FACES OF RESILIENCE

Fifty years ago, Larry Littlejohn wrote a letter to PLAYBOY condemning a method of treatment intended to “cure” homosexuality. Littlejohn, who served as president of San Francisco’s Society for Individual Rights, described the case of a 22-year-old patient “treated for transvestism” through aversion techniques. After showing the patient photos of himself dressed in women’s clothing, Littlejohn claimed, doctors injected the individual with apomorphine. Sometimes used to treat Parkinson’s disease, the drug also induces “headaches, nausea and vomiting.”

“It had been planned to put him through 72 ‘trials,’ ” Littlejohn wrote, “but the last four had to be abandoned because he became irritable, confused and hostile; developed rigors, high temperature and high blood pressure; suffered from impaired coordination and was unable to maintain a normal conversation.”

Although doctors had declared the patient “cured” of his condition, Littlejohn noted that another person subjected to electroshock therapy, this time as treatment to cure homosexuality, “wept for half an hour after each session.” He eventually refused further sessions after “rushing out of the room in tears.”

“I cannot see where this form of treatment differs from the tortures of the Inquisition or the brainwashing of the Communists,” Littlejohn concluded.

His letter to the editor was published in March 1969—four months before the Stonewall riots, during which activists including Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera fought back against police brutality at gay bars in New York City’s West Village. But 50 years after the six-day protest kick-started what would become the modern LGBTQ movement, the treatment Littlejohn described remains legal in 34 states in this country. New York passed statewide legislation to ban the practice only in January.

Today such treatments are widely known as conversion therapy, though they’re sometimes referred to as “reparative therapy” or “orientation change.” The terms refer to a loosely associated range of practices including everything from shock treatment and aversion therapy to waterboarding and ice baths. In the vast majority of cases, though, conversion therapy takes the form of talk therapy wherein LGBTQ individuals meet with a counselor or pastor who teaches them that who they are is “sick” and “wrong.”

At the time of Littlejohn’s letter, homosexuality was considered a “mental illness”; since then, the American Medical Association and other organizations have evolved. In its Journal of Ethics, the AMA has condemned conversion therapy as harmful and ineffective, claiming it leads to depression, anxiety and increased risk of suicidal ideation. Despite such cautionary assessments, an estimated 700,000 people in the United States have been subjected to the practice. Without decisive action, in the coming years thousands more LGBTQ youth will join the ranks of (often traumatized) conversion-therapy survivors.

To honor the decades of advocacy against conversion therapy, PLAYBOY partnered with the Trevor Project—a national LGBTQ youth suicide-prevention organization and architect of the “50 Bills 50 States” campaign to ban conversion therapy nationwide. On the following pages we spotlight and celebrate six activists and survivors who are raising awareness of its impact.

Their stories, each representative of a different experience with conversion therapy and presented alongside stunning portraits by queer photographer Ryan Pfluger, are a reminder of what Franklin E. Kameny, co-founder and president of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., wrote in PLAYBOY five decades ago. (His letter to the editor ran alongside Littlejohn’s in response to April 1967 and August 1968 Playboy Forum comments made by behavioral researchers Gerald Davison and David Barlow, who believed it was possible to recondition “sexual deviation.”) Kameny, whose organization was a branch of one of the first LGBTQ advocacy groups in the U.S., declared that homosexuality didn’t need to be cured.

“Gay is good,” he said.

These inspiring leaders are working to ensure society finally heeds that message.

the advocate sam brinton

31, alexandria, virginia

Sam Brinton would be the first to admit they are an unlikely face of today’s movement to ban conversion therapy. Brinton, who identifies as gender fluid and uses gender-neutral pronouns, received a master’s degree in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2013 and started a nonprofit devoted to clean-energy advocacy soon after. “My technical passion is solving nuclear waste and disarming nuclear bombs,” they say. “I’ve been doing it for more than a decade.”

But two years before graduation, Brinton took on a very different kind of advocacy. As a conversion-therapy survivor, they began lobbying states to ban the practice, which was still legal in all 50 states in 2011. California became the first state to outlaw orientation-change efforts affecting LGBTQ youth the following year.

While advocates and survivors have been fighting against conversion therapy for decades—through litigation and storytelling, and by persuading major medical and mental health organizations to cease treating a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity as a pathology—recent years have seen the practice achieve unprecedented levels of public attention and legislative progress. Today’s advocacy landscape, Brinton notes, is practically unrecognizable in comparison with that of just eight years ago.

