Hello, everybody, and welcome to Outward Slate's LGBTQ podcast. I'm Brian Louder and editor at Slate.

Regular listeners will probably have noticed that we end every show with a little reminder or

even exhortation you might say to stay gay we started doing this early on

because we thought it was a cute sign-off but also because as we all know

there are plenty of people and institutions that would very much like for us

not to stay gay or trans that would like to see us change to straight or cis or barring that be erased

from the world entirely. But that idea frankly sucks and so we stay gay. On this week's show,

we're going to hear about one of the most insidious forms of anti-gay and trans repression out

there, the ideology and practice of so-called conversion therapy. In the book, shame, sex,

attraction, survivor stories of conversion therapy, Lucas F.W. Wilson, a scholar of religion,

literature, and history, and a conversion therapy survivor himself, collects the testimonies of those

who've been subjected to various attempts to quash and supplant their queerness. It's a harrowing read,

but an important one now, I think,

as we head into a second Trump term that is already being marked by increasing anti-queer

and transactions, and where, despite bans currently on the books and blew in some purple

states on conversion therapy, we're likely to see an increase in this kind of quackery under

the guise of religious liberty. We'll be back to talk with Lucas about all that after a short break.

All right, we are back.

Lucas Wilson is a Shirk Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, and

was formerly the Justice, Equity and Transformation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University

of Calgary.

In addition to editing shame, sex attraction, he is the author of At Home with the Holocaust, post-memory, domestic space,

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