Protesters at cancelled gay ‘cure’ screening call homosexuality ‘unnatural, abnormal and sinful’

Attendees of a protest against the Vue cinema which cancelled a gay ‘cure’ therapy film have called homosexuality “unnatural,” “a sin” and an “addiction”.

Vue International dropped the screening of Voices of the Silenced: Experts, Evidences and Ideologies following a PinkNews investigation.

The gay ‘cure’ film’s creators have claimed it features 15 people who have “come out of homosexual practices” thanks to therapy or religion.

Nearly every medical body in the world has disavowed gay cure therapy.

The documentary was set to be shown by the Core Issues Trust, an evangelical Christian group which advocates for efforts to change people’s sexual orientation.

Instead, the screening was discreetly moved to the Emmanuel Centre, an events venue just minutes away from the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey and Big Ben.

Andrea Williams, chief executive of Christian Concern, told PinkNews she was expecting more than the 126 people who acquired tickets for the event to attend the rearranged screening.

Attempts to contact the Emmanuel Centre for comment were not responded to at the time of publication.

Around 40 people showed up to the 30-minute protest outside Vue Piccadilly Circus cinema in London, accompanied by four police officers.

Core Issues Trust chief executive Dr Michael Davidson said as many as 90 protesters were present.

Davidson said his organisation’s gay ‘cure’ film was “about patterning, about habits, about addictions in some cases, that some people want to do something about.”

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The self-proclaimed “ex-gay” made headlines last year when he appeared on Good Morning Britain with Piers Morgan to advocate for gay ‘cure’ therapy.

Williams compared the documentary to the 50 Shades of Grey series.

She told PinkNews: “We wanted to see it here in the cinema that we’ve paid for, that we’ve complied with the rules, just as 50 Shades of Grey is showing, and Star Wars, and The Greatest Showman.”

Williams directly blamed PinkNews for the film being cancelled by Vue.

“I think they responded to PinkNews’ misrepresentation of what the film was about; they got intimidated and scared,” she told PinkNews.

“You’ve managed to shut it down,” added Williams.

She continued: “It’s a sad thing that a minority, the strong gay lobby, can call up the Vue cinema and misrepresent, using words like ‘gay cure’ – that’s not something… this film is all about people being free to choose to access therapeutic support for unwanted behaviours.

“Certainly there are people here in this crowd who have decided they no longer want to live with homosexual behaviours.”

Vue has denied that PinkNews’ story on Tuesday was responsible for the cinema deciding on Tuesday to block the screening.

Lucy Northmore, the group PR manager for Vue International, said yesterday (February 7): “To assume that it was reviewed in reaction to the story is incorrect.

“They booked in November. The client was notified this morning and the decision was made yesterday.”

Holding signs reading: “Voices of the Silenced: SILENCED”, the few dozen protesters who showed up in the central London location decried homosexuality in many varied ways.

Others said the cancellation was “against our human rights,” with one woman displaying a sign which said: “Truth suppressed, freedom denied: can’t view at Vue.”

Williams told PinkNews to speak to Dr Peter May, who was asked whether homosexuality was natural.

He said: “No, it’s not natural and it’s not normal. It’s not natural, no.

“There are [people] trying to put out the view that people are born gay. That view is dead in the water.”

After speaking about “homosexual desires” and “feeding” them, PinkNews asked him whether there was anything wrong with doing so.

Dr May said: “In the same way, is there anything wrong with feeding adulterous desires? There is.”

He was asked whether he was comparing homosexuality with adultery.

“Yes,” he replied.

About same-sex marriages, he said: “It’s not the way we were made. It leads to the breakdown of the family.”

Dr May added: “Jesus talked about Hell, and what he meant by Hell was ultimately alienation from the god who made you.

“Destruction was the phrase which Jesus repeatedly used. Everyone is trapped in their sins until they turn to Christ.”

When asked if homosexuality was one of those sins, he said: “Well, it’s clearly one of them, yup.”

He also voiced anti-trans views, saying: “The gender you’re born with is expressed in your genitals.

“Germaine Greer’s brilliant on this – just chopping off your todger doesn’t make you a woman.”

In 2015, anti-trans author Greer said: “Just because you lop off your d**k and then wear a dress doesn’t make you a f***ing woman.”

One protester talked to PinkNews about a BBC Radio 4 segment he’d heard in which a guest had talked about the future of LGBT people in terms of fluidity and a lack of labels.

He said this was a point in the protesters’ favour, and against those who “believe that people cannot move out of homosexuality.

“The reality is that a great many people move freely,” he added.

One man told PinkNews that “in terms of diseases for men, it is worse to be gay.

“In terms of promiscuity, gay men find it hard to settle monogamously together. They can stay together for a long time, but only by opening the relationship.”

He said same-sex parents would lead to polyamory and “the destruction of the family unit”.

When asked why, he said: “I think a child has a daddy-shaped hole in it, and a mummy-shaped hole, and I think that there will be pain. Their parents need to fill those holes.

“That’s the way we have evolved over the millennia. It would be against evolution. Against nature. And against my Christian values.”

Another protester said that “there are Christians who would say that they’re gay Christians, and they wouldn’t see any incompatibility with that.

“But God is completely uncompromising on that issue, and would say, obviously, that he’s not in favour of homosexuality, and that Jesus Christ has the power to restore people to normality.

“And by normality,” he clarified, “I mean heterosexuality, the way God created people. Monogamous male and female marriage is the only approved model in God’s design.

“It’s like, if you had a car, you wouldn’t put sawdust in the petrol tank, because the maker’s instructions designed it to run on petrol,” he added.

“God designed us as human beings to run on a functioning basis of male and female complimentarity [sic].”

He continued: “I think homosexuality undermines the basis – it is a kind of defiance of God. It won’t end happily if society rejects God.”