Conversion Therapy Only Creates More Shame

This year legislation was introduced in California that would classify Sexual Orientation Conversion Therapy (SOCT) as a deceptive act of consumer fraud. Backed by findings by medical, psychological and psychiatric associations, and with clear evidence such therapy doesn’t work, AB 2943 was introduced.

 As a lesbian minister, over the past 29 years I have counseled many people who had tried  “ex-gay ministries” (SOCT) in an attempt to be converted to heterosexuality; none of them successful. Indeed, the news carried details of fallen leaders of ex-gay ministries caught in gay bars or furtively seeking same sex companionship. Some, such as Jeremy Marks and Michael Bussee, co-founders of Exodus, International, not only came out as “ex-ex-gays” but  acknowledged conversion therapy doesn’t work and is harmful to those who attempt it. They apologized for the harm they inadvertently did to the lgbtq community in their attempt to seek heterosexuality in order to be approved by God

Thus, I was appalled at an editorial in the August 9, 2018 edition of the Gazette which stated that LGBTQ persons and their families should have access to the clearly debunked efforts of Sexual Orientation Conversion Therapy (SOCT) This editorial stated that the government shouldn’t attempt to regulate or ban such therapies because, “no state should declare ‘invalid’ or ‘unlawful’ a treatment individuals desire, pay for, and appreciate.”

In an Orwellian twist (four legs good, two legs better! chant the “re-educated” animals under the tutelage of the devious Snowball) the Gazette seems to be saying it is sympathetic to members of the LGBTQ community having free will in seeking to live their lives to the fullest.

Unfortunately, the Gazette completely misses the danger of SOCT. The American Psychological Association (APA) states that not only does research show SOCT is unlikely to be successful, it carries a serious risk of harm to the client. Most SOCT is advocated by religious conservatives who believe homosexuality is a sin that goes against their god’s will, although, the APA states “the research and clinical literature demonstrate that same-sex sexual and romantic attractions, feelings and behaviors are normal and positive variations of human sexuality, regardless of sexual orientation identity. (http://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/sexual-orientation.aspx)

For someone to be told that something as natural as left-handedness is sin leads to a deep-seated sense of shame over their identity; this, plus family and church pressure, is why people seek out SOCT. When the therapy doesn’t work (just as attempts to convert me to right-handedness as a child didn’t work) the client feels deeper shame and a profound sense of failing their family, church, and god. No wonder suicide attempts among LGBTQ youth are 3- 5 times higher than their heterosexual counterparts

Our response to those who seek SOCT due to their sense of shame and guilt over perfectly natural feelings should be to encourage what the APA suggests: “the appropriate application of affirmative therapeutic interventions for those who seek SOCT involves therapist acceptance, support and understanding of clients and the facilitation of clients’ active coping, social support and identity exploration and development, without imposing a specific sexual orientation identity outcome.”

At the end of the day, SOCT is a fraudulent practice, regardless of how fervently those who champion it and those who attempt it wish otherwise. Our energy is better served creating a community and culture in which people don’t have to hide or try to change who they are in order to be accepted by their families or their communities of faith. Just imagine a world where the amazing diversity of all creation was celebrated rather than pathologized. That’s a vision I can get behind.

We're here! We're queer! And we're voting in November!

Recently, I was honored by the Colorado Springs community as an Indy Inclusion Legacy Award recipient. This annual award has honored people who have been on the frontlines of activism for the queer community. Last year I was an honoree for this award and this year, I was named as one of the top five activists of the previous winners.

Last year I was the first person to be called up to receive my award and I decided to simply say thank you, in the interest of time. 😊 But this year, as a legacy winner, I figured a small speech would be in order.

The Colorado Springs Independent weekly newspaper, who sponsors this award has chosen, from the inception of this honor to celebrate the winners at a “White Party.” For many people, this means nothing more than wearing white. But I knew better and wanted to link the meaning of the White Party to what we are currently facing as social justice activists. Below is the text of my speech I gave when accepting my award.

