To Ban or Not to Ban may be the question for lawmakers, but the underlying issue, at least in my books, remains helping to prevent immeasurable harm while fostering lives lived in honesty and integrity, or perpetuating institutionalized hatred by turning a blind eye for the sake of maintaining a lie.
Read More“Coming out” demands so much more than telling people I’m gay, and discussing my book’s underlying issues necessitates so much more than repeating the potentially banal pitch of “conversion therapy.”
Read MorePsychopharmacology, I’m convinced, is robbing us of our humanity. Agency has been replaced with the prescription pad.
Read MoreAll people share the same humanity, but we are also not all "the same." We are all different, and our differences must be voiced, and celebrated, seen, and never assimilated.
Read MoreIf Silence = Death, then Voice = Life.
Read MoreNo longer strapping gay people into chairs and shocking them with electricity but merely “helping” them to not have sex may sound like progress, it may no longer sound like conversion therapy, and therein lies the rub. When we talk about conversion therapy we are talking about an ideology, not any one “type” of treatment.
Read MoreWho will sit with me, night after long and lonely night, after I send my book out into the world, then suffer through separation anxiety? So, my book is now published, and I am lonely and alone, childless, staring at the blank page, ready and willing to birth another.
Read MoreWhen I just can’t deal with life, or my next writing project, there are always prune pockets. Just be forewarned: one is never enough.
Read MoreBelieving that therapists won’t practice conversion therapy—that they won’t treat their gay or trans patients in an effort to “change” them—because it’s been deemed ineligible for funding seems to imply that there is a thing or product actually called “conversion therapy” that can be removed from the marketplace, like a prescription drug or a tainted food, and therefore withdrawn from public consumption. It's a lie.
Read MoreRead their struggles. Hear their voices. Remember their legacies.
Read MoreThe Wizard of Oz became such a focus in my young life that, years after coming of age, I often joked with friends that I wondered if I was gay because I loved The Wizard of Oz, or if I loved The Wizard of Oz because I was gay.
Read MoreIt was easy, as a confused teenager, to think that sexual abuse from my childhood had "made me gay." I was raised in the 1970's to believe that Homosexuals Recruited Children. Anita Bryant's voice prevailed.
Read MoreI'm tired, and I'm mad. I can't stand the waiting. I can't wait for politicians, or committees. Bureaucracy makes me crazy. I can't stand trying to make my point that "conversion therapy" is dangerous, that it causes harm, that it hurts people, that it hurt me.
Read More“Conversion therapy,” as an umbrella term signifying a vast array of therapies aimed at “curing homosexuality,” was actually created decades ago by, and from within, an anti-gay-rights movement aimed at affirming and endorsing psychiatry’s long-held belief of homosexuality as a mental illness in need of “change.”
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