‘I truly believed I would be more valuable to the world if I were heterosexual’

In an interview out in tomorrow's edition of MaltaToday, American performance artist and gay activist Peterson Toscano speaks about his harrowing experience of 'reparative therapy' meant to stamp out his sexuality.

"I truly believed I would be more valuable to the world if I were heterosexual. The messages I heard in church, at home, in the media, and on the playground all reinforced the idea that heterosexuality was superior to anything else and anyone who deviated from it would be punished in one way or another. In many ways I was a coward, afraid to face the consequences of being honest about who I was," Toscano said, adding that he has been following Malta's own controversy over similar 'gay conversion' techniques.

"We need to have an adult conversation about why people pursue or push these fake therapies designed to de-gay people and the dire long-term consequences that often come from them," he said.

Toscano, who has since been happily married to his husband Glen while remaining a practicing Christian, will be performing at St James Cavalier on September 21 and 22 with the intriguingly-entitled Jesus Had Two Daddies. The show will fall in line with his attempts to explore the tensions between homosexuality and faith, and, perhaps surprisingly, Toscano claimed that he didn't have to venture very far from Scripture to locate pertinent passages from the Bible itself.

Commenting on how the Bible is full of "off-the-wall stories that often get overlooked because theologians and ministers have no idea what to do with them", Toscano said that "it turns out most of the Bible stories I tell in Jesus Had Two Daddies have something to do with bloody genitals".

Read the full interview in this Sunday's edition of MaltaToday.