Category: Conversion therapy

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The Changing Face of Conversion Therapy

By Eliel Cruz

When I was a teenager in the early aughts, conversion therapists reigned supreme in evangelical Christian spaces, spewing pseudo-scientific techniques as a supposed “remedy” for LGBTQ identities. Growing up in the Seventh-day Adventist church and school system, LGBTQ identities were vilified and demonized at the pulpit and in our classrooms. The answer to our sexualities, according to the church, was to deny ourselves love or a partner, stay celibate, or to work on “changing” our sexuality so that we were no longer queer. There were groups and conferences with self-proclaimed “ex-gay” speakers providing testimonies about how they “overcame” their sexuality and therapists eager to “help” others pursue the same path.

According to a Williams Institute report, 7% of LGB adults ages 18 to 59 in the United States have undergone conversion therapy. About 81% of those individuals were in “therapy” with religious leaders, which heightened suicidal thoughts and ideation in comparison to LGB people who have not gone through conversion “therapy” practices. Across the globe, these numbers fluctuate between 2% all the way up to 34% of LGBTQ+ people having undergone conversion practices.

By the mid-2010s, these groups and their influence began to dwindle as national organizations like Exodus International, one of the longest-running and largest ex-gay organizations, shuttered its doors after 37 years, admitting that not only did conversion or reparative therapy not work, it was harmful to the LGBTQ people subjected to it. Former Exodus International President Alan Chambers said: “I am sorry for the pain and hurt many of you have experienced. I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn’t change,” admitting his own attractions to men had not gone away, despite being married to a woman and having children.

The closing of Exodus International signaled the end of a decades-long push for ex-gay therapy, or so it would seem. But in recent years, as legislation has passed across the country to ban conversion therapy for youth, a new push for so-called “change therapy” has re-emerged with the same flawed premise and tactics of the ex-gays of old. A group called Changed Movement, formed in response to legislation banning conversion therapy in California, is one such group using new language to promote the same-old conversion therapy.

Conversion or reparative therapy, loosely defined, is any attempt to influence and change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Often, these counselors blame trauma or violence, family dynamics, or your upbringing as the root of the deviant sexuality or gender identity. Changed Movement shares stories of individuals blaming these roots as the cause of their sexuality or gender. This assertion is false and only serves to shame the individual, often for reasons beyond their control. Importantly, ex-gay groups like the Changed Movement do not seem to reckon with the fluidity of sexuality and gender and, as proponents of this ideology typically do, seemingly view things as either gay or straight, trans or cisgender.

Leading medical and psychiatric associations have condemned conversion practices as pseudo-scientific, ineffective, and harmful to the person undergoing them. Still, groups like Changed Movement have reemerged, using religious language to promote change therapies.

“It is very difficult to stop all conversion therapy from happening for several reasons. One is that legislation is a powerful tool. We’ve made very good progress, with about half the states now having passed laws that prohibit licensed therapists from engaging in conversion practices. I hate to call it therapy,” said Shannon Minter, Legal Director at the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), who, through its Born Perfect campaign, has successfully litigated conversion therapy bans. “But that’s only a part of the picture. Those laws don’t do anything to stop people who are engaging in it, such as religious counselors. Which is a very big chunk of what goes on.”

Conversion therapy efforts adapt their language to evade laws, Minter said, making it difficult to stop.

“What will happen is these counselors and therapists become very good — every move we make, they have a counter move — which is repackaging what they’re doing with new terminology, always trying to make it sound like something benign. Always trying to make it sound like something harmless,” Minter said. “The only remedy we really have is to educate parents.”

In a report by the Trevor Project, researchers found at least 1,320 conversion therapy practitioners in almost all 50 states, including states with active conversion therapy bans for minors. Almost half of those counselors are unlicensed, and most are attached to some sort of religious ministry. While couching their language and pretending to be there to help LGBTQ people, the danger of these groups and practitioners cannot be understated.

Recently, an ex-gay group called Coming Out Ministries bought a building across from my alma mater, Andrews University, a Seventh-day Adventist University, intending to “work closely” with the university on LGBTQ issues “from a redemptive perspective.” Groups like Changed Movement and Coming Out Ministries see LGBTQ young people’s identities as “confusion” instead of who they are intrinsically. Their ideology stems from a theological understanding of sexuality that does not take into account science or the world as it exists around them. Anti-LGBTQ theology fuels conversion therapy, and it’s not only flawed but also inherently harmful and violent.

