transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Okay, here we go, stand by.

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[00:01] Three, two, one.

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[00:04] The Thinking Atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol, an idea.

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[00:10] The population of atheists in this country is going through the roof.

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[00:13] Rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred.

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[00:18] If I tell the truth, it's because I tell the truth. Not because I put my hand on a book and made a wish.

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[00:25] And working together for a more rational world.

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[00:29] Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.

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[00:42] This is the Thinking Atheist Podcast, hosted by Seth Andrews.

Speaker 1:
[00:56] After my conversation with guest Dr. Lucas Wilson on today's show, I'm going to come back, and in the last segment of the broadcast, I'm going to read chapter one of the book, and he's given me permission to do that. So once he and I sort of handshake and say goodbye, I will return for the last segment of the broadcast and read from the book. Here we go. We start today by talking about March 31st Supreme Court ruling in what has become a famous case that has to do with a Colorado therapist and something known as conversion therapy. We're going to talk about what that is in just a second with my special guest. A quick primer. The Colorado legislature passed a law in 2019. It was called the Minor Conversion Therapy Law, and it prevented counselors from gender affirming conversations with patients under the age of 18. There was a lawsuit filed in 2022 by a Christian therapist. Her name is Kaylee Chiles. She was upset that she was not able to imbue her therapy with her Christian faith, worldview values, etc. So she was represented by an organization called Alliance Defending Freedom. The case was presented to the Supreme Court last fall. The ruling just came down on the last day of March, 8-1 in favor of Kaylee. And of course, this has been a big blow up, and the conversation continues about conversion therapy. And I wanted to talk about this with my special guest today. His name is Dr. Lucas Wilson. He is author of the book Shame, Sex, Attraction, Survivor Stories of Conversion Therapy. Good to have you, Lucas.

Speaker 2:
[02:49] Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.

Speaker 1:
[02:51] First of all, I guess, let's define what conversion therapy is.

Speaker 2:
[02:56] Yeah. So conversion therapy or what some folks refer to as conversion practices are efforts to change an individual's sexual orientation, gender identity and or gender expression. So it's looking at queerness as a problem that needs to be fixed, right? Something that is negative or pejorative framing of queerness that really is undergirding these practices that ultimately try to change someone from who they are, a queer person into who they're not, a heteronormative, heterosexual, whatever person. And so these practices, I mean, there's a range of practices that conversion therapists employ, anything from talk therapy. And again, I'm using the term therapy quite loosely when we're talking about conversion therapy. But, you know, talk therapy, behavioral modification, right? So pushing individuals to act a certain way, to perform a certain brand of masculinity or femininity, depending on their sex assigned at birth. And that over time, one's not just going to act like a man or a woman, one's eventually going to become a man or a woman. And this is very much an essentialist understanding of gender. So a man is a straight man and a woman is a straight woman. But in addition to behavioral modification, electro shock therapy, these sorts of practices, there's also corrective prayer. There's coerced sexual relationships and relations. That is to say, pushing folks into mixed orientation marriages or forced rape as conversion practices or efforts to again, change an individual from who they are and to who they're not. The list goes on, but there are numerous practices and maybe the best known and one of the most violent is electroshock therapy, a form of aversion therapy, associating something negative with something that theretofore had been seen or experienced positively. So this is really what conversion practices or what conversion therapy is slash are. And these are not benign practices. These are practices that have very much real world consequences and we can talk more about those, whether they be psychological, social, emotional, spiritual, whatever. But again, very much not benign practices, but instead practices that leave marks and scars and traumas for years to come.

Speaker 1:
[05:04] In the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, as far back as the 50s and even before, non-heterosexuality was listed as a sociopathic personality disturbance. And I think these sort of designations went on for decades and were only corrected recently. Is that accurate? Do I have that right, Lucas?

Speaker 2:
[05:28] Yeah, they were corrected in 1973. And so from the first DSM came out in the 1950s up until 1973, homosexuality was, like you said, understood as a pathology. But 1973 was a year where, because of mounting political pressure as well as just research findings that worked in favor of queer and trans communities, that again, homosexuality was declassified, thank goodness. I will say that 1973 was also a year that was really important as it relates to conversion practices, but for a different reason, not necessarily related to the DSM.

