I’m a television fan. I DVR at least one show a night and on the weekends I do my best to catch up. The shows I watch range from the ridiculous (Family Guy and Glee) and the dramatic (Revenge) to the eerie (The Walking Dead and American Horror Story).
My taste in entertainment is vast, but the horror genre is especially engrossing to me. Maybe it’s because I used to read the murder mystery novels of Dean Koontz, Stephen King and Patricia Cornwell that sat on my mother’s bookshelves as a kid.
I am a sucker for stories with disturbing characters and scenarios, but I can easily separate reality from fiction. I know that these shows and their film and book cousins are merely entertainment. But when a show has smatterings of truth in it for authenticity, it can really affect me. I’m not talking about the details of a murder or the details behind a suspected haunting. I’m talking about the realities of life people faced in our recent past that we take for granted today.
During a recent episode of American Horror Story, a particular scene and storyline hit surprisingly close to home.
For those unfamiliar, the sophomore year of the series is much different than its first, placing a cast of characters in a dark, 1960s-era American insane asylum run by the wonderful Jessica Lange and featuring so-far-unidentified creatures lurking just outside the grounds. The classic concept is ludicrous and is of what Hollywood horror legends are made.
It’s been campy, disturbing fun for the most part, but when one of the asylum’s residents a reporter who happens to be a lesbian learned how to work the system, the series claimed a sobering look at reality.
The character is completely sane but trapped within the asylum. To regain her freedom, she commits to undergoing conversion therapy at the hands of a sympathetic psychologist, played by openly gay actor Zachary Quinto. The goal is to “train” herself to lose her sexual attraction to other women and reprogram her mind to seek out men, not women, as sexual partners.
This particular scene shows the patient looking at slides of scantily clad women while the doctor controls an IV attached to her and containing a vomit-inducing medication. If she associates the pictures of the women with vomiting, the doctor explains, she will learn to disassociate women with sexual pleasure.
The scene goes on to introduce a young, attractive, naked male to the young woman. The doctor instructs the patient to pleasure herself while admiring the young, naked man’s chiseled physique. Her tearful experience is overwhelming, and ends with a non-medically induced vomiting session when she is instructed to touch the young man.
The experience is shameful, unsettling and mind-boggling.
But while the characters and the plot are fictional, the practice of conversion therapy was very real in our recent past. It is so real and so recent, in fact, that it took until this year for California to ban the practice.
And it’s not because of a few isolated incidents.
Conversion therapy got a lot of attention early on in the recent election cycle when it was revealed that Marcus Bachmann, husband to one-time GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann, practiced faith-based therapy to purge the homosexual urges of his patients.
Scientific research continues to show that human sexual orientation is innate and not learned, punching a gaping hole in the theory that gays and lesbians “choose” a specific orientation. The only choice we make is whether or not to share those feelings with others.
The term “unwanted same-sex attraction” is used often when it is argued that conversion therapy is needed. Looking back on my life I can admit that I had the very same condition. But the reason my attraction was “unwanted” is directly tied to the hateful rhetoric of anti-gay advocates.
Television and popular entertainment are ways to escape our everyday reality. But it can also remind us of how far we’ve come and how much further we have to go.
Hopefully, someday in the near future, we’ll look back at the views of the anti-LGBT population in 2012 America and have the very same reaction to today’s shows depicting the narrow-minded views of characters within a 1960s plotline.