In 2019, the top Google search results for “conversion therapy” are resource guides and info sheets from LGBTQ organizations including the Trevor Project and Born Perfect, an initiative founded by the National Center for Lesbian Rights. But in 2011, Brinton says, the top 10 or 20 entries on Google were for conversion-therapy providers seeking patients. At the time, the LGBTQ movement was largely focused on marriage equality, so it was “hard to find anyone who would listen.”

“Most people didn’t think conversion therapy was still happening, and most people didn’t think it was worthy of attention,” Brinton explains, adding that advocacy efforts in 2011 focused on “trying to find someone who cared.” But by 2017, the movement to ban conversion therapy had gained enough momentum that Brinton left nuclear engineering to work as the head of advocacy and government affairs for the Trevor Project. Advances since then have been significant. When Brinton brought the 50 Bills 50 States project to the LGBTQ youth organization two years ago, just five states—California, New Jersey, Oregon, Illinois and Vermont—had taken action to outlaw orientation-change efforts. Four states moved to ban conversion therapy in 2017, and five followed suit in 2018.

At press time, two states—New York and Massachusetts—had taken action this year to protect LGBTQ youth from “gay cure” treatments, and two more may soon join them. Colorado, led by Jared Polis, the country’s first openly gay governor, is expected to enact a ban this year, and Maine governor Janet Mills has pledged her support for a conversion-therapy ban should legislation reach her desk.

Brinton credits that progress to the tireless advocacy of conversion-therapy survivors. But according to Brinton, misconceptions about the treatment persist.

“So many people think that because this is being done by a licensed therapist, it’s effective and it works,” they say. “Every major medical association and organization has come out against conversion therapy, and yet there’s this pervasive idea that because the person who is doing it has the word doctor before their name, this must be good.”

Brinton, who was subjected to shock therapy at the age of 11, won’t be satisfied until conversion therapy is treated the same as smoking. “The Surgeon General has a warning on every pack of cigarettes,” they say. “I want every single person across the country to know how bad conversion therapy is for their health.”

In the meantime, Brinton keeps, above their desk, a memento of how far the movement has come. In 2015, when President Barack Obama came out against conversion therapy, it was reported above the fold of The New York Times—marking the first time a sitting president condemned the practice. Since then, Brinton has begun collecting pens from all the governors—seven Republicans and nine Democrats—who have signed conversion-therapy bans.

Brinton is hoping to add 34 more someday. If the past eight years are any indication, it may be sooner than anyone could have imagined.

Dusty Ray Bottoms prayed for a change. He just didn’t know what needed to change. He was 20 years old and home on spring break from Wright State, a small university outside Dayton, Ohio built on land donated by the nearby Air Force base. Bottoms didn’t fit in with his classmates in the theater program, and his home life wasn’t any easier. The son and grandson of evangelical pastors, he grew up in what he calls a “conservative, God-fearing household.”

Bottoms was essentially living three lives: There was the person his parents wanted him to be, the person his peers wanted him to be, and the hollow space where he hoped to one day carve out his own identity. He cried out to God to come and fill the space. “I can’t do this anymore,” he said. “I need something to happen.”

The very next morning Bottoms got his wish. His mother called him down to the kitchen, saying his father had discovered something on his computer. To this day, he still doesn’t know what it was his father found, but as he crossed the threshold into the living room, he already knew what they were about to say. Bottoms came out to them, the private longings and fears left unspoken for years suddenly pouring out like shattered glass.

“I was so terrified they were going to disown me and kick me out, but they did quite the opposite,” he recalls. “They wanted to do anything they could to fix me. I was so depressed at the time that I would try anything to feel happy or to feel better.”

At his parents’ request, Bottoms agreed to be exorcised. At the age of 12, he had been sexually assaulted by a man who had pulled him underneath the stall in a mall bathroom. Although he’d lied and said he got away before the man hurt him, his parents remained convinced that he was “possessed by a gay demon.” The church he grew up in taught that “if you have a sexual encounter with someone, you take on that person’s spirit,” he explains.

Bottoms compares his exorcism to a trip to the principal’s office. The two-hour session was held in a conference room at a local church, where he was given a series of rules to follow. The facilitator, whom Bottoms calls a “prayer warrior,” ordered him to keep both feet planted firmly on the floor and put his hands on the table in the center of the room, palms facing up. Bottoms was instructed to maintain eye contact with the prayer warrior at all times and keep his mouth wide open so the demons could be released. Three people held him in place while his parents looked on—his father scarlet-faced, his mother crying.

“I had to list the names of all the people I ever had a sexual encounter with,” he says. “I was nervous, so I made up names. They tried to get me to speak in tongues. I just remember the prayer warrior would tell me to say ‘Hallelujah!’ over and over and over and over again, really fast, and the tongues would come.”

