An American student has described how he was tortured for a month by his father in an effort to turn him heterosexual.
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.
His father responded by knocking him out so brutally, he needed hospital treatment.
Samuel was interviewed as part of a project by a group called I’m From Driftwood, which travelled across the US to find untold LGBT stories.
He described how his father told him he was the only gay person left in the country and the government would soon find him and kill him.
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.
Samuel says he considered suicide, even climbing on to the roof of a three-storey building. His mother, he says, told him she would love him again if he became straight.
The student said he then decided to pretend to be straight, which his parents accepted.
But when he came to leave home for university, he told them the truth and was warned by his father that he would be killed if he ever returned.
He said: “I’ve tried to call them multiple times. ‘I try to keep calling. I want contact.
“The last time [my dad told me] he would shoot me if I ever tried to walk in the door again.”
But he added he would still give his parents “the chance” to accept him in future.