Speaker 1:
[06:06] When I look at the biography of Kayleigh Chiles, I see that she has a Master of Arts in clinical mental health, a BA in biblical studies and a minor in psychology. I couldn't link that to any specific university. But it's obvious that she is trying to do therapy in relation to her faith. But you know, this is theology, not therapy. And yet she has framed it as a free speech issue. I'm a therapist. I should be constitutionally allowed to do therapy my way. And apparently, that was the reasoning that the court used. I don't know, what's your take on all this?

Speaker 2:
[06:46] To put it academically, it's bananas. It's absolutely crazy that this is how the ADF and Chiles, you know, pursued this case in the name of free speech, of course, is a thinly veiled way of pushing for her religious, for religious sort of, you know, liberty or whatever. And so the idea that she needs to be able to practice, you know, conversion therapy, and again, it's an infringement upon her free speech, by not being able to practice conversion therapy is ludicrous. You know, every single professional organization or every single profession, I should say more accurately, whether you be a counselor, whether you be a doctor, whether you be a lawyer, whatever, there's a certain code of conduct you have to follow, right? And your freedom of speech is superseded by that code of conduct. And yet, this was again, how she argued the case and somehow was successful. And you know, the eight to one ruling was just, how do you say, bonkers. We were expecting to lose this Supreme Court case, those of us who are invested in fighting against conversion practices, but we did not think that it was going to be an eight to one landslide.

Speaker 1:
[07:55] What explains the liberal justices lining up for Cayley?

Speaker 2:
[08:00] You tell me. I mean, it's crazy. And I think that, you know, it was argued that, I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[08:08] I honestly, to this point, I guess I'm asking you to read mine. But you know, you've certainly read reasonings. It surprised me. I'm like, wait a minute, Sotomayor and others lined up and said, did they see this as a free speech thing? I mean, if you work as a church counselor and you're not enjoying licensure by the state as a mental health professional, that's different. I mean, when you work as a state licensed therapist, you are essentially signing a social contract. You have requirements and restrictions. That's fair, right?

Speaker 2:
[08:44] That's fair. And the law only protects folks against conversion therapy if in fact we're dealing with licensed professionals. The problem with that is that the vast majority, according to the research of conversion therapy cases, really are happening in high control religious context, specifically high control Christian context. So although this lawsuit is important, although protecting folks, particularly minors, from conversion therapy is important when they're going through conversion therapy with licensed professionals, that's all super important. But really what we need to be doing is going after the entire practice, not just those, and practitioners, not just those who are licensed, but those who are in Christian churches, who are in Christian ministries, whatever. These are the people who are affecting and wreaking a lot of harm and a lot more harm than just those who are licensed. And so although again, I'm super invested in these conversations around ensuring that licensed professionals do act according to evidence-based claims and research, I think that really what we need to be doing is thinking much bigger and imagining how we can attack, not just the problem by way of going after conversion therapists who are licensed, but those who are unlicensed. Because again, that's where most conversion practices are taking place today.

Speaker 1:
[10:08] When people ask, well, why do you go hard at fundy religions or high control environments like this? What harm does it do? This is like case study number one. We can just point to this and say it does great harm. And I want to get into some of the harms. What's your dog in this fight? I mean, obviously you take this particular battle very personally. What's that about?

Speaker 2:
[10:30] Yeah. So I went to Liberty University, Jerry Falwell School, and I went through four years of their one-on-one conversion therapy program. I also went to the group Conversion Therapy Program. I only went to the group once.

Speaker 1:
[10:43] Now, I got to jump in. You went to conversion therapy. Why? What were you going through?