This isn’t the first time Bottoms has told this story. He moved to New York City to pursue acting in 2010 and began doing drag after seeing performances by local artists Bob the Drag Queen and Thorgy Thor. Their shows gave him permission to be “different, weird and unique,” he says. His stage name is a combination of his childhood nickname, Dusty Ray, and a playful taunt from fellow waiters at a serving job in the city. After performing for nearly a decade in New York bars and nightclubs, last year Bottoms competed on RuPaul’s Drag Race, on which he opened up publicly for the first time about surviving conversion therapy.

Bottoms came out as a survivor because he hoped it would help others who had endured similar circumstances feel less alone. But now he just wants to prove he was never broken, never needed fixing in the first place. After the exorcism, he was forced to meet with church leaders for a series of exit interviews, and during the third and final session a pastor warned him against continuing down the path of a “homosexual lifestyle.”

“You will never find true love,” he recalls the man saying. “You will never find success. You will just have a life of misery.”

Today Bottoms knows that isn’t true. The popularity of RuPaul’s Drag Race has given him a global fan base. He has starred in national ad campaigns. His one-woman show, It’s a Hard Dot Life, is set to tour the United States. He’s engaged to his partner of six years. “Everything they said I couldn’t have,” he says, “I have.”

the celebrity dusty ray bottoms

31, new york, new york

When Peter Nunn was 15 years old, his parents told him he was going on a trip. What he didn’t know was that they’d found a men’s workout magazine he’d tucked away. At the time, Nunn didn’t understand what he was feeling or what it meant to be gay. Homeschooled throughout his childhood, he was raised in a repressive fundamentalist faith that he compares to a cult. “Every aspect of your life was controlled,” he says. Transgressing those strict dictates meant risking excommunication, both from the church and the entire community.

During a layover at the airport, his father explained that Nunn was headed to a “therapy center” where counselors were going to “fix” him. If Nunn didn’t change, he says, his family planned to “get rid” of him.

“I wasn’t prepared for this. I’d been a pretty happy kid, but really quickly—just in that one conversation—I realized everything was on the line for me: my family, my relationship with my parents, my security of having a home, but also my faith and my God were at risk. If I didn’t get this fixed, then everything that was important to me in my life could be taken away.”

Nunn spent two weeks receiving conversion-therapy treatment at a center in Sioux City, Iowa. He says the building looked like a small office complex that might have been built in the 1970s—a series of sparsely furnished rooms with chairs and desks filling the space as an afterthought. During sessions, counselors told him, he recalls, that “homosexuality is a sin, that God punishes gay people with AIDS, and that there’s no way to be in a happy gay relationship.” If he continued act ing on his attraction to men, they warned, he would die alone.

Although Nunn wanted to change, these sessions weren’t the cure his parents had prayed for. Instead, he was left with depression and shame. At the age of 16, he attempted to take his own life.

Nunn survived that attempt, and he has continued surviving. In his early 20s, at the urging of a friend, he began seeing a psychologist, who helped him cope with the trauma he’d experienced. Even as he began dating men and slowly opening up to friends about his sexuality, the lessons he learned in conversion therapy festered.

“I didn’t feel loved by my family, my friends or my God,” he says. Therapy helped him embrace the parts of himself he’d been taught to hate, but it also showed him that talking about his trauma could be transformative—both for himself and his community. In March, he testified in favor of House Bill 580, which seeks to ban conversion therapy in the state of Georgia. If the bill becomes law, therapists in the Peach State will be subject to “discipline by the appropriate licensing authority” if they’re caught offering any treatment that seeks to “cure” the sexual orientation or gender identity of anyone under the age of 18.

By talking about his experiences, Nunn hopes to help ensure other LGBTQ youth don’t have to suffer the hardships he did.

“If I can give hope to a kid or educate a parent who might not understand how dangerous this practice is and might reconsider sending their kid to conversion therapy,” he says, “then it will have been worth it.”

the survivor peter nunn

33, norcross, georgia

In many ways, Ralph Bruneau has been there from the beginning. When former California state senator Ted Lieu—now a U.S. representative—sought to introduce legislation banning conversion therapy in 2012, Equality California called Bruneau, a marriage and family therapist based in Los Angeles, to help craft the language. At the time, Bruneau was on the board of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, where he played a part in creating a certification process for LGBTQ-affirmative therapists.

As a gay man himself, Bruneau says, he leaped at the chance to help set a precedent for other states to pass legislation banning conversion therapy for LGBTQ youth.

