This week’s edition of Bay Windows leads with an interview with Sam Brinton, an openly gay MIT graduate student, who survived brutal attempts to coerce him into heterosexuality as a minor. Now an activist with Join the Impact Massachusetts, Sam is working to spare other young people the horrors he had to go through before he reached the age of emancipation.
Sam is speaking out in advance of the North Atlantic Regional Conference of Exodus International which is occuring next month in Auburn, New Hampshire. Exodus is the leading proponent of ex-gay “reparative therapy” which holds out to parents anguished over their child’s sexual orientation the false hope that the kids can be turned into straights. “Reparative therapy” has been denounced by every leading health and mental health professional association, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics. The American Psychiatric Association has linked “reparative therapy” to anxiety and major depressive disorders and suicide.
Join the Impact MA is going to have a visible, non-confrontational presence at the Exodus conference site on Saturday, September 16, 2011. To kids hearing a message of condemnation and rejection, we hold out the alternative of self-acceptance, community solidarity, and love. Here is the Facebook page.