Speaker 2:
[10:50] Right. So the question of why and also what I'm going through, I'll maybe separate them out. The question of why is within evangelical spaces, within high control Christian contexts. It is set up for young folks and well, really anyone who's within these spaces, that one cannot be queer and Christian. And so if you are told you have to make a quote unquote choice, as if you're making a choice between yourself and God, God's always going to take the cake, right? You're always going to choose God because to choose yourself as selfish and to choose yourself ultimately has the potential for you to go to hell, at least within your theological imagination, emphasis on imagination. At this point, I'm not a person of faith, but I do believe that you can be queer and a Christian. There is not really that much of a contradiction there. However, when I was in this space and when I was an evangelical, it was again set up where I had to choose. And so I of course chose God. I didn't want to go to hell. And so my motivation to go into this was because of my eternal security in heaven with Jesus, or at least that's what I thought. And so looking back now about the idea and questioning, what does it mean to choose and what would it mean for me to choose conversion therapy? I think this is somewhat of a complicated question. And at the end of the day, I'm the one who said, yes, this is what I want, but what does it mean to want conversion therapy? What does it mean to choose to go into it? If we understand conversion practices as definitional abuse, because they are, what does it mean to say, oh, I want to be abused? We would never blame a victim of abuse and say, you deserved it. Or that, you know, and also what would it mean for that person to say, well, that's what I want. I'm going to choose that. Of course, that's a ludicrous thing to say. And so looking back, when I think about me choosing to go into conversion therapy, of course, I was made to believe I wanted to go into it. I was made to believe that I was doing the right thing. And it's within these high control Christian spaces where, again, this breeds the mentality that one needs to choose God. I mean, if ever you are to choose yourself that's selfish, that's wrong, that's immoral. So again, you're forced, you're told really, you have to choose this. And so I chose to go into conversion therapy. I chose because I thought if I didn't, I either had to remain chaste, and that didn't sound like that much of an exciting option, or to leave the faith altogether and then again, risk going to hell, or not just risk, but would go to hell. Therefore, my quote unquote choice was to go into conversion therapy.

Speaker 1:
[13:19] Fake it till you make it? I guess certainly you were probably innately still who you were, but who you were professing had to change.

Speaker 2:
[13:28] Yeah, conversion practices are predicated upon performance. So you are told if you act a certain way, you're not just going to act that certain way over time, you're eventually going to become whatever persona you're performing. Then when you again, habituate that persona and you make that and then again, becomes who you are, then you're going to become a real man or woman, depending on your sex assigned at birth. And so for me, I was told if I play sports, if I do things like carpentry, if I do other masculine activities and talk to men about manly things and the way that men supposedly talk, over time, I wasn't just going to act like that, I was going to become that and then in turn, change my sexual orientation. So really a lot of this is to do with gender performance and the foundation of conversion practices are pushing folks to perform a certain brand of hegemonic masculinity or femininity so as to change not just their gender performance, but also their gender identity and in turn changing their sexual orientation.

Speaker 1:
[14:29] It is interesting to watch this sort of need to overcompensate, if I'm a man and I'm not doing something that's manly, then I need to adjust to become more manly. And this is an absolute true story, Lucas. I had a brand on my tennis team and he bought himself like a little Fitbit watch. This old dainty little watch that kept track of his heartbeat and his steps and who knows what else was going on. But he felt like, oh, it looks too dainty. It looks kind of like a woman's watch. And he went out and he bought like a housing for it, some sort of a thing to make it more boxy and big and manly and masculine. And I thought to myself, how insecure do you have to be? But we as a culture have seen this sort of John Wayne-esque caricature of what a man is supposed to be. And then, of course, we raise young boys to emulate that or else.

Speaker 2:
[15:21] Yeah, you know, and there's actually research on exactly what you just said, this idea of Jesus and John Wayne. It's a Kristen Dumais book, which talks all about this, right? About how Christianity doesn't just push, you know, gendered scripts, right? To follow these hegemonic gender roles, whether you're a man or a woman or whatever. But that it's inextricably connected to the very theology. And that your performance of masculinity for men and your performance for, you know, femininity for women is very much indicative of your relationship to God. That in order to be connected to God, the way that you're supposed to, quote unquote, be connected to God is influenced by and impacted by how you perform your gender. Because if you don't perform gender a certain way, the way that you're supposed to, the godly way, then you're not acting in right relationship to the world, to God, to yourself. And so you have to change, you have to perform these scripts. And so there's very much this emphatic push towards performing. So this goes well beyond conversion therapy, right? This goes well beyond queer folks within these spaces. This goes for everyone. And I think that that is the charade, if we're to use sort of dramaturgical or sort of theatrical language, that we're talking about a community or communities that require you to perform, that require therefore a high level of artifice, that require a high level of performance and really trying to be someone you're not, trying to affect personas that are in alignment with the quote unquote ideal, when in fact very few of us actually align with that, right? And so we're talking about communities that breed in authenticity as defining features of those communities.

