Jeff Williamson is an articulate young man who grew up in a conservative, Christian family and church. When he came out to his parents last year, they sent him to a counselor recommended by Focus on the Family. He says they sent him there with the absolute expectation that he would become heterosexual. As Jeff had investigated things related to reparative therapy, he came prepared — apparently to the frustration of Hudson.
It’s nice to see a new generation of young people unwilling to listen to the old stereotypes, or be shamed into a situation not of their own choosing. Providing them with the facts, and helping them think for themselves, is one of the main goals of XGW.
Hat Tip: Daniel Gonzales, BoxTurtleBulletin.
Update 3-26-2008: The video is no longer available. According to Daniel, the subject of the video, Jeff, was concerned over “the ramifications of having certain aspects of his story in the public domain.” He has asked that the video be remade with an emphasis on those things he feels are most important about the story. When and if that happens, we will post the new and link to it from here.
Update 3-31-2008: Jeff’s new video is now available and has been put in place of the original and now unavailable one. The emphasis is different, and were we to post the article today, having never seen the first one, our title and description might be someone different as well. However, the content is self-explanatory.
Update 5-29-2009: The name of the counselor has been removed at Jeff’s request. This is a rare occurrence, but we thought it fair to comply this time. If additional facts come in about this counselor from other sources, we will post that separately.
Nice to see a young boy stand up for himself and have an intelligent dialogue with an adult!
What a powerful testimony. I hope your message gets heard to as many youths and their parents as possible.
well done Jeff. How wonderful that you have this confidence at such a young age. hearing stories like yours reminds me that change is happening. It took my 28 years to get to where you are at now. that longer than you have been alive I guess.
your calm and articulate manner will help other young people know that its much better to love if you are than to hate yourself.
God bless you.
Wow! Good job, Jeff. You had the counseling session many of us wished we had the foresight to have had. Thank you for sharing your story.
It’s disturbing that ‘your pal’ Therapist Bob only relented and discussed your willingness to participate after you argued with him. It seems he was just trying to cover his a** when he realized you were not buying his reparative therapy shtick. Had you been a more docile and compliant fundamentalist-follower, I wonder if he would have bothered discussing your willingness and beliefs.
I tried the reparative therapy thing and was involved in ex-gay ministry for many, many years. What happened was 15+ years of more self hatred than I experienced as a lesbian and condemnation from fear-based theology and what I hope were well-meaning Christians who didn’t know what to do with me unless my behavior remained in check. I even wrote an article for Christianity Today back in 2005 where I talked about how I had been healed. Well, I’m now happily in a relationship with a woman and am still trying to recover from the wounds inflicted by ex-gay ministry. I am who I am.
I could not be any more proud of you.
I thought the exact literal phrase you did, Norm, when Jeff said the therapist said at the end of the session about how he normally doesn’t work with people unless they make their own appointments (instead of parents making appointments and forcing their children to go) – the Focus on the Family endorsed therapist was covering his a55.
Jeff was being generous by calling this honesty; I’m sorry to say that I’ve seen this pattern of saying one thing and doing the opposite so much now in the ex-gay movement that I can no longer be this generous. It’s a SERIOUS thing to subject an unwilling participant to ex-gay therapy, and this therapist knows it, which is why he claims it’s his policy generally to not do it. If it really is that serious, and it IS, and he REALLY cares about the well being of young people who might be coerced by their parents, then he should be scrupulously consistent with his practices.
On another subject, Diane, thank you for sharing where you’ve been and where you are now. I’m going to look up your Christianity Today article. It takes enormous courage, especially for people who have so publicly professed “change” and “healing”, to then publicly renounce ex-gay ministries. I’m so glad that you found love, Diane. I wish you and your partner the best, and I wish you the best as you recover from the harm you experienced.
I’m assuming that you are familiar with beyondexgay.com, the ex-gay survivor’s movement. If not, there are great resources there and a wonderful community of people who will love you not despite, but *because* of whom you are.
I’ve been to several therapists in my lifetime, I had a lot of issues with coming out, alcohol, some abuse issues.
My therapists spent a LOT less time talking, and a lot more time LISTENING, than this.
I don’t recall any of my therapists putting value judgements on me, either. They also didn’t try to steer me in any particular direction — other than the one I wanted to go in.
Course nothing was ever blamed on my sexuality, either.
Could y’all help me out with something? I have been going a few rounds with a newly minted heterosexual ex lesbiand named Mary over at Dr. T’s blog.
At first I pretty much told a lot on myself in order to give Mary an opportunity to understand I’m well informed.
But mostly, I wanted to tell the thread and being nice to gay people and insisting they have rights is all well and good as far as an attempt is concerned, but since conversion, as in the case of this young man has been the standard response to gay people in lieu of incarceration and state ordered execution: being nice to gay people is something that conversion supporters already think they are doing.
