In between studying for finals and the general busyness of college life, Aaron Rad, a junior at USC’s Marshall School of Business, has been preparing to release a musical confessional about his time in conversion therapy when he was 17 years old.
For three years, Rad was reluctant to discuss this dark period. Now, he is writing and recording a song titled “Suffering Id” about his experiences in the conversion therapy, with a release date later this month.
“The whole song is steeped with all my skeletons,” Rad said. “I was so scared to tell even my friends and people I was in relationships with. I wouldn’t tell them about my conversion therapy experience and now I’m publishing a song about it on Spotify. It’s like a whole 180.”
Rad’s time in conversion therapy was instigated during the fall of his senior year at Palisades Charter High School in West Los Angeles when he was outed as gay to his parents by a close confidante.
“When they told my parents, for two weeks my mom was online searching for ‘why my son is gay’ and she found a bunch of this scary information that isn’t true,” Rad said.
Rad said his mother saw being gay as “a death sentence," thinking his “life would be easier” if he were straight.
As a result, Rad said his mother bought him a book on “how to go from gay to straight” and was recommended to a therapist who could aid in that conversion.
However, Rad is insistent his parents’ intentions were never malicious. Both of Rad’s parents are observant Jewish immigrants from Iran, a culture where Rad said "you can get capital punishment for being queer in any capacity.” His parents had no exposure to the queer community, so he said they were simply misguided and unaware of the potential psychological distress the therapy could precipitate.
“They were just so scared for my well-being that they wanted to do anything to keep me safe, and in their minds the best way to keep me safe was to make me straight,” Rad said.
Rad said he went to his first session with no intention or desire to change his sexuality, but went because his father and brother begged him to go out of concern for his mother’s emotional state. He said he did not know that the intention of the therapy was to change his sexuality, but realized it quickly when he saw religious iconography.
“It was a random office that this guy had been renting out close to Beverly Hills,” Rad said. “He claimed to be a rabbi and I didn’t see any documentation that he was a certified therapist.”
The first therapy session was a group session including Rad, his parents and the professed therapist rabbi, who Rad asked not to name specifically. Rad characterized the session as him being “interrogated,” with the “therapist” (Rad used this term with air quotes repeatedly) asking him to answer invasive questions in front of his parents, including if he watched pornography, which men he had been sexually attracted to and if he had sexual encounters with men.
According to Rad, there were three one-on-one sessions with the therapist, which culminated in the therapist suggesting “heavier psychoanalysis by getting wires taped to [his] head and being shown visual stimuli."
"He thought he could make a more targeted approach if I did that,” Rad said.
After this session, Rad told his parents he could no longer see the therapist. Rad then attended four sessions with a second therapist who Rad said “is a [professionally certified] therapist [who] claims he was able to convert himself from being gay to straight.”
Despite his claims of changing his own sexuality, this therapist did not aggressively or conspicuously attempt to convert Rad. After approximately eight weeks of therapy, however, Rad stopped attending the sessions.
Then came the psychological fallout. Rad described “shattered confidence,” panic attacks, thoughts of self-harm, crying in secret and strained relationships with his family, including not talking to them for months on end despite living in the same house.
“It still haunts me sometimes. It’s not something I feel like is just going to go away,” said Rad. “There was a whole period where I had to self-soothe. It made it very difficult to get close to people, which is something else we talk about in the song.”
The song, titled “Suffering Id,” began as an assignment in a USC songwriting class. The title alludes to the Freudian term for “the primitive and instinctual part of the mind that contains sexual and aggressive drives and hidden memories”, according to the organization Simply Psychology.
“It all started with the line ‘consciously I’m evergreen but subconsciously my mind just bleeds,’” Rad said, explaining that the song details someone who appears fine on the outside, yet is struggling emotionally.
“There was this one night where I was crying on the bathtub floor, and I remember when I got out of the shower I just sat down and I wrote like four pages of what was on my mind,” Rad said.
Sofia Lopez, a fellow Marshall student and friend of Rad’s, learned of his experience a year and a half prior to him writing the song. When he performed the song for her using a random YouTube beat for an instrumental backing, Lopez used her budding interest in music production to produce track specific for the song.
“I constantly go back to the beat to keep improving on it,” said Lopez. “We wanted a soft vibe for it. I wanted Aaron’s vocals to the center point of the song.”
The result is what Rad describes as “dreamy R&B”; equal parts his R&B influences and Lopez’s EDM and ambient styles. Lyrically, Rad begins by addressing “trauma” and referencing the cover art visual of a “bleeding brain.” By the second verse, the ambiguity gives way to pure storytelling about the conversion therapy.
“I hope people are honestly just touched when they listen to the song,” Lopez said. “[I hope] that they’re touched on a deeper emotional level.”
Rad said he hopes his story brings awareness that “just because something is illegal doesn’t mean it’s not happening.” He alludes to the fact that California is one of 18 states and the District of Columbia that have banned medical professionals from using conversion therapy on minors.
In 2018, a bill banning paid conversion therapy for adults was shelved.
In the three years since going to conversion therapy, Rad said he is finding greater peace.
“I’m realizing that [the therapists’] hate is just ignorance recycled," he said. "Forgiveness has to be for me, not them, but it is hard to forgive their actions.”
Though his family has not explicitly apologized and the experience is somewhat of an unspoken elephant in the room, Rad said he has grown his relationship with his family again and that they understand that what they did came from a lack of understanding.
Ignorance and a lack of awareness seems to be the common thread between the therapists, his family and the person who outed him, Rad said. He feels “no antipathy toward any of them, especially [his] family.” Consequently, the intention behind “Suffering Id” seems to be to encourage greater understanding.
“Moving forward, I just want to continue fostering love in myself, even for those who I may not be on the best terms with, for my own well-being and mental health,” Rad said.