Speaker 1:
[16:56] Short break. More with my guest, Dr. Lucas Wilson, talking about conversion therapy after this. First weekend of May, I am gonna be part of the We Can Reason, the Western Canadian Reason Conference in Calgary. Gonna be a great time. May 1st, 2nd and 3rd, there are still tickets available for that. July the 11th, Noah Lujans, the scathing atheist and I are gonna take the stage together in Cincinnati. We are more than a quarter sold out, and the event is not for three months. This sucker will sell out. July the 11th, 2 o'clock Cincinnati, Ohio. Now, if it does sell out, we are exploring the possibility of maybe an evening encore performance. That is not guaranteed. So if you wanna go, it's gonna be so much fun with Noah and myself. And there are some other great events planned for the rest of the year. If you wanna find out about all of these, go to thethinkingatheist.com/events. All the links, details, everything you need, are right there, the thinkingatheist.com/events. Continuing my conversation now with Dr. Lucas Wilson, who has written an introduction for a book that he has also edited, a compilation called Shame Sex Marriage. It's terrifying to get our notions of worth out of the Bible. I know progressive Christians like to talk about now, Jesus loves everybody and would never judge anybody, he would never send you to hell and never condemn the non hetero and blah, blah, blah. They go through all this stuff and of course, I'm screaming at the monitors. I read these claims and blogs and substacks and Facebook posts because I'm like, have you read your Bible? But the whole thing is there is no one worthy, no, not one. Unworthiness is baked in to these high control notions of Christianity. So you add that into the mix and now you are really susceptible if somebody tries to tell you who you are and who to be and what to think and how to feel or else, right?

Speaker 2:
[19:12] That's exactly it, right? In the same way that I think gendered performance and performance writ large is a necessary ingredient of high control Christianity, so is, I think, to what you're saying right now, to your point, is so is shame, right? And if we think about scripture, if we look to the book of Isaiah that says not like your righteousness, whatever sort of goodness that you have or possess, that is what God considers filthy rags. Now, what filthy rags meant in ancient times, the equivalent today is used tampons. So your righteousness, what you do that you consider good is considered in God's eyes, filthy used tampons, right? And so this is the idea that there's nothing good that you can do, nothing good that any of us can do, again, in comparison to God and God's perfect standard. So this again points to how shame is intrinsic to Christian theology. There's no need for Jesus and Jesus' sacrifice if it were not for one's shame, one's sin, one's again, filthy rags before God. And so again, in the same way that performance is required, so is shame because Christian theology necessitates shame. It also necessitates performance and a number of other really negative factors. But you're exactly right. It's required to believe, you have to believe that you are gross, that you're dirty, that you're disgusting before God in order to follow this version of God and this version of Jesus more specifically.

Speaker 1:
[20:43] We have to go back into the dark side of conversion therapy practices, which go far beyond pray away the gay. You mentioned the word electroshock therapy. Is that used today? Because it's freaking sounds like something that they did half century ago.

Speaker 2:
[21:00] Yeah, so they did do this a half century ago and they still do it today. In fact, a number of universities, including Harvard, Brigham Young, no surprise there, a number of these schools were responsible for aversion therapy by way of electroshock therapy. It's associating something negative, in this case, physical pain with something that they're too far you've understood or experienced as positive.

Speaker 1:
[21:25] And what other tactics are used? I mean, all right, fine, someone somewhere is shocking someone whenever they have a quote unquote sinful thought, but beyond prayer, what else is going on?

Speaker 2:
[21:36] If we're talking about aversion therapy, I mean, there are different quote unquote tactics. Some folks will put an elastic band around their wrist and they'll snap it every time they see someone who's attractive, so as to snap themselves out of it and not look at that person and again to associate that negative pain. But if we're going to go beyond aversion therapy specific tactics, again, we can think of course of prayer, oftentimes connected to exorcisms, trying to exorcise demons out of people, highly traumatic experiences that folks go through when they are being quote unquote exercised. We can think of course relationships, so pushing folks into mixed orientation marriages. There's a gay man, he's pushed into a marriage with a straight woman, so as to correct him and over time he'll learn to love her, not just emotionally, but also physically. There's also course sexual relations, so thinking about forced rape as a conversion practice. These are just some of the ways that conversion therapists try to change individuals again from who they are into who they're not.

