Conversion Therapy: I Didn't Want To Be Me

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."*

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Looking back, I thought I was trying to change my sexual orientation.

What I was really learning was the difference between truth and belonging.

There is a particular cruelty in being eleven years old and already certain that the thing at the center of you is the thing God hates most.

I was a devout child. Not a reluctant churchgoer dragged to the pew, but a believer—someone who genuinely longed for God, who wanted, more than almost anything, some transcendent experience that would make sense of my life and of the world. And I had worked out, with the relentless logic available to a serious child, that I was an abomination. I had felt crushes on boys as far back as kindergarten. By eleven I had a name for the energetic, electric, exciting feeling those boys produced in me, because the church had supplied a whole vocabulary for it: sodomite, effeminate, perverse, unclean. I knew the code words before I knew myself. Noah's son who "knew him." The verse about not lying with a man as with a woman. I had read the New Testament seven or eight times and the whole Bible twice, and everywhere I looked, there I was, condemned.

It is not lost on me that I got saved the same year I figured out what I was. July 7th, 1978. Born again at the precise moment I discovered there was something in me that needed saving from.

So I began, at eleven, the long project of growing up to become a straight man.

Looking back, though, I don't think what I wanted was heterosexuality so much as normality. I had been taught that homosexuality was not merely a sin but one of the worst things a person could be, and I felt that supposed wrongness in the most intimate parts of myself. I wanted to be a man. I wanted to fall in love with a woman. I wanted marriage, children, family photographs, the ordinary future everyone around me seemed to assume would one day be theirs. More than anything, I wanted to be someone who could be loved without qualification. I was exhausted from pretending—pretending to be more masculine than I felt, pretending to be interested in girls, pretending to be whatever I imagined the other boys simply were. I was eleven. I did want a different orientation. But what I wanted underneath it, and more than it, was to stop feeling alien to my own life.

I need to be careful here, because it would be easy to tell this as a story of villains, and it mostly wasn't. It was a story of sincere people doing real harm with real conviction. I started on my own, the way a bookish kid starts anything—with reading. James Dobson and others assured me that what I felt was a wound, a developmental injury, something that could be repaired with enough prayer and the right kind of masculine friendship. I memorized Scripture. I prayed until praying felt like a second pulse. I kept a spiritual journal in which I could never quite write the actual word, so my orientation appears in those pages as "my problem," or coyly as "you know, God ;-)"—as though naming it would make it real, and worse, might make it permanent.

At thirteen I told my youth minister. He was kind. He promised to pray for me and to be available whenever I needed to talk, and he counseled the standard protocol: build strong friendships with other boys, stay in the Word, stay in church, and in time the desire would fade into a God-ordained heterosexuality. Or—and here was the escape hatch the theology always kept handy—perhaps this was my thorn in the flesh. My cross to bear.

Six more years of prayer and Scripture and a dedication of my whole life to the ministry produced exactly one result: I fell, helplessly and completely, in love with that minister, and with one of my closest male friends. The former I loved because I wanted to grow up to be him. The latter I loved because I wanted to share my life with him. My faith survived this intact. My logic did not entirely. Even then I noticed the strangeness of it—that I was being asked to un-choose something I had never chosen, and that the desire to un-choose it had done nothing whatsoever to dislodge it. I remember the exasperation more than anything. The sheer, bone-deep frustration of working that hard at something and watching it not move.

I chose a conservative Southern Baptist university, where my freshman year offered the predictable irony of placing me among magnificent men twenty-four hours a day and then asking me to stop noticing. So I escalated. I sought professional help, and I joined a group called Homosexuals Anonymous—H.A., and yes, I have always appreciated the laugh built into the acronym. It was a twelve-step program modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous, except ours had fourteen steps. Being especially devout, apparently, required two extra.

I never quite resolved how one could be addicted to something one had never done. I was, at this point, a virgin in every sense the word allows. But if a twelve-step program with fourteen steps could make me straight, I was willing to work all fourteen.

