News / Society

“Therapist” tries to cure gay teen by making her carry a backpack full of rocks. - "It's not going to work. What it's going to do is damage you."

A 21-year-old gay woman is telling the harrowing tale of abuse and humiliation she faced at the hands of gay conversion therapists in Utah. In her book Saving Alex: When I Was Fifteen I Told My Mormon Parents I Was Gay, and That’s When My Nightmare Began, Alex Cooper writes vividly of her experiences going to gay conversion therapy upon telling her Mormon parents that she was a lesbian.

The therapy took place at the home of a couple with no formal training or licensure, but who had promised Cooper’s parents that they would be able to turn her straight.

PHOTO: JOANNABROOKS.ORG

Cooper told Publishers Weekly that among the many abuses she faced in therapy, the most painful involved a regimen in which she would wear a backpack full of heavy rocks and face a wall for upwards of 18 hours a day.

When she tried to run away, one of her therapists “made a fist and punched me in the gut, knocking the wind out of me. I doubled over and choked for breath.”

Thankfully, she was finally able to escape, according to the Salt Lake Tribune: “Eight months, at least one suicide attempt and several escape efforts later, Cooper managed to break free and get help to be herself from friends, lawyers and the courts. She reconnected with her parents after they agreed to an unprecedented court order in Utah not to try to change her orientation.”

“It’s like sending you to therapy to change your eye color,” Cooper said of her time in conversion therapy.

“It’s not going to work. What it’s going to do is damage you.”

Cooper was able to finish high school, earn a cosmetology certificate, and now lives alone and supports herself.