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Ordinarily, this wouldn't be news; lots of well-intentioned parents have sought to change their child's God-given sexuality.
But this Bartlett 16-year-old, who came out to his parents just weeks ago and whom I won't name, keeps a Weblog. Thousands around the world have been following his saga online.
"They tell me that there is something psychologically wrong with me," he wrote on his blog May 29. "I'm a big screw up to them, who isn't on the path God wants me to be on. So I'm sitting here in tears... and I can't help it.
"I wish I had never told them. I wish I just fought the urge two more years... I had done it for three before then, right? If I could take it all back.. I would..."
LIA's director, John Smid, who says he's been free from the homosexual lifestyle, although not same-sex attractions, for 20 years, says it's not LIA's goal "to make sure clients never act out in homosexual relationships."
The mission, he says, is to help the teens make informed, honest decisions about their sexual choices, and to seek God's best for their life.
For Peterson Toscano, who put himself in LIA's adult program nearly 10 years ago, the best life is one free from the shame that reparative therapy programs inflict and a life of self-acceptance.
Today, after years of trying to reconcile his sexuality with his Christianity, he's confident in his salvation and his sexual identity as a gay man.
Toscano spent $30,000 and time on three continents trying to be straight. He got married (and divorced). He joined fundamentalist, then evangelical, then Pentecostal, and finally, charismatic churches. "I started trying to ramp up my experience, (thinking) that maybe a little more Holy Ghost would do it."
He volunteered in Ecuador with Exodus International, an organization that believes gay people can become straight.
He subjected himself to three exorcisms, including one by a Jamaican woman in New York City. "She was trying to drive out the spirits of homosexuality, lust and gluttony," he remembers. "It got broken up by the police because it was getting too loud."
The exorcism for homosexuality didn't -- couldn't -- take. In July 1996, Toscano moved to Memphis to enroll in LIA's adult program.
At a cost of $950 a month, Toscano, now 40, stayed in LIA's residential program for more than two years.
The rules dictated he shave every day, and stay out of the forbidden zones: Midtown, Downtown and anywhere west of Highland. In group therapy, clients were instructed to share their sexual thoughts and homosexual experiences in clinical terms. (Smid says the group sharing of sexual experiences is no longer a part of the therapy.)
Toscano says he was in a "biblically induced coma, with a toxic mixture of fear and shame."
"We had a mock funeral for a 19-year-old" also in the program, he says. "We actually laid him out on the table, so we could talk about what a shame he didn't live his life right."
While he was at LIA, a fellow client tried to kill himself.
It took Toscano, now a Quaker, 17 years of submitting to the ex-gay movement to realize that "there's nothing that can be done ... and nothing need be done" about his sexual identity.
"The big shift came when I stopped looking outward for direction and started looking inward," said Toscano, who has made a career, literally, about the years he spent trying to be straight. His time at LIA became a one-man play, "Doing Time in the Ho Mo No Mo Halfway House," which he performed at a Memphis church in 2003. "Fish Can't Fly," a film that includes his LIA experience, debuted at a gay/lesbian film festival in New York City Sunday.
He calls his play a "truth-telling piece about what I experienced. I let people make their own decision" about whether reparative therapy works or not.
For him, it didn't, and that's a good thing.
"The amazing thing for me is how comfortable I feel in my skin," he says.
"People who know me, and have known me over a couple years it's so refreshing to see you as you."
For more links to Toscano, Love In Action, or the local group supporting the Bartlett teen, Queer Action Coalition, go to commercialappeal.com and click on the links with this column.
Also online: The story of Brandon Tidwell, a Memphis man who didn't find help in LIA, but in New Testament scripture.
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