The gay life

Early in my freshman year of tall school, I came home to spot my mom sitting on her bed, crying.

"Are you gay?" she asked. I blurted out that I was.

"I knew it, ever since you were a petite boy."

Her resignation didn't last long. My mom is a problem solver, and the next night she handed me a stack of papers she had printed out from the Internet about reorientation, or "ex-gay," therapy. I threw them away. I said I didn't see how talking about myself in a therapist's office was going to make me end liking guys. My mother responded by asking whether I wanted a family, then posed a hypothetical: "If there were a pill you could obtain that would create you straight, would you take it?"

I admitted that experience would be easier if such a pill existed. I hadn't thought about how my obsession with boys would play out over the course of my life. In fact, I had always imagined myself middle-aged, married to a woman, and having a son and daughter-didn't everyone want some version of that?

"The same-sex attracted lifestyle is very lonely," she said.

She told me about Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, a clinical psychologist in California who was then president of the National Association for