Conversion therapy does not say “you are loved but broken.” Conversion therapy says, insists in fact, that we don’t belong. That the world would be better, more whole, if we were not in it. Conversion therapy can never restore someone or heal them. That’s because its thesis is to shift through the gritty humanity of us, the confusion, the yearning, the desire to be loved, until it can find trace amounts of normalcy. It seeks to place us within the confines of a binary not for our benefit, but theirs.
The ideology that supports conversion therapy wants a rigid certainty and an authoritarian order in the universe to negate their experiences as humans : despair, anger, loneliness, and numbness acquired through repeated exposure to a harsh world. They think exterminating or sublimating queerness will bring this world into fruition. But what they don’t understand is that their world building is contingent upon the destruction of a real, living world we all occupy. There is no imagined perfect godly world unless we are in it.
They believe there is an elevated alternate universe where men and women have sex only when necessary, have children who wear blue and pink respective to their assigned genders, and embrace roles they view as created by god which were actually cultivated by hundreds of years of oppression. The secret is, that universe has not and will never exist. We’ve always been here, existing not at the fringes of “normal” but instead interwoven in the fabric of your seemingly “normal” lives on every level. The magic of “un-normal” infects everything you do, and brings your world into living color, and you’re grateful for it — your’e grateful for the writing, the food, the movies, the music, so long as the true nature of it isn’t spoken out loud.
Sometimes I imagine the queer world as being a forest at the edge of this grey and defeated world, full of fantasy and wildness and every emotion felt but more powerfully and in living color. I think of it as the forbidden forest in Harry Potter — nothing prevents one from crossing over to the other than fear. But the truth is, these two worlds don’t border each other. That Venn diagram is a circle. Trying to marginalize the queer world as an “issue” or “talking point” is like trying to argue that air is a vaguely interesting concept rather than vital to life. You can’t suppress the world you already live in. You can’t tame it, or constrict it. You’ll never quell the magic, you’ll only hurt those who embody it.
