LGBTQ Conversion Therapy Survivor Moving 8 Month Nightmare
Alex Cooper says she was forced to quit school, carry a backpack of rocks sometimes weighing 40 pounds and face a wall for hours at a time as part of her family’s efforts to change her sexuality after she came out at 15 years old.
Cooper, who identifies as a lesbian, describes her harrowing time at a Utah gay “conversion therapy camp” in a powerful new video produced by the Human Rights Campaign. She said she was subjected to “physical pain and emotional pain” during her eight-month stay at the camp run by a family “who promised to make me straight.”
“I felt like I couldn’t change being a lesbian, but that I could just conceal it” while undergoing the conversion therapy, Cooper said in the clip above. Eventually, she worked up the courage to reach out to a teacher, who helped her escape the experience. In 2016, she documented what she went through in a memoir, Saving Alex.
The video was released Wednesday as part of the Human Rights Campaign’s ongoing efforts to educate Americans on the dangers of conversion, or reparative, therapy practices. A day earlier, Maryland became the 10th state to ban the practice on minors, while New Hampshire and Hawaii recently passed protections that await approval from their governors. The American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have all discredited conversion therapy. Still, the practice continues to be promoted in conservative religious communities.
Cooper, who identifies as a lesbian, describes her harrowing time at a Utah gay “conversion therapy camp” in a powerful new video produced by the Human Rights Campaign. She said she was subjected to “physical pain and emotional pain” during her eight-month stay at the camp run by a family “who promised to make me straight.”
“I felt like I couldn’t change being a lesbian, but that I could just conceal it” while undergoing the conversion therapy, Cooper said in the clip above. Eventually, she worked up the courage to reach out to a teacher, who helped her escape the experience. In 2016, she documented what she went through in a memoir, Saving Alex.
The video was released Wednesday as part of the Human Rights Campaign’s ongoing efforts to educate Americans on the dangers of conversion, or reparative, therapy practices. A day earlier, Maryland became the 10th state to ban the practice on minors, while New Hampshire and Hawaii recently passed protections that await approval from their governors. The American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have all discredited conversion therapy. Still, the practice continues to be promoted in conservative religious communities.
*The American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have all discredited conversion therapy.
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