Pray away the gay

WATCH: The dark history of gay conversion therapy

ex-gay

We all know that “conversion therapy” is neither — it doesn’t convert your sexuality, and it isn’t even therapy. It’s just a bunch of guesswork that does a ton of harm and zero good.

A new video from Seeker rehashes the terrible history of “ex-gay” cures — we’ve been over this before, but in case you need a reminder of just how bad it can get, well, here you go.

Various US states have banned (or tried to ban) the treatment. Many victims are minors who are pressured into therapy. This can range from bullying to electroshocks. In South Africa, kids are sent to hard labor camps — in fact, some have died in those camps. In the past, countries around the world (including America) used to remove one of the victim’s testicles and replace it with testicles from a straight donor. Surprise: that didn’t work. Neither did some of the other crazy cures of the time: riding a bicycle, getting a lobotomy, and stealing monkey testicles.

So mental health professionals imagined that homosexuality was an illness that required treatment. They would create insane stunts like surrounding gay men with jars of urine and making them jerk off. Surprise: that didn’t work either!

By the 1970s, psychiatrists started figuring out that homosexuality isn’t an illness, and that the treatments are all dumb. Nevertheless, various fake therapists such as Dr. John Nicolosi still subject kids and adults alike to harmful phony treatments. Is he still transplanting testicles into people? Probably not, but the snake-oil “ex-gay” treatment these lunatics practice is almost as bad.

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