I still remember the first time when someone told me, “you can choose to be straight.”

I was 17 at the time, and I was having lunch with Mum at McDonald’s until we were interrupted by one of my Mum’s church friends. They shared small talk about being Christian and I focused on my McChicken. And when Mum let slip that I was gay, he turned to me and said it.

“You can choose to be straight.”

A smug smile lifted from his face. But I was old enough and experienced enough to know that it wasn’t true. So I asked him if he could choose to be gay.

After scrunching his nose up in disgust, he shook his head.

“I couldn’t do that,” he said. “It’s just not natural.”

And so I asked: “Well, how could it be a choice?”

I looked at him a moment longer before returning to my McChicken. But within that brief final look, I sensed a glimmer of hope. I made him think, which is probably a miracle considering the tight grip Christianity had on him.

It’s not our fault Eve ate from the tree of knowledge. It’s God’s fault for putting it there in the first place. 

But I think my Mum’s Christian friend realised some truth in my final rhetorical question. How can homosexuality be a choice if most people are willingly straight? Of course, we could say that homosexuality was frowned upon up until the 1990s, but then why did gay people actively be gay in a world that despised it?

If that were still the case, I’d most likely choose to be straight.

But you cannot choose what you like!

Here’s the problem with gay conversion therapy: It’s a deceitful name. In fact, gay conversion therapy is best described as a harmful method of forcing someone to change their sexual orientation. Here’s the truth: you’re not actually converting your sexuality; you’re faking it.

You cannot convert your sexuality just like you cannot convert your distaste for certain foods. So the only way for you to truly “succeed” in gay conversion therapy is to adhere to a lie. And if you push hard enough, you can train yourself to sleep with the opposite sex.

But you will never stop your true desires.

So the real question is: why would you go to gay conversion therapy in the first place?

Well, that’s mostly because not everyone around you accepts your sexuality. Even your own disgust is a product of the social interferences around you. You can’t learn to be gay, but you can learn to hate it.

My advice: stop being a guinea pig and live your true life.

Being true is easier than being fake

It’s much easier to accept being gay than it is to fake being straight. Acceptance only requires you to change the way you think about it.

You’re gay. Whoopty doo! It doesn’t change all the other great things about you. It just means you like the same sex.

When you fake being straight, you have to find someone of the opposite sex and sleep with them. And I don’t need to tell you how cringeworthy that is. Who actively goes out of their way to like something they don’t like? Imagine forcing yourself to eat food you don’t like, then having to eat enough of it to hopefully learn to like them. What a waste of time that is!

And yet, that’s exactly what happens at gay conversion therapy. It wastes your time (and money) forcing you to do something you don’t actually like.

Why would you waste time and money doing something you don’t like?

Take the easy road and accept being gay. It’s free! Simply say yes to it and explore it in your own way. And when you do, you’ll set yourself on a wonderful journey of self-discovery.

Live it, enjoy it and just be who you are.

And if the people around you have a problem with it, that’s their problem to deal with. It’s not your responsibility to mitigate other people’s emotions.

Your responsibility is to mitigate your own.