Letter to the Editor

Here's the letter to the editor I wrote them in response, and which they published the week after the article appeared:

To the editor: I wish that I’d had the opportunity 16 years ago to read Eric Griffey’s strong, even-handed report on the damage done by those seeking to offer a “Gay Cure” (June 13, 2007). It might have dissuaded me from over a decade of painful and misguided efforts to “pray the gay away.”
Groups like Arlington’s “Living Hope” seek to reconfirm, under the guise of pseudo-scientific, professionally discredited theories and methods, the bigotry amid which we allow many of our young people to be raised. Young gay men and lesbians who read Griffey’s report will be much less likely to place themselves at the mercy of such quackery. It is unlikely they can appreciate, without the hindsight of those who fell prey to these groups, what reports like Griffey’s may have done for them, or thank him for the effort. So let me do it for them.