“I don’t think there’s anybody in our LGBTQ world who doesn’t carry around injury and shame, whether they’ve been through conversion therapy or not,” says Bruneau, who specializes in trauma relief for both gay and straight patients. “It’s so pernicious and so pervasive that it haunts us through our lives. Conversion therapy is ground zero for that.”

Bruneau knows the weight of shame and how difficult it is to unload. He moved to New York City to pursue acting during the time of “free love” in the 1970s, when it felt as though “sex happened almost everywhere.” He struggled to reconcile the radical sexual liberation he experienced in the West Village with the nagging idea that maybe, just maybe, he could be straight if he tried hard enough. He attended group sessions at a Scientology center in Manhattan and attempted a practice known as aesthetic realism, which sought to balance an individual’s feminine and masculine energies.

Bruneau didn’t change, but the world around him did. When the HIV/AIDS epidemic swept through New York in the 1980s, he watched as his theater community was hit hard. Two men with whom he had long-term relationships both died. After he began volunteering at a hospice in the city, he quit acting to pursue his master’s (and later his Ph.D.) in clinical psychology.

“Every resource we had was being used to care for our loved ones, and I wanted to redirect my life in that direction,” he says. “I’ve been doing that ever since.”

His work as a clinician led him, eight years ago, to advocate against conversion therapy, and eventually Bruneau found an unexpected platform to raise awareness about the practice’s harms. In 2017 he competed in International Mr. Leather, an annual contest held in Chicago that’s best described as Miss America meets Tom of Finland. Bruneau’s speech was about his “journey out of shame.”

“I had tried everything, and the thing that worked was to accept that I’m born perfect,” he now says.

Bruneau won the title, which made him the oldest IML winner in history. A friend often jokes that his victory was historic for another reason: “Nobody else ever won IML with a ‘save the children’ speech,” Bruneau says.

Bruneau spent the greater part of the following year traveling the world to represent IML. During his travels he raised funds for a National Center for Lesbian Rights campaign to ban conversion therapy. His goal was to raise “enough money to hire one staff member for one year.” He says he came close. According to Bruneau, most people he discussed the issue with weren’t even aware that orientation-change efforts were still legal in their country. At the national level, as few as three countries have outlawed conversion therapy.

Bruneau believes it’s his duty to use his platform, his profession and his expertise to fight for LGBTQ youth. He hopes others will join him.

“Those of us who’ve dealt with shame our whole lives,” he says, “have an obligation to do what we can to make sure other generations of kids don’t feel the shame we felt.”

the therapist ralph bruneau

66, los angeles, california

the faithful gaby garcia-vera

30, washington, d.c.

“Did you hear?” Gaby Garcia-Vera asked his friends and family. “Isn’t this so amazing?”

It was March 27, 2019, and Puerto Rico governor Ricardo Rosselló had just signed an executive order protecting minors from the practice of conversion therapy. Although the order doesn’t outright ban the practice in the U.S. commonwealth, it does call on Puerto Rico’s health officials to take action, within 90 days, against therapy that promotes efforts to change sexual orientation.

From Washington, D.C., Garcia-Vera dialed everyone he knew who still lived on the island—his birthplace and home until the age of 18. A year and a half after Hurricane Maria left Puerto Rico with a death toll in the thousands, and thousands more without clean water or electricity, Garcia-Vera felt irrepressible joy that his community had something to celebrate.

“In the midst of all the horrible things that have happened, it made me proud to be Puerto Rican,” he tells PLAYBOY. “It was affirming. It made me feel seen.”

Garcia-Vera is among the 70 percent of Puerto Ricans who identify as Catholic. At the age of 11, he shared his sexual orientation for the first time—“I was part of one of the first generations of folks who came out really, really young,” he says. Some people in his personal life told him that those like him were “inherently bad.” There was something inside them that “needed to get fixed to be right with God.”

Garcia-Vera isn’t a survivor of conversion therapy, but after joining the Trevor Project’s youth advisory council in 2011, he began meeting LGBTQ youth who had been forced to attend camps that promised to pray the gay away. He understood the trauma they experienced.

“I know the warm wash of being and feeling alone,” he says. “I know what it feels like for someone to single you out because of who you love. It is one of the most difficult things to overcome.”

Many practitioners of conversion therapy invoke scripture to legitimize their work. But Garcia-Vera’s Catholicism is precisely what feeds his passion to end the practice nationwide. Feeling shunned by a religious tradition that, he was told, viewed him as the living embodiment of sin, he left the Catholic Church as a teenager. It wasn’t until his mid-20s, as he questioned whether condemnation could truly represent God’s feelings toward LGBTQ people, that Garcia-Vera began to reconcile his faith with his sexual orientation.