As you know the white parties originated in the gay male community during the US AIDS years.
I remember living through those years; the devastation of AIDS growing more and more each day as, each day our government remained silent. AIDS was, in the words of one ACT UP activist, a terrifying war that no one seemed to see, except the combatants, those who were fighting for their lives or the lives of our friends.
Like now, rallies and protests seemed to be almost a weekly thing.
Our Protest chants went from we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!!
To:
We’re here, we’re queer, We’re fabulous! (snap)
To
We’re here, we’re queer and We’re not going shopping!
That one was a nod to how gay men were always the most stylish.
If lesbians led the chants it would’ve been
We’re here, we’re queer, And we’re not playing softball!

But those chants were more than defiant cheers in marches---we had marches then-not parades.

What we were saying collectively is that we’re not going about our business as usual. We are putting our lives on hold to fight this battle.
You can’t lull us into complacency with clothes or sports or the mindless activities that make up the days of so many whose heads were stuck in the sand.
And the white parties, too, were more than just fabulous soirées with dancing, drinking and seeing who had indeed gone shopping for the event and look fabulous in their white attire.
It was a way to celebrate life, to cherish each breath, to come together, to remind one another that even if the U.S. government had decided to write off the entire gay male community as a lost cause-- and good riddance –that they were not so easily gotten rid of. And that their accomplices (not allies, allies implies you’re helping me with my issue, accomplice says you’re aiding and abetting in an issue that impacts us all, that' we're all queer)their accomplices—lesbians, parents, straight folk would do all we could to seek justice, research, treatment for their friends, family members, everyone with HIV.
They wore white to counter the black attire they had worn to too many memorial services. They wore white to declare the goodness of their lives, the purity of their loves.
And so as we gather tonight at this fabulous White Party, I want to say how honored I am to receive this legacy award. And to remind us that it is still important in these perilous times when so many marginalized groups are under attack, not by a virus, but by a xenophobic culture of white straight privilege that has toppled our very government, it is so important in these times when children are torn from their parents arms to be put in cages, when trans rights and lgbtq rights so recently won are threatened in this strange new world. It is important in these times to come together to celebrate the purity of our lives and our loves to reclaim the goodness of who we are, and to chant loudly and proudly we’re here, we’re queer and we’re voting in November.

Families Belong Together

Recently we have seen a travesty of justice, a betrayal of the very values that are core to our nation. We have witnessed children ripped from their parents arms and thrown into cages. There is no due process, there is no justice, there is no mercy for these families who came to our borders seeking asylum, seeking aid, seeking human compassion. But they did not receive these things. Instead, they were torn apart under the inhumane dictates of this regime while politicians quoted Christian scripture to justify this unholy act.

Tonight I spoke at a rally protesting these detentions. Here is what I said:

I’m Rev. Dr. Nori Rost, minister of All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church, and here representing the Colorado Springs Sanctuary Coalition

It’s not surprising that Jeff Sessions used Romans 13 to try to validate separating families at the border. In fact, that is the scripture of choice for white supremacists around the world.
Romans 13 was used to condone the expelling of the Jews in Rome; it was used to condone apartheid in South Africa; it was used by the segregationists Presbyterians to condemn the civil rights movement.
Anytime you see a politician quoting that watch out.
Now I could counter with other verses from the Bible but I don’t need to. Why? Because we are not a Christian nation and frankly it doesn’t matter what the Bible or any other sacred text says.
As a Unitarian Universalist I am bound to a higher law. The first of our seven principles that says every human has inherent worth and dignity.
I am bound by the founding documents of this nation that says we are a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people; a nation that holds that all humans are created equal and are endowed with certain inalienable rights such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The Colorado Springs sanctuary coalition was founded over a year ago expressly to keep immigrant families together, to advocate for just laws for creating a society where no one need be afraid to get stopped by the police, where all can seek to be contributing members of society.
To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. : “We must all learn to live together as kin or we will all perish together as fools.  We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.  And whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.  For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way the universe is made; this is the way it is structured.”         
Let these words ring in our hearts, let them inspire us to never give up or shut up or sit down or slow down or stand down or go away until no family need fear being torn apart.

