Imagine it: Mum is a Born Again Christian and Dad is a Roman Catholic and you’ve decided that you’re finally going to come out to both of them.
Naturally, the prospect is a little daunting, but could you imagine if your parents reaction was to send you off to Gay Conversion School, where men go to rid themselves of homosexual tendencies and become ‘ex-gays’?
For openly out comedian Anthony Menchetti, this was exactly what happened, although the whole process ‘failed spectacularly’. Clearly. Hence the title of his show, Gay Conversion School Drop Out.
‘Didn’t work, no,’ Menchetti laughed on the phone from Melbourne.
‘The whole premise of it is to turn people from gay to straight under the belief that gay people don’t go to heaven, they get tortured in hell and all that stuff.
‘So I went because my parents suggested strongly that I do and I was pretty young so I went and gave it a shot. I was there for about two years and worked pretty hard at it but ended up having a bit of an affair with the team leader.’
Menchetti realised he was gay when he was 14, and tried to suppress the fact for a good four or five years by dating girls and generally running away from it all.
When he finally told his mother, she burst into tears and then suggested he go to Gay Conversion School, a program that operated in conjunction with her church and had been established by Sy Rogers, a prominent figure in gay conversion therapy.
‘He’s probably one of the only people I’ve ever met that have actually ever succeeded at converting,’ Menchetti said of Rogers.
‘I asked him outright as well if he was still attracted to men he said it basically didn’t matter what he felt because his relationship with God was stronger.
‘So whatever he felt he suppresses and pushes aside for the greater good of God.’
What followed at Conversion School was a complete purging of all homoerotic pursuits: no more late night SBS; no more catalogues with Bonds models in them; no more buying swimming trunks online.
But of course, put a group of abstaining men in the one room, discussing their sexual fantasies in an attempt to purge them, and you could imagine the ensuing sexual tension.
Hence Menchetti eventually falling for his team leader.
‘He was someone who had been celibate for two years,’ Menchetti said.
‘He was the team leader of the group because he had succeeded at being celibate and stuff , but there was a miscommunication: there was a barbecue at one of the church people’s houses and it got cancelled but we weren’t told about it so we ended up rocking up there alone and chatting for a while and it turns out he wasn’t really that celibate.
‘It all started that night. We ended up going to Connections and partying on.’
What followed is all revealed in Menchetti’s hilarious show, Gay Conversion School Drop Out, which features plenty of one-liners and even some songs, such as The Steps To Conversion.
Menchetti himself has been praised as one of the top 10 performers at the recent Edinburgh Fringe Festival, his short but sweet season in Perth promising to be hilarious and memorable.
But the experience of Gay Conversion School is summarised most succinctly by: ‘It was massively demented really.’
Gay Conversion School Drop Out appears Downstairs At His Maj as part of the Cabaret Soiree Carnivale. It runs from Thursday August 5 until Saturday August 7. www.bocsticketing.com.au
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
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