I was in two minds about watching this documentary because I’m in such a happy queer space right now and I knew this was just going to be wall-to-wall religious trauma. But it’s such an important subject and it’s such a rare opportunity to have see inside what takes place in conversion therapy.
“The religious community offers very clear options,” says one survivor. “One is to marry a woman, even though you’re attracted to men. Two is to live alone. Three is to leave the Orthodox life. And four is suicide.”
The documentary follows two men, Ben and Lev, as they continue in the conversion therapy they’ve been undergoing for years in the hopes it might rid them of their attraction to other men. Ben is in his early 20s and has been in conversion therapy since he was 16, when he fell in love with another boy at yeshiva school, and their constant companionship and longing glances were noticed by the principal, who immediately outed him to his family and expelled him from the school. Lev is in his 50s and has been in conversion therapy for almost 30 years, since emigrating from the States to Israel. He fled New York in the early 90s, what would have been during the AIDS crisis, and became deeply religious, settled in the Holy Land and married a woman. Three decades on he is divorced, single, and still attending private and group therapy sessions to end his attractions.
The thing that sticks out from the get-go is how deeply lonely a life it makes. And you see how it works, this cult-like therapy, because you have literally no other support network. The only place where you are shown any kind of empathy and support is in the therapy. Because you can’t have authentic loving relationships, because you can’t establish honest and real friendships, because everything with your family is so conditional and always balanced on a precipice of world-shattering loss. You are utterly reliant on the therapy continuing because it’s the only connection that makes you feel hopeful and good about yourself.
And it’s so easy to see how you would not clock it as abusive. The conversion therapy in Israel originates and is evangelised from the religious right in the States. It was developed there in the 90s, again during the AIDS crisis, and seems to have grown like a weed based on collective queer trauma. And it is specifically dressed up not to look like the more traditional forms of conversion therapy, namely strapping your genitals to a car battery, inducing vomiting so you throw up when shown pornography, beatings, and nothing short of sexual assault. All of those things are hard to disguise as legitimate therapy, but talking? Pshh! Talking is free, and voluntary, and everything legitimate therapy is based on. So softly, softly, catchy monkey, you have these nice people, with kind voices, tell you that you can be everything you need to be, for your family, for your community, for your religion. You can have the happy and fulfilling cishet TM life. You are going to be able to be this person you feel like you should be, want to be, are desperate to be, and that they, and they alone, can help you get there.
They go into all this bollocks about how attraction to men is rooted in traumatic and difficult relationships your father, which is of course gonna resonate with everyone in the room, because if they had a loving father, he wouldn’t let them spend a single minute in conversion therapy. So of course in that room it hits as true 100% of the time. And that just reinforces that the therapy is insightful and based on tangible evidence.
Over the course of the film you are just begging for both these men to get out this situation. The traumatic scenes I had dreaded going into the film, something dramatic with vulnerable people having hateful scorn poured upon them, don’t materialise. Instead it manifests as this continual drip-drip, done with soft voices and gentle hands, of slowly mutilating people from the inside out.
Really excellent documentary, done with patience, understanding and empathy for its subjects, and eschewing anything gratuitous or retraumatising for the audience.