Reviews

I Just finished watching the movie "Pray Away" which began streaming a few days ago on Netflix. I knew it was about Gay ("LGBTQ+") conversion therapy. I knew it would be hard to watch. What I didn't realize is that it is practically unwatchable.

As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I thought it was important to watch this movie and I was correct. I started watching this morning and after about 30 minutes, I had to hit the pause button. Hours later, I bit the bullet and watched the rest of the movie.

"Pray Away" is a documentary about former leaders of the Gay conversion therapy group, Exodus, which started in the 1970's and ended about three decades later. When it began, the leaders of Exodus promised Gay people that they could be changed by attending the Exodus program, which largely consisted of Bible study, prayer and other teachings and rituals. The leaders told their victims that it was wrong that they were Gay. Same Sex attraction was considered a sickness but there was hope - by attending Exodus, people could become Heterosexual which is what G-d wanted.

To add credibility to this message given by the Fundamentalist Christian leaders of Exodus, psychologists were brought in to validate this way of thinking.

But conversion therapy does not work. People who go into conversation therapy, often because their parents force them into it, end up hating themselves because they don't change and they believe it's their own fault. Some people actually believe they have successfully changed but eventually realize that they were only lying to themselves.

The leaders of Exodus came to realize that conversion therapy does not work and they put an end to the organization. But what about all the people who were severely traumatized by what they experienced in Exodus? And while Exodus went out of business, new conversation therapy groups have replaced it and are still going strong.

I wish all of this was an exaggeration and/or a dramatization. It's not. I have a friend, Carl, who was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home. His parents sent him off to Jonah, a Jewish conversion therapy organization. He told a few people, including me, about some of the practices of Jonah. I remember him talking about how one of the Jonah leaders forced him to stand in front of a mirror and remove his clothing, one item at a time, until he was standing in front of the mirror completely naked. He was ordered to hold his penis, supposedly to get more in touch with his masculinity, which was supposed to help cure him of his homosexual desires. It didn't work and fortunately Carl left Jonah. He sued them for malpractice. Jonah was forced out of business, but other groups have since taken its place.

Why should people watch this movie? Whether Heterosexual, Gay or anywhere along the LGBTQ+ spectrum, people need to be reminded how destructive conversation therapy is to its victims. If you are approached by a person concerned that he/she/they might be LGBTQ+, reassure this person that this is how G-d created him/her/them and these people are beautiful the way they are. Point them in the right direction. Help get them into a legitimate support group that can be a safe space and help them along the road to healing.

Directors Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg pull off a miracle here. They use authentic archival material, such as film clips, photos and interviews with real people who lived through it, to tell the story of the struggles of the LGBTQ+ ("Gay") community in America in the decades leading up to the famous Stonewall Inn riots of 1969.

The now famous Stonewall riots clearly did not just happen suddenly. The tension was building for centuries with this film focusing on Gay life in America between 1900 and the 1960s. It portrays a dark story of how Gay people were harassed, abused, humiliated, and forced to hide while being hunted down by the straight establishment (many of whom were closeted Gays themselves.)

Gay people from all over the U. S. moved to the Gay meccas such as San Francisco, CA, Harlem, NYC and of course, Greenwich Village, NYC, to escape into worlds of Gay bars, clubs, bathhouses, etc., at least to find some temporary relief. While they met people, made new friends, and found community, they were also terrified of being outed. Being outed meant beatings, arrests, almost certain termination from one's job, and pressure to out other Gay people.

Police raids on Gay bars, such as Stonewall, were routine, and people arrested often found their names printed in local newspapers as part of a list of deviant, mentally ill misfits. In fact, being Gay was considered both a crime and a mental illness. Gay people could be forced into mental institutions since after all they were "sick." They were hunted down like communists were hunted down in the late 1940s and 1950s, during Senator Joseph McCarthy's hideous witch hunts.

(The film does mention that Gays were sent to concentration camps during WWII, along with Jews and other minorities.)

So why does this fact-based documentary matter so much today, in 2021, in the post-2015 era of legal same sex marriage in America? Partly as a reminder, but more to educate the Gay youth of today who are able to live a much more comfortable, though not problem free, existence. There are also pockets in America today where conditions for Gay people are still unbearable. There's much work to be done to achieve true Equality and the risk is ever present that progress that has been made can be rolled back in a heartbeat. So, Gays need films like this to study and learn from to be prepared. The film brings out the importance of unity and community self-organizing. And a note to today's Gay youth: never forget the generations who came before you and paved the way for you to have the rights and freedoms that you have today.