Kent Philpott and the Origins of Conversion Therapy
1960s San Francisco is remembered as the capital of gay liberation, but it also saw the birth of conversion therapy.
In the summer of 1967 thousands of young people descended on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district in search of sex, drugs, and transcendence. For many the ‘Summer of Love’ symbolised liberation from conformity and repression. But to Kent Philpott, a young Baptist seminarian, the Haight was not a utopia. It was a battlefield in the struggle against Satan.
Philpott, then a student at Golden Gate Baptist Seminary, felt called to minister to the hippies flooding into San Francisco. Long-haired and armed with an acoustic guitar, he blended into the counterculture. Yet his message could not have been more conservative and his experiences there laid the foundations for what would become known as the ‘ex-gay movement’.
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