Radiolab - UnErased: Smid

Today on Radiolab, we're playing the fourth and final episode of a series Jad worked on called UnErased: The history of conversion therapy in America. Imagine... You’re openly gay. Then, you become the leader of the largest ex-gay organization and, under your leadership, many lives are destroyed. You leave that organization, come out as gay - again - and find love. Do you deserve to be happy? This is a story of identity, making amends and John Smid’s reckoning with his life. UnErased is a series with Focus Features, Stitcher and Limina House in conjunction with the feature film, BOY ERASED. Special thanks go out to the folks at Anonymous Content for their support of UnErased. If you want to hear the whole series, you can find UnErased in all the usual podcast places. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Duration: 52m
Broadcast on: 27 Nov 2018
Audio Format: other

Today on Radiolab, we're playing the fourth and final episode of a series Jad worked on called UnErased: The history of conversion therapy in America.

Imagine... You’re openly gay. Then, you become the leader of the largest ex-gay organization and, under your leadership, many lives are destroyed. You leave that organization, come out as gay - again - and find love. Do you deserve to be happy? This is a story of identity, making amends and John Smid’s reckoning with his life.

UnErased is a series with Focus Features, Stitcher and Limina House in conjunction with the feature film, BOY ERASED. Special thanks go out to the folks at Anonymous Content for their support of UnErased.

If you want to hear the whole series, you can find UnErased in all the usual podcast places.

Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

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Oh wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. Okay, are you there? Bubbert? Hello. Okay, there you are. I'm Chad Abenrod. I'm Robert Krollich, this is Radio Lab. Yes, sir. Okay, we're going to continue with one more episode from the series Unraced. What did you do for somebody else, but we're including here? I was kind of for somebody else, but also for us at the same time. It all was kind of squishy, to be honest. So I've produced a four-part series along with Focus Features, Stitcher, Limina House, that was about the history of conversion therapy in America. It's people who are gay, who are being pushed to or asked to or want to be straight. Yes, and sometimes it's a therapy type situation, science-y, sometimes it's a church type situation. Here's a funny thing, Robert. You would think it doesn't happen a lot, right? These days, I think certainly less, certainly less than before. Well, there was a survey done recently by a group at UCLA at the Williams Institute in conjunction with Gallup Polling. They did a survey they looked at of the people in America who identify as LGBTQ, which is about 4.5%, roughly, 13 million people. How many of those people have gone through something like conversion therapy? And the number was completely shocking to me. Shockingly small, what kind of shock? Almost 700,000 people. In the 1970s and '80s and so on. Yeah, I mean, but also recently, recently, this was a survey done in 2012, and I just want to give you a sense of scale. Okay. 700,000 people, that is the equivalent of the city of Boston. That's the number of people we're talking about. That's a lot of freaking people. That's a lot of people. Now, to your question, you would think it would be mostly older folks? Yes, from the days when it was an abomination and now no longer, really, for many families. No, it was actually equally prevalent in all age groups. I mean, the survey found that just as many young people, teens, were being put through these kinds of programs as people of older generations. Wow, that is surprising. The prevalence wasn't going down. If anything, just as LGBTQ people are being embraced in the wider culture, there has been a kind of silent re-entrenchment in certain communities in America. Yeah. And so that was part of the whole reason to do this project, is that there's this thing happening that we're not really looking at, and it's got a whole history to it that's troubling but also kind of fascinating. So, I want to play the final episode in the four-part series, it deals with, well, it deals with one of the central guys in that history.

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