Weston Ashley is a 25 year old out and proud gay man working as a studio maintenance hand. It was only a few years ago, however, that he was a 
helpless teen forced into “gay rehab” by his parents. After his Arkansas parents found his diary — they confronted him about his sexuality. He acknowledged his sexual orientation and they immediately adopted tough measures to “reform” his behavior.
“That summer my father forced me to work as a maintenance man,” Ashley wrote in the Huffington Post. “I had the pleasure of working alongside some of the most ignorant, grotesque men. These middle-aged men would spit homophobic slurs and make sexually suggestive comments about my sisters, and when I used their restroom, I was forced to stare at pictures of naked women that they had posted on the wall. As I endured my own personal hell, I came to the conclusion that my father was somehow trying to butch me up. It was as if he thought that if I spent enough time doing manual labor, listening to crude humor and keeping away from the arts, then the gay would eventually just wash away. It didn’t work.
When this attempt to butch Ashley up did not work, he was whisked away from his private school and taken to a series of clinics:
As we walked into the admissions building, I could see two men sitting on the couch eyeing me suspiciously (I later found out that they were narcotics officers who had been hired to restrain me and escort me if I tried to escape), as well as my advisor’s husband and the dean of students. Everyone was just staring at me with the saddest look in their eyes. My advisor then walked me to the door, and I will never forget what she said to me: “I’m so sorry about what’s about to happen. Just know that Tom and I love you. And everyone here at Stevenson does, too. Your parents are here, and they’re taking you away.” She then opened the door, and sitting there were my father and stepmother.
The narcotics officers were bizarre, because Ashley was not on drugs. This was the beginning of a series of gay rehab institutions where he did not belong:
I was being put away against my will for being gay, not to mention in a drug and behavioral facility that focused on kids with eating disorders, drug problems and suicidal tendencies. I didn’t belong there. I was stripped of my shoelaces so that I couldn’t kill myself with them. I was tested for drugs (it came out negative), given a full body cavity search (completely clean) and started on a dose of Zoloft that rendered me incapable of feeling any type of emotion. Talk about completely losing every shred of privacy in a matter of 24 hours. I was a zombie. I was stuck. I was gay and couldn’t get out of there.
This is an important story because it highlights the need to ban reparative therapy and other misguided or malevolent attempts at changing the sexual orientation of minors. No LGBT youth should be subjected to such child abuse. We thank Ashley for sharing his cogent and entertaining story that shows the degree of coercion and cruelty faced by too many children in America. It is our responsibility to do everything in our power to shut down quack clinics and strip the licenses of crackpot doctors who exploit the fears of parents for the purpose of ideology and money.
Truth Wins Out is proud to be in the forefront of such efforts.
If this were a legitimate facility, the professional staff should have come to the conclusion within a few weeks that his parents were the ones that needed to be incarcerated and psychoanalyzed. I am assuming that since this didn’t happen, that this was one of those undercover “religious counseling” places that mentally and physically abuse “patients” for their deity. DISGUSTING. I hope he sued his parents when he got out.
The tactics employed by his ignorant parents need to be regulated out of existence. I find it offensive that he was dumped into a mental facility and drugged into submission.
I would think that it might be more lucrative to go after the institutions he was placed in. Deeper pockets and the ultimate responsibility to figure out what is wrong with a patient (or not wrong in this case), and then treat appropriately. If they are treating someone who doesn’t meet generally acceptable criteria for treatment, they would likely be liable for damages. Weston might want to think about finding a really good lawyer.
Wes, as you already know, we all love you and were so happy to get you back at Stevenson to graduate with us! I’m so glad that you are able to talk about it and share your story to help support those who don’t have a voice.
That is true. I was going to personally destroy that boot camp in Vermont that he attended. But, it has already closed down.
Except for the last place maybe, he got kind of lucky. And compared to other so-called “camps for troubled teens” even that seems relatively mild. I guess he didn’t tell everything, but finding understanding staff is rare there. Extreme physical and mental abuse is the rule.
Anyways, what I mean is that none of those places were dedicated ex-gay programs. It would be have been a lot worse if he had been sent to some places where they only focused on his gayness for weeks and months on end.
The story I wrote originally was at least 24 pages in a Word Document, but had to cut my piece down to around 6 pages. There is a lot more to the story in terms of describing each individual place and other experiences that had gone on.
The fact that I was sent to drug and behavioral programs for being gay still boggles my mind.
The strange part of his story was that none of the places this guy was placed were grounded in or driven by ex-gay ideology.
His experience leaves me wondering if the bigger issue for youth is that parents have broad options commit them to any facility they wish (or at least, parents with enough money). Some segments of the industry, operating off-shore or in remote locations, have been exposed for severe abuses of kids as well as blocking parents from access.
CAFETY.org is the organization that I’ve trusted most for tackling the big picture.
My parents surprised me with a trip to a psychiatrist in the late 60s, when gay people were still officially mentally ill. The psychiatrist talked with me for a while, then told my parents that I was normal and they needed therapy. After we got home, my mother spent an hour or so on the bed crying. I had no idea how fortunate I was.
To me the most shocking part of this story is the administration of zombie drugs. For what purpose? But I have a story similar to to Ken’s. I came out to my parents when I was 16, and that coincided with a substantial drop in body weight (a body that was not in any sense porcine in the first place). When a medical doctor could find no cause, he suggested a psychiatrist, and I believe my father told the psychiatrist behind my back, “Well, while you’re at it…” The psychiatrist said to me: “So, I understand that you’re gay.” I said: “Yes.” The psychiatrist said: “Do you have any problem with that?” I said: “No.” The psychiatrist said: “OK, let’s talk about your weight.” I was very fortunate.
Where was a social worker in all of this? Were drugs forced on him? If he wasn’t acting out, if his tests came back clean, and if he was so clearly different from all the other residents, why didn’t anybody take notice? He’s a minor and it doesn’t look like anybody was keeping tabs, not the police, and not anybody from “the system.”
If answers to these questions aren’t possible, than neither is preventing things like this from happening. And this happened to him in the 2000s. NOT the 1960s – or even the 1980s.
If there was no complaint, no one to report this, a social worker wouldn’t enter into the story.
Additionally, I think his parents should be prosecuted. Or at least severely reprimanded publicly in some manner.
It is so HARD to forgive parents like that! I am happy to know that this young man SURVIVED in order to testify!
I am not sure I believe that this happened. The big hole in the story is that he was committed against his will to several legitimate drug and psych rehab facilities. Not to Love In Action. Not to some unaccountable religious camp. But real licensed facilities. I find it hard to believe that these facilities would risk their licenses and steep liability by admitting a non-drug using minor for drug rehab, or by admitting and confining a minor for psychiatric treatment who has no condition that can be found in the DSM.
He does name all the facilities, which adds some credibility to the story, since it would be libelous if he were just making the whole thing up. But I am still not sure I buy it.
And his bio on HuffPo describes him as a “storyteller.” Could it be that he is telling a tale that is not strictly true but which he feels represents a “larger truth” about how gay kids are abused? This is essentially what happened a few months ago with a professional storyteller who spun a partially false tale on public radio about the manufacture of Apple products in China. He didn’t think he was lying because he was addressing larger issue in a theatrical manner.
I am not sure what is going on, but I would want to see some corroboration of his commitment in these facilities before I accepted this story as true.