But people in this thread are telling me that it's impossible for someone who is gay to wish they weren't gay. And to declare that one person can think to know how everyone else in a group thinks, is as strange to me as someone's stating that they know for a fact that there is no other life in the universe.
I wished
several times growing up that I was not gay. I hated how disgusting it was seen by everyone around me. The existence of gay people was rarely talked about, and if it was, it was nothing but negative or wrong. It felt impossibly lonely, and it makes you wonder what was wrong with you and why you had to be that way. I may not have wanted to be gay, but I never felt like I wanted to be straight.
Ex-gay conversion therapy is born out of the notion that being gay is disgusting, sinful, and harmful. People who choose to pursue that option are those who have been told all their lives that it is a despicable thing to be, and put the onus of the gay person to stop being who they are as if it were a choice. Most of the time, it is others (such as parents) who force their children to be "made right" as if it were a disease to treat.
I don't believe that anyone who want to change their sexual orientation if they did not feel rejected, hated, discriminated against, reviled, or told they were wrong for who they were. You are merely, perhaps unintentionally, serving as a devil's advocate for a destructive mindset that continues the propagation of the belief that being gay is ultimately wrong. Nobody is saying that anyone should be restricted from choosing their identities, but it is not something that we are afforded a choice for, and if there were that sliver of free will that existed in redefining ourselves so fundamentally, then I'd rather it be a decision made from a mind not wanting to change themselves to evade prejudice.
