Peter Gajdics is an award-winning writer whose essays, short memoir and poetry have appeared in Huffington Post (Canada), Maclean’s, The Advocate, New York Tyrant, The Gay and Lesbian Review / Worldwide, Gay Times, Manhattan Book Review, and Brevity, among others. He is a recipient of several writing grants from Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council, a fellowship from The Summer Literary Seminars, and an alumnus of Lambda Literary Foundation’s “Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices.” Peter’s first book, The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir, about his six years in a bizarre form of conversion therapy with a licensed psychiatrist and his long road to recovery, was published in 2017. The Inheritance of Shame was awarded the 2018 Silver Medal in LGBT Nonfiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and was nominated for the Publishing Triangle Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction.
As a result of his “therapeutic” experience, Peter has advocated for legal bans of conversion therapy for over 20 years. In 2018, Peter helped initiate the first Canadian municipal ban on conversion therapy in his home city of Vancouver, British Columbia. In December 2020, he testified before Canada’s House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights in support of a federal Bill to criminalize conversion therapy across the country.
Peter is a dual citizen of Canada and Hungary, and currently lives and writes in Vancouver.
