A Stitch in Haste

WARNING: This blogpost contains foul language. I'm sorry, but I refuse to be genteel about this subject.

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Some bloggers, whom I like and do not wish to offend, are all giddy over the fact that the New York Times has finally decided that anti-gay child abuse is newsworthy:

It was the sort of confession that a decade ago might have been scribbled in a teenager's diary, then quietly tucked away in a drawer: "Somewhat recently," wrote a boy who identified himself only as Zach, 16, from Tennessee, on his personal Web page, "I told my parents I was gay." He noted, "This didn't go over very well," and "They tell me that there is something psychologically wrong with me, and they 'raised me wrong.' "

But what grabbed the attention of Zach's friends and subsequently of both gay activists and fundamentalist Christians around the world who came across the entry, made on May 29, was not the intimacy of the confession. Teenagers have been outing themselves online for years, and many of Zach's friends already knew he was gay. It was another sentence in the Web log: "Today, my mother, father and I had a very long 'talk' in my room, where they let me know I am to apply for a fundamentalist Christian program for gays."

"It's like boot camp," Zach added in a dispatch the next day. "If I do come out straight, I'll be so mentally unstable and depressed it won't matter."

The camp in question, Refuge, is a youth program of Love in Action International, a group in Memphis that runs a religion-based program intended to change the sexual orientation of gay men and women. Often called reparative or conversion therapy, such programs took hold in fundamentalist Christian circles in the 1970's, when mainstream psychiatric organizations overturned previous designations of homosexuality as a mental disorder, and gained ground rapidly from the late 90's. Programs like Love in Action have always been controversial, but Zach's blog entries have brought wide attention to a less-known aspect of them, their application to teenagers.

There's just one problem, which perhaps the bloggers sympathetic to Zach have not realized:

This story appears in the "Fashion & Style" section!

The fucking fashion section?!? Child abuse goes in the fucking fashion section?!? The ex-gay and reparative therapy movements, which have caused so much pain and suffering over the years, go in the fucking fashion section?

No.

Fuck the New York Times.

Fuck its fashion section.

Fuck its "bury the story as deeply as possible" and "Gee, isn't that a cute story?" mentality.

Zach deserves better.