CONVERSION THERAPY

As part of the Ban Conversion Therapy campaign — applying pressure on the UK government to act on its 2018 pledge to stamp out the insidious practice — Amir*, a medical student from London, shares his story of visiting a Harley Street psychiatrist who claimed he could change his sexuality with medicine

As told to Thomas Stichbury

I didn’t have that classic thing of always knowing that I was gay. It was something I came to terms with when I was 16, 17.

There was one person, a schoolteacher, that I knew I liked. I was in admiration of them, and I was really confused: do I want to be like them? Do I just want to be in their company? Then I, kind of, found that, no, I was thinking about them even when I was at home. It dawned on me that, maybe I do have romantic and, I guess, sexual feelings towards this person, which was unfamiliar for me.

Growing up, I didn’t really have sexual thoughts or romantic feelings towards anybody. I don’t know if that was partly to do with my conservative Muslim upbringing; dating is not encouraged, and there is an expectation that you will meet someone from the mosque community.

My family are of Pakistani origin, we speak Urdu, and I don’t know if there is even a word for “gay”. For the longest time, the words that were used were swearwords. One of them was “kanjar” and I think that translates as someone who is sexually promiscuous or immoral, “like an animal”. That’s a slur that is used towards LGBT people, or people that are not very religious and go off the rails. That was their word for “gay”. Ironically, “gay” was seen as a greater swearword. There were such negative connotations.

I REMEMBER my dad called me into his room and he sat me down and said, “Your brother said you don’t feel like coming to the mosque. What’s happening?” I said, “I really can’t explain, and I don’t want to go into it until after my A-level exams are done.” He goes, “What have you done?” I replied, “No, it’s more to do with me fundamentally as a person.” He immediately went to saying, “Well, what are you? Some kind of queer?”