A college student says his father tortured him after he came out at age 12. Pink News reports:
Samuel Brinton, a student at Kansas State University, said his Southern Baptist missionary father beat him, burned him and shocked him with electric currents.
He said his family, who lived on a missionary base in Iowa, first realised he was gay at the age of 12, when he told his father that he felt more strongly about his male best friend than models in Playboy magazine.
According to Brinton, his father told him that he had AIDS and that the government was hunting down gay children. Then he allegedly subjected his son to homemade conversion therapy. It was unimaginably brutal:
He said he was beaten badly by his father to the point of being hospitalised six times, although doctors were told that he had fallen down the stairs.
Samuel was also burned or forced to hold ice cubes while looking at pictures of men embracing to make him associate male intimacy with pain.
The worst came in the form of the “month of hell”, in which needles were stuck in his fingers to administer electric shocks while he was shown gay porn.
Brinton finally relented and pretended to be straight to avoid punishment. Shortly before going to college, though, he told his family the truth. His father kicked him out of the house and allegedly threatened to kill him if he ever came near the family again.
Brinton now appears to be in high spirits, and he's still offering his parents the chance to accept him. They haven't returned any of his calls.
He was interviewed for I'm From Driftwood, a fascinating project that's documenting untold LGBT stories across the country.
Watch, AFTER THE JUMP...