Sam's family reacted to the first inklings of puberty by seeking medical help. As distasteful as it is, "your kid starting to become a teenager" is not cause for professional intervention. Sam was taken to "conversion therapy," which started with lies, and quickly devolved into torture.

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"Within my first weeks in therapy, I was told every other gay person on Earth had been executed. ... By the end of the so-called 'treatments,' I believed the government was looking for me because the gays had brought AIDS to America and that I now had this disease raging through me."

Then they asked him what he calls "overbearing Mother, absent Father questions." That is, they assumed that because he was gay, it's because his controlling mother and deadbeat dad had confused and irreparably traumatized his genitals. Only Sam's mother wasn't particularly overbearing, and his father was actually pretty present. In fact, they couldn't find any trauma to blame Sam's homosexuality on at all.