Mutability is in the courts as defense of discriminatory laws. I’m a witness to that, so the bottom line I was trying to convey was that ex gays very conversion sinks the defense of IMMUTABILITY and gives more power to those who are fighting to keep it by any means necessary and make the burden of young people like Jeff W. here that much heavier.
Why is it that your friendlier ex gays (we all know the homophobic ones don’t care), don’t understand that what their doing renders their help useless?
In what kind of mind, is giving a broken toy to a needy child still thought of as an act of charity?
That is what I said. Are ex gays THAT insecure, while all the while trying to assure the rest of us they are just SO heterosexual now they could bust.
Correct me if I’m wrong folks. I’d appreciate it.
Tim K and Michael B were witness to this exchange.
Regan, I don’t think Mary is “newly minted.” I believe she was banned from commenting here over last summer.
Regan, I appreciate your dilemma but any issue you have with a commenter on another blog should probably be dealt with on that blog. This is particularly so in this case since, as Emily mentioned, the other person involved was banned from commenting here last year and can’t respond.
This thread is about a young man’s experience in a reparative therapy session, so we are pretty far off topic with this. If you don’t find it possible to handle your concerns on the other blog, perhaps you can email some people privately about it. She rattled on here inconsistently for two months before we finally had to deal with it, I would suggest just avoiding here.
Thanks and good luck.
Holy cow, I just can’t believe this. If I could only have been so with-it when I went through this so-called reparative therapy (when I was 21) I could have saved myself so much untold grief and *&^!.
I feel so much anger at these abject nutjobs who have the audacity to call themselves therapists. I went through a program called ‘Evergreen’ in Salt Lake City in the early 90’s. You can guess it was a Mormon affiliation. The same things Jeff talks about are the exact same things they fed me. Except I had been raised in such a dogmatic fearful environment I didn’t have the wherewithall to call them on their crap like Jeff did.
Absolute morons these ‘christian therapists’ are. And that I can say from first-hand experience.
Chris
Chris, you’re genuine. Who else but a Mormon would type “*&^!” instead of shit. You still have vestiges of Mormonism in you. And that’s good.
Until XGW and someone in my social group told me otherwise, I thought NARTH was a reputable group. And then, the only thing I knew about ‘Evergreen’ was their conferences that were timed with the LDS general conference twice a year and therefore a tacit endorsement by ‘The Church’.
Question: Did Evergreen with close Mormon association and in their therapies ever used genital shock therapy on gay patients in the early 90’s?
Perhaps an XGW commenter named Benjamin can guide you to Affirmation or Reconciliation for help with some of that anger. But just let it out. It’s: shit. There! Without offending any XGW sensibilities, I hope you feel better.
Cowboy,
Evergreen has always denied that they gave shock therapy. Given that Evergreen runs “support groups” rather than “therapy sessions”, I believe this to be true: Evergreen did not itself get directly involved.
(and the shocks were/are typically delivered to the forearms, not the genitals — ooh, awwch! The very idea. I think you may be confusing SL City with Abu Grahib!)
However… that said… some Evergreen(ish) “participants” were, it appears, in previous years, involved with “affiliated” or “recommended” therapists who did administer shock therapy in a (painful and equally useless) attempt to cure homosexuality. The true situation is further confused because the boundaries between the LDS church, Evergreen, and ex/antigay therapists have always been very blurry and not very public.
It’s probably better to suggest a web-search for anyone interested, rather than name names etc here at XGW, but there are reports of shock therapy from people — dating even up until the mid-90’s. BYU gets more than a fair share of references, for some reason.
For Evergreen, I think “they” know full-well that this dreadful treatment occured from time to time … but they are shielded by “plausible deniability”. Or outright deliberate ignorance.
Lucky for them. Unlucky for some.
and the main reason for avoiding “blue language” — as our Nan would say in her old-fashioned way! — is to hopefully ensure this site doesn’t get blocked too often.
It’s not our sensibilities, per se, but even the word “gay” is often problematic. As you’d guess, it’s often those who could most benefit from this site that are “protected” behind the most severe of site-blockers. Don’t want XGW information falling into the wrong hands… 🙂
Cowboy, you’re right, I still have that bit of inhibition in me. I good strong (strangling) sense of inhibitions are one of the long-term results of this cult on me.
Evergreen has tried to deny that they are affiliated with the LDS church, but that’s complete nonsense. I met with one of its leaders in the Church Office Building right downtown in Salt Lake (where my dad happened to also work). In fact we held our meetings in a local mormon church (although oddly my very first meeting was held in a floral shop, go figure).
