If There Was a Gay-Straight Switch, Would You Switch?

 

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Peterson Toscano, a gay Connecticut-based performance artist and comic, certainly wouldn't make the switch, and he has plenty of experience in trying to change his orientation.

Toscano, 42, spent 17 years in therapy to undo his homosexuality. "I was so ashamed of being gay that I tried everything -- it didn't matter who had the 'cure,' I tried it," he said. "I even went to a Jamaican exorcist woman in Brooklyn who was ranting and raving and trying to get me to vomit into a bucket."

Toscano also married a woman and spent two years at Love in Action, a Christian ministry for ex-gays in Memphis, Tenn. At one session, they were told that it was forbidden to use after-shave and cologne because those smells might remind you of your former gay lovers. Another time, Toscano had to talk about his most embarrassing sexual experience in front of his parents and the group. In the end, he realized that he was gay and that no amount of therapy would change that fact.

As a result, he would never contemplate a switch and compares switching to society's obsession with plastic surgery and body sculpting.

"I know so many people who did not want to be gay, and if they could have taken a pill, they would have in a minute," he said. Now they look back and think, 'Thank God, I didn't change.'"