He had a talk with the priest in the village. Cristi asked him what was Jesus’s most important commandment, and the priest responded: Thou shalt love thy neighbor. Cristi told him that this isn’t the whole commandment. “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. The most powerful part of the commandment is as thyself. You ignore that. You don’t teach people to love themselves, you teach them to hate themselves. And so, if I was taught from a young age to hate myself, to hate what I feel and, effectively, hate myself, what love can I give to someone else if I have no love for myself?”

He told the priest that he felt abandoned by him. “I just needed you to put your robe aside for five minutes and ask me What’s going on? How are you? I started to cry. He felt it, too—that he didn’t do something and he should have. I told him: I really felt your absence. But it was no use. The demands of the job are so much that he can’t stop it.”

He wanted to see a priest who would reassure him, what the hell, there’s nothing wrong, you’re fine. Right after going to therapy, he realized a priest couldn’t truly help him. “Because right when I’d find the priest to say it, he’d be outside the church framework. And I realized that, in my case, I needed validation from the entire Orthodox church. And I thought what the hell, are you stupid? You want to change the church? I mean, I never was a half believer. I was a believer. And then the burden was even heavier.”

The Pill

The theory underlying conversion therapy is the claim that homosexuality is an illness that can be cured, usually through faith or sexual abstinence. This is what the priest and the confessor suggested for Cristi.

In 2012, the World Health Organization (WHO) decided that therapies to change sexual orientation lack medical justification and threaten health. “Since homosexuality is not a disorder or a disease, it does not require a cure,” said Mirta Roses Periago, the former director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).

In a quick Google search of the word homosexualitate (homosexuality), the first results take you to sites that present homosexuality as a treatable disease. If you’re a young person with questions about his or her sexuality, or a mother trying to get her head around the sexual orientation of her child, you’re going to read that homosexuality can be treated, that the highest percentages of mental diseases are among homosexuals and that most pedophiles are homosexual.

Some of these sites are directly or indirectly related to Coaliția pentru Familie (Coalition for Family).

The first page that appears in the search is the site homosexualitate.ro, which promises “A Hope and a Cure for Homosexuals.” It offers information about reducing and eliminating “same sex attraction, confessions of people who succeeded and comments and analyses of social norms.” The former IP address of the site also hosted the webpages Coalition for Family, PRO VITA Bucharest and Cultura Vieții (Life Culture).

Still on the first page of the Google search, there’s an article called “10 myths about homosexuality” published on activenews.ro. The article was taken from the book, Fața Nevăzută a Homosexualității (The Unseen Face of Homosexuality), by Virgiliu Gheorghe and Andrei Dîrlău, published by Christiana publishing house, owned by Pavel Chirilă, a member of the Initiative Committee for the Coalition for Family. The book aims to help “people oppressed by the engulfing passion of homosexuality to realize that there is a way back to normalcy” and to make us aware that “homosexual propaganda represents the greatest assault on the human race in all of history.”

The books co-author, Virgiliu Gheorghe, is a specialist in bioethics, in the "destructive effects of pornography" and in addiction to television. Beyond this, Virgiliu, under his real name, Virgiliu George Vlăescu, is an associate of George Becali with the Imunomedica ProVita SRL company, which supports treating cancer with alternative methods such as oxygen and heat therapy.

One of the main ideas of the book Fața Nevăzută a Homosexualității is that changing sexual orientation is possible. They reference the American psychiatrist Robert Spitzer: “Similarly, Robert Spitzer, a pro-gay psychiatrist, also considered that changing is real and there are no negative consequences. (Spitzer, 2003)” In the book however, an important piece of information was omitted. After retiring, Spitzer acknowledged that his study was flawed, and apologized to the gay community.

If society views homosexuality as a disease, there are those who’d like to “cure” it. Or to “cure” you. 10-15 years ago, Cristi thought that if there were a magic pill that could “rid” you of homosexuality, he’d take it. He wouldn’t have problems with the church anymore, he could have a regular family and he would go back to being a functional person.

After beginning to accept himself in 2015, he pondered the same question. This time, it was clear to him that he wouldn’t take the imaginary pill. “It would have meant giving up on myself, transforming myself into something I’m not. Lying to myself.”

Auntie Anica

One of the first people Cristi told about his sexuality was his 22-year-old niece. It was in the fall of 2015. They went to the mall together in Cluj and, before leaving, she asked what plans he had for the rest of the evening. He said he was meeting someone for pizza and showed her a picture of the guy. He told her he’s gay.

“I was having a panic attack then. I was hyperventilating. And she goes, Are you kidding? I don’t believe you. You don’t believe me? I took her hand and put it on my chest. I think my heart was going at 200 beats per minute.”

Then he talked with the girl’s mother, his older sister. It was a week before Christmas and he remembers that he had to slaughter the poultry. After their mother died in 2005, his sister took over the role of the family matriarch, which made it difficult to tell her. He tried to prepare for her shock. “I was preparing for her to be freaked out. I thought there was no way she wouldn’t freak out. And when I told her, I got freaked out because she wasn’t freaked out.” She asked him if it would have been easier if their mother hadn’t died. Then, she suggested he not tell anyone else. “I told her not to worry, I wasn’t going to commit social suicide. But things went on differently. I didn’t commit social suicide, but I talked to people about it.”

In the same period, he went to Auntie Anica’s for coffee, a neighbor of his, over 60 years old. She asked him what was going on with him because he seemed down. “You know we can talk about anything.” And he worked up the courage to tell her he was gay. She was shocked at first, but also curious. They talked for several hours. “And at one point during the discussion, she said, Well, I think I’ll love the person you’ll be as much I love you now. Obviously, I started crying on the spot.”