“If we’re all made in God’s image, then you’re perfect the way you are—with all your imperfections,” he says. “Loving someone else inherently can’t be something that is imperfect.”

Today, Garcia-Vera works for a nonpartisan Catholic advocacy group in the nation’s capital. In his efforts to ban conversion therapy, he continues to see how morality can be “weaponized” against the LGBTQ community. While talking to a conservative politician in Florida who supported a bill that would allow adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex couples, for example, Garcia-Vera says the lawmaker asserted that homosexuality is a personal choice.

Catholicism is showing some signs of evolution. In a 2014 Pew Research Center survey, seven out of 10 Catholics in the U.S. agreed that society should accept homosexuality, compared with 66 percent of mainline Protestants and 36 percent of evangelical Protestants. Though Pope Francis has been lauded for his more moderate views on homosexuality, he seemingly endorsed conversion therapy as recently as August 2018, saying that “a lot can be done through psychiatry.” The Vatican backtracked on those remarks, but the pontiff outlined a similar sentiment in April, when he advised parents of LGBTQ youth to “please consult and go to a professional” if they are “seeing rare things” in their children.

As Catholic leaders and conservative lawmakers refuse to modernize their views, Garcia-Vera remains optimistic that one day our leaders, both elected and religious, will realize the responsibility they have to those “they represent—to both do better and be better.”

“Who and how we love isn’t something that is up for question,” he says. “We know exactly who we are. We deserve better.”

Veronica Kennedy remembers exactly where she was when she found out Matthew Shepard had been murdered. Then just 18, Kennedy was living with her parents while she attended Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale. She had come home between classes to eat lunch and furiously type up a paper she’d waited until the last minute to start writing. Her family had a television in the basement, and when she looked up, she saw Shepard’s face. He was killed in October 1998 by two men, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, who beat him and left him tied to a fence to die.

Kennedy didn’t know him as Matthew Shepard. She knew him as Matt, a theater nerd with a “goose-honk laugh” who frequently showed up to class with a rumpled shirt when he missed laundry day on Mondays. The two had attended the American School in Switzerland, where their classmates included the “children of civil servants and military brats, along with Saudi princes, celebrities’ kids and rich businessmen’s children.” They were dorm mates and had German class together.

Kennedy, who was just entering her freshman year when Shepard was a senior, is still reluctant to discuss his death. She describes the horror of seeing him become a national symbol of anti-gay hate crimes as the “end of innocence.”

“I didn’t talk about it for a long time, but what I did do was become very vocal as an advocate,” she says. “I came out.”

Kennedy describes herself as “bisexual, a polyglot and a giant nerd.” But she is “a mother first and foremost,” which she says gave her a new perspective on the violence and stigma LGBTQ people face just because of who they are. Around the time she gave birth to her son, Elias, and after meeting Sam Brinton and learning about the 50 Bills 50 States campaign, Kennedy began to research conversion therapy. As the mother of a little boy who is “black, Irish and Colombian,” the prospect of anyone trying to force him to be someone he isn’t horrifies her.

“It’s as ludicrous as me saying I’m going to change my kid from straight to gay,” Kennedy says. “If Elias comes to me one day and says, ‘Mom, I’m straight,’ what am I going to do—send him off to try and make him gay? How goofy does that sound?” Her experience as both a mother and a teenage friend of Matthew Shepard has given her a unique voice with which to advocate against orientation change. The only cisgender female member of the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, she frequents gay bars in the metro area in gothic nun regalia to advocate for HIV/AIDS awareness. But Kennedy says her role in the drag activist troupe has evolved: She often broaches the subject of conversion therapy with the people she meets, many of whom are survivors.

One interaction sticks out to her. When she was five months pregnant, Kennedy rode with her fellow sisters in the 2015 Pride parade, the punishing humidity of summer in D.C. compounded by the group’s signature costumery. As they prepared to board the float, a drag queen approached her and noticed she was expecting. “Love that baby regardless of how he turns out,” he told her. “I am who I am right now because I had to stand up for myself and my parents wouldn’t.”

The two never spoke again after that day, and Kennedy will probably never know exactly what that stranger went through. But having witnessed the brutal cost of homophobia, she told the drag queen exactly what she would one day tell her son. “You are fantastic and you are beautiful,” she said. “You are perfection, sweetheart.”

the parent veronica kennedy

39, annandale, virginia