News & Stories

“I’ve had many days of my life when I wanted to just die.”

Wil Sampson-Bernstrom was a teenager in Alabama in 2007 when he attended a conference run by Exodus International – the largest “ex-gay” Christian organization at the time. That was one of his first experiences with conversion therapy.

Now an ordained minister who lives in south Minneapolis with his husband, he remembers being separated from his parents and forced to sit through hours and hours of classes. He doesn’t remember clearly what all the instructors told him. Some said the reason he thought he liked boys was because of some grave error his parents made raising him – that they were going to make him right again. Some tried to cure him of being gay by making him act and talk a certain way – to sit without crossing his legs, to speak with a certain voice.

A newly elected member of the Minnesota House has announced that he is going to work toward the state banning so-called conversion therapy for gay people.

State Rep.-elect Hunter Cantrell said successful legislative action would make Minnesota the 15th state to prohibit the practice, which aims to change the sexual orientation of gays and lesbians but has been discredited by mainstream mental health experts.

The new option to identify as non-binary, a term used by people who choose to not identify as male or female, came with the rollout of new driver’s license software on Monday allowing people to register for Real IDs — the state’s new-strength ID that meets federal standards for citizens to fly and enter some federal sites.

For a trio of Minnesotans who have spent the last 12 years as elected politicians, the main candidates in the DFL primary for governor talk about their previous occupations a lot.

Being an elected official, it seems, is not how they want to be known to potential voters.