Hi Orfeo

Thanks for sharing your experience and clarifying the different levels of support available, some of which, even from ex gay organisations. I’m glad your experiences were positive despite the underlying belief that your sexuality was the issue. 🙂

Blessings,

Ann Maree

deeply disturbing. I’ve been upset since I heard that. as I mentioned….I’ve known about the problem for some time…….but it is obviously worse than what I even thought.

Makes me even more determined to march with as many people as possibly next weekend.

AVB I do not think your stance is too extreme. Let’s face it, it is no different to people saying the following, which I know some have said in the past …”I treated the Indigenous Australians well when they were working on my farm … ” they got paid virtually no money and had no choice where they worked, they were not allowed to live with their family, they were not allowed to marry who they chose, ” … BUT I TREATED THEM WELL WHEN THEY WERE WORKING ON MY FARM.”

People can have the best of intentions but if their cause is fixed on a bigoted ideal, to benefit some while disadvantaging others, that ’cause’ needs to be eradicated. We are in an age of growing awareness of our humanity and injustices, wrong ideals of minorities and those that are different to the many must be stamped out.

The very ideal of Jesus was that none should perish, that all can and should be saved and to leave the 99 to go for the 1. Minorities, those individuals, the ‘ugly’ of our society have every right to be loved and accepted. Exgay programs are like so many other ’causes’ of the past and present, they may have had good intentions but they were based on misinformation that fed ignorance which led to even more hatred. We still have a racist society here about this land’s own Indigenous people which is based on misconceptions because accurate education has been neglected to the greater population. So too with GLBTI. I stand with you AVB that these programs need to be stamped out.

Too many tragedies have occurred for it to be ignored.

On an offshoot to this – is there ‘good wholesome’ support for the families of those that committed suicide? The assumption many would have is that those that felt they had no way out came from christian families, many of which may very well have been against their own children/family members for being GLBTI. I wonder how they feel about the tragedy of losing their loved one? Are they able to get good wholesome assistance/comfort? Or do they continue to be fed that their son or daughter/ brother or sister has gone to ‘hell’ ?

Anne Marie

This is a bit private but when they did the aversion therapy, they put a wire ring that measured temperature changes on your private parts and showed you about 1000 pictures of men and 1000 pictures of women over about 10 days. The needle on the doctor’s machine recorded temperature changes. They also attached wires that delivered fairly high voltages of electricity to “punish” you for being gay when it recorded temparature rises when I saw the guys.

In my case, the machine never recorded anything when I saw all those pictures of naked women. There isn’t anything anyone can do to influence the outcome of those tests. The doctors said it proved I was gay. No surprises there!

They also said that of all the years they had been doing those tests, NOT ONE person had changed their sexual orientation, though many had changed their behaviour. The method they used was to have a person take the tests first to prove they were gay to start with. Then they went out to be “cured”. Thirdly they came back and had the tests taken again several times over a few years.

I STRONGLY believe that before anyone accepts the claims from anyone who says they have had their sexual orientation “cured” from gay to straight, they must have had those temperature tests, remain silent, and let the doctors say if they have been “cured”. The pressure to LIE from the church is enormous.

On the other point, I get one day off a month from the carer role and I go on a bus trip away somewhere. I really look forward to that. When I went on the first one about a year ago, that was the first time I had been out like that in over six years. I am not asking for sympathy. That is just life. That is why this site is just tremendous for me.

We started to go to a home group yesterday and would you believe the group raised the topic of homosexuality and they just gay bashed full on the entire time. One even said “There is no way he would welcome a f..gg.t to this church, or even let them come into the place.” I took it for a while, then just walked out, as I couldn’t trust myself not to say something I might regret later. I haven’t come out for my wife’s sake. They wheeled her out to me in the car park. There were quite few tears shed yesterday. There is no way known I will ever go back to that group.

Sorry if this is drifting from the thread here. I got carried away a bit. Sorry.

David what a terrible experience……how insensitive, cruel of that Christian man. I wonder what he was projecting.