As a queer person of faith, I reject theology and religious practices that cause harm, as it is not from God. The history and devastating impacts of ex-gay practices are clear in the irreparable damage it has caused to large swathes of the LGBTQ community raised in religious settings. The re-emergence of ex-gay groups, however covertly or obscure in language they may be, is an alarming and dangerous trend. More must be done to stop these groups, and it’s not going to be solely via the courts. It will take communities denouncing any and all change practices as not only ineffective but dangerous to young people — and in some cases, it’s a matter of life or death.

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Conversion Therapy Left Gay Man ‘Broken.’

— Now He Explores How It Changed an Aspiring Nun Who Died by Suicide

“It’s really given me the courage to tell my own story, which has been an incredibly healing process for me,” Simon Kent Fung — host of the ‘Dear Alana,’ podcast

by Brian Brant

As a teenager growing up in Colorado, Alana Chen — known by loved ones for her generosity and kindness to others — dreamed of becoming a nun.

But Alana’s life came to a tragic end on Dec. 8, 2019, when she died by suicide at just 24 years. Now a new podcast, Dear Alana, explores the diaries she wrote as a young woman trying to reconcile her strong Catholic faith with her sexual identity — an exhausting challenge that drove her to conversion therapy.

According to the podcast, Alana attended two church summer camps in Boulder when she was 13 years old: Sacred Heart of Mary Catholic Church and St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center on the University of Colorado Boulder Campus, where she met and soon entrusted a priest at St. Thomas Aquinas, who would eventually become her spiritual director.

With the help of her best friend, Alana began sneaking behind her mother’s back to attend early evening mass at St. Thomas. Then, one day, she told her mom the truth.

“She just said, ‘I’m sneaking out. I lied. I’ve been going to mass every day at 5:30, taking the bus,'” her mother, Joyce Calvo, tells PEOPLE.

“I just remember saying, ‘Why? Why are you doing that?’ She said, ‘I love it,'” adds Calvo, who was shocked by her daughter’s goal of nunhood. Although she hadn’t been a religious person in her youth, Calvo’s sobriety journey sparked the search for a spiritual home for family.

But Alana was hiding another secret: she was struggling with her sexual identity. At 14, Alana came out to the priest, who instructed her not to tell anyone, not even her family, according to the podcast.

Simon Kent Fung, creator of the "Dear Atlanta" Podcast
Simon Kent Fung.

“[He] noticed me. He knew me. He knew I loved God. He knew I did not want to marry a man,” Alana wrote in one of her journal entries. “He forgave my unspeakable sin. He took my defilement and buried it. ‘You ought to pray the rosary everyday.’ Later, he said, ‘I better pray it five times per day to keep temptation away.'”

The priest did not return PEOPLE’s request for comment, but the Archdiocese of Denver — where he is now a diocesan hermit, a monk-missionary, per his blog — says in a statement: “Commenting on specifics regarding Alana Chen is improper, but as the Archdiocese of Denver has previously stated, conversion therapy was never practiced. Trying to explain Alana’s story with a simplistic explanation is unfair to her memory. We reject any practices that are manipulative, coercive, or pseudoscientific. Alana, and every person, is beloved by God and deserves to be treated with mercy, dignity, and reverence. We continue to pray with and for everyone who is affected by Alana’s untimely death.”

St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center says in a separate statement: “Our deepest prayers and condolences continue for the Chen family, who experienced the tragic loss of their daughter, Alana. The St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center does not practice conversion therapy and remains against any form of coercion or manipulation. As Catholics, we reverence the dignity and free will of each and every human person and view every person’s life as a beautiful gift from God. We strive to live and preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ and embrace the teachings of the Catholic Church.”

Reflecting on the revelations in her daughter’s journals, Calvo tells PEOPLE, “I love the Saints and Mary and Jesus, but [in] a lot of churches, I didn’t like the language and how strict it was. That’s why I was always church-hopping. But I was shocked [by] this, what he was doing, seeing her in private.”

