UPDATE#2 From a column in the Memphis Flyer:
Yellow is blue and pink's a sin at the Love in Action camp.
As you read this, there are teens in Memphis being forced to engage in activities that are psychologically damaging and scientifically without basis. According to many who have endured conversion therapy, these teens are being subjected to "shaming sessions" that might be classified as torture were they carried out by American troops on enemy combatants. According to Smid and company, this is all God's work.
This is Love in Action.
Update: Memphis blogger EJ at Cherry Blossom Special reports that Love In Action/Refuge is holding a press conference today. The blogger speculates that it may be related to an "ongoing investigation into a report filed [yesterday] with the City of Memphis over allegations of child endangerment."
The New York Blade reports that Love in Action is supported by numerous Memphis churches, and notes that according to Zach’s blog, the earliest he will be released is June 20.
UK Gay News covers the story and asks: "Just how civilised are certain section of American society?
Pulp Faction has links to news video clips in a post entitled: Love in action or child abuse?
Mike Ditto has links to the press coverage, which include yet more alarming details about the inhumane tactics of the so-called Love in Action Camp, a.k.a. Camp Hetero Horror.
Memphis Commercial Appeal:
At a cost of $950 a month, Toscano, now 40, stayed in LIA's residential program for more than two years. The rules dictated he shave every day, and stay out of the forbidden zones: Midtown, Downtown and anywhere west of Highland. In group therapy, clients were instructed to share their sexual thoughts and homosexual experiences in clinical terms. (Smid says the group sharing of sexual experiences is no longer a part of the therapy.)
Toscano says he was in a "biblically induced coma, with a toxic mixture of fear and shame."
"We had a mock funeral for a 19-year-old" also in the program, he says. "We actually laid him out on the table, so we could talk about what a shame he didn't live his life right."
While he was at LIA, a fellow client tried to kill himself.
It took Toscano, now a Quaker, 17 years of submitting to the ex-gay movement to realize that "there's nothing that can be done ... and nothing need be done" about his sexual identity.
"The big shift came when I stopped looking outward for direction and started looking inward," said Toscano, who has made a career, literally, about the years he spent trying to be straight. His time at LIA became a one-man play, "Doing Time in the Ho Mo No Mo Halfway House," which he performed at a Memphis church in 2003. "Fish Can't Fly," a film that includes his LIA experience, debuted at a gay/lesbian film festival in New York City Sunday.
Related posts:
Memphis Gay Kid Imprisoned in Gay Brainwashing Camp
More on Zach . .
