Alex cooper gay
THE 2025 LAVENDER LAW®
This seminar will tell a unusual story of transformation. Within the space of a decade, the State of Utah moved from defending conversion therapy to banning it. The lessons learned from this journey present that if it can happen in Utah, conversion therapy can be banned everywhere. Ten years ago, Alex Cooper was sent by her parents to be tortured in an effort to change her sexual orientation. The Declare of Utah defended her parents’ supposed right to determine their daughter’s sexual orientation. The State of Utah also challenged Cooper’s right to be represented by a lawyer of her own choosing. Cooper prevailed in an extended legal battle and obtained a trailblazing court direct that established her right to live as an openly gay teenager, prohibited her parents from subjecting her to conversion therapy, and affirmed her right to date girls. After assisting with Cooper’s case, the National Center for Lesbian Rights launched its Born Perfect campaign to ban conversion therapy across the country. Equality Utah, led by its Executive Director Troy Williams, took on Utah’s political and ecclesiastical establishments to promote a
Teenager’s Queer Conversion Therapy Ordeal Told in Recent Memoir
In 2009, 15-year-old Alex Cooper told her devout Mormon parents she liked girls. She knew they would be upset—the Latter-day Saints Church taught that homosexuality was an aberration and a sin. But she didn’t expect them to kick her out of the house, or what happened next, a story she recounts in Saving Alex: When I Was Fifteen I Told My Parents I Was Gay, and That’s When My Nightmare Began.
Cooper’s parents told her she was going to live with her grandparents, but instead, they dropped her off with Tiana and Johnny Siale, a couple in Utah practicing “reparative therapy”—designed to “cure” her homosexuality. She writes, “These people, they were total strangers. I had never seen them before in my life. Why would my parents abandon me with total strangers?”
The Siales—who had no training or credentials as therapists—subjected Cooper to eight months of captivity, servitude, beatings, and torture, including punishment for several bids to escape: she had to wear a backpack packed of rocks and stand facing a w
Based on a harrowing true story, when 15-year-old Alex (Addison Holley) revealed she was same-sex attracted to her devout Mormon parents, they feared so deeply for her essence that they took her from their Southern California dwelling and placed her against her will in a conversion therapy home in Utah. Trapped for eight months with strangers (Sarah Booth and Ian Lake), Alex faced horrible punishments and beatings that were intended to cure her homosexuality. After realizing she would hold to submit to their rules in order to live, Alex was eventually allowed to appear school, where she became friends with a boy that was the president of the gay-straight alliance. He helped Alex get in touch with an attorney, who later helped orchestrate her escape.
Trapped: The Alex Cooper Story is produced by SilverScreen Pictures and executive produced by Jeffrey Hunt, Kyle Clark and Lina Wong. Jeffrey Hunt directs from a script by Michelle Paradise.
Saving Alex: When I Was Fifteen I Told My Mormon Parents I Was Gay, and That’s When My Nightmare Began
By Alex Cooper and Joanna Brooks
To learn more details of Alex’s story, and to hear it in her own words, check out her memoir, Sa This is not a product we currently sell. Try searching for Saving Alex When I Was Fifteen I Told My Mormon Parents I Was Gay and Thats When My Nightmare Began, or check out these recommended products: