Blessed Cure is an awarded LGBTQ+ graphic novel by Brazilian author Mário César that portrays what it is like to have a life marked by homophobia and the effects of sexual reversal therapies – Conversion Therapy – that try to cure something that is not a disease.

Since he was a child, Acácio do Nascimento was a different boy from others. He rather playing with dolls to playing soccer, the hula hoop interested him more than cowboy pistols. Scared by the possibility of their son was a homosexual, Mara and Galdino submit Acácio since he was five years old to several treatments for him to become a normal boy like the others.

In 1990 the World Health Organization (WHO) stopped considering homosexuality a disease. Based on this understanding, a 1999 resolution by the Brazilian Federal Council of Psychology prohibited professionals from applying therapies to try to change sexual orientation in Brazil. Even so, the so-called “gay cure”, time and again, comes into the spotlight due to the greed of those who aim to profit from ignorance and prejudice. Conservative groups want to subject perfectly healthy people to abusive treatments and, often, homosexuals themselves subordinate themselves to medieval methods to live up to the expectations of others.

Blessed Cure narrates Acácio’s life through the decades since the 60’s. Each chapter shows the provocations of other children at school, the awakening of his sexuality as a teenager, the demands of his parents for him to fit in with the standards dictated by the majority, the beginning of his adult life, the first time he falls in love with another man, the persecution of the Brazilian military dictatorship against LGBTQ+ people, the prejudice in the in the workplace and the dilemma between following his most intimate instincts or going according to what society imposes and marrying a woman.

Discover if Acácio will keep on living a heteronormative life he never chose for himself or if he’s going to live his truth.