Thankfully, I have never had to endure so-called reparative therapy, but I am an adult survivor of childhood abuse. In fact, I was in a psychiatric hospital several times in my twenties and I was placed in a special ward for survivors of abuse.
As a child, I was taught that what I feel and what I think don’t matter. Scenes in movies that show adults speaking to children with great care and offering comfort and understanding will remind me that no one ever did that for me. My mother loved me, but she suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. We didn’t have heart to heart conversations. I found out early on, if I told my mother something personal, what I got back was crazy and sometimes scary. My father was concerned for my welfare, but he was not a nurturing person, and he was wrapped up in fundamentalist dogma. And he was often not even there. I learned early on that society was disapproving of sissy boys and boys who didn’t fit a certain stereotypical view of masculinity. Later I learned that society disapproved of boys who like boys. I was bullied at school, and those in authority there seemed indifferent to the hurtful names, the marginalization, and the threats of violence. Home was not a safe place. Home didn’t provide comfort. Home was chaos and condemnation. My older sister was desperate for approval and acknowledgement from our damaged parents, too, and because of the deficit, she turned to sibling rivalry. She belittled and berated me constantly, and my parents ignored this. When I was twelve, I performed a striptease for a neighbor boy. I already knew I was gay at that point, and I wanted the boy to like me. I didn’t know what I was doing or how to go about finding a boy who was interested in me, so I acted out in this foolish and embarrassing manner. My father caught us, and I’ll never forget the look of shame on his face. He was disgusted with me. And to add insult to injury, he told my sister about the incident. For years she regularly humiliated me by bringing the incident up…out of the blue, whenever she felt like making me feel like shit. I was terrified that someone would find out my secret.
Even though it might be irrational, I grew to believe that I couldn’t trust most people and that my inner thoughts and feelings must be protected. In my 20’s, I was diagnosed with PTSD and social phobia. I suffered from severe anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. I am more stable than I was in my twenties, but to this day I have never had a proper boyfriend, never been on a proper date. All I have are memories of one night stands and the unrequited love I had for a young man I knew in college. I never found the nerve to tell him what I felt for him, and we were close for just one year before he graduated and moved away. I don’t work. I’ve been on disability social security since the early 90’s. I don’t drive. I don’t leave the house much, and when I do, I avoid talking to people. If there’s a knock on the door, I often don’t answer it. I have caller ID and an answering machine, and I never answer the phone unless I know who is calling. The internet is my primary social outlet, and I can literally go a year without having a real face to face conversation with anyone.
Alan Chambers publicly and repeatedly states that there is something wrong with LGBT people, and that God will not accept them until they reject their feelings and identity, and he’s highly praised for this, labeled “Man of the Year” and given money for spreading the lies, while I live in a roach infested government subsidized apartment in a town I don’t like, in a neighborhood that is described as a ghetto. I see things like this, and it drives me further into my shell and reinforces the belief that has been ingrained in some primitive part of my brain that I can not trust people, I can not talk to people, I can not tell.
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