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Smid explained that teenage participants in Refuge are forbidden to speak with anyone the program does not approve of. In an interview early this month at his headquarters, a weathered 1960's A-frame building, which was until recently a vacant Episcopal Church, Mr. Smid, the executive director of Love in Action, declined to discuss the details of Zach's experience, citing the program's confidentiality rules. But I can't help it - no I'm not going to commit suicide - all I can think about is killing my mother and myself. He described arguments he had been having with his parents, his mother in particular. on June 4, Zach wrote, "I pray this blows over," adding that if his parents caught him online he'd be in trouble. In his last blog entry before beginning the program, at 2:33 a.m.
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To others he is a boy whose confused and formative sexual identity is being exploited by gay political activists. To some, Zach, whose family name is not disclosed on his blog and has not appeared in news accounts, is the embodiment of gay adolescent vulnerability, pulled away from friends who accepted him by adults who do not. The investigation was dropped when the allegation proved unfounded, a spokeswoman for the agency said. Programs like Love in Action have always been controversial, but Zach's blog entries have brought wide attention to a less-known aspect of them, their application to teenagers.Īlthough Zach wrote only a handful of entries about the Refuge program, all posted before he arrived there in the Memphis suburbs on June 6, his words have been forwarded on the Internet over and over, inspiring online debates, news articles, sidewalk protests and an investigation into Love in Action by the Tennessee Department of Children's Services in response to a child abuse allegation.
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Often called reparative or conversion therapy, such programs took hold in fundamentalist Christian circles in the 1970's, when mainstream psychiatric organizations overturned previous designations of homosexuality as a mental disorder, and gained ground rapidly from the late 90's. The camp in question, Refuge, is a youth program of Love in Action International, a group in Memphis that runs a religion-based program intended to change the sexual orientation of gay men and women. "If I do come out straight, I'll be so mentally unstable and depressed it won't matter." "It's like boot camp," Zach added in a dispatch the next day. It was another sentence in the Web log: "Today, my mother, father and I had a very long 'talk' in my room, where they let me know I am to apply for a fundamentalist Christian program for gays." Teenagers have been outing themselves online for years, and many of Zach's friends already knew he was gay. MEMPHIS - IT was the sort of confession that a decade ago might have been scribbled in a teenager's diary, then quietly tucked away in a drawer: "Somewhat recently," wrote a boy who identified himself only as Zach, 16, from Tennessee, on his personal Web page, "I told my parents I was gay." He noted, "This didn't go over very well," and "They tell me that there is something psychologically wrong with me, and they 'raised me wrong."'īut what grabbed the attention of Zach's friends and subsequently of both gay activists and fundamentalist Christians around the world who came across the entry, made on May 29, was not the intimacy of the confession.