Why The Fuck Are We Here?
Carolyn Mercer: An Account
They strapped Carolyn Mercer to a fucking chair and tried to electrocute the gay out of her.
Let that sink in. Let it crawl under your skin and make a home there. Because this isn't ancient history—this is the story of our people, told in voltage and screams, written in the neural pathways rewired by pain, archived in the bodies that learned to flinch at their own reflections.
The year could have been 1965 or 1985 or 2005. The specifics blur because the cruelty remains constant. A darkened room. Electrodes soaked in salt water for "better contact"—because when you're torturing someone, you want to be thorough, don't you? You want maximum conductivity. Maximum pain. Maximum association between who you are and the sensation of your own muscles convulsing against restraints, your hand shooting upward while your strapped arm screams in its socket, tears rolling down your face while some motherfucker in a white coat with a degree on his wall asks "why are you crying?" as if the answer isn't self-evident, as if he doesn't fucking know.
"Cause it hurts."
Two words that contain an ocean of anguish.
The Historical Architecture of Annihilation
Conversion therapy didn't materialize from thin air like some demonic jack-in-the-box. It was carefully constructed over decades, brick by brutal brick, built on the foundation of a society that decided queerness was a disease that needed curing rather than a reality that deserved respect.
The roots stretch back to the late 19th century, when the emerging fields of psychiatry and psychology were desperate to establish themselves as legitimate medical sciences. They needed patients. They needed disorders. And conveniently, a society already marinating in religious disgust for same-sex attraction handed them a ready-made pathology. Homosexuality became their laboratory, and queer bodies became their experimental subjects.
By the 1920s and 1930s, the medical establishment had fully embraced the idea that queerness was a mental illness requiring intervention. Sigmund Freud, for all his theories about sexuality, at least had the decency to believe homosexuality wasn't something to be "cured," writing to a mother in 1935 that her gay son was perfectly fine. But his followers weren't so enlightened. They took his framework and twisted it into justification for increasingly horrific "treatments."
The mid-20th century became the golden age of psychiatric violence against LGBTQIA+ people. Electroshock therapy, chemical castration, lobotomies, nausea-inducing drugs paired with homoerotic imagery—the medical profession threw every tool in its sadistic arsenal at the problem of people who refused to be straight. In Britain, Alan Turing—the fucking genius who helped end World War II—was chemically castrated for the crime of being gay. In America, thousands of queer people were institutionalized, given insulin shock therapy until they seized, subjected to ice baths and isolation chambers and every conceivable form of torture dressed up in clinical language.
They called it "aversion therapy." They published papers about it in respected journals. They received grants to study it. They built entire careers on the systematic brutalization of queer people, and the medical establishment nodded along because the alternative—admitting that queerness was natural, that these people were fine exactly as they were—would have required confronting centuries of bigotry, and that was apparently too fucking difficult.
The Religious Weaponization of Shame
But here's where it gets even more insidious: when the American Psychiatric Association finally removed homosexuality from the DSM in 1973—after years of activism by queer psychologists and allies who had to literally fight their way into their own professional organization to be heard—the medical establishment largely backed away from conversion therapy. Not because they suddenly grew consciences, but because the professional liability became too high.
So the religious right picked up the fucking torch.
Organizations like Focus on the Family—founded in 1977 by James Dobson, a psychologist who apparently missed the memo about homosexuality no longer being classified as a disorder—stepped into the void. They rebranded conversion therapy as "reparative therapy" or "sexual orientation change efforts," slapped a Christian label on it, and continued the torture under the guise of religious freedom.
Connor's story—the friend sent to Focus on the Family's camps in Colorado Springs—illustrates the horrific evolution. They made this sixteen-year-old kid carry a 50-pound backpack filled with rocks all day long, a weight roughly half his body weight, because his homosexuality was supposed to be a "burden." Think about that metaphor. Think about the psychology of forcing a child to physically embody the message that who he is—not what he's done, but who he fundamentally is—is an unbearable weight that will crush him.
They forced him and other children to watch heterosexual pornography while licensed counselors—people with degrees and certifications and professional credentials—laughed. They laughed at traumatized queer kids being subjected to sexual material they didn't want to see, material weaponized to confuse and shame them. And then, at the end of his time there, they put him alone in a room with an adult woman who sexually assaulted him. The "grand finale," as it was described. The final lesson: your body isn't yours. Your consent doesn't matter. Your queerness makes you deserving of violation.
