Dallas billboard company says ‘repulsive’ conversion therapy ad coming down

DALLAS — A billboard in Dallas, Texas, claiming that gay-to-straight “reparative therapy really works,” will be coming down after the billboard’s owner said it was misled by the ad’s content.

Think Progress reports that the billboard, erected last week along Interstate 35, directs citizens to the therapy practice of David Pickup, a practitioner and proponent of ex-gay therapy.

But Terry Kafka, president of Impact Outdoor Advertising, the billboard company that is hosting the ad, told Think Progress they had been convinced the ad was for couples therapy, having never heard the term “reparative therapy” before.

Article continues below

Kafka described the true content of the ad as “repulsive to me personally,” promising that the ad would be coming down by the end of this week at the latest.

“If we had known, we wouldn’t have put it up in the first place,” said Kafka.

The Dallas billboard was erected just weeks after a similar billboard created controversy in Richmond, Va.

The Virginia billboard by Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays (PFOX), a group that supports gay-to-straight “conversion therapy” as a means to change a person’s sexual orientation, declared “nobody is born gay.”

It was later learned that the model, whose decade-old stock photos were used in the ad, is openly gay.