If you read this article
HERE, it clarifies that, indeed, they were persecuted for being
perceived as homosexuals for being too effeminate. If it remains true that they weren't gay is irrelevant. They were perceived as being so, and consequently tortured to death.
The Young Turks were correct in linking religious ties to the movement responsible, as is clarified from this excerpt here:
"The Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement AWB / Iron Guards movement is a far right white supremacist group who fly a flag with a Nazi-like death head skull centered over the “Three Sevens” symbol. A former paramilitary group in South Africa, the AWB claims that the three sevens symbolized
supremacy over the devil."
To reaffirm, there IS a religious aspect to their racist, homophobic ideology.
To smooth out any confusion about whether or not it was gay conversion "therapy" or not read this excerpt:
"The idea of the camp is to apparently make men of teens and to “cure” ‘”feminine traits’ in male youths…”
another way of saying gay reparative therapy, instead in this instance that therapy involved “beating the gay out of the kid” – torture and if torture didn’t effect the desired change, then certainly murder would; after all a dead teen is not a gay teen."