"Inhale the Gay Away"

A Very Strange Conversion Tale...

“I was thinking you could use feces,” she said.

“I’m sorry…feces?” I asked, for a quick second confusing the word with “Freezies,” which was a street term for what us college kids—with our white, red foxing stripes Vans and backwards baseball hats—used to call “Otter Pops.”

The therapist corrected me.  She did mean feces. 

“I’m supposed to eat…feces?”

“No, no, no…you won’t have to eat them; you’ll just have to smell them while looking at pictures of men you find attractive.” 

Oh, good that makes so much more sense.

“For lack of a clinical term,” she continued, “you’ll lust over the magazine ads depicting men you find attractive, and let your mind concentrate on various sexual acts as you take several deep, diaphragmatic whiffs of the feces.  You can put them in an open bowl or a Tupperware so you can get the tip of your nose right in there. Do this several times until you get yourself to a point where you retch and then throw up into a toilet.”

“I do this with my feces?” I asked, left eye squinting as I struggled to visually communicate the idea that the use of my own crap was the most offensive part of this entire experiment.  I felt I should be offended. Was the smell of my own poop so perfectly horrendous that not one other person in the whole of humanity could come close to duplicating its rancidness? I wouldn’t be able to use, let’s say, the President of the United States’ excrement if he just so happened to pop into an Arco station on the way into town for a campaign rally? 

“Um, no that probably wouldn’t be a good idea.  You’ll want to distance yourself from the waste.”

“Oh.”  And just before I got to questioning her about grandparents or maybe even distant cousins, she added, “Animal feces will work.  You have a dog or a cat?”

“I live with my friend.  At his house with his parents.  They have a dog.  But she’s super old.  Her dog’s…‘patties’…have gray in them.”  And just as I said that, I do weirdly remember thinking, and almost commenting, “they’d be gray, g-r-A-y and not g-r-E-y.  Unless it were a British dog.  Like the Queen’s Corgi’s.

“Doesn’t make a difference,” she said.  Then: “Are you sexually attracted to women at all?

“Not really.  No.  I mean, I find some types of painting, like, beautiful to look at, but I don’t want to, like, make-out with art or anything.”

“What are your percentages do you think?  Compare your attraction to men vs. women.  80/20?  70/30?”

To this day I hate getting asked this question.  Why the flip does this matter?  Do some people

automatically think that the more equal the percentage, the easier it’d be for me to swing permanently back to women?  If it were 60% women and 40% men would the advice be to simply give in and choose women because at least my feelings for them are above average? 

I can hear it now, “You know, Gregory, a D- is at least passing…”

I never answer this question anymore.

The therapist and her office were right out of an “80s Cybill Shepherd” style guide, the walls and décor splattered with pink and blue pastels glowing under soft, halo lighting.  Furniture to match.  And while I was never a fashion guy, even I knew what straight up gaudy looked like.  Turns out her office should have been draped in “red flags” instead of Motel 6 paintings of pink vases and neon purple ships.   

This was about a month into my third or fourth therapist, and I was about ready to bail when I decided to bring up the idea of assigning me homework, assignments that could include specific tasks that might contribute to the reduction of my homosexual desires.  Like the time I fasted for four hours.  Or that day on the beach when I prayed while pouring suntan oil on my forehead so the gay would be “anointed” out of me.

Keep this in mind: I asked for it.

That was when my therapist, whose name I wish hasn’t permanently escaped my memory, wondered if I had ever heard of a particular therapy called “aversion therapy,” explaining that sometimes it was referred to as “conversion therapy” as it related to working with gay folks who wanted to change their sexual orientation. I hadn’t, and since Ask Jeeves was still several years into the future, and Google even further, I couldn’t do my own research.  She was my only source, and she had a degree, so I trusted her.  

