ALBANY COUNTY — A county bill would prohibit minors from being subjected to “conversion therapy” — the practice, discredited by the United States Surgeon General in 2001, of trying to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

The bill is touted as sending a message that “conversion therapy” is wrong in a county where it is almost unheard of, but a former Berne resident who had a near-brush with conversion “therapy” says that it would expose such practices.

A man who is a member of the Albany chapter of the worldwide organization Courage International, a Catholic apostolate which “offers pastoral support to men and women experiencing same-sex attractions who have chosen to live a chaste life,” told The Enterprise that he is concerned that the county would be prohibiting “conversion therapy,” although Courage International does not promote it.

The bill for Local Law E will be discussed in a public hearing at the Albany County Legislature on April 24, pending approval at the regular legislative meeting on April 9.

The bill’s sponsor, Bryan Clenahan, a Democrat who represents part of Guilderland, said that “conversion therapy” — also called “reparative” or “curative” therapy — would be defined as professional services offered for a fee that would attempt to change someone’s sexual orientation.

While this law would not target unpaid efforts to change a person’s orientation such as through religious or familial pressures, Clenahan said it will still send a strong message, by fining practitioners, that efforts to change an individual’s sexual orientation are wrong.

“A tarbrush demonizing people seeking help”

The Albany chapter of Courage International has been open since 2007; although there was a “pause,” members began meeting again last summer in Troy, according to the member, Dave, who declined to give his last name, comparing the group to Alcoholics Anonymous.

The group meets monthly for 90-minute sessions for prayer and discussion, said Dave. There are five goals that the group follows, he said: to live a chaste life, to dedicate one’s entire life to Christ, to foster a spirit of fellowship, to be mindful that friendships are possible and even necessary, and to live as a good example to others.

The group ranges from about five to eight members, said Dave, and is mostly men, with ages ranging from 20s to 70s. Although the members come from the Albany area, some have come from as far as Kingston, Pittsfield, or Herkimer, he said.

Members have pursued what Dave described “minimizing same-sex attraction” and developing an attraction to the opposite gender in therapy, but Courage International does not promote this, he said. He himself does not identify as gay, although he still experiences what he describes as “same-sex attraction.”

Dave said he was raised Catholic, but left the church in his 20s and 30s and identified as gay, but he said he wasn’t happy. He said it was “destructive” when he was sexually active, because there was a lack of structure to a relationship outside of marriage.

“It’s really not what sexuality is, what God meant it to be used for,” he said.

When asked about the ability for a homosexual couple to legally marry, Dave said that this was not as binding as a religious marriage due to the ability to end a legal marriage in divorce. Catholic marriages can be annulled in the church through a multi-step process that finds the marriage invalid.

When he was in his 40s, a friend asked him to attend Mass. It was in the church, he said, that he found wholeness in the prayer and scripture.

Dave decided to return to the Catholic Church and discovered Courage International. He began attending meetings of Courage International at chapters in Syracuse and Springfield as well as national conferences.

“It’s the right thing for me,” he said. “It’s really a personal decision.”

Dave argued that the county legislature is not knowledgeable enough to make a decision about what he described as psychology.

“I feel so sad hearing about it,” he said of the proposed bill.

“Conversion therapy” is a term that is “a tarbrush used to demonize people looking for help,” said Dave, adding that Courage International is also misconstrued.

“You’re either under the rainbow flag or be a hater … ,” he said.

Dave himself supports anyone – of any age – to seek therapy, including therapy to change his or her sexuality. He argued that therapists would not be prohibited from encouraging children to explore their sexuality, something he believes could be harmful.

“It’s really child abuse”

In 2014, a similar bill which would have banned “conversion therapy” for minors in the City of Albany was introduced by then-Common Council member Judd Krasher. He did not pursue passing the bill, he said this week, after a similar bill was introduced at the state level. Krasher was not re-elected to his seat on the council after losing the Democratic primary last September to Alfredo Balarin.

“I struggle to use the word ‘conversion therapy,’” Krasher said. “Because it’s a bullshit term; it’s really child abuse.”

Other names for it include, he said, “corrective action” or a “Christian or Religious Intervention.”

Behind outlawing mental-health professionals from practicing it, Krasher believes “conversion therapy” should be considered a form of child abuse in order to protect children who are subjected to it by family members or religious leaders. He acknowledged that this could lead to a “gray area,” when dealing with religious freedom.

“If it is explicitly banned, it becomes easier to expose it,” he said.

Krasher, who is gay, has had a personal experience with “conversion therapy.” Although he lives now in Albany, he had lived in the town of Berne from the ages of 12 to 18. In 2006, when he was 18 and a senior at Berne-Knox-Westerlo High School, he was approached by two individuals about “conversion therapy.”

“Thankfully I did not go through with the actual therapy part,” he said.

Krasher had come out several months prior to being approached by the two individuals, and the word had spread around town, he said. The two people were part of a church in the Hilltowns, which he declined to name.

“I pretty much knew I was gay,” he said. “I was still in a state of denial.”

Krasher said he was waiting for the bus at the high school in Berne following an after-school program when the two individuals approached him about “conversion therapy.”

Vulnerable from the mixed reactions of friends and family and his own questioning of his sexuality, his interest was piqued, Krasher said. He met with the two people the next day at a local deli, he said. At the time, he didn’t know exactly what “conversion therapy” was.

The two individuals, who Krasher said were staunch Evangelicals — he himself was raised Presbyterian but is no longer religious — said that the therapy would involve “intense prayer sessions that would connect me with God,” he said. He was also told he would become more involved in “male heterosexual sports” and interacting with straight men.

