“I’m a product of the 60s and you don’t even talk about your sexuality or gender in those days, I knew as soon as puberty hit that I was gay but no way to do anything about it or talk about even. I became a Christian in my late teens thinking it was a spiritual journey but to actually be genuine to myself, I didn’t know what to do so I thought I can’t be gay, I just can’t.
I dove into Christianity in an effort to change because I had heard that you could be changed, it was absolutely possible, from that point on I spent my whole life just radically attempting anything I could to become straight, normal. I ended up going through all sorts of things, all sorts of prayer therapies right through to deliverance therapies where they cast out the demons. The primary [message] is that you’re broken and God doesn’t like you like that, some go far as to say God can’t stand the sight of you, others will just say he loves you but he just wants to be normal which is now the primary focus of conversion therapy. A lot of it comes across as a very loving process but there’s still this element to it that you are broken and must be fixed.
My wife and I worked together [in conversion therapy], she had come from lesbian relationships. We had that background in common, we ended up joining an organization called Living Waters in the mid-’90s and we worked together, we’re both musicians so we’re sort of music leaders. We became work leaders and worked in good faith, in helping people but through all this time, this massive cognitive dissonance going on where I knew I was just as gay as I ever was, but you live in this repression, denial. It’s underneath everything in your life, part of it is this constant deep fear that I’d get found out and I’d be a fraud, I had to keep this front up all the time because I wasn’t allowed to be gay, my belief system said ‘sorry you can’t do it.'”–Former conversion therapist and now openly-gay activist Jim Marjoran, speaking to Kiwi morning show Breakfast about his life journey. Following the death of his wife, Marjoran realized he couldn’t change his sexuality. He now operates Silent Gays, a group working to expose the abuses of conversion therapy, and which works to ban the practice. New Zealand is expected to ban conversion therapy nationwide by the end of next year.
Cam
Michelle Bachman’ss husband also runs a clinic where they do conversion therapy and she comes off very butch. Hmmmmm
James
How many other lives has this guy ruined with his self hate.
radiooutmike
Exactly.
It’s one thing when your own self-hate is confined to yourself; in that you are doing damage to yourself….But then actively recruit other people to hate themselves.
All this hate is just wrong. You hate you. God who supposedly made people is his own image and has infinite love hates you. You help other people hate themselves and God, for the record, hates them too.
When I was 18 I joined a born-again church to get away from my own queerness. The very thing that actually makes me me. I get that this guy is trying to make amends, but I don’t think he will ever fully atone for the damage to others that he’s done.
Essie
It’s going to be really difficult for this man to pay for all the lives he has ruined. I don’t care how hard he works to change minds, he will still be a hypocrite.
Essie
It’s going to be really difficult for this man to pay for all the lives he has ruined. I don’t care how hard he works to change minds, he will still be a hypocrite. I my opinion, he is VILE!!!
Vince
I’d say that nobody’s better equipped to fight ex gay groups than another ex-gay who ran one.
Donston
I would tend to agree. People who have experienced conversion therapy and worked in it have greater knowledge of the ins and outs and how they manipulate/prey on people.
I do feel that making it all about how terrible religion is is not the smartest way to go about it. Homophobia (be it casual or more blatant and aggressive) is still normal for many people and in many areas in the states. While a lot of folks don’t know how to deal with hetero expectations, closet pressures, masculine/feminine insecurities, past traumas and mental health struggles, fluidity, contradictions, not understanding where they are in the gender, romantic, sexual, affection, emotional investment, commitment spectrum. Conversion therapy is one of the results of that of other stuff. It is the one most tied to religious persecution.
Hetero commitments between two people dealing with stuff like hetero expectations, religious pressures, queer insecurities, gay resentments, fluidity, confusions, internalized homophobia, etc. is pretty much typical. Though don’t assume that a “queer seeming” male and female being together is automatically driven by those things or mostly by those things.
Heywood Jablowme
“we ended up joining an organization called Living Waters…”
I got an image of John Waters pretending to be a preacher, lol.
jackmister
Religion ruins everything.
Ginger Tom
As Bob Dylan said, “You Never Ask Questions, When God’s On Your Side.” Lots of people don’t really know how to be on God’s side but they don’t usually have any problems about enlisting Him/Her/Whatever on theirs.