HUFFINGTON
07.14.13
STRAIGHT TALK
colossal affairs by any standard.
Like Gatsby, Mathew’s father had
conjured a fortune from thin air,
proving that nothing was impossible, no dream out of reach.
Mathew saw no reason to doubt
his dad’s judgment, and was terrified of letting him down. And yet
he continued sleeping with Jacob
on and off for the next five years.
In his sessions with John,
Mathew complained that he felt
torn. A part of him still hoped
that the therapy would somehow
make his love for Jacob vanish.
But he was increasingly sure that
he didn’t like sex with women,
and the Viagra that his father gave
him on two occasions only made
him feel worse.
By this point, John says he had
begun to harbor serious doubts
about his practice, and about his
work with Mathew in particular.
He could see that the treatment
wasn’t working, and he prompted
Mathew to consider that he might
actually be happy as a gay man.
But he didn’t let Mathew or his father know that he was losing faith
in the therapy. He didn’t admit to
selling what he’d later refer to, in a
moment of uncharacteristic bluntness, as “garbage.” At the coffee
In 1998,
advertisements
featuring
testimonies
from people
who underwent
sexual
conversion
therapy
appeared in
The New York
Times and other
newspapers
throughout the
country.
shop in LA, he said he regretted his
lack of candor with the Shurkas.
In the world of conversion therapy,
“therapists collude with the clients’ wishes,” he said, “rather than
bringing the bad news, or helping them cope with the news they
didn’t want to hear.”
T
he question of whether it’s
possible, or desirable, to
change one’s sexual orientation goes back to the
dawn of modern society’s understanding of mental health. Freud
attributed same-sex desires to
“developmental arrest,” but he
didn’t see homosexuality as an
illness and was skeptical of at-