He ultimately decided against it, he said.

“Some warning bells went off and I backed off very quickly,” Krasher said, of his second interaction with the two Evangelicals.

One warning sign, he said, was the manipulative, threatening manner they used in telling him what would happen should he not undergo “conversion therapy.” The individuals told Krasher that there was something wrong with him, he said, and that he would be going through “trials and tribulations” in his life should he continue to be gay. He was told that would be damned to hell, and that he “wasn’t going to have much of a life,” he said.

“I was being almost bullied into this,” he said.

However, Krasher said that two or three other gay students he knew at Berne-Knox-Westerlo did decide to attend this “conversion therapy.” These students would leave regularly for a particular church in the Hilltowns, he said, where they would spend about three hours undergoing talk therapy.

Krasher said that some “conversion therapy” reportedly involves “aversion therapy,” where the person undergoing “treatment” is made to have a physical reaction to images of same-sex relationships such as by being hit or forced to vomit. Although Krasher had been told by those who took part in the Hilltown sessions that it was talk therapy, he added, “I wasn’t sure to what extreme they would go to fix me.”

Some of his BKW friends attended for six, 12, or 18 months. While there was no physical intervention, Krasher said, the students suffered lasting psychological damage.

“They made it clear that it was a daily ritual of guilt and shaming … ,” he said. “And for them, all it did was exacerbate feelings of guilt, feelings of low self-esteem.”

For a vulnerable young adult in a place where gay relationships weren’t accepted, he said, “I could see how you would do anything to stop being gay.”

Krasher said that it is difficult for someone who underwent “conversion therapy” to discuss the experience. He himself did not talk about his close encounter with it for another three or four years.

“I was embarrassed,” he said.

Krasher said that there are others who have gone through “conversion therapy” in Albany County. But he said that these individuals who are still questioning themselves or have not come out risk exposing a church, congregation, or community that they are loyal to.

The same year that he was approached about undergoing “conversion therapy,” Krasher was running as the youngest candidate for the BKW School Board and attending the very selective New Visions Law and Government program, where he interned for the State Attorney General and the Assembly.

“Berne has give me so much, so I want to give back, to not only the students, but to the school in general,” he told The Enterprise at the time. He placed second, by only 25 votes, behind incumbent school board member John Harlow.

But despite this, Krasher said he felt ostracized in the school and the community. He had moved to Berne from Burnt Hills after his family’s home burned down, starting at BKW in the sixth grade, where he was bullied relentlessly from that time onward, he said.

“I was called a faggot, a homo,” he said, adding he was never attacked but was physically “knocked around.” He said that this was done on the suspicion that he was gay, though he had not come out at the time or even knew for sure himself.

“So those bullies that were there when I was 12 or 13, they existed when I was 17, 18,” he said.

Krasher said he was part of a small group of students at BKW High School who were gay and were faced with what he called “an attitude, sort of, that it was not OK to be gay.”

When debates over gay marriage came about as he grew older, other students had “very ugly opinions about gay people, LGBT people,” he said.

Krasher said he did not date in high school, due to his fear of verbal or physical retaliation.

His teachers at BKW, however, offered some relief; they told him being gay wasn’t something to be ashamed of.

“Across the board, they were wonderfully supportive,” he said of his high school teachers.

When he did decide to come out as being gay, the response was mixed among friends and family. His mother and brother were supportive, but his estranged father said he would “get AIDS.” There were mixed reactions in his extended family, and some friends were fine with it and others distanced themselves.

In the years since he lived in the Hilltowns, Krasher said that he has seen attitudes towards the LGBT community improve, but says that there has not been a “100-percent change.” He said, however, that it is wrong to solely associate rural areas with homophobia. He has met others who faced worse discrimination in suburban and urban areas, Krasher said.

“Homophobia doesn’t have a geography attached to it; it doesn’t have an ethnicity attached to it,” he said.

Proposed law

Penalties for practicing “conversion therapy” would be in the form of a fine, said Clenahan; up to $1,000 would be charged for a first offense, $2,500 for a second, and $5,000 would be charged for each following offense.

“Conversion therapy has been shown, in any number of cases, to be very emotionally harmful,” he said. He added that there have been reports of conversion therapy involving physical treatment that “borders on torture.”

Most national medical and psychiatric groups condemn the practice, he noted. This includes the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Psychological Association.

Clenahan said he was not sure if “conversion therapy” occurs in Albany County, but said he knows it occurs in New York State, citing a statistic from a 2015 report issued for the LGBT Community Center and the New York State LGBT Health and Human Services Network, which states that 10.5 percent of sexual minority youth aged 16 to 24 in the state have been subjected to “conversion therapy,” either through a counselor or religious figure. Transgender or gender-nonconforming youth reported that they had been subjected at an even higher rate, of 14.2 percent.

The same report also describes LGBT youth as being shamed or punished for gender expression, such as acting too masculine or too feminine.

The Enterprise could not find listed practices in Albany County offering services to change someone’s sexuality or gender identity.

“Conversion therapy” has already been banned in New York City, this past December; and has been banned for minors in Erie County, in March.

Governor Andrew Cuomo banned insurers from covering “conversion therapy” in the state in 2016.

A state bill to ban conversion therapy for minors passed in the Assembly with an overwhelming majority of votes last March. The bill died in the Senate in January, but was requested for committee consideration in March.

Clenahan, who is an attorney for the State Senate, hopes that municipalities banning “conversion therapy” will encourage the state government to do the same. He said he is not sure why such a bill is not moving forward at the state level, calling it “common sense” to pass it.

“I’m very hopeful that it will pass, and it will pass very quickly,” Clenahan said of the bill.