"Pray the Gay Away"

In “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” writer Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains how most people are open to homosexuality in today’s culture. However, she attacks the inefficiency of current psychoanalysis and psychiatry in addressing the needs for guiding the development of young homosexuals. Sedgwick claims that effeminate boys – (including adult men) have been regulated to the official gay movement who want to “interrupt a long tradition of viewing gender and sexuality as continuous and collapsible categories” (20). She then critiques psychoanalysts, mainly Friedman and Green, in which drives the article saying that adolescents and teens do have a tolerant attitude towards existent gays, but interferes with the gay movement because institutions are more likely to try to turn kids away from being gay, than rather expanding homosexuality. This personally disturbed me about the idea of psychoanalysis’s trying to turn gays the other way, however this issue is very important, especially in certain situations. For example, I came across a video called “Pray the Gay Away.” Perhaps most of you have heard about this, but the video describes a combination of nausea and sadness at the same time. Orange County pastor Bobby Blakey created a joke in which warns parents that even if their kids are not gay, they will most likely embrace the lifestyle as legitimate for their friends, however if you do not accept homosexuality, that person is not “in” with what is happening in today’s culture. This has made matters worse, since kids killed themselves, and not to mention teens who are homosexual repent their gay ways, and try to convert their sexuality but going totally gaga for Christ. This priest has brainwashed adolescent gay teens, by saying they will not live a healthy life by being gay, and therefore need to turn to God because he may be able to change that person’s life.

Though in essay “The Joy of the Castrated Boy,” targets a boy who loves the color pink and wearing lipstick, it did somewhat relate to Sedgwick’s writing piece. This quote stuck out to me the most near the end of the essay: “And because laughter is very killing to the soft soul of the young, we tried to get away from the shame and pain of laughter by denouncing that identity. And yet it can be powerful to be what you look like…In the end, the joy of the castrated boy is that which he initially dreaded to be mistaken for someone that you are.” This quote is deep and supports the response that there is an inappropriate theory of lack of homosexual development. The lag confesses that an effeminate boy receives unhappiness in which homosexuality is not the norm in society, and rather is a site of failure.