Torture mentale, déshumanisation permanente, traumatismes… Une pétition en ligne d’initiative citoyenne propose à la Commission européenne l’interdiction des pratiques de conversion ciblant les personnes LGBTQ+ dans l’UE.
En 2019, l’auteur Garrard Conley nous a raconté son expérience dans un de ces camps prônant les "thérapies de conversion".
En 2019, l’auteur Garrard Conley nous a raconté son expérience dans un de ces camps prônant les "thérapies de conversion".
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ÉducationTranscription
00:00The therapy created trauma that is still in me.
00:04I'm still very gay. It did not work.
00:08I was technically 18.
00:11My father gave me an ultimatum.
00:13You either leave your family, your church, your faith, and your education,
00:18or keep everything you've ever known.
00:30Now, this may be the toughest but most rewarding 12 days that many of you will ever face,
00:38but we have just one task, to bring ourselves back to God.
00:43Well, they had over 200 rules.
00:46Our phones were taken away from us.
00:48We couldn't wear anything that could be a temptation to someone else.
00:52You had to have full sleeves, button-down shirts.
00:55Basically, it had to be very neutral.
00:56If I stood with my hand on my hip and it was kind of gay,
01:02then someone would come up and report it and say,
01:06oh, you need to tell a counselor that you have violated the rules, you acted gay.
01:11If you were sarcastic or ironic, you would be reprimanded.
01:16Everything you did was recorded.
01:17So you could never relax.
01:19You could never be a person.
01:21We were forced to watch sports because gay men don't like sports, question mark.
01:26The most prominent exercise we had was called a moral inventory.
01:32We had to write down each night for homework any sort of sexual thought we'd ever had
01:37or any sexual experience we'd ever had.
01:39And then we would have to read it aloud in front of the entire group.
01:44That was probably one of the worst exercises because we just had to hear people's sexual thoughts
01:50but stripped of any sort of emotion, and then we would have to be shamed.
01:58They did that pretty much every day.
02:00We had to make a family tree on a poster, and beside each family member's name,
02:05we had to put sin symbols.
02:07So if someone had ever had an abortion, for example, it was seen as sinful,
02:12so they had to put an A-B next to that person's name.
02:16If someone had ever gambled, we would put a dollar sign.
02:21If they'd ever done drugs, we would put a D.
02:23If there was drinking, there was a D-R.
02:26And the idea was that we would see how much sin was in our families,
02:30and this would tell us why we were at a place like Love in Action,
02:34why my name had an H next to it for homosexuality.
02:39It's because my ancestors and my family engaged in sin, and it created sin in me.
02:46There was a boy, basically he was found out having sex with another boy,
02:51and the punishment was to convince that he was going to die.
02:56They had a fake funeral where they had a coffin brought in.
03:00They invited his family to come, and he had to come dressed completely in black.
03:06Everyone was in black.
03:07People were gathered around the coffin saying,
03:10oh, he died of AIDS because he had sex with this man,
03:14and he had to watch his own funeral.
03:16So you continually dehumanize a person by humiliating them
03:21and making them feel terrible about themselves.
03:23Then you offer them a solution.
03:25Here's what you need to do to fix it.
03:27Here's what you need to do.
03:28And that's classic, like every cult.
03:31It's all over.
03:32It's a classic tactic that dictators, fascists, and cult leaders use continuously.
03:41It messed up a lot of my mind for like a decade of my life.
03:45It created trauma that is still in me.
03:49But what it did teach me was how to survive.
03:53Love in Action and Exodus International, which was the larger group,
03:57they've completely been disbanded.
03:59But there are still a ton of places.
04:03There are only, I think, 15 states that have banned conversion therapy so far.
04:08And we have 50, so we've got a long way to go.