At the beginning of Conversion, a man tells the story of his first love—and first loss.
At 15, he had a boyfriend whose parents had put him through a doctor’s treatment program in an attempt to convert him to heterosexuality. After classmates discovered the two youths holding hands behind the school, the boyfriend said he was terrified that he’d be sent back into the program.
Later that night, he took his own life.
“Our love killed him,” the man remembers thinking at the time. But, of course, what really killed the boy was society’s problem with homosexuality, as well as the doctor’s attempt to “cure” him through what’s often called “conversion therapy.”
Though this practice is now widely condemned and even illegal in nearly half of U.S. states, thousands of LGBTQ people have been subjected to it down through the years. Three of them tell their stories in Zach Meiners’s new documentary.
