A Stitch in Haste

The excellent and important blog Ex-Gay Watch is recruiting contributors.

Ideal candidates read XGW or similar blogs frequently, support freedom of religion and expression, reject discrimination and censorship as a tool for one's own political advancement, oppose the religious right, and relate well with both "liberals" and "conservatives." Gay-tolerant exgays, in particular, are encouraged to apply.

I've never personally encountered any "ex-gay" or reparative therapy types or their victims. I've heard, however, that the torture theater from "Clockwork Orange" was based on early reparative therapy experiments.

Meanwhile, hopefully readers are aware of what is happening in Tennessee — a gay 16-year old boy named Zach has been sent by his parents and against his will to an isolation compound to be "cured" of his homosexuality. The compound is run by a man who expressly warns his young inmates that it is better to commit suicide than be gay.

We only know this because of — you guessed it — Zach's blog.

Many fine blogs are chronicling the situation, including of course Ex-Gay Watch as well as Republic of T. and Where the Dolphins Play.

And speaking of gay youth, if you have a few pennies in your pocket that have not yet been taxed away, you could do worse than send them to the Point Foundation, which offers scholarships to gay students who have been disowned by their parents.

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.

Remember "Zach," the gay teenager whose parents committed him, against his will, to an unlicensed Christian "reparative therapy" facility with the obnoxious name "Love in Action," where the reported practices were so outrageous that some thought the whole story a hoax?

It was no hoax, as state officials proved when they investigated and reprimanded the facilities and its unlicensed "therapists."

"Zach" was eventually released from "Love in Action" and faded into a well-deserved private life (but his MySpace page, which sparked the whole controversy, is still available).

Now another youth, admitted the same day as Zach, is also free of involuntary confinement and is speaking out:

Lance Carroll, now 18, entered the program the same day as Zach did ... and remained in the program for two months ... just as Zach did...

"In January of 2005, I came out to my parents as being gay. After an initial positive and supporting reaction they began to change their minds. They had me see three separate counselors, the last of which was a Christian counselor in St. Louis who worked for a fundamentalist, evangelical church. He told me that I wasn't really gay, in fact no one was "really" gay. He tried to convince me that the whole idea of homosexual orientation is a lie, and that I felt the way I did because of some sort of early emotional/psychological deficiency. This counselor recommended Love in Action to my parents.
...
while I was there, it just seemed to make people more depressed and self-loathing than they already were. I, myself, went through several of these depressive periods.

Reparative therapy is not only a fraud but a dangerous, cruel and inhumane fraud. To subject a minor to such treatments is per se child abuse and must never be tolerated.

Parents have a right -- up to a point -- to raise their children as they see fit, but that does not extend to a right to scar them for life.

More thoughts at Ex-Gay Watch, Wayne Besen.

Best broken link I've seen in a while:


"Refuge," the nightmarish reparative-therapy involuntary confinement facility run by the (ridiculously misnamed) group Love in Action (a group that brags about how it is fed its victims by the radical Evangelical bigot complex, Focus on the Family) has been — their term — "dissolved."

Refuge was exposed, in large part by blogs, back in 2005 when a teenager named "Zach" (later identified as Zach Stark) chronicled his story on his (now private) MySpace page. The bloggers caught the attention of the media, which caught the attention of the authorities.

More:

It also inspired filmmaker Morgan Fox to begin filming the documentary, "This Is What Love In Action Looks Like."

This evening at the Ex-Gay Survivor Conference in Irvine, California, we screened short excerpts of several documentary films including Fox's unfinished work. Just before Fox's extended trailer was shown, we learned that he had to make a very quick last-minute change to the ending today. And when we saw that ending, the crowd erupted in both cheers and tears as we saw that Love In Action Director John Smid confirmed that the "Refuge" youth program has been "dissolved."

Cheers and tears? Now that sounds like "love in action" to me.

Via Straight, Not Narrow. More thoughts at Republic of T.

(Cross-linked to Blog Against Theocracy.)