Monday, September 18, 2006
Gay Teenagers Blogging to Express Their Feeling's
In the article Gay Teenagers Stirs a Storm by Alex Williams he talks about a young boy name Zach who is sixteen and gay. When he told his parents that he was gay they didn't like it "They tell me there is something psychologically wrong with me, and they raised me wrong". Zach's parents went decided to send Zach off to a fundamentalist Christian program for gays. He writes on his blog about his life and how he feels emotionally about his parents sending him to this camp. He writes how he is so depressed and unhappy. "I pray this blows over , adding that if his parents caught him online he'd be in trouble". This shows how he is trying to blog and talk to others about his feelings by writhing them online to others but he really can't do that because if his parents found out he would get yelled at by them.
The camp in question, Refuge, is a youth program of Love Action International, a group in Memphis that runs a religion-based program intended to change the sexual orientation of gay men and women. Often called reparative or conversion therapy, such programs took hold in fundamentalist Christian circles in the 1970's, when mainstream psychiatric organizations overturned previous designations of homosexuality as a mental disorder, and gained ground rapidly from the late 90's. Programs like Love in Action have always been controversial, but Zach's blog entries have brought wide attention to a less-known aspect of them, their application to teenagers.
Zach wrote these entries online and had it sent all over the internet, it helped to start up debates and most importantly an investigation into Love and Action. They said that this place was like being in prison. They couldn't have name brand clothing, couldn;t wear too much jewerly, or have physical contract with another person beside shaking someone's hand. Since they slept at the camp they were not really permitted to go on a computer or to watch television. This kept Zach away from the one thing that he liked to do expressing his feelings on his myspace page. "Critics of programs that seek to change sexual orientation say the programs themselves can open a person to lifelong problems, including guilt, shame and even suicidal impulses". It seems from reading this article that the people who go here don't for the most part change and that they are making it worse by sending them to a place where they don't want to be. It seemed that he announed that he was gay online on his myspace for about a year before he told his parents. It seems like he was more scared to tell his parents then his friends. This article shows how parents and society view everyone and how you have to be like everyone else to fit in.
