Around the World with Jonathan deBurca Butler every Monday from 3pm on Moncrieff
Early last month Christina Fonthes went to Democratic Republic of the Congo to visit her mother and younger sister. The Manchester-based rights activist was sure that her family had accepted her homosexuality but when she arrived in Kinshasa, her mother confiscated her passport and tried to persuade her to visit a clinic that claims to cure people of homosexuality.
When it became apparent that her freedom was being restricted against her will, Fonthes tweeted the contact details of the British Embassy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to her followers and urged them to call and demand help. She had visited the embassy earlier that day and had been reported missing by her mother. According to reports, police arrested Fonthes and released her back into her mother’s care. Fonthes is 27 years old.
The story spread quickly around social media. Fonthes’s relationship with BBC presenter, Jessica Creighton, and her work with LGBT groups both in London, where she was raised, and Manchester helped to increase the profile of her case. It was eventually picked up by main stream media who early last week reported that Fonthes had returned home to Britain that weekend.
Fonthes's story is not unique nor is it restricted to places that some might refer to as ‘backward’. It is true that vast swathes of Sub-Saharan Africa, and particularly Uganda where lesbians are routinely ‘cured’ through so-called ‘corrective rape’, have come under the spotlight in recent years for criminalising homosexual acts and imposing serious punishments on those who carry them out. According to a report issued by Amnesty International in 2013, homosexual acts are illegal in no fewer than thirty-eight Sub-Saharan countries.
But it should be remembered that the US only declassified homosexuality as a mental illness as recently as 1975 and they were way ahead of many places. Sweden, that beacon of all things liberal (and the home of ABBA), only followed suit in 1979. China decided that gays weren’t crazy in 2001. Even the World Health Organisation didn't destigmatise homosexuality until 1990.
Of course, sexual reorientation therapies and medicines are still available. Everything from psychoanalysis to electric shock therapy has been used to treat what some still perceive as an illness. A favourite method practised in the US as well as other places involves modifying the behaviour of the so-called patient by associating homoerotic images with electric shock and/or nausea inducing drugs – a sort of Clockwork Orange therapy for gays.
In 1992, Professor Benjamin Kaufman and Joseph Nicolosi founded The National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality. It still offers conversion therapy which it claims changes the sexual orientation of individuals who experience unwanted same-sex attraction. The organisation disagrees with those who claim that homosexuality is biological and they believe that it can be unlearnt.
Needless to say, there are other organisations that believe God (who must be a homophobe) can help cure you. Exodus International which was started in 1976 offered homosexuals the opportunity to become ex-gays through a mixed methodology that included participating in sports, having sex with women, getting married, having children and praying a lot. Effectively, individuals were encouraged to go back into the closet and pretend they had never come out. If God could forgive your gayness then, shucks, everyone else would. The organisation closed down in 2013 and its President Alan Chambers apologised for “the pain and hurt many [people] had experienced”.
Besides all the cognitive, sexual, religious and kitchen sink therapies available there are medicinal cures ranging from diets to magic potions. Back in 2012, a Republican candidate for the US Senate named Todd Akin claimed that breast milk fed to an adult male for four weeks could cure him of homosexual tendencies; at least in 94% of cases. How the other 6% slipped through the net wasn’t immediately clear but no doubt it was down to some gay black magic. In India, Ayurvedic potions can cure gay people of their unnatural affliction while in Serbia, Miroljub Petrovic claimed patients must cut out junk food from their diet, drink a lot of water, reject anything that is diarrhetic, engage in physical activity and receive regular enemas.
But if all that seems just a little too much effort then modern technology is here to help. Gay? There's an app for that; in fact there are a few.
One of them is Setting Captives Free which pitches its app by reassuring its users that they “can be set free from the bondage of homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ and the cross!”
For just a couple of dollars you can stop being gay in just sixty days; a miracle cure if ever there was one.
For more, you can follow Jonathan on Twitter: @deburcabutler.
