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Law lagged far behind. A 1952 congressional enactment required the Immigration and Naturalization Service to exclude individuals “afflicted with psychopathic personality” from the United States. Everyone at the time understood this category to encompass homosexuals. When the APA depathologized homosexuality in 1973, its president urged the INS to stop exclusions based on homosexuality. The INS refused. Not until 1990, seventeen years after the DSM deletion, did it surrender the power to exclude homosexuals as psychopaths.

Today, conversion therapy grows scarce. The major mental health associations, such as the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association, have withdrawn their support for the practice. Conversion therapists bemoan their beleaguered status, claiming Americans have been “brainwashed” into accepting homosexuality. Responsibility for converting gays has devolved back to religious organizations, such as Exodus International and Quest. These two groups have had their own difficulties, as the “ex-gays” who led them have subsequently reemerged as “ex-ex-gays.”

The world is changing; the stories I hear are changing. A colleague recounts how his friend, a gay man, was taken to a mental hospital as a teenager by his parents, who wanted to commit him. He struggled so desperately he smashed the windshield of the car, but they literally dragged him to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist calmly told the parents he was more inclined to commit them than to commit their son. He told them to go home. I imagine the gay teenager’s ride back behind the broken windshield, the dome of heaven cracked, the lid taken off his world.

My friend David tells me that when he came out at nineteen, his parents took him to the family minister, who had known David all his life. The minister listened silently as his parents detailed their shame, their love, their confusion, and above all, their request that David be converted at whatever cost. David waited sullenly for the verdict, his dread tasting like tinfoil in his mouth. “I have three sons,” the minister finally said. “My hope for each of them is that they turn out as well as David. So if you want David to change, I am not your man.” I heard this story when I asked David, now a social worker in his late thirties, how his parents had become so active in gay rights. He dates it to this conversation, which he says began their conversion.

The formal demand that gays convert is loosening its grip on our culture. The triple engines of social regulation—law, medicine, and religion—have all begun to retire the demand. So where do I see its modern vestiges?

I see them in my own history. After my first term at Oxford, I started to see a psychiatrist. He looked like Orville Redenbacher from the popcorn commercials, with the white hair and the glasses, so I dubbed him Orville in my mind. If his home office was any indication, Orville was an avid gardener. Every surface was populated with flowers—hyacinths, cyclamen, and orchids, orchids everywhere, labial and purple or feathery and pert, arching off their supports. I hated those orchids on sight, as a too obvious metaphor for sexual knowledge, and, no doubt, for how they listed toward the light. Let us admit I was not well then.

I never asked Orville to convert me. But this was the cure I was secretly seeking. My depression and my homosexuality had formed such a terrible braid I could not imagine one going away without the other. When I said, Take this away, I could not have specified the referent.

I cannot remember all of Orville’s attempts to pry these two conditions apart. I know time passed in that office, as the orchids unfisted into savage and delicate colors, grew papery and fell, and were replaced. I can see him now on the screen of my mind—speaking, listening, opening his hands toward me. But I cannot hear the words. I can only admire the locksmith patience with which he tried every combination to my padlocked mind.

The click, when it came, was simple.