My counselor was an ex-gay man named Thom—spelled, I could not help noticing, in the gayest possible way for someone advertising himself as cured. I pushed the observation down, along with everything else. Our meetings opened with a recitation of the steps. We admitted we were powerless over our homosexuality and that our emotional lives had become unmanageable. We affirmed that God loved and forgave us in spite of what we were. We talked about our feelings, our fathers, our moments of weakness. In private, Thom told me about his own transformation and his marriage, prayed with me, and embraced me—"in a non-sexual way," he was always careful to specify—to model what healthy masculine affection was supposed to feel like.

None of it touched the thing it was meant to cure.

What it did instead was make me lonely in a way prayer couldn't reach. I wanted companionship. I wanted to be known. And so I did something I am not proud of: I pursued a young woman, partly because she made me feel valued, and partly—if I am honest, and the whole point of writing this is to be honest—because some superstitious corner of me believed that if we could just go all the way, the spell might break and I would be transformed. Breaking the rule against premarital sex seemed a small price if the reward was a self I could live with.

She deserved better than to be someone's experiment, and at the time I could not fully see that. I told myself my guilt was about the sex. It was really about her. As we grew closer the guilt grew with us, until I finally told her the truth, and we found our way to a friendship instead. What I felt afterward was relief so total it blinded me—blinded me to the fact that I had cast her, without asking, from girlfriend into confidante, rearranging her life to relieve the pressure in mine. I have thought about her many times since. The honesty that set me free was not, in that moment, equally kind to her, and any account of my liberation that left that out would be a lie of exactly the kind I was trying to escape.

Because that was what had begun to change. Not my orientation—that remained magnificently, stubbornly intact—but my relationship to truth itself. That first taste of saying a true thing out loud had started something, and it would not stop.

I began to think. Really think, the way the university was teaching me to think about everything except, until now, myself. And when I turned that critical attention on the program, it came apart in my hands. The phrase "change your sexual orientation" began to look like a lie—not a malicious one necessarily, but a lie all the same. Because what they actually meant by it was not change what you feel. They meant change what you do. And since I wasn't doing anything, the promise was empty at its core. I was furious to realize that a Christian ministry was being slippery with language, selling a change of orientation while delivering, at most, a change of behavior—a behavior I didn't even exhibit, however much desire I was drowning in.

That distinction, I came to see, is the whole quiet argument. To one side, your sexuality is what you feel—the orientation of your longing. To the other, it is only what you do—the act, and nothing but the act. The program needed that second definition, because the second definition was the only one it could pretend to deliver on.

I put the contradiction to Thom. He told me that with continued prayer I might yet be healed, and that if I wasn't, it would mean I was being called to bear that cross as an example to others. I had heard that line before. So I asked him directly: after ten years of prayer and dedication and marriage, were his own desires gone? He admitted he "still had weak moments."

That answer detonated something in me, because he had presented himself—to the group and to me—as a whole and complete heterosexual. And a straight man does not have weak moments of romantic and sexual yearning for other men. That is not weakness. That is not a lapse. That is simply being gay, or bisexual, described in the vocabulary of shame. Why, I wanted to know, would this earnest Christian man lie about his own transformation?

And then I understood, all at once, what these ministries were actually teaching. Not healing. They were teaching gay and bisexual men how to lie—how to live a lie, and how to conscript wives and children and friendships into protecting a lie. What they offered was not change; it was belonging, on the condition that you never tell the truth about yourself. If I loved a man as an "ex-gay," my love was still gay whether or not I ever touched him. The feelings were not fundamentally about sex. They were about love, companionship, mutual respect, passion, the whole human longing to be matched in the world. And if all of that was wrong, then I was wrong, constitutively, and no amount of prayer in a decade had changed it. I did the math plainly: if a boy of eleven with the devotion and the sexual purity of St. Paul couldn't be changed in ten years of total effort, what hope—or what sense—was there in promising to change a grown man who had actually known love?