Speaker 1:
[22:35] Well, let's talk about consequences. I'm sure many, many struggle with depression, issues of self-worth, I'm sure suicide pops into the mix. You know much more about this than I do, consequences.

Speaker 2:
[22:49] Yeah, so it's everything from, as the title of the book suggests, from shame and guilt to anxiety, depression, like you said, suicidal ideation. In fact, it's not just suicidal ideation, it's actually lifetime suicidal ideation and the chances of suicidal ideation double for survivors of conversion practices. Isolation, self-loathing, anger, increased chances of experiencing homelessness, increased chances of alcohol dependency and drug dependency, overall poor mental health, negative impacts on family relationships, negative impacts on self-identity, negative impacts on how one relates to queer communities and trans communities. Again, it's just this litany of psychological and emotional consequences. But then there's also what some might describe as spiritual. I'm not a spiritual person, but a lot of the folks who went through conversion therapy went through conversion therapy in high-controlled religious contexts. And so with that being said, these are people who come out of conversion therapy and don't necessarily right away divorce themselves from these religious traditions. And so there are negative impacts on how they construct, for example, existential meaning, how they identify spiritually, how they identify to what they have up until that point referred to as God or a higher power or the divine. Also, obviously, negative impacts on their religious community or the relationship to their religious communities. Then if we're thinking of physical consequences and we're thinking of aversion therapy, specifically electroshock therapy, I think the physical example or the physical consequences are perhaps obvious, but then there's also psychosomatic consequences like bulimia and anorexia, right? So there's just this legion of consequences that stem from folks undergoing these practices that are wildly dehumanizing, dangerous and damaging.

Speaker 1:
[24:38] Well, give me the elevator speech real fast. I want to get some final thoughts. But before we do that, I'm going to link to the book, Shame, Sex, Attraction, in the description box, but sum it up for me quickly.

Speaker 2:
[24:49] Yeah, so it's a collection of 17 stories written about conversion therapy by conversion therapy survivors, with a foreword by Garry Connolly, who wrote Boy Erased, the memoir upon which the film is based. But the stories again, they run the gamut. So you have folks who identify along the LGBTQ spectrum, folks who come from three different countries, Canada, Australia, and the US. Mostly we're talking about conversion therapy experiences within high control Christian contexts, so evangelical, Pentecostal, and white Christian fundamentalist spaces. But there's also a story written by an orthodox Jew. There's one story written by someone who describes his religious upbringing as being part of a Chinese cult. And there's also a story written by someone who does not identify religiously and their family was not religious. And so the stories really are both shocking and sobering. There's certainly humor mixed in throughout several stories, mine included, but you're mostly looking at, again, high control Christian contexts, although there are other stories included.

Speaker 1:
[25:56] I'm listening to the cars and trucks going by your window as you speak. So like you must be really close to a high traffic area, I'm guessing.

Speaker 2:
[26:05] Terrible.

Speaker 1:
[26:06] It's all right. It is one of those things that happens whenever we are operating in the podcast verse. For me, it's the people doing the lawn care. I'm here, I'm doing a very serious interview and somebody all of a sudden across the street pulls out the weed whacker and I'm just cursing. I'm like, please stop. I'm trying to be meaningful here during the conversation, but I hear the traffic in the background. I just had to say it. All right. Well, somebody within the sound of my voice, I know, is wrestling with not, if not just scars, perhaps even open wounds from being told you are not who you are, or you should not be who you are. So what words would you give them?

Speaker 2:
[26:48] I would first and foremost say that conversion therapy doesn't work, right? There's no evidence to suggest that anyone's ever been able to change their sexual orientation, their gender identity, and or their gender expression. So any effort to change who you are, it's not going to happen. Again, there's no research to back up the efficacy of conversion practices. Second of all, I think it's always important to question why we want to change who we are. And I put want in quotation marks. What does it mean to want to change a constitutive, definitional part of who you are?

Speaker 1:
[27:19] It's almost like saying, we need to convert you out of your eye color or your height or the pigment of your skin. I mean, who we are as far as our sexual identity is, it's who we are, right? We're wired in a very specific way. So they're essentially trying to fix what is not broken, right?

