Sex and the City (not)

"If you believe you are born gay, you are forced to be tolerant. But if you bring in choices, it changes everything."

It is this ominous quote from Joe Nicolosi, speaker at the recent “Gay Cure” conference ¹, which seems to me to most clearly and succinctly delineate his bigotry.

Of course, people are born gay and as law-abiding citizens we deserve acceptance and equal rights. But, say - completely hypothetically speaking - if homosexuality was a choice, why does Dr Nicolosi think “it changes everything”? Again, as a free, autonomous and law-abiding citizen, I would expect society to respect my free choice to love whoever I want. Nicolosi has no right at all to judge me or intervene in any way in how I choose to live my life lawfully in a free society, especially over a choice which has no impact on him whatsoever.²

The ex-gay brigade’s failures of logic are just astonishing. If homosexuality is a ‘choice’, why does there need to be such a large and activist “reparative” industry to “change” people’s “choices”? ~ and what about the gay penguins, flamingos, bonobos and the 1000s of other animal species demonstrated to evince homosexuality quite naturally? How do they fit into his ridiculous, completely outdated and discredited Freudian ideas of how gayness comes about?

The tragedy is this flim-flam only appeals to vulnerable gay people and their families, desperate out of fear and ignorance to clutch at any straw. Words like “reparative”, “choice” and “healing” completely disguise what their “therapy” really is: brainwashing and mental bludgeoning, forcing internal repression and the simulated appearance of heterosexuality. Underlying same-sex orientation and desire does not change, it is merely suppressed. The unfortunate victim of this “therapy” lives a zombie half-life, desperately trying to convince everyone, including themselves, they are straight, until they have some kind of breakdown. The established psychiatric opinion is that there is no scientific evidence reparative therapy succeeds in its objectives, and in fact it has the potential to do tremendous damage to the patient and their family.

So for Heaven’s sake, Dr Nicolosi, let my people go!

¹ Zefrog organized a well-attended protest outside this conference.
² Apart from destroying the rationale behind his business, of course.