Once she covered the basics, I told her that my brother Jim once had an elementary school teacher who went through a similar type of therapy. This 4^th grade teacher was a “bigger” gal and had gone to a clinic in order to lose weight.  The clinician took a survey, making a list of favorite junk food the teacher was prone to eating and thus sabotaging her weight loss. Doughnuts was on her list, and so they took condiments like ketchup and mustard and pickle juice, mixing it in with a fresh doughnut.  They had her smell it and then eat it so it would make her nauseous even to the point of throwing up.  This same thing was repeated every week with the doughnuts and her other favorite foods, the hope being that she would associate doughnuts, cake, etc. with repulsion.  The idea was to turn her off from that food.

When I mumbled something akin to “90/10,” the therapist continued.  “Well, there can be two faces to conversion therapy, and we’ll have you explore both.  Listen it’s not enough to turn your unwanted sexual feelings into undesirable feelings by experiencing images and associations that are repulsive—we have to create wanted sexual desires by exposing you to images and associations that you will eventually find attractive.

“How…do we do that.  Exactly?”

“Ok, let’s concentrate on that 10%: what kind of women fit into those numbers?

“You mean, what kind of women do I find attractive?”

“Yes.  It’s easier if you pick a couple of celebrities, that way there’s little chance you’d run into them on the street, creating an unnecessarily awkward exchange.”

Listen folks, I want to say so much more here, but I think there’s been enough talk about human waste already.  Insert your own jokes here.

“I’ve always liked Kathleen Turner.  Kirstie Alley.”

“Hmmm.  Both brunettes.  Any blondes?”

“Rebecca De Mornay?” I asked, in case De Mornay wasn’t acceptable, since she, unbeknownst to a lot of people, was daughter to Wally George, the famed, wacko American commentator.  That crazy, white-haired screamer you’d have to watch on TV when an outside storm tweaked the antennae in the wrong direction and all other shows were Poltergeist’d out.

“Good.  Get some magazine pictures of the ladies and of different men you find attractive.  Cologne ads could work.”

This was 1992 or ‘93, if you haven’t figured it out, so it was pre-internet.  It was gonna take a few days, but I eventually found the photos I thought would work best.

“The women photos,” she next during our next session, “you get to have fun with those, and as often as you like.  But we also have to focus on the repulsion aspect, and the way repulsion is generally acquired is to consistently, even daily, introduce something to humans that produce something so revolting that a person can actually vomit. 

Revolting? I thought.  Sure, I understood the concept, but I knew with my limited time and resources it would be impossible to find a church potluck every single day, Monday through Sunday.  

But I knew where she was going with this.

That same week, late at night when no one was around, I went into my friend’s kitchen, taking a Mason jar from a cabinet that had no glass remaining because my friend and I were goofing around one day when he picked me up and slammed me backwards through the double-paned pantry door.  I took the jar outside with me, located some silvery-gray-by-the-moonlight pieces, collected my specimens, and brought the Mason jar back to my room.  Six other people lived in that house, so I couldn’t just put a jar of dog feces on a shelf inside my closet to be found by anyone who needed to borrow a t-shirt, so I grabbed my beat up JanSport backpack which was big enough to hide a notebook, a couple of good-sized books, some pens, my checkbook, some postage—yes, I carry postage with me at all times—and the Mason jar.  Once organized, I put the whole thing in the closet. Pretty ingenious idea actually, putting it in a backpack, because not only would I be able to hide the poop in my bedroom, I could also take the backpack with me to do my “homework” whenever I was out of the house since the plan was for me to work on the aversion/conversion therapy a couple of times a day.  It would be convenient when going to the library to work on an assignment for The Canterbury Tales, for example, because when the mood had arisen, I could duck into a bathroom stall for some special time, just me and my jar.

Turns out looking at pictures of good-looking men while taking five or six deep breaths of the dog poop throughout my day became somewhat of a challenge.  It was proving difficult to do it even once a day. The end goal was to keep my nose in the jar and my eyes on the pictures…engaging myself in some lusting…until the retching became full blown vomiting.  Then I would be done.  For that session. 

But I never once threw up.  It would make for a better story, true, but I couldn’t make it past the retching, although I think retching is worse than vomiting.  At least when you throw up you get a release—I just got a bad case of nausea that sometimes lasted a while because I could always smell the poop for hours after. 

