The documentary starts with the very handsome and charming doctor Christian first taking a very special sexual orientation test, in which unsurprisingly he is confirmed to be 100% gay. So, now starts his journey to see and experience for himself the various (about 8-10) different therapies and therapists that guarantee the conversion. He first goes for aversion therapy where he is given a drug that violently makes him ill while watching gay porn images. Then he goes to the American Bible Belt, where he tries methods like gay rehab, color therapy (this was so delusional and made no sense) and others. As expected the Balme was most of these institutions is put on childhood trauma or abuse. There was an encounter with a group of young Evangelical Christians, who viewed homosexuality as a sin and worry about it. Back in UK, he witnessed a pastor in East London conducting a human exorcism. The therapies that Jessen experienced had no affect on his sexual orientation. He was before a happy gay person and even after the experiments he was a part of remains a well-adjusted gay male.
Through this documentary, one point that is being tried to prove again is that we are born gay and this is something that cannot be changed. We need to ask ourselves what this says about a society that finds homosexuality as an illness and can be cured. While the intention of the show was definitely noble, the surface-level criticism provided by Dr Christian tended more towards mockery and disbelief rather than truly addressing the issues at stake. Its nothing new that we find out, except probably that there are way too many institutions out there hoping to convert gays to straight. It is of course arguable that the world of gay cure therapy deserves nothing less than scorn, mockery and skepticism, as it often seeks to progress its own social agenda. However, the lack of objectivity offered by the show, alongside its quite disparate use of case studies in both the UK and US, meant that the underlying issues and pressures that brought people to believe in and seek support from such extreme therapies were not adequately addressed and debunked. Cure Me, I’m Gay shied away from clarifying the absolutely abstract non-threat that such treatments, policies and campaigns pose to our lives in terms of accessing healthcare. (4.5/10)
Comments