Turning from gay to straight success stories
'I can make you straight in three months': Inside India's gay conversion industry
Widely discredited around the world, conversion therapy - which aims to change someone's sexual orientation - is still legal in India but the practice of it by doctors is banned.
Above a second-hand car shop on a bustling Delhi street, sits the office of the Indian capital's self-proclaimed "best sexologist".
Dr Shriyans Jain is smartly dressed in a crisp alabaster shirt and jet waistcoat with a jet black moustache adorning his upper lip. His plump, dark hair is swept across his forehead. I'm going undercover to probe claims he suggestions gay and queer woman people a remedy for their sexuality.
He is trained in modern medicine (MBBS qualified) but also practises ayurvedic medicine (a traditional type of Indian medical system). He's also registered with the Delhi Medical Council. His website proudly trumpets his credentials, and lists several of the conditions he treats with herbal medicine. They include premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction and even infertility. But the service he offers gay and lesbian patients doesn't appear to be advertised.
Widely discredited around the world, conv
My So-Called Ex-Gay Life
Early in my freshman year of high school, I came home to find my mom sitting on her bed, crying. She had snooped through my e-mail and discovered a communication in which I confessed to having a affection on a male classmate.
"Are you gay?" she asked. I blurted out that I was.
"I knew it, ever since you were a little boy."
Her resignation didn't last distant. My mom is a problem solver, and the next day she handed me a stack of papers she had printed out from the Internet about reorientation, or "ex-gay," therapy. I threw them away. I said I didn't see how talking about myself in a therapist's office was going to make me halt liking guys. My mother responded by asking whether I wanted a family, then posed a hypothetical: "If there were a pill you could grab that would make you straight, would you get it?"
I admitted that experience would be easier if such a pill existed. I hadn't thought about how my infatuation with boys would play out over the course of my life. In truth, I had always imagined myself middle-aged, married to a woman, and having a son and daughter-didn't everyone want some version of that?
"The gay lifestyle is very lonely," she said.
She told me a
The Lies and Dangers of Efforts to Adjust Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity
Organizational Positions on Reparative Therapy
Declaration on the Impropriety and Dangers of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Change Efforts
We, as national organizations showing millions of licensed medical and mental health nurture professionals, educators, and advocates, come together to state our professional and scientific consensus on the impropriety, inefficacy, and detriments of practices that seek to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender individuality, commonly referred to as “conversion therapy.”
We endure firmly together in help of legislative and policy efforts to curtail the unscientific and dangerous train of sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts.
American Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry
"The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry finds no evidence to support the application of any “therapeutic intervention” operating under the premise that a specific sexual orientation, gender identity, and/or gender expression is pathological. Furthermore, based on the scientific evidence, the AACAP asserts that such “conversion ther
Acting Straight: A Communication for My Kind
Everything began to lose meaning: I was worn out by lying and loneliness took carry of me, becoming my living nightmare. I would get up up in the morning wishing I had died in my sleep. I hit rock bottom when I swallowed thirty-seven Ambien sleeping pills, before entity overcome by the fear of death and the image of my mother hearing that her only son had killed himself at the age of twenty-six in a distant land.
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I returned to Syria a few months after that dreadful night, and without much thought or reflection (or perhaps after a lifetime’s worth), I took the first opportunity I had to go to Beirut and look for a young Palestinian man I had once met there, and whom I had later heard was openly queer . I found him and told him “about myself” i
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