Speaker 2:
[27:38] Exactly, exactly. And so, I mean, the idea of wanting to change some part of who you are, again, a definitional part of who you are, we have to interrogate that, right? We want to wonder, why would we ever in the first place try to pursue these change efforts? And so, I think that when we do understand that the reason why is because of internalized homophobia, internalized transphobia or whatever, these are feelings that we feel about ourselves that have been passed on to us from others, right? If we think about shame, and again, perhaps the number one reason why folks go into conversion practices, and also the number one consequence of conversion therapy is shame. Shame is a social emotion, right? We don't feel shame unless we're seeing ourselves through the eyes of others, or just another. And so, when we interrogate and look back and sort of trace that genealogy of where this emotion is coming from, we can see that it's really because of how others see us, not necessarily how we've seen ourselves or how we initially saw ourselves. And so, when we think about how these change efforts are really to appease others, I think that does reframe the conversation in such a way that we can start to think about how, again, maybe we don't actually want this, maybe this is something that these are emotions that have been given to us that we've inherited and that we ultimately need to interrogate and then push against and resist.

Speaker 1:
[28:56] I think it's very telling to watch the conversion therapists who are trying to stop somebody from doing and being something that makes them feel whole and happy, and not just the history of bigotry, ignorance and bigotry throughout human history. And be who you are, live your life and, if you'll pardon the expression, God bless you, right? Just go do your thing on your terms. Have a nice life. I want to say this about the book. You don't have to be a victim of conversion therapy. You don't have to be LGBT or any of that to be able to benefit from it, because it opens the window. It actually allows us to see behind closed doors through the stories of those affected as to what's going on. Good information gives us the opportunity to better battle bigotry and some of the insanity that's going on all around us. And it's a great book. I'm glad you compiled it and put your heart and soul into it. And I'm glad you spoke with us today, Lucas. Any final thoughts before we call it a day today?

Speaker 2:
[29:55] Well, you know, what you just said there, that you don't have to be someone who went through conversion therapy to read the book. I absolutely agree. And I always say at this point that although not every single queer person has undergone conversion therapy, every single queer person, I would argue, has undergone conversion practices. The difference here being a very programmatic, concentrated change efforts to, again, change someone from who they are and to see who they're not being conversion therapy, whereas change efforts or conversion practices more broadly are really just efforts that try to change any queer person into someone to align them with the heteronormative model, right? So for any young gay boy who was told, don't sit like that, you look like a sissy, sit up straight, sit with your shoulders back. That's a conversion practice, right? For young girls, you should be wearing a dress, you should act more feminine, whatever. These messages over time, they accumulate. These messages are these different conversion practices. Although again, thank God, for lack of better term, not every queer person has ever gone conversion therapy. I would argue that every single queer person has experienced these conversion practices, efforts to try to change them and to align them with that heteronormative model. And even beyond that, not to make everyone feel like they need to be included to read the book, but I would say that even a number of straight folks, right? If anyone's, any straight guy, straight gal, whose gender expression has diverged in any way from the heteronormative model, if they wear nail polish, if they walk a certain way, they talk a certain way, whatever, and that they have also experienced, heard messaging saying, hey, don't act like that, don't wear that, don't do that, whatever it might be, these are also conversion practices, right? These are ultimately trying to push people towards a very particular brand of masculinity or femininity. So I would say that, again, for anyone who's picking up the book, you don't have to have experienced conversion therapy to read this, but I think every single person is going to see in some way, shape, or form themselves in these stories. Even if their stories aren't the same, I would argue that a lot of these stories rhyme. Again, I hope that when people do read this, they're able to, again, see themselves and hopefully the stories resonate with them in some way, shape, or form.

Speaker 1:
[32:03] The book, Shame, Sex, Attraction, Survivor Stories of Conversion Therapy, compiled by Dr. Lucas Wilson. Pleasure talking to you, man. Thanks for being here.

Speaker 2:
[32:14] Thanks so much for having me. It's been great.