The Making of a Nation

This past week a friend and I went to NYC for vacation. New York is one of my favorite cities in the world. I come alive there in a different way than anywhere else. We stayed at a friend’s apartment in the Bronx and took the subway or walked everywhere. The weather was perfect: brisk, cloudy, rainy, and snowy one night!

I had a Nathan’s hotdog for lunch every day and we hit my favorite haunts: the New York Public Library, Central Park, the Brooklyn Museum of Art (Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party is on permanent display there!) and, of course, Broadway.

We saw three shows, The Waitress starring Sara Barielles, The Parisian Woman, starring Uma Thurman, and, how could we come to New York and not see the hit musical, Hamilton??

I have listened to the soundtrack of Hamilton for months but nothing prepared me for its power and beauty. No wonder it won 11 Tonys, including best musical. The first Secretary of Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, seems an unlikely subject for such theatrical success, yet, listening to the soundtrack, I got it. Here was a retelling of the Revolution and our earliest days as a nation not told in the dry, academic style of textbooks; rap is the music of Revolution in this show.

The fact that the cast is racially diverse with African American and Latinos playing the parts of our august forebears makes this even more electrifying. This is not your staid, whitewashed Revolution. This is earthy, gritty and filled with the indomitable hope of those yearning to break free; this Revolution is edgy and sexy and real. In one song, Hamilton sings, I am not throwing my shot! I am not throwing away my shot! Yo, I’m just like my country: I’m young, scrappy, and hungry, and I’m not throwing my shot!

What was it like, then, I wondered, when our country was young, scrappy, and hungry? What was it like to be at the forefront of building a new nation? To be so committed to liberty that you were willing to die for it?

As I witness the unfolding of this new administration in Washington, DC in bas relief against the boisterous spirit of Hamilton I can’t help but think that somewhere along the way we’ve lost the vision that our forebears had, imperfect though it was, in its fledging state, depicted in the musical with one exchange between Hamilton and Aaron Burr about the constitution, Burr says, The constitution’s a mess! Hamilton replies, so it needs amendments. Burr: It’s full of contradictions! Hamilton: so is independence.

Maybe that’s what we’ve forgotten: independence, democracy, is not a black and white matter, there isn’t a right way and a wrong way. There is only a commitment to find the best way, the way makes room at the table for the most people.  Throughout the presidential election and in the  first year of this new regime, what I’ve seen is an attempt to turn our democratic process into a reality show, even though it doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to the reality of our citizens. Outrageous claims have taken the place of civil discourse, including proclamations of building walls to keep others out, forgetting that immigrants are what made this country great in the first place (One line sung by Lafayette and Hamilton: Immigrants! We get the job done!)

What would happen if we returned to the values upon which we were founded, values of freedom, inclusion, diversity, and a spirit that recognized that we are always imperfect, full of contradictions, in need of amendments, and apologies and reparation and grace?

We still don’t have it down, 240 years later. Racism and intolerance are still embedded institutionally and culturally; we weep over the needless deaths of unarmed Black men, women, and children, feel outrage over the treatment of Muslims, forced to deplane aircraft for doing mathematical problems or wearing a head scarf. Poverty is still the reality show for 48 million Americans, according to a 2014 report from the Census Bureau.

Perhaps the call isn’t to make America great again; but rather to continue to make America, to build on the best of the foundation laid in 1776, while demolishing that which has bound us to racism, xenophobia, and the garden variety intolerance that is still rooted in our soil. Maybe what the musical Hamilton can teach us is that the language of Revolution must be sung in the language of every generation, to remind us of what a great country this is, and to plead with us to not throw away our shot to make it greater, still.

