Thank you to LoveBytes for giving me permission to assault you with my view of life each month!

This month I want to recount to you some stories I’ve heard since I’ve been singing with the London Gay Men’s Chorus.

Sorry. Not those kinds of stories! I’ll leave it to your fertile imaginations to think what happens when two hundred gay men get together…

No. I’m afraid I’m going to get all serious for a moment. And talk about the actual experiences of men I’ve spoken to in the Chorus who’ve undergone gay ‘conversion’ therapy. I was surprised at the percentage of men who’ve suffered the pain of this dreadful torture.

For those who don’t know, gay conversion therapy is a benignly named pseudo-science that claims to turn homosexuals straight. It’s discredited widely, including by the American Psychiatric Association. Despite this, it remains legal in many countries around the world, including here in the UK. I’ve been campaigning to get it made illegal, but it keeps getting bumped down the Parliamentary priority list.

When I discovered just how many people have been damaged by gay conversion therapy, I decided to write a novel with gay conversion therapy as its dark secret. For the Love of Luke has just been republished in its second edition.

Meanwhile, here are a few true-life stories.

First, there’s the testimony of a young American man, originally from Iowa. His parents are southern Baptists. He was in his teens when they forced him to undergo gay conversion therapy. Here’s part of what he described:

“Physical therapy is my hands being tied down, and blocks of ice being placed on my hands. Then pictures of men holding hands would be shown to me. So that way I would associate the concept of the pain of ice with a man touching me. It worked really well, my dad couldn’t hug me any more…”

There’s more testimony that’s really unpleasant, because it culminated in electric shocks. The therapy was unsuccessful, but damaging. It left the man feeling self-loathing and suicidal. Fortunately today, he’s out and proud, but still has flashbacks to the “treatments”.

Then there’s a British guy living in London. I’ll call him Andy. He was the victim of gay conversion therapy through a Pentecostal church nearly thirty years ago. Andy was keen to talk to me, not only to make public what he suffered, but also to tell me about his life long friend from the same church, who had gone through gay conversion therapy at the same time. Andy believed his friend was cured. The man married a woman who was also a member of the church and they had children together. But three weeks before Andy spoke to me, his friend decided he could no longer live with his lifetime of conflict. And he killed himself.

While researching For the Love of Luke I discovered many more stories, not only within the London Gay Men’s Chorus, but across the world. It worries me that, with the resurgence of homophobia around the world, proponents of gay conversion therapy will see seek to legitimise it again.

So I’m fighting. Hard.

If you feel as angry as I do about gay conversion therapy, please write to your political representative, and lobby them to get it made illegal.

David C Dawson writes contemporary thrillers featuring gay heroes in love. He lives in London with his boyfriend, and in Oxfordshire with two cats.