Gary Hayashi frequently offers counsel to individuals who have lost their identities trying to mirror others’ expectations and struggle to come out as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. Eleven years ago, he was one of them.
Hayashi, now a marriage and family therapist, shared his experience as a member of an ex-gay ministry at a graduate student conference at Royce Hall Friday. Ex-gay ministries gather individuals who previously identified as LGBT and want to ‘correct’ themselves by exclusively pursuing heterosexual relationships.
At home, in church and throughout his life, people had led him to believe God is monolithic, rigid and intolerant, Hayashi said.
About 100 people registered to attend the annual QGrad conference, “Curing the Queer: From Pathology to Resistance,” hosted by the LGBT studies department. The event, which centered around how people consider LGBT identities abnormal, featured two keynote speakers, including Hayashi, and others who presented LGBT-related research.
Rachael Greenberg, one of the conference’s organizers and a graduate student in Chicana/o studies, said organizers chose the theme because the use of conversion therapy on minors is still legal in some states, despite the American Psychological Association’s delegitimization of the practice.
Greenberg said she hopes the conference showed people anti-gay practices still exist.
“The LGBTQ movement in the United States has been moving in the right direction for the last few years,” Greenberg said. “But every time it moves forward, there’s an opposite reaction.”
Hayashi told the audience he joined the ex-gay ministry because he believed his homosexuality could be cured by presenting himself as heterosexual, though he was never certain that was true.
“I thought, ‘This is finally it – I can be a good boy, make God happy, make my parents happy and give them grandchildren,'” he said.
Hayashi said he was able to change his thinking after accepting his homosexuality and spirituality were not at war with one another.
The conference also covered topics such as religion, identity and media representation, rather than focusing solely on pathological issues.
Carl Schottmiller, a graduate student in the world arts and cultures/dance department, presented research on queer narratives in mainstream media. Schottmiller discussed how Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story: Freak Show” focuses on representing white, gay men positively and more accurately, but Murphy tends to make women and minority groups the butt of his jokes.
“It’s nice there’s more representation of queer people on television, but it can’t come at the expense of other minorities,” he said.
Nathan Fredrickson, a graduate student in religious studies at UC Santa Barbara, said he thinks scholars too often interpret queer narratives positively. He added he thinks the conference shares critical interpretations like Schottmiller’s, even if only with others who also study LGBT issues.
“It’s the same problem in society,” Fredrickson said. “The people who should be learning about these issues are the people who aren’t ever going to seek it out.”
Greenberg said the conference was modeled after the interdisciplinary nature of the UCLA LGBT studies program’s faculty.
She added organizers used the image of a plastic pill bottle to compare two contrasting ideas – that LGBT individuals need to be healed, and that they can heal themselves from harmful dismissals of their identities.
“People associate certain things with a medicine bottle – that it’s something to heal someone who needs to be cured,” Greenberg said.
Some graduate students presented research focused on practices that look to cure queerness, while others focused on how LGBT-identifying individuals can heal after cultural, institutional or social rejection.
Organizers prepared plastic pill bottles, filled with heart-shaped candy inscribed with messages such as “I love you” and “be true” for attendees because they wanted people to walk away from the conference associating love and acceptance with a cure.