The Unwanted Anniversary

The first week in January has always been a portentous week for me. I started my first ministry, as the Minister of Evangelism at Metropolitan Community Church, Long Beach, CA on January 1, 1989 and left five years later to begin my ministry at Pikes Peak MCC on January 2, 1994. Twelve years later this week, I bid farewell to that congregation to finish my Doctorate of ministry and try my hand at non-profit work.

In 1995, I conceived my son on January 5^th. Trust me, when you’re using alternative insemination and have fertility issues you know exactly when these things occur.

This year, January 5^th marks another major milestone, though darker than the others. On that day I will be as old as my older brother will ever be.

Erik was the second youngest of us five siblings; the only boy in a sea of girls, the second step of our stair step progression, so close in age that when I was born, the youngest, my siblings were five, four, three, and 18 months.

In some regard, I got along better with my brother than with my sisters. I was the perennial tomboy, not given to playing with dolls; dresses were anathema to me. Erik and I would pretend to be cowboys, riding the roughhewn pallet lean-to that held our lawnmower, scrambling on top of the roof, sneaking through my bedroom window at midnight to go for walks. He was the first person in my family I came out to as a lesbian, writing to him with all the angst of my 16-year-old heart.

We weren’t particularly close as we grew older, although in our overlapping military service years, he would drive up from San Diego, CA to Castle Air Force base where I was stationed. We shared Thanksgiving dinners more than once and he even made it to the Base Airman of the Month banquet where I was awarded that honor. He looked so dashing in his meticulously kept Navy whites; everyone thought he was my date, which gave my girlfriend and me a chuckle.

My brother, Erik, completed suicide over four years ago at the age of 55 years, 203 days.  I will be that age on January 5th this year.

I always considered myself a "grief expert." My father died of cancer when I was just shy days of my 23rd birthday; the following year, my only nephew died of SIDS. Add to that the scores of deaths I witnessed, and the memorial services I did during the US AIDS years and you get the point. From 1981-1995 I lost 33 friends to AIDS, not to mention the countless memorial services I led as a queer minister in a queer church. 

But dealing with the grief over my brother's suicide is singularly piercing and in its own category. In those early days following his death, someone told me about a page on Facebook: Sibling Survivors of Suicide. That page became my grounding in those early months and years. It was the only place where I could be with people who understood what I was going through. On July 3, 2014, not quite a year after my brother's death, I made this entry:  color: #1d2129; font-size: 14px;">For some reason, this week has been really hard for me. No anniversaries or triggers-- just one second away from crying, every second of the day. I feel like this page is a parallel universe for me. "Out there" in the "real" facebook world, everything is bright and sunny, and my posts are political or funny; then I sneak away and enter here-- it is a darkened room, or cave-- and am drawn to the circle of this group, where there are candles lit and our voices murmur words of anguish and comfort and hope. This is a universe no one knows, except for those of us who live in these shadowlands, and I hope there will be no one else who has to discover it, though I take comfort in knowing we will be there for them, when they stumble through this portal for the first time.

The grief that accompanies suicide is unlike any other and leads to its own unique accounting system. I remember telling a friend that it was the 8^th month anniversary of my brother’s death. She said she wouldn’t keep track of the dates like that, as it makes it more painful. But I feel differently. 

It’s like parents keeping track of their baby's life by months. There's no way you could pass the date of the month and not exclaim, "This is my baby's 6^th month birthday!" Grief is like that; an unwelcome new family member, whose early days and months are ticked off in exacting measure. And then grief turns a year old and, beyond that annual anniversary, has its own assortment of personalized holidays; the birthday of the own who died, the first holiday without him, the first birthday of your own without him there. And now this new one, this date that I surpass my brother in age, this stepping off point into a future age he will never know.  I would say that, really, grief needs its own calendar, but the heart manages to keep track of it just fine.

]If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, there’s help. Call 1-800-273-8255 or text 741741. Never give up your place in the order of life.