Imagine you’re a gay teenager, and you’ve either just come out to your parents, or been outed to them.  Imagine they react with anger and shame and contempt.  You’re a kid, going through adolescence, struggling with your emerging sexuality.   It’s a  confusing, embarrassing time when you begin to feel things, things about the attractive sex, that you’d never felt before.  Thrilling, confusing, embarrassing things.  You are a pervert, your parents tell you.  You’re going to catch AIDS and die before you’re 40 they tell you.  You’re a shame on your family name, and on them.  You’re going to hell.   

Imagine your parents force you into Love In Action to be cured.  Imagine you find yourself one day, inside the Love In Action program.  You are a young teenager, and you are in one of the group sessions, surrounded by older adults who have in their past engaged in sexual perversions and addictions the likes of which your teenage mind could never have conceived.  Imagine being force into exposing yourself, your deepest sexual thoughts and feelings, to these men, and being forced to listen as they expose themselves to you.  They are sexually broken, say the staff at Love In Action.  You are sexually broken, they tell you.  You, and the man next to you telling you how it is to fuck animals, are both sexually broken.  You are the same as they.  The sessions last for weeks.  There is no place inside of yourself that is safe from the staff at Love In Action, and you must expose it all to the men who fuck animals, rape children, and have never known what it is to have a healthy adult sex life.  You’re a young teenager.  Throughout it all you are told in word and in deed that you are no different from them.

Eventually, you begin to believe it.  You are finally dismissed from the Program, and perhaps you decide you are still gay and there is nothing wrong with that.  Or perhaps you try, as so many do, to stop being gay, only to discover you can no more choose your sexual orientation then you can choose whether to be right or left handed.  Perhaps some logical, rational part of your mind rejects what you were told about your sexuality at Love In Action.  But deep down inside, the seed is planted.  I’m a freak…There’s something wrong with me…with my sex…I’m a freak…I’m a freak…  You try to go on with your life, find yourself failing utterly to find love, emotional intimacy, peace…

Surely, nobody would do this to a child, even if they think that homosexuality is sinful and wrong.  Right?  You don’t understand.  Faith excuses everything.  Faith, and hate.  Peterson Toscano has an expanded post up now that you should read.

Back in January 2005, I met with the BBC crew that had just finished filming LIA/R. The presenter and the crew expressed shock at the treatment of the youth in the facility. They told me that adults and minors gathered together and talked about serious issues including prostitution, sexual abuse, and beastiality. They told me of a 16 year old lesbian placed in the program against her will. And the message that she received by being there is that her same-sex attractions are on the same level as a man having sex with animals.

I couldn’t believe it, so on June 1, 2005, when I bumped into John Smid at the Atlantia airport, I questioned him about this. (I had not yet heard of Zach’s story as it was just unfolding). He assured me that although the youth and the adults attended the some of the same sessions, they did not talk about their particular "issues", just their feelings.

Even if that were true, any 16 year old I know is smart enough to figure out within a half a day why everyone is in the program.

This fall, I spoke at length with a young man who was in the adult program this summer when Zach was also in attendance in Refuge, the youth program. I asked him to describe the sessions and he confirmed that adults and youth met together. When I asked, "But of course they don’t talk about issues, just emotions, right?" He replied that they talked about the issues often, in fact, each participant had to give an introduction which outlined the exact nature of their issues.

[Emphasis mine] Notice how John Smid was able to look Peterson right in the eye and tell him it wasn’t happening.  And it was.

Today, pumped up on the war rhetoric of saving youth from a culture set out to destroy them, potentially thoughtful and kind human beings who run LIA/R end up employing harmful strategies designed to scare these kids straight by any means necessary. Even if it means exposing them to pedophiles and people with extreme sexual fetishes. (The language reminds me of the fear-fueled war talk of the US Christian fascist group BattleCry)

I know folks from my time at LIA who before they entered the program never had sex with another person and were quite naive sexually. By the time they left, often with the shame of failure, armed with loads of details about what we thought of as "the gay lifestyle", they ended up living self-destructive lives filled with anonymous sexual encounters and worse addictions than they ever experienced before.

Go read the whole thing.   This is why I’m going to be in Memphis on June 5th.  If doing this to kids in the name of love appalls you, and you can make it to Memphis, then be there too.