Playing It Straight

Gay-to-straight bedroom conversion. The 50 Cent poster helped familiarize Jamie with male nudity in a nonsexual context.

Jamie’s gay iPod (top) and straight iPod (bottom).

Thanks to religion and the fact that certain people find butt sex “totally gross,” being gay can sometimes be a huge bummer. Due to this, there are some who would like to “leave the lifestyle.” But can this be done? Were we “born this way,” or do we have a choice? I wanted to find out. My original plan was to attend one of those Christian retreats where you stay in the woods for a week and learn how to appreciate vaginas, but they all require super-intense confidentiality agreements, so I wouldn’t have been able to make fun of it in a magazine. After doing some internet research, I (a 5 on the Kinsey scale, slightly less gay than Elton John) decided to spend a month self-administering treatment instead. Here are some popular conversion methods that I tested.

REGAINING MY MASCULINITY According to Leanne Payne’s 1985 classic Crisis in Masculinity, the main reason men become gay is because they’ve lost touch with their masculinity. This causes a void in their souls, which they then attempt to fill with other men’s dicks. To rectify this situation, I gave my life a full heterosexual makeover: I started referring to my bedroom as my “man cave,” stopped keeping my clothes in a wardrobe and started throwing them on my floor, replaced my Wii with an Xbox, tacked a poster of 50 Cent on my wall, abstained from using conditioner, and replaced my iPod’s self-conscious mix of fragile indie songs and girly music with white-people rap and soft rock. I also stopped ironically watching Lindsay Lohan flicks and started seriously scrutinizing Matt Damon movies, refused to wash my towels or bedsheets, used my bookcase to store empty liquor bottles, read Tracy Morgan’s autobiography, only ate meals that took less than 20 minutes to cook in the microwave, drank protein shakes and beers, and took part in a soccer game “with the lads.” Effectiveness: 4 out of 10. The depression that resulted from constantly fixating on every aspect of my behavior served as a welcome distraction from my persistent homosexual thoughts (more on those later).

Jamie looking at gay porn (left) and straight porn (right).

AVERSION THERAPY Even though I am a total baby when it comes to getting electrocuted, my initial plan was to self-administer electroshock therapy. The thought of it scared the shit out of me, but using instructions I found (of course) on the internet, I fashioned a disposable camera into a Taser and shocked myself while looking at gay porn. Do not EVER fucking do this. It hurt incredibly badly—like I was simultaneously being punched in the face, being hit by a car, and dry heaving while having cigarettes put out on my teeth. Aversion therapy is supposed to be painful, but I genuinely thought I was going to die. I made an executive decision and downgraded my punishment to self-flagellation. I read somewhere that this is how monks counter sexual urges. Belt at the ready, I prepared a slide show containing a mixture of straight and gay porn. For each gay image I looked at, I whipped myself with the belt. For each straight image, I ate a piece of candy. I did this for about 15 minutes each morning and night for the duration of the month. Effectiveness: 1 out of 10. Despite the fact that my left arm began to look like it was covered in rosacea, after a couple days, I got used to the pain of the whipping and started to really enjoy my nightly porn-and-candy sessions.

Jamie discovered Christian indie rock was actually worse than the new music on his straight iPod.

RELIGION Because I live in England and not some developing country like Nigeria, Iran, or the USA, I was unable to locate a church that would perform a gay exorcism on me (lame), or even find one with strong antihomosexual leanings. My best bet was an organization called the Christian Revival Church that, according to their website, believes “in heterosexual relationships between a natural man and a natural woman within the confines of lawful matrimony. Adherence to this stated principle of sexual behavior is an inherent requirement of membership.” It’s been a while since I’ve attended a church service, and they’ve really upped their game since my last visit. For starters, it was held inside a cinema with big La-Z-Boy seats and a Starbucks in the lobby. Instead of the congregation singing hymnals from a book, a guy with gelled hair and dog tags hanging around his neck led a band that played MGMT and Arcade Fire rip-offs with religious lyrics that scrolled across the movie screen like it was a karaoke party for Jesus. The talking part was as boring as ever, but weirdly, the topic of discussion in my final week was Sodom and Gomorrah. Was this a sign from God? I also started praying regularly, which I’d never done before. At first it was a total snoozefest, but eventually I got used to it and it was kind of nice to have ten minutes of quiet time each night. Effectiveness: 1 out of 10 again. I was going to burn in hell forever, I guess. ABSTINENCE Due to pretty much every psychological group on earth claiming that gay conversion doesn’t work, most ex-gay groups have started to focus on abstinence rather than “curing” gay people. I abstained from sex and masturbation for the duration of my experiment. Though I thought this would be totally ineffective, it actually had a fairly large impact on my sexuality by making me about 10,000 percent gayer. Now I know why closeted old gay guys cruise undercover police officers in airport bathrooms and hire male prostitutes to “carry their luggage.” I turned into a hypersexual monster. I’m usually a picky person, but by the end of the month I found myself attracted to all adult males, which, when coupled with the fact that I was thinking about sex ALL THE TIME, caused me to develop a really intense and creepy staring problem. At one point I got turned on while watching an argument between Meat Loaf and Gary Busey on Celebrity Apprentice. Ugh. Effectiveness: -1,000 out of 10.

Touch therapy worked about as well as treating alcoholism with beer bongs.

REPARATIVE THERAPY Reparative therapy is based around the theory that gays are spawned from a specific parental combination: an overbearing mother and emotionally unavailable father. This doesn’t really apply to me, but that’s cool because there are a TON of other things that cause homosexuality: loneliness, sexual abuse, low self-esteem, “artisticness,” lack of confidence (anyone who has ever been to a gay-pride parade can confirm that queers lack confidence), repressed childhood trauma, and platonic female friendships. Much like a horoscope, this applies to every single person on earth. All of the reparative therapy I performed on myself was based on information given out by big ex-gay organizations like Exodus International and the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality. It was a little difficult for me to find specific instructions because almost every sentence on their sites ends with “for more information, buy this $40 book.” Still, I tried my best. The main areas I focused on were “bioenergetics therapy” (hitting a pillow while screaming, “WHY DAD?!?!”), “touch therapy” (no-homo spooning sessions with straight dudes), and obsessing over every homosexual urge to work out why I was having it (apparently it’s because I’m trying to fill gaps in my own personality by having sex with people who possess the traits I want, like a charisma vampire). Effectiveness: 0 out of 10. It’s easy to be cynical about the reparative-therapy movement and say that it’s a giant scam that preys on the hopes of desperate people, which is good because I’m feeling lazy today. OVERALL EFFECTIVENESS Zip, obviously. I arranged a date with a young lady from the internet to test my heterosexuality, but I canceled at the last minute because leading the poor girl on made me feel like the worst person on earth. Also, I didn’t need to test it. Pretending to not be gay doesn’t make you any less attracted to men. It just makes you into a self-loathing homo. The only thing I gained from this experiment was a newfound sense of pity for people who stretch this process out over their entire lives. That’s too awful to even think about. To summarize: Baby, I’m a fiiiiiiiiirework!