The idea that a person can “change” their sexual orientation has been steeped in controversy for generations. Historically, treatments aimed at trying to change a person from homosexual to heterosexual—often called “reparative” or “conversion therapy”—rose in prominence primarily as a religious and socio-political counter-movement against the gay rights movement of the 20th century. More recently, academics coined the term “sexual orientation change efforts,” or SOCE. Virtually every leading worldwide psychological and psychiatric organization has denounced SOCE, and its traumatic effects have, by now, been well documented. On May 17, 2012 the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), a regional office of the World Health Organization, issued a Position Statement: “Therapies to change sexual orientation lack medical justification and threaten health.” Noting the long-term effects of such therapies as “feelings of guilt and shame, depression, anxiety, and even suicide,” the PAHO added that practitioners of these therapies should be “subject to sanctions and penalties under national legislation. These supposed conversion therapies constitute a violation of the ethical principles of health care and violate human rights that are protected by international and regional agreements.”
Today in the United States, dozens of jurisdictions so far have passed laws banning forms of conversion therapy. In 2018, Gajdics helped initiate Canada’s first municipal ban on conversion therapy in his home city of Vancouver, British Columbia. Since then in Canada, several provinces and local municipalities enacted laws or regulations banning these discredited treatments. In December 2020, Gajdics provided testimony before The Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, one of the Committees of Canada's House of Commons, in support of a federal ban. In December 2021, the national ban on conversion therapy passed into Canadian criminal law.
The overall problem with many of these laws is that they do not take into account experiences such as the one described in The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir, where author Gajdics was not in any kind of formal conversion therapy but was simply under the care of a licensed psychiatrist who took it upon himself to try to “cure” him (i.e., prescribed extreme doses of psychiatric medication, used aversive techniques, contextualized his entire therapeutic treatment and all of his life history in an effort to help convince him that he was really heterosexual). In other words, changing laws does not necessarily change hearts, and as long as the belief systems of those who treat gay people have not altogether and radically changed, there will always be someone “out there” who will think that the gay person would be much happier if they could only “change.”
Self-portrait 1 year before therapy
Self-portrait 1 year into therapy.
Self-portrait 2 years into therapy.
Primal Scream, sculpted 3 years into therapy.