Ecuador: Novelist releases book in English on Gay Conversion Therapy

“Ecuador lives a facade of lies. People from around the world say it is a secular and progressive country, which it absolutely is not. The reality is far from that.” (César L. Baquerizo)

Vice.com reported in 2013, César L. Baquerizo’s novel about the horrors of gay reparative therapy in his native Ecuador, Un Lugar Seguro Contigo (“A Safe Place With You”), was first published in Spanish. Otherwise known as “conversion therapy,” gay reparative therapy is a slate of “psychological treatments” intended to convert patients from homosexual to heterosexual. They often employ emotionally scarring and clinically unproven techniques which have been banned in many countries around the world—but the practice remains legal in much of America, and proliferates in countries like Ecuador, where 80 percent of citizens are Catholic.

SAFETY, HEALTH, SECURITY IN ECUADOR – ONE BOOK THAT NEEDS TO BE READ

Baquerizo’s novel is set in the early 1990s, when homosexuality was still criminalized and hundreds of clinics operated in the country. It relates the journey of two young men from Guayaquil, Tomás and Sebastián, as they progress through one such clinic named “Grow and Live Normally.” Read Article