me or someone else—cry with them and somehow take away their pain.
So how could I possibly feel like a victim? Because I was once Arturo. My own path through LDS anti-gay history is different from his, and I actually had very good experiences with therapy. Even so, I ingested and internalized the same kinds of dark and dehumanizing ideas that were taught to him and felt shame about being gay. I’m old enough to remember not only the words of LDS Church president Spencer W. Kimball, but also the disgusted and almost hateful tone in his voice as he spoke publicly about gay people using terms like, “weakness,” “pervert,” “crime against nature,” and “ever deepening degeneracy.”
I fell prey to that mindset and it formed the foundation of my responses to homosexuality, both personally and professionally. It didn’t mess up my life as it has the lives of so many others, like Arturo. My life has been very blessed; my bisexuality afforded me a long and mostly good heterosexual marriage and 3 amazing children. I have little to complain about in that regard.
But here is my complaint: the foundational mindset that homosexuality is evil took me a very, very long time to escape. And I inflicted it on others. While most of my former clients would say they never heard such things from me and that I did them a lot of good, still the idea that homosexuality was something to avoid if at all possible was the very purpose of my clinical practice.
I never beat kids with Bibles or used aversive techniques. On the contrary, I spent lots of time helping clients love and accept all parts of themselves. Even so, I was an unwitting agent of a belief system that dehumanizes and represses LGBTQ people. I didn’t create the system but I perpetuated it. Maybe now I can help to change it.