Quick disclaimer, folks: The following story is incredibly disturbing.
Samuel Brinton is a conversion therapy/torture survivor and LGBTQ rights activist. In a recent speech given at the Equality Federation’s 20th Annual Leadership Conference, he recalled the absolute horrors he was subjected to as a young teenager inside a gay conversion clinic.
Brinton was sent to the clinic by his mother, who was told that if she didn’t cure her son of the homosexual demons that possessed him, she may lose him forever.
Related: A Disturbing Undercover Look At How Conversion Therapy Tries To “Cure” Gayness
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“My hands were bound, placed in ice and pictures of men touching other men, holding hands, were shown,” Brinton explained. “I was supposed to associate the cold I was feeling with the image that I was seeing.”
When that didn’t work, Brinton said, his captures tried using heat.
“Wires were wrapped around my hands. Heat was applied when pictures of men touching men were shown and turned off when pictures of women touching women were shown.”
After that, came electricity.
“Needles were stuck into my fingers. Electricity was shoved through my body as pornographic images–the vey first pornographic images I would basically ever see–were shown to me.”
Related: Mike Pence just tried to revise his history on HIV and conversion therapy — here’s the real story
But that was only the beginning of the nightmare. Brinton listed a slew of other torture methods the clinic used to turn young men straight, including “doctors” inducing nausea, vomiting, or paralysis while showing patients homoerotic images and forcing them to wear elastic wrist bands that would zap them whenever they got aroused.
“This was not actual science,” he said. “This was people trying to apply horrible, horrible pseudo-science to a child.”
He says he was shamed, forced to undergo “orgasmic reconditioning,” and subjected to satiation therapy, which involves a person engaging in “prolonged masturbation” of no less than one hour and being forced to verbalize their “deviant sexual fantasies” to “doctors.” (You can read all about it in this creepy 1979 medical “study.”)
He was also told AIDS was God’s punishment for gay people.
Related: WATCH: The dark history of gay conversion therapy
“To me, [that] was the most debilitating,” he recalled. “The one constant in my life was that God loved me and I loved others and if God didn’t love me anymore, how was I supposed to love others? How was I supposed to be a person who would make the world a better place?”
As all this was happening, Brinton’s mother would sit patiently in the clinic’s waiting room as her son was being tortured on the other side of the door.
“I do not understand how a mother hears her child screaming ‘Mommy, make it stop!’ and doesn’t run to the room,” Brinton said. “My mother truly, truly believed she was saving my life. There is no doubt in my mind that woman had been lied to. … And so she sat there and listened to the screams.”
Watch Brinton’s powerful speech below…
MR. BULLDOPS
I hate Christians more than ever now
Navalator
Does it surprise anybody that the California couple that for years and routinely abused, tortured, starved and savaged their thirteen children are Evangelical Christians?
Danny595
I remember when Brinton first surfaced on a video telling this tale in 2011. It seemed incredibly fake then and it still does. If you go back to Queerty’s original article on this fellow, readers were expressing skepticism back then. https://www.queerty.com/punching-burning-electrocuting-and-stabbing-your-gay-son-will-probably-not-make-him-straight-20111007
He tells different versions of the story. There are many holes and red flags. To mention just one: for no reason whatsoever, he refuses to identify the therapist (who in the 2017 version is now apparently part of a “clinic”). Why wouldn’t he? Why wouldn’t he take that basic step of naming the clinic? Why does he not file a complaint with the state of Iowa? In the 6 years since he told this story, no organization or individual has identified this clinic in Iowa, come forward to talk about their own experiences there, or filed a complaint against it. In fact, no one in the US has claimed to have experienced any of these extreme aversion techniques since the 1970s, and even then, ice and heated coils were never used. “Aversion therapy” for homosexuality doesn’t exist in the US anymore and hasn’t for decades. But somehow, there is this one extraordinarily brutal, retrograde clinic in Iowa, which no one else has heard of, and which he won’t name. Sure, Jan.
DCguy
I thought that maybe your comment had some merit until you stated that Ice and heated coils were never used.
Ice was used very frequently. So the fact that you would make such a declarative statement about that seems to indicate an agenda.
Danny595
DCGuy – AFAIK, aversion therapy in the 20th century did not use ice. It used nausea-inducing drugs and electro-shock. But even if I were wrong about that, it doesn’t invalidate everything else that is wrong and/or suspicious with this story. My “agenda” is to no mindlessly support outlandish stories which have lots of holes and which no one has ever verified. Doing so is not only unethical in its own right, but it also undermines the movement to end conversion therapy.
Mark
I agree with Danny. Brinton has produced NO corroborating evidence, no connection to any real group, to substantiate his masochistic narrative. I’d been studying initiation work for years, in response to Michael Meade speaking on The Water of Life, and had always been fascinated by initiation-work, both the realities of it and the image it has in the church and in the gay community. I thought to myself, who’s the most aggressive debunker in the gay journalism community? Wayne Besen. And so I wrote to Wayne Besen to see if he smelled anything fishy in Sammy’s story. He didn’t have time to pursue it, but I think he saw the logic in my points.
I’ll post the dialog if people are interested.
As for me, I teach Greek and Latin. The sufferings Brinton describes are nothing to what I put my students through.