To my knowledge Evergreen was never directly involved in ECT, however I spoke with someone who had been through it down at BYU and my sense was that if someone had gone to such lengths they would have also been involved with Evergreen to one degree or another.
In fact even 2 years ago I knew of a kid in his 20’s who was seeing a ‘therapist’ who was using a different form of aversion therapy (some ammonia, smell thing) on him. I believe he also had been doing the Evergreen thing.
All the creepy stuff Jeff spoke about above, the male relationship bonding crap, was also the same stuff they told us and had us read about. However I was so utterly naive. I had guilt about even acknowledging homosexual “tendencies” by simply going to the meetings.
I need to sit down and write out my entire story because there’s some crazy stuff there. But they had us attempting to play basketball because of course real men played basketball. I have this funny memory of being in a mormon church in their ‘cultural center’ watching a bunch of gay men dribbling basket balls down a court (or trying to do so).
The entire experience was a complete mind-fuck for someone easily brainwashed like I had been. Brainwashing was all I ever knew growing up. Oh, ok, I did learn that Santa wasn’t real, I’ll give you that. But Jesus, Satan, The Holy Ghost, virginal births, Moroni, Nephi (and every other silly Book of Mormon creation), in addition to other mythical creatures at the base of mormon belief were all real of course. They sure as hell beat us over the head with the Satan being real over our shoulder at every turn fear tactic.
The stories I have…
Chris
Grantdale,
Gosh, I shall tone it down a bit then. I’m thoroughly embarrassed that I thought they hooked up the electrodes to….ahem…(cough cough)…well…you know. Maybe I have been reading too much of Peter La-What’s-his-face’s accounts on the depravity of gays.
Chris,
Do write it down. I think you should.
I think the story about using a Florist Shop as a site for the therapy session is a hoot! The perfect snare! Hey Look! There’s a guy wearing Prada in our store…GRAB HIM!
And how could you NOT help be gay if you viewed the Arnold Friberg illustrations in the Book of Mormon. Those muscled Lamanites! (sigh)
Tip: Next time you see two of those boys in white shirts, ties, and black name-tags: Tackle them and ask them for a free copy and see what I mean.
David, thanks! I had NO idea about Mary having been by here before.
I look at this kid Jeff…he’s well spoken, charming and fresh faced and definitely smart.
How can any parents look at this young man and thing there was ANYTHING wrong. I’m sure he’d TELL them if they have established a loving and confident bond between each other.
If he’s got siblings, and many gay folk do, logic would suggest that he’s fine.
Maybe the parents of gay kids should look around their neighborhoods and ask their neighbors what mental illness or addiction REALLY does to families, communities and individuals.
What violence does, what complete dysfunction really is.
Wouldn’t be THAT hard to search out.
Few of us in America are untouched by addiction among family members. You’d think the process of elimination would work in favor of how families look at their gay children.
Good on young Mr. Jeff for being onto the doctor he was sent to.
Maybe its Jeff’s parents who need acceptance therapy. Can Jeff sign them up and force them to go? (just being sarcastic)
Peter La-What’s-his-face’s accounts on the depravity of gays
/snort. Yesss… well, by all accounts, he’s “the subject expert”; not any of us!
Off the top of my head, I’m not even sure where I’d need to go looking for the things LaBabs insists are “everywhere”. And we’re in a (generally) tolerant city of millions…
But a monogamous, coupled gay man? — he’s no further away than the first mirror 🙂
(I’m trying to get my head around me starting up a “business” with the sole aim of “recording” heterosexual depravity. Why would I, in the first place, and exactly how long could I even stand being in that line of work??? Ick.)
I’m sorry…but Chris’s account of a group of gay men trying to dribble a basketball in a Mormon Cultural Hall…is something that MUST be on youtube somewhere?!?!? If not, I’m going to find out when they do and surreptitiously video record it.
If one of them were African-American… the mind conjures up a skit for Saturday Night Live!
It sounds like something from SNL, but it really happened and perhaps still goes on. Truly they told us that our masculine deficiencies could become filled if we learned to do what ‘regular’ guys did including playing basketball. We just needed to bond of course with basketball players and we’d be straight.
Cowboy, I was interviewed for a magazine/newspaper article a few years ago about my Mormon therapy. I never went to group with Evergreen, but my therapist worked with Evergreen. When everything did not pan out in therapy, I was told I could do a form of shock aversion therapy. I got out then.
I had a friend who did do it for two years where electrodes were stuck on parts of his body and on arousal he was shocked.
Evergreen denied that they were ever associated with this practice, and it is true I only worked with a therapist, but still I had the impression at the time that they were encouraging people to go through this. I was also told a number of bizarre things like Evergreen does not work with therapists, etc. I think they tend to change their minds depending on the situation.