Speaker 1:
[32:17] Okay, let me take my final break when I come back. I'm gonna read for you the first chapter of the book we have been talking about. It's a chapter with a wacky title, but it is a true story. Hang on. Okay, with the permission and blessing of the author-editor, Dr. Lucas Wilson, I'm gonna read you the entire first chapter of the book Shame, Sex, Attraction. It was written by someone who had endured conversion therapy and tells the tale. His name is Gregory Ilassar Chavez. He titled his story, Sniffing the Gay Away. I was thinking you could use feces, she said. I'm sorry, feces, I asked, for a quick second, confusing the word with freezes, which was a term for what us college kids with our checkered vans and backward baseball hats used to call Otter Pops. The therapist corrected me, she did mean feces. I'm supposed to eat feces. No, no, no, you don't have to eat it, you'll just have to smell it while looking at pictures of men you find attractive. Oh good, I thought that makes so much more sense. For a lack of a clinical term, she continued, you'll lust over the magazine ads depicting men you find attractive and let your mind concentrate on various sexual acts as you take several deep diaphragmatic whiffs of the feces. You can put them in an open bowl or a tupperware so you can get the tip of your nose right in there. Do this several times until you get yourself to a point where you retch and then throw up into a toilet. I do this with my feces, I ask, left squinting my eyes as I struggle to visually communicate the idea that the use of my own crap was the most offensive part of this entire experiment. I felt I should be offended. Was the smell of my own shit so perfectly horrendous that not one other person in the whole of humanity should come close to duplicating its rancidness? Uh, no, that probably wouldn't be a good idea. You'll want to distance yourself from the waste. Oh, and just before I got to questioning her about grandparents or maybe even distant cousins, she added, animal feces will work. You have a dog or a cat. I live with my friend at his house with his parents. They have a dog, but she's super old. Her dog's patties have gray in them. And just as I said that, I remember weirdly thinking and almost commenting that it'd be gray, G-R-A-Y, not G-R-E-Y, unless it were a British dog. You know, like the Queen's Corgis. Doesn't make a difference, she said. Then, are you sexually attracted to women at all? Not really. No, I mean, I find some types of painting, like beautiful to look at, but I don't want to like make out with art or anything. What are your percentages, do you think? Compare your attraction to men versus women. 80-20, 70-30? To this day, I hate getting asked this question. Why the flip does this matter? Do some people automatically think that the more equal the percentage, the easier it would be for me to swing permanently back to women? If it were 60% women and 40% men, would the advice be to simply give in and choose women because at least my feelings for them are above average? I can hear it now. You know, Gregory, a D- is at least passing. I don't answer this question anymore. The therapist and her office were right out of a 1980s Civil Shepherd style guide. The walls and decor splattered with pink and blue pastels, glowing under soft halo lighting, furniture to match. And while I was never a fashion guy, even I knew what straight up gaudy looked like. Turns out her office should have been draped in red flags instead of Motel 6 paintings of pink vases and neon purple ships. This was about a month into working with her, my third or fourth therapist, and I was about ready to bail when I decided to bring out the idea of giving me homework. Assignments that could include specific tasks that might contribute to the reduction of my homosexual desires. Like the time I fasted for four hours. Or that day on the beach when I prayed while pouring sun tan oil on my forehead so the gay would be anointed out of me. I got a zit out of that. That was when my therapist, whose name continues to escape my memory, wondered if I had ever heard of a particular therapy called aversion therapy, explaining that sometimes it was referred to as conversion therapy as it related to working with gay folks who wanted to change their sexual orientation. I hadn't and internet searches weren't a thing yet. I couldn't do my own research. She was my only source, and she had a degree, so I trusted her. Once she had covered the basics, I told her that my brother Jim once had an elementary school teacher who went through a similar type of therapy. His fourth grade teacher was a bigger gal and had gone to a clinic in order to lose weight. The clinician took a survey making a list of favorite junk food the teacher was prone to eating that therefore sabotaged her weight loss. Doughnuts were on her list. So, they took condiments like ketchup and mustard and pickle juice, mixing them in with a fresh doughnut. They had her smell it and then eat it, so it would make her nauseous, even to the point of throwing up. This same thing was repeated every week with the doughnuts and her other favorite foods, the hope being that she would associate doughnuts, cake and so on with repulsion, and thus it would turn her off from those foods. When I mumbled something akin to 90-10, the therapist continued, Well, there can be two faces to conversion therapy, and we'll have you explore both. Listen, it's not enough to turn your unwanted sexual feelings into undesirable feelings by experiencing images