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... while I don't think it's especially relevant for this case, some of the details in Brinton's past summaries are extremely unusual, especially for their time period. Conversion therapy doesn't work, but even into the late-90s it'd mostly turned into very creepy talk therapy and sometimes the use of psychiatric drugs to reduce sex drive. Which can still get pretty damn overtly abusive!
Brinton alleged that an unnamed therapist applied severe heat, ice, needles, and electrical shocks. There were still therapists using electroshock aversives against children in the early 2000s, but even places like the Judge Rotenberg Center (mostly for autistics) were far outliers and acting in far more circumspect ways. Most serious reports along things line date back to the early 80s or late 70s. The scientific discrediting of aversion therapy probably wasn't enough evidence against its use by some of the more extreme anti-gay actors, but the combination of increasingly bad publicity related to the tactic and changing norms related to psychiatric therapists made it much less common.
And most of the stuff is in that class. It's not that Brinton's father shamed or even beat Brinton for being gay; on coming out, his father allegedly punched the child in the face hard enough to result in one of seven ER visits, and later aimed a gun at the kid. See here for a Blue Tribe perspective. It's possible Wesen's covering for the movement now, but he does point out suspicions dating back to 2011.
This isn't strong evidence: Wesen focuses on Brinton's unwillingness to name names, but it's not quite so completely unheard of to have difficulty with them. And there have been some reports of the use of foul-smelling chemical aversives into the mid-90s and early-00s. And violent threats aimed at gay children weren't completely unheard of in the 00s, and you'd expect some correlation between parents punching kids and parents willing to have their kids electrically shocked. But it raises some questions.
Thanks for the detailed response.
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