Gay to Straight: Stacey Dooley Explores Controversial Sexual Conversion Therapy

A BBC3 documentary looks at how teens in the US are turning to gay conversion therapy in an effort to turn them heterosexual.

Gay to Straight: Stacey Dooley in the USA is the second episode in the three-part series looking at US youth culture.

TJ, a 19-year-old who features in the programme, has been encouraged by his parents to have gay conversion therapy for the last five years. Although he now says he is not attracted to men, he also has no interest in women.

In the documentary, Dooley travels to the west of the US. She also meets Danny, who has been married to Erin for five years and has children with her.

Danny believes having gay conversion therapy has allowed him to stay married.

The final part of the show sees Dooley visit a camp for men. They hope that bonding and embracing their masculinity will turn them straight.

This programme follows the news that California has become the first state in the US to ban such therapy for under-18s.

Governor Jerry Brown signed the legislation into law, meaning psychotherapy that tries to turn gay teens straight will be illegal from 1 January.

Brown said the therapy had "no basis in science or medicine".

Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT activist group, said young people in California would now be "protected from a practice that has not only been debunked as junk science, but has been proven to have drastically negative effects on their wellbeing".

The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy wrote to its 30,000 members to say gay-to-staight therapies were unethical.

"[The BACP] opposes any psychological treatment such as 'reparative' or 'conversion' therapy which is based upon the assumption that homosexuality is a mental disorder, or based on the premise that the client/patient should change his/her sexuality," it said.

But Andrea Williams, chief executive of Christian Concern, said: "Counselling and psychotherapy are based on the assumption that people can change. Yet it would appear that the BACP abandons that notion when it comes to human sexuality. This is in spite of evidence that people's sexual attractions can change.

"To deny people the option of receiving this kind of therapy is to deny people the opportunity to try and change if they want to. This does not appear to be in line with the caring nature of the profession but rather panders to the politically correct brigade."