The journals and podcast claim Alana spent years seeking pastoral counsel and receiving conversion therapy treatment, practitioners of which “commonly use an array of psychosocially harmful techniques,” according to the American Psychological Association.

Her nearly two-dozen journals explore the pain she experienced as a result of conversion therapy, which she publicly opened up about in The Denver Post in August 2019.

“I felt a lot of shame and anxiety,” Alana told the Post. “I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Was I going to hell? But I was still extremely faithful, and I felt like the church and the counseling was the thing that was saving me. The worse I got, the more I clung to it.”

Alana said she eventually broke free from conversion therapy after a suicide attempt that led to her receiving professional mental health treatment.

“I was feeling so much shame that I was comforted by the thought of hurting myself,” she told the newspaper of her heartbreaking mindset. “I’ve now basically completely lost my faith. I don’t know what I believe about God, but I think if there is a God, he doesn’t need me talking to him anymore.”

Four months after the Post interview, she vanished and was found dead by suicide. Nearly four years later, her life is the basis of the eight-episode podcast. In the series, host Simon Kent Fung explores his personal connection to Alana’s story, the origins of conversion therapy and the death of a young woman who, according to Fung, “had it all.”

Alana Chen
Alana Chen

“I learned about Alana’s story in the news, like a lot of people did,” Fung, a gay Catholic man, tells PEOPLE. “I think what stuck out to me was how devout and religious she was and her family’s suspicion of the role that that community played, as well as the role that conversion therapy played in her disappearance and death.”

Fung — who has worked in tech at Patreon and Google and as a designer at Time — says he “recognized very similar experiences in my own life with my faith community and with the subculture of the American Catholic Church that I was a part of.”

Ashamed of his sexual identity, he spent “all of my twenties in various forms of conversion therapy in my attempt to become a priest,” Fung says. During this period, he was taught that his sexuality was “the result of an underdeveloped bonding with my father and male peers and encouraged to deconstruct his attractions in order to connect them to trauma.”

“I remember I was in a coffee shop and I just read [her story], and I was just sobbing in the corner by myself … I couldn’t believe that somebody had an almost identical story, at least from the way it was reported,” Fung says. “I didn’t know all the details.”

Fung was then inspired to reach out to Calvo. “A couple of months later, we had our first phone conversation,” he says.

He soon began traveling back and forth between Colorado and California to speak with Calvo, Alana’s sisters and her friends, ultimately deciding to create the podcast.

“In the two years of making this, I had this incredible privilege of being able to read about Alana’s inner life through the journals that her family provided me,” he says.

As Fung learned about Alana’s life outside of what was reported, the host began to understand who she was and the inner turmoil she went through.

“She had many friends [and] was kind of this all-star child and young person,” the host says. “She was an ultimate frisbee champ. She was a top student, getting all the best grades. She was this extremely active kid in her church, but it was really when she was a teenager, an early teenager, that she became more serious about her faith and met a priest who offered to be her spiritual director.”

Alana “sought out conversion therapy” for the next seven years under the guidance of the priest and other spiritual leaders, hoping to “fix herself” to become a nun, according to Fung.

In addition, Alana pursued two years of individual counseling from the ages of 18 to 20 with a therapist she sought through her spiritual mentors and provided by the Archdiocese of Denver, Fung tells PEOPLE in a statement.

Alana attended meetings with Courage International, a Catholic ministry “whose founder explicitly encouraged conversion therapy and whose writings are based on conversion therapy theorists,” he adds. Throughout her treatment, she was “consistently” directed to conversion therapy resources, blog posts and spiritual programs by spiritual mentors like priests and nuns, he claims.

Alana was even referred to a conversion therapist who was formerly on the board of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, the largest clinical network of conversion therapy practitioners, Fung says. In 2014, the organization rebranded as the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity, which did not return PEOPLE’s request for comment.

The American Psychiatrist Association said it has been “opposed” to “any psychiatric treatment, such as ‘reparative’ or conversion therapy, which is based upon the assumption that homosexuality per se is a mental disorder or that a patient should change his or her homosexual orientation,” since 1998.<

Colorado is one of the 22 states, in addition to the District of Columbia, to ban conversion therapy for minors, per the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank.

