As reported on this blog and elsewhere, the ex-gay industry operates a number of “camps” or “clinics” in Ecuador, where lesbians undergo rape and torture, many of them put there by their parents. Credo and Change.org circulated petitions; the latter site garnered 100,000 signatures, pressuring Ecuador’s Ministry of Health into agreeing to meet with LGBT activists and work on shutting these camps down for good.

Hooray for social media and for sunlight as disinfectant, and hooray for the brave women who told us what it was like in those places, at great personal risk.

The Advocate recently wrote about the testimony of lesbians from Ecuador who were forced into “prey away the gay” camps. These women report being raped, starved, handcuffed, and forced to dress like prostitutes during the “curative” process. Thanks to an outcry from Ecuadorian and international LGBT organizations, a few of the clinics have been shut down since the international spotlight has shone upon them, but many reportedly remain open. El Tiempo reports that many victims are reluctant to come forward because they don’t want to denounce their parents, who forced them into the clinics in the first place.

The French website that originally broke the story reported that

clinics have also enclosed gays and transvestites and trans people, but on a smaller scale, “probably because they get to leave the family earlier than girls,” says Tatiana [Velasquez, of the lesbian organization Taller de Comunicacion Mujer].

As if it weren’t hard enough to be gay in a homophobic culture, if you’re a gay woman in a homophobic and misogynistic culture, you’re that much more easily trapped and victimized. Homophobia: a weapon of sexism.

Change.org has begun a petition, which you can sign here (there’s another one at Credo), to get Ecuador’s Minister of Health to shut down the clinics and force his country to stop brutalizing its lesbian citizens in this way.

This is not an invitation to get into The Cuba Discussion, but it is good when any world leader looks back on a nation’s past misdeeds against LGBT people and says, “You know what?  That was wrong.”

Fidel Castro this week admitted responsibility for the persecution of homosexuals in Cuba in the 1960s, calling their internment in forced-labor camps “a great injustice.”

In the second installment of an interview with the editor of the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, Castro said that the revolutionary government’s actions represented “a great injustice – a great injustice! – whoever committed it. If we committed it, we committed it. I am trying to limit my responsibility in all that because, of course, personally I don’t have that type of prejudice.”

The interviewer paraphrases him as saying that “everything came about as a spontaneous reaction in the revolutionary ranks that came from the nation’s traditions. In the old Cuba, blacks were not the only ones discriminated against; there was discrimination against women and, of course, homosexuals.”

Was the Communist Party to blame, the interviewer asks.

“No,” Castro responds. “If anyone is responsible, I am. True, at that time I couldn’t concern myself with the subject. I was deeply and mainly involved in the October Crisis, the war, the political issues.

Joe points out that Fidel Castro’s niece, Mariela, has been the de facto leader of the Cuban gay rights movement, and likely deserves some of the credit for this.

For three decades, Exodus International has tried to fool the U.S. Christian Right into believing that homosexuality is caused by bad parenting and abuse that can be reversed if one simply prays hard enough and if one adheres to tiresome and unimaginative activities that are stereotypical for one’s gender.

With the U.S. white evangelical market nearly saturated by these myths, Exodus International is now turning its attention to Latin America, where Exodus has political “ministries” in just two countries.

Earlier this month, Exodus spokesman Randy Thomas interviewed Oscar Galindo, executive director of Exodus Latin America.

Thomas paraphrases Galindo as stating that EXLA conferences will convince pastors and antigay parents “about the basis of homosexuality, roots, prevention, reorientation, how the church should be involved, sexual abuse, accountability, practical suggestions to help.” Exodus’ superstitious views regarding homosexuality and “reorientation” are contrary to well-established science.

Galindo’s anti-scientific re-education plan resembles that of Exodus board member Don Schmierer, who took the same agenda to a March 2009 Uganda ex-gay conference whose intent — announced in advance — was to launch that nation’s current campaign of vigilantism and arrest, imprisonment, and execution of LGBT Ugandans.

Exodus Latin America will hold its next conference in Costa Rica.