My interview w/Truth Wins Out founder Wayne Besen: ‘Ex-gay therapy is nothing but child abuse. We must stop it’

Wayne Besen, the founder of Truth Wins Out, spoke last week at an event hosted by the La Gay & Lesbian Center and co-sponsored by the LA chapter of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association of which I am president.

I was all concerned with attendance and who was there etc. but once Besen started talking, all I could think about was all the horrible damage this conversion therapy can do to LGBT people.

I had a recovered memory kind of a moment during the presentation. When I was in college in the mid-80s, my dorm roommate had left for Christmas vacation and it was the first time I could really use the telephone in privacy (no cell phones then!). I was so tormented about being gay and so not wanting to be that I opened up the pages of a weekly San Diego paper called The Reader and called an ad that promised to make you straight.

I remember talking to a guy on the line about it, my voice shaking, then after awhile started flirting with him.

I was hopeless!

Anyway, I’m lucky that was my only experience with it. My parents didn’t try and send me to this kind of therapy (banned in California this week for teens) because I was firmly in the closet, had girlfriends, and was determined to throw anyone and everyone off the scent.

But there are plenty of kids who have been forced to undergo this gay conversion therapy that just can’t and doesn’t work. I spoke with Besen about it after his presentation and told him about my college experience.

‘We need to look across the country where we can have this because ex-gay therapy is nothing but child abuse,’ he said. ‘We must stop it.’

Besen, a former spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, has made it his life’s work to fight anti-LGBT extremism and the dangerous ‘ex-gay’ industry. He’s the architect of a sting operation that proved for the first time that the clinic run by Marcus Bachmann, husband of former presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann, practices “ex-gay” therapy.

He says he’s well aware of what he’s up against.

‘Our opponents are not lying down, they are not surrendering, they are not raising the white flag,’ Besen says. ‘They are sincere, they are true believers. They will fight, they will scrap, they will claw all the way to the end. And just when you think they’re dead, like a horror movie they’ll crawl out of the grave bloodied and bruised and come after you again to fight another day.’

To read my interview with Wayne Besen in its entirety, please go over to Gay Star News.