However, Colorado’s 2019 law, which was passed months before Alana died, may not have fully protected her — not only because she was over the age of 18, but also because the law doesn’t touch pastoral counseling and only prohibits state-licensed medical or mental health care providers from the controversial practice, the Post noted.

Alan Chen, 3
Alan Chen, 3.

Fung says “a lot of people are unaware” that conversion therapy is happening and that what’s depicted in Hollywood is often far from the reality of what people experience.

“I think the podcast shows the ways in which conversion therapy doesn’t have to look like a very Hollywood, physically violent form or very dramatized way,” he adds. “It can look like talk therapy. It can look like it happened in a clinical setting.”

“A lot of us go down the rabbit hole of believing these ideas and really struggling with what I call a triple shame,” Fung continues. “First of all, the shame of being gay or feeling different in this way, the shame of feeling like you’ve had something horrible happen to you that makes you damaged in this way. Then the shame of not being able to change.”

“I just felt so damaged and broken,” he shares of his experience with conversion therapy. “I think that’s the impact and the harm that it has on people.”

In order to stop conversion therapy, the host argues, it’s important to foster conversations within churches in a “compassionate and sensitive way rather than an antagonistic, accusatory way.”

Alana’s story has paved the way for a new mission: the Alana Faith Chen Foundation, launched by her family to provide “financial support to LGBTQ+ [people] who are at risk of suicide so that they can receive the mental health treatment and therapy they need on their path to healing,” per their website.

Joyce Calvo
Mother Joyce Calvo.

Though Calvo says a priest and people at church would come up to her to tell her Alana was a “saint,” she never wanted to put that pressure on her daughter.

Still, Alana “always wanted to help people,” she says, and the foundation is a “beautiful tribute to Alana and keeps Alana’s desires going.”

Meanwhile, Fung hopes Alana’s story and the podcast help others as much as they’ve helped him.

“It’s really given me the courage to tell my own story, which has been an incredibly healing process for me,” he adds. “I hope in hearing that, other people will feel similarly and will feel they’re not alone.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Spanish lawyer names bishops and priests pushing conversion therapy

Many of the 70 figures identified by Saúl Castro have not previously been linked to the anti-LGBTIQ practice

By a href=”https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/author/lucy-martirosyan/”>Lucy Martirosyan

A Spanish human rights lawyer has named 70 practitioners and promoters of so-called ‘conversion therapy’ in Spain, among them Catholic bishops and priests.

In Saúl Castro’s new book ‘Ni enfermos ni pecadores’ (meaning ‘neither sick nor sinners’), he reveals the traumatic experiences of therapy survivors and identifies different kinds of therapy providers. Many of the people he identifies have never been publicly linked to conversion therapy before.

These range from self-proclaimed “identity coaches” who provide paid services online to “cure” what they call “homosexual obsessive compulsive disorder” to “ex-gay” leaders from the US who spread misinformation via the internet. Catholic schools and churches also promote conversion therapy to their members.

Conversion therapy, which claims to change a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression, has been condemned by international health and human rights experts and is banned in many countries.

As a cisgender gay man, Castro takes this topic personally. “Conversion therapy is a sort of genocide,” he said. “They are offering mechanisms to make us disappear.”

He is also the founder of the association No Es Terapia (‘not a therapy’), which campaigns against conversion therapy in Spain.

There are bans on conversion therapy in nine of Spain’s 17 regions. Promoting or carrying out conversion therapy has been prohibited in Madrid since 2016, with fines of up to €45,000.

In June, the Spanish government approved a draft of a wide-ranging bill to protect the rights of LGBTIQ people. It is particularly strong on rights for trans people, and seeks to classify conversion therapy as a “very serious administrative offence with penalties between €10,001 and €150,000” throughout Spain. The bill is currently going through parliament.

However, making conversion therapy an administrative offence – meaning it is not punishable with jail time – would not criminalise its practitioners or promoters in the way Castro says is needed.

Bishops promoting conversion therapy

Castro interviewed 15 survivors of conversion therapy during his three years of research for the book. They described some of the so-called ‘treatments’ they had experienced.