I went to see Thom one last time. He had a new theory: demonic influence. He asked if he could pray over me, and I, exhausted and curious, agreed. He warned me, with complete seriousness, that demons sometimes exit the body as a burp or a passing of gas.

So I sat there with my eyes closed while a man prayed the homosexuality out of me, and I waited. I wondered if my skin would turn green. I listened for evil voices. I took a quiet inventory of what I'd eaten that day. And then it landed on me like a dropped piano:

Straight people burp. Straight people fart. Straight people have gas, and it has never once meant they were possessed by a ravenous demon of heterosexuality.

Even my ordinary body, the most innocent functions of it, had been recruited into the case against me. And I wanted to laugh—wanted to throw my head back in that little room and laugh until something broke—because the whole apparatus had finally revealed itself as absurd.

And once the absurdity cracked open, the questions I'd been forbidding myself came flooding through. Noah's son Ham did something to his drunk, naked father that the text is famously cagey about—was the sin there incest, or assault, rather than anything to do with love between men? When the men of Sodom massed at Lot's door demanding the angels, was God's anger about desire, or about a mob intent on raping strangers who had come under the protection of hospitality—an actual atrocity you would never guess was the point, given the ratio of sermons preached against the wrong sin? And if sexual violence was the real offense in those stories, then perhaps homosexuality—two people bound in love, in fidelity, in lifelong companionship—was not the thing being condemned at all.

Thom did cast something out of me that afternoon. Not a demon. He helped the scales fall from my eyes, and I walked out seeing differently. What I saw, above everything, was this: a truth that needs lies to defend it is not a truth. Whatever else I believed or stopped believing, that became bedrock. The people who raised me in that faith were so afraid of being wrong that they were prepared to perpetuate a falsehood to preserve what they had decided holiness required. And I could not stop asking the question that undid the whole edifice—would a real truth ever need deception as its defense?

Maybe Scripture does condemn something its authors recognized as homosexuality: temple prostitution, conquering armies raping the defeated, the violent and the coerced. I can believe that. But the love of two people, united as companions in the midst of a community, sharing intimacy and respect and one shared life across a lifetime—that I do not find condemned anywhere in those pages. I do not find it addressed at all.

I left that room as fast as I could and I did not look back.

What I carried out with me has lasted longer than anything the ministry tried to put in:

A truth that needs lies to defend it is not a truth.

That realization changed far more than my understanding of sexuality. It changed how I held religion, politics, relationships, and eventually how I held myself—because every community faces the same temptation. We grow attached to a story, a doctrine, an identity, a certainty. And once belonging depends on preserving that certainty, reality itself starts to feel like a threat. The question quietly stops being is this true? and becomes what must I ignore in order to keep believing it?

That is where honesty begins to die.

And that is why the search for truth is so often frightening. Truth can cost us our communities, our certainties, the very identities we have spent years building. But the alternative is worse: a lifetime spent defending what we secretly already know cannot survive examination.

Perhaps that is why the old commandment against bearing false witness has always struck me as deeper than it first appears. Not only because lies harm other people, but because lies eventually estrange us from reality itself.

At eleven, I could not distinguish between what I was and what I had been taught about what I was. The loneliness came from both directions at once: from a culture that treated homosexuality as a defect, and from my own desperate determination not to become the thing I believed everyone feared. What I wanted was transformation. What I received instead was something less dramatic and far more valuable: permission. Permission to ask questions, to follow evidence where it led, to examine my own assumptions, to admit that sincere people can be sincerely mistaken—and to trust that truth need not fear investigation.

So here is to the quest itself. To peace in the searching, to humility enough to admit when we have been wrong, to courage enough to recognize truth when we meet it, and to the strange grace of discovering that reality survives our questions far better than our certainties do.

The journey continues.

I am grateful that it does.

Conversion Therapy: I Didn't Want To Be Me

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