and associations that are repulsive. We have to create wanted sexual desires by exposing you to images and associations that you will eventually find attractive. How do we do that, exactly? Okay, let's concentrate on that 10%. What kind of women fit into those numbers? You mean, what kind of women do I find attractive? Yes, it's easier if you pick a couple of celebrities. That way, there's little chance you'd run into them on the street, creating an unnecessarily awkward exchange. Um, I've always liked Kathleen Turner and Kirsty Alley. Hmm, both brunettes. Any blondes? Rebecca DeMornay, I ask, in case DeMornay wasn't acceptable, since she, unbeknownst to a lot of people, was the daughter of Wally George, the famed wacko American commentator, that crazy white-haired screamer you'd have to watch on TV when an outside storm tweaked the antenna in the wrong direction and all the other shows were poltergeisted out. Good. Good. Get some magazine pictures of these ladies and of different men you find attractive. Cologne ads could work. This was 1992 or 1993. It was going to take a few days, but I eventually found the photos I thought would work best. For the women photos, she said during our next session, you get to have fun with those and as often as you'd like, but we also have to focus on the repulsion aspect. And the way repulsion is generally acquired is to consistently, even daily, introduce something to humans that produces a reaction so revolting that a person can actually vomit. Revolting, I thought? Where was I going to find a church potluck on a Tuesday afternoon? But I knew where she was going with this. That same week, late at night, when no one was around, I went into my friend's kitchen, taking a mason jar from a cabinet that had no glass remaining because my friend and I were goofing around one day when he picked me up and slammed me backwards through the double-paned pantry door. I took the jar outside with me, located some silvery gray by the moonlight pieces, collected my specimens, and took the mason jar back to my room. Six other people lived in that house, so I couldn't just put a jar of dog shit on the shelf inside my closet to be found by anyone who needed to borrow a t-shirt. So I grabbed my beat up Jansport backpack, which was big enough to hide a notebook, a couple of good sized books, some pens, my checkbook, some postage. Yes, I carry postage with me at all times. And the mason jar. Once organized, I put the whole thing in the closet. Pretty ingenious idea, actually, putting it in a backpack because not only would I be able to hide the crap in my bedroom, I could also take the backpack with me to do my homework whenever I was out of the house, since the plan was for me to do the aversion therapy a couple of times a day. It would be convenient when going to the library to work on an assignment about the Canterbury Tales, for example, because when the mood arose, I could duck into a bathroom stall for some special time, just me and my jar. Turns out, looking at pictures of good looking men while taking five or six deep breaths of the dog shit throughout my day became somewhat of a challenge. It was proving difficult to do it even once a day. The end goal was to keep my nose in the jar and my eyes on the pictures, engaging in some lusting until the retching became full blown vomiting. Then I would be done for that session at least, but I never once threw up. I couldn't make it past the retching, although I think retching is worse than vomiting. At least when you throw up, you get release. I just got a bad case of nausea that sometimes lasted a while because I could smell the shit for hours later. Most of the time, I was able to complete the task from my bedroom, but there were times I had to do it while out and about, which meant at any given time I was carrying a jar of dog crap to school, to church, to get my oil changed. Consistency was the key, but I was only able to do it for a couple of months. Go to class, come home, look at black and white pictures of men advertising cologne, unscrew the lid, sniff for several minutes. That was pretty much my routine for those very long 30 to 60 days or so. And in order for it to be totally effective, I had to exchange the feces every few days, waiting until everyone was asleep to go outside and collect new samples. After a few weeks, the humiliation set in. Sitting on my carpet floor with pictures propped up at various places against my closet door, while holding a jar of dog poo on my lap brought flushes to my face. Perhaps those little pinpricks on my cheeks were a response to the revulsion that was coming, or it was simply the embarrassment of knowing I was a grown man sitting cross-legged in my room, sticking my nose in a mason jar, inhaling dog shit. I would no longer just pray away the gay. I would do my best to sniff it away. And that is the end of the account of Chapter One from Gregory Alassar Chavez. I will admit, I'm desperate to find out what happened next. Of course, the purpose of Chapter One was to reveal the insanity of this particular process and others. But the good news is it's obvious Gregory made his way out, found his voice and is now using it to expose the insanity, the harmful practices of conversion therapies by people who may think they're doing a good thing, but are in reality doing great damage. Again, the link to the book in the description box. Thanks again to Dr. Lucas Wilson for joining me and I will see you back here next week.

Speaker 3:
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