Most of the time I was able to complete the therapy from my bedroom, but there were times I had to do it while out and about, which means that at any given time I was carrying a jar of dog crap. To school.  To church.  To get my oil changed. 

Consistency was the key, but I was only able to do it for a couple of months.  Go to class, come home, look at black-and-white pictures of men advertising cologne, unscrew the lid, sniff for several minutes—that was pretty much my routine for those very long thirty to sixty days or so.  And in order for it to be totally effective, I’d have to exchange feces every few days, waiting until everyone was asleep to go outside and retrieve new samples. 

About halfway through the therapy the humiliation set in.  Sitting on my carpet floor with pictures propped up at various places against my closet door while holding a jar of dog poop on my lap brought about literal warm flushes to my cheeks.  At the time I chalked it up to the nervousness of unscrewing that lid, knowing what was coming, but I think I really understood that what I was doing and what I must have looked like was deeply shameful, albeit stupid.  

Honestly if I had ever forgotten to lock my door and someone would have walked in, I’m pretty sure another suicide attempt would have followed.  How do you even explain something like that to people? How would I have explained that not only was I inhaling dog poop, but the poop had come from their dog?  

And more importantly, how was it that a Christian counselor was recommending I get rid of what I thought was a sin by essentially asking me to substitute that sin with another sin?

Lust over men: bad.  Lust over women: good.

Worse yet, the guilt I was already feeling increased ten-fold because now I was not only making a willful decision to try and trigger a lust for women, but I was also purposefully engaging my desires for men.  Sure, the whole “end justifies the means” was a powerful defense while I gave in to what I whole-heartedly perceived as sin, but at least before I was able to keep any illicit thoughts stored tightly into my subconscious.  Now I was forcing myself to entertain them.  How could that possibly be godly?  Was God pleased with me for taking action, or was my sin count piling up, God’s rising anger just fueling hell flames?  Sound melodramatic?  It wasn’t.  I had read Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, so I considered that a real scenario.  

Fast-forward to a more recent time.

As all of us are likely to do at some point in the middle of our middle-aged crisis, I now look back on my twenties with an almost equal mix of embarrassment and nostalgia, the nostalgic part inching ahead just a tad so all of us middle-agers can romanticize and harmonize with Steinbeck as we cry in unison, “Oh, strawberries don’t taste as they used to and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!” 

But I also look back on the time spent in my twenties with the therapist—and several others of the same ilk—with a fifty-year-old man’s sense of indignant perspective of horror, slamming the stupid twenty-year-old who had been told he was broken so many times by so many people that he refused to unfasten himself to any dogma other than the one that proclaimed, “Whatever it takes.  Whatever it takes to get rid of this sin that’s more revoltingly egregious than sex out of marriage.  Or even adultery.  Than thievery.  Than murder.”

Fast-forward even further.  Today when I share this tale of the Boy and his Dog…’s poop, I find myself recalling the events of those months with more humor and lightheartedness than the story calls for, me taking it upon myself to act the role of some poor man’s 21^st Century Mark Twain, making jokes like, “Man, I wish I had thought at the time to tell the story in script form and submitted it to Friends.  I could have called it ‘The One with Chandler’s Mason Jar.’” Certainly not my best joke, but if I don’t intertwine parts of my darkety, dark, dark past with some form of comedy, I would have to somber up and confront the fact that once upon a time, I sat on the carpet of my room, simultaneously weeping, lusting, and inhaling dog shit so that I might not piss off someone’s interpretation of his God and subsequently get sent to hell. 

It’s such a warped story, I have to find the humor in it.

Of course, much like it’s reparative and conversion therapy cousins, in the end, this little twisted aversion experiment didn’t work, and thankfully—from then until now—I have never felt the expected nausea when I see a good-looking man, whether it be Russell Tovey, a buffed out, oily guy in a Men’s Health article, or some despondently, smirky beach guy, bare-chested and spread out over two pages of a cologne advertisement.

However, no one gets off completely, for in the end, that bizarre little “therapy” does have to shoulder some responsibility for my current aversion to Drakkar Noir and Polo.

But, then again, maybe now I just have good taste.