It was half an hour after my approach to True Freedom Trust (tft) when I got an email from Paul Bach. He works in outreach for the charity and asked if we could speak on the phone. In a friendly chat, Paul told me that acting on desires to sleep with other men would make me feel ‘empty and regretful’. ‘We have to watch out and realise that the devil is always trying to entice us, and realise our own potential weaknesses,’ he said. ‘Sin is always lurking at the door, however strong a Christian you are.’
He told me tft aims to ‘help people handle their same-sex attraction, to reconcile that with their faithful Christian living and actually to be a faithful Christian without sinning within their same-sex attraction’. This would happen, he claimed, by treating sexuality like alcoholism.
‘It’s like aa,’ he said. ‘With alcoholics, they can never ever say, I’m free from alcoholism, they say I’m a recovering alcoholic.’ He told me that by ‘starving ourselves’ of our desires, they would apparently ‘wane away’.
He also claimed that some members of tft said they had been able to ‘diminish’ their same-sex desires to the point that they could get married to women and have children.
He said that I would be unable to pursue a relationship with a man and remain a Christian for two reasons: ‘The trouble is that gay relationships don’t really develop in that way. They usually are the wham-bam-let’s-have-sex-kind-of-thing… But even if it was, I don’t see for one moment that that is acceptable by God.’
Our call ended with a prayer. Paul said, ‘Lord, you can change him in the way that you want to change him… Whether that means actually attracted to a woman to get married to her, or whatever, or knowing the gift of singleness and service in that way. I pray that you would help Harry to come to terms with simply wanting your will, and the change that you desire for him.’
I was reporting undercover on conversion therapy, an umbrella term described by the nhs as efforts to demonstrate ‘an assumption that any sexual orientation is inherently preferable to any other, and which attempts to bring about a change of sexual orientation, or seeks to suppress an individual’s expression of sexual orientation on that basis’.
In parts of the usa, where conversion therapy is more common, it can take the form of Inquisition-grade misery which you might have seen in movies like Boy Erased, in which a young man is thrashed by his family with Bibles for being gay. Similar methods were reported in the uk in the 1960s, when gay men were subjected to electric shock treatment or injected with vomit-inducing apomorphine and shown pictures of naked men as a crude form of aversive conditioning.