Over half the kids at that camp are suspected dead now. Suicide doesn't always leave a note explaining that conversion therapy was the reason, but when you gather enough stories, when you map enough trajectories, the pattern becomes undeniable. These camps were manufacturing corpses.
The Evangelical Industrial Complex
Matthew Scott Montgomery's story adds another layer to this nightmare. Here's a kid working on the Disney Channel—living the supposed dream—and on his days off, his "very, very conservative" parents were sending him to conversion therapy. The juxtaposition is almost darkly comedic if it weren't so fucking tragic: smile for the cameras, entertain America's children, then go get tortured for being yourself.
The place his father sent him sold itself with a claim that should make your blood run cold: "You look at any billboard in LA and see any male actor, they've been through these walls before." If that's true—and given how many gay men in Hollywood have confirmed similar experiences, it probably is—then we're talking about an entire industry of successful, talented queer people who were tortured before they could achieve their dreams. How many actors have smiled on red carpets while carrying trauma from holding silver rods in their hands, feeling electricity surge through them as punishment for imagining hugging a man?
The ideology these places pushed was particularly insidious: "There's no such thing as a gay man." Just straight boys with "sensitive, artistic temperaments" and "emotionally overbearing mothers" and "emotionally unavailable fathers." It's victim-blaming wrapped in pseudoscience wrapped in homophobia. Your queerness isn't real—it's your parents' fault. You're not gay—you're damaged. You don't need acceptance—you need fixing.
This framework does devastating psychological work. It tells queer people that their identity is a symptom, a malfunction, a wound that hasn't healed. It pathologizes every instance of same-sex attraction as "seeking" something you can never have, which creates a narrative of permanent, existential lack. You're not whole. You can never be whole. Your desires are evidence of your brokenness.
The shock therapy component—building up tolerance to electrical pain before deploying it as punishment for imagined scenarios—is Pavlovian conditioning applied to human sexuality. They were literally trying to rewire neural pathways, to make the fundamental attraction that defines someone's capacity for love and connection register as physical danger. The goal was to make queer people afraid of their own hearts.
Ryan's Story: When Theology Becomes Murder
And then there's Ryan Robertson, whose story is told by his mother Linda with the kind of guilt-soaked hindsight that comes too fucking late to matter.
"We told our son that he had to choose between Jesus and his sexuality."
Six words that sentenced a young man to death.
Linda and her husband—good Christians, presumably, people who thought they were doing the right thing—taught their son to hate himself. Not through explicit abuse in this case, not through electrodes or camps, but through something arguably more insidious: conditional love. You can have God or you can have your authentic self, but not both. Choose.
What choice is that for a kid raised in faith? It's Sophie's fucking Choice for the soul. Except Ryan didn't choose. He couldn't choose. Because you can't choose to not be gay any more than you can choose to not be left-handed or tall or blue-eyed. So he did what countless queer people have done when faced with this impossible demand: he tried to destroy the part of himself that wouldn't comply.
He used drugs "with recklessness and a lack of caution for his own safety." Of course he did. When you've been taught that your authentic self is so repugnant to God and your family that it threatens your eternal soul, why the fuck would you protect that self? Why would you treat carefully a body that houses something so allegedly shameful?
Eighteen months of silence followed. Eighteen months where Linda and her husband presumably prayed that their son would "come back to Jesus," which really meant come back straight, come back acceptable, come back as someone they could love without the cognitive dissonance of reconciling their theology with their son's reality.
By the time Ryan called, his parents' perspective had changed. God, apparently, had shown them that loving their son as he was might be the actual Christian thing to do. Revelatory. Groundbreaking. Too fucking late.
Ryan pursued recovery. His parents "learned to truly love" him—a phrase that should make you furious because it implies they hadn't before, or not fully, not without reservation. And then, one evening that was supposed to be just movies, he shot up for the first time in months.
And the last time.
Ryan died on July 16, 2009.
"What we had wished for, prayed for, hoped for—that we would not have a gay son—came true."
Linda's final line is a masterpiece of tragic irony. They prayed their son wouldn't be gay, and their prayers were answered: they don't have a gay son anymore. They have a dead one. The wish came true in the cruelest possible way, a monkey's paw curling its rotten fingers around their bigotry and granting them exactly what they asked for.
The Psychological Aftermath: Living in the Ruins
The psychological effects of conversion therapy on LGBTQIA+ individuals operate on multiple interconnected levels, creating a trauma architecture that can persist for decades or lifetimes.
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