These included being instructed to flick a rubber band worn around their wrist whenever they felt attracted to someone of the same sex. In some sessions, they were told to strip and hug other naked same-sex participants, to “de-sexualise” their bodies.

He also discovered cases where, if the therapy ‘isn’t working’, psychiatrists prescribe patients medication for bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, because these drugs are known to suppress the libido.

Conversion therapy is a sort of genocide

Through his interviews with therapy survivors, Castro was able to reveal the names of several Spanish bishops who have promoted conversion therapy.

Last year, the Vatican conducted an investigation into Granada-based Verdad y Libertad (Truth and Freedom), an organisation that often recruits Catholic bishops and priests to promote and refer people to conversion therapy. The Vatican urged bishops not to participate in any activities run by the group, which has tried several times to be officially recognised as a faith ministry by the Catholic Church.

However, the church itself has never released the names of faith leaders involved with Verdad y Libertad.

Castro said that some bishops and priests would select their victims in parishes, dioceses and theological schools and “monitor their paths to ‘conversion’”. One such case involved a gay Spanish priest who was ordered to start conversion therapy by his parish.

“The worst part of the ‘therapy’ for him was being forced to record his masturbatory and homoerotic fantasies daily,” Castro said. Three times a day, for a year, the priest participated in group Telegram chats dedicated to conversion therapy, with more than 100 other participants. He had a ‘fake’ funeral and burial to symbolise “becoming a new person”.

“They had forced him to break his relationships with friends [and family] because they were ‘triggering’ his homosexuality,” said Castro. Eventually, he left the Telegram group, but “it took him so much to [do so].”

Castro is using the evidence he found to report both individuals and groups to regional authorities in Spain, and also to human rights offices at the United Nations that specialise in sexual orientation and gender identity.

All the way from the US

Paid-for online counselling sessions – in person or via books and audio – are another common channel for conversion therapy in Spain. While researching his book, Castro signed up for a couple of sessions to understand the practitioners’ motives.

PATH screenshot.png
Positive Approaches To Healthy Sexuality website (screenshot 25 July 2022) | PATH

One example is provided by US website Positive Approaches To Healthy Sexuality (PATH). Its $150 “counselor training program”, designed for therapists and ministry leaders who would in turn “assist” LGBTIQ people to change their “same-sex attraction” and enter heterosexual relationships. The training includes more than 18 hours of recordings and a 180-page manual.

It was devised by Richard Cohen, a prominent figure in the ‘ex-gay’ movement in the US, who identifies as a “former homosexual” and is now married to a woman and has three children. In 2002, he was permanently expelled from the American Counseling Association for multiple ethical violations.

“In Spain, the main discourse by perpetrators of conversion therapy stems directly from Richard Cohen,” according to Castro. He also says that “teenagers who lack education about the LGBTIQ community” are the “most susceptible” to Cohen’s ideas if they come across his books online.

In 2012, Cohen promoted his latest book, ‘Coming Out Straight: Understanding and Healing Homosexuality’, in Madrid during the sixth conference of the ultra-conservative network World Congress of Families (WCF).

A 2020 investigation by openDemocracy revealed that the WCF is linked to $280m of ‘dark money’ spent overseas by US Christian right groups since 2007. More money was spent in Europe than in any other region.

The late Joseph Nicolosi is another American practitioner of ‘reparative therapy’ – an alternative term for conversion therapy – with significant influence abroad. A Google search in Spain for “cómo dejar de ser gay” (‘how to stop being gay’) yields results for five books by Nicolosi.

‘Conversion therapy has to be criminalised’

For Castro, simply banning conversion therapy in Spain doesn’t go far enough.

“Conversion therapy has to be criminalised,” he said. “Our criminal code has to be amended, not only [to stop] impunity, but so that those who are responsible for promoting the practice and violence are locked up in jail… Fines are not a deterrent, but jail is.”

Spain is the home of CitizenGo, an ultra-Catholic, far-right advocacy group, which has created bailout funds for anti-LGBTIQ groups in the past.

Since the publication of his book in June, six more survivors of conversion therapy have contacted Castro. He encourages people to report cases to his organisation, No Es Terapia.

“I’m not hoping that [criminal proceedings] will happen,” Castro said. “I will make them happen.”

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