Good Evening All…
As you may see if you try to play my video, it is no longer available. (as of 3/26/08) After seeing the ramifications of having parts of my story in the public domain, I have personally requested that it be take off-line and re-shot to allow a closer focus on what I would like to say. I have no animosity towards my family, or the counselor I saw for one session. I knew that nothing was wrong with me, and that I would not enter a reparative therapy program. I certainly did not mean that my counselor had ANY malicious intent or agenda in mind during our one-hour session. This story was to inspire those people who face the possibility of being forced into therapy at their resistance that there are other options, and to understand that acceptance of their sexuality is healthy and good.
This is MY story to tell, and as such I have every right to make sure it focuses on the right things and does not vilify those in the counseling or psychological profession. This does NOT help those who would face reparative therapy programs. We must endure to focus on them; to strengthen and educate those who need our help.
I would like to ask that everyone please understand why I asked for this action to take place. Also, I would personally like to ask the author of this blog to contact me. I do not wish my story become a lightning rod for action against my counselor who I do respect for his work with couples. I may not agree with his therapy in other areas, but his name did not need to be published and his website forced off-line.
When this video becomes active again, it will show a focused energy towards encouraging people who may be forced to go to reparative therapy programs against their will that they have it within themselves to reject such therapy if they so choose (as was my choice to reject starting reparative therapy). It will tell MY story the way I believe I should have been more careful to tell. It will speak about the incredible relationship that I now have with my family, and acceptance that my family has come to, and ultimately their support of me as a gay man.
If you would like to contact me, my email if jeff.t.williamson@gmail.com.
Thank you,
Jeff Williamson
Wow, considering how many failure stories they have right here on this thread, maybe Evergreen should change its name to Everpink.
Jeff Said:
While we understand that you may not have put forth the focus you intended, we need to respond for clarification of this statement. In the opening line of the video, you give the counselor’s name, and repeat it later. We placed his name in the short summary description, and as is our policy we linked to his site for reference. However, a Google search for “Bob Hudson” turned up his site as the first response. Also, Hudson’s site was not forced down, he locked it (a very odd response). That was his choice. He could just as easily have commented on BTB or here to give his opinion on the discussion.
I personally don’t think you did anything inappropriate, and I am positive we didn’t. But we do respect your desire to tell your own story. Just please understand that we assumed that was what you were doing when the first video was posted 😉
Jeff, I personally found nothing malicious in your video. If all it took to get a reparative therapist trampled upon and put out of business was a single video testimony and a posted blog entry, all of NARTH would be unemployed.
If it had been me that was forced into the “therapy” session, especially if it had been 18-year-old me, I would’ve trounced him with words and refutations so viciously blunt that his great-grandchildren would’ve gritted their teeth. No doubt the therapy would have lasted all of 10 minutes before he threw me out. You were (are) much more tactful and respectful. You did nothing wrong and in fact DID provide an excellent example for people to follow. I’m very glad you shared your story. Thank you.
I agree, you didn’t do anything wrong. In fact I was quite impressed with how grounded you were in the video. But you have to understand that it was exactly people like this guy who really, really damaged me when I was your age. If someone like this therapist put forward the same garbage you described (which was the same lack of male bonding crap I was told) they have to be ready to take some responsibility for the damage caused by it. And there are people like myself who are right there ready to call them on their garbage.
Chris
I don’t think Jeff did anything wrong either, nor do I think XGW or BTB did anything wrong or inappropriate.
Thinking people know that no one, no matter how bad, is entirely evil. Even Darth Vader loved his mommy. Certainly Bob Hudson has done some good in his life. That doesn’t wash away whatever harm he might’ve done as a reparative therapist. Note the word “might’ve”.
In other words, Jeff, don’t apologize for him.
Going to all this trouble, taking down the video, posting an explanation on (at least) two websites –seems unnecessary to me. Unnecessary to the point of mild suspicion. Note the word “mild”.
Why not let a few days pass, a week, and let the whole thing blow over? No harm done. The blogs in question weren’t exactly overwhelmed with traffic. The conversations seem to center on congratualting Jeff on his articulate and respectful handling of the situation.
Anyone who does something as controversial as reparative therapy should expect the limelight to shine on them from time to time. And considering what might’ve happened had someone less graceful than Jeff decided to tell their story…well, quite frankly I don’t see the problem.
Re-telling the story to put a more positive spin on it seems like revisionist history, and I personally am not all that motivated to watch essentially the same story told from an extra responsible and positive angle.
I missed the video. Jeff and Daniel have the option though of releasing the video under one of the Creative Commons license, if they feel they need to retain certain control of the video.