For four years, I underwent conversion therapy at the world’s largest evangelical college: Liberty University. In fact, I had chosen Liberty in large part because I knew the school had a program for “guys like me,” those who loved Jesus but who had to keep our sexuality a secret. Bright-eyed and eager, I left Toronto, Ontario, my hometown, for Liberty’s campus in Lynchburg, Virginia, where on a regular basis I would meet with an on-campus pastor by the name of Dane Emerick, a paid university employee whose job it was to try to straighten out gay Liberty undergrads.
Over the four years I spent at the school, Emerick tutored me in his “ex-gay” ways. He taught me how to act like a “real” (that is, straight) man, so that over time, I wouldn’t just act like a “real”/straight man but would eventually become one. Slowly, I lost myself in favor of someone I was not. I was made into an actor playing a heterosexual part, performing a version of myself that was both thoroughly foreign and deeply inauthentic.
But when I began to realize that my sexuality wasn’t changing, I started to turn on myself. Feelings of guilt for my “sin” turned into shame, which then metastasized into self-hatred. These were the fruits of conversion therapy—emotional and psychological wounds that required years of recovery.
Although many know what it is in general terms, there are still many misconceptions about the range of practices that constitute conversion therapy. Moreover, few know the history of conversion therapy, not to mention the prevenance of these practices today. As a survivor of conversion therapy who now writes extensively on the topic, I believe it is important to clarify what falls under the umbrella of conversion therapy, its history, and how common these practices are in our current historical moment.
What Is Conversion Therapy?
At its core, conversion therapy is comprised of programmatic efforts to change individuals’ sexualities, gender identities, and/or gender expressions that do not align with the heteronormative model. Whether formal or informal, blatant or subtle, these efforts aim to repair, reduce, or suppress non-normative genders and sexualities, with the goal of converting individuals from who they are into who they’re not.
Such change efforts are undergirded by what is known as conversion ideology: beliefs and teachings that negatively frame queerness as a problem to be fixed or an ailment to be cured. Variously positioning queerness as incomplete, defective, broken, dirty, sick, and sinful, conversion ideology argues that queerness results from one or more root cause(s). Such causes, according to conversion practitioners, include damaged or inadequate relationship with parents or siblings, negative experiences with the opposite sex, pornography, negative spiritual influences (demonic possession), and predatory members of the “same” sex.
Arguing that queerness is not an intrinsic part of individuals’ subjectivities but is rather something that is acquired, learned, or chosen, conversion practitioners believe that sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression can therefore be rejected or unlearned through various practices. These practices can include talk therapy, behavioral suppression, aversion therapy, corrective prayer, forced celibacy, coerced sexual relations (including rape) and/or relationships (including forced marriages), hypnosis, and exorcisms. Conversion practitioners afford themselves the illusion—or, more accurately, the delusion—that change is possible through these various interventions.
However, not only is change not possible, but these practices come with a host of consequences. Some of the psychological effects include shame, guilt, anxiety, anger, depression, loneliness, poor self-esteem, negative impacts on identity formation, self-loathing, and lifetime suicidal ideation. Other research has found that undergoing conversion practices results in greater chances of drug and alcohol dependency, along with increased risk of experiencing homelessness. Social impacts include isolation, disruption in family relationships, struggling to celebrate LGBTQ+ identities, and difficulty in romantic and sexual relationships. As for spiritual consequences, those who undergo conversion therapy experience negative impacts on spiritual self-identity, their ability to construct existential meaning, their ability to connect to God or a Higher Power, and their relationship to their religious community. To put it biblically, the consequences of conversion therapy ought to be called Legion, for they are many.
A Brief North American History
Although these harmful practices weren’t always done in the name of God, they became a largely Christian phenomenon. In the latter half of the 1800s and throughout the majority of the 1900s, medical doctors, psychologists, and psychiatrists were the main practitioners of conversion therapy. But in the 1970s, there was a decisive shift from the secular to the religious. In 1973, the first “ex-gay” Christian ministry in North America, Love In Action, was founded. The second, the Ex-Gay Intervention Team (EXIT), was founded a year later, and in 1976, EXIT hosted the first ex-gay conference, where delegates formed a network of ex-gay ministries called Exodus. Exodus would eventually become Exodus International, the largest, most notorious, and most influential ex-gay organization in the world. Exodus, along with numerous other ex-gay ministries, grew and spread across the world, creating what would become the ex-gay movement.
The ex-gay movement was at its height in the 1980s into the 1990s, wherein ex-gay “researchers” joined forces with ex-gay ministries. The former afforded the latter specious credibility, and the latter financed the former as they bought their books, manuals, tapes, etc. Together, these two groups led hundreds of thousands of queers, along with the parents of queers, to believe that change is possible. They advertised widely, promising false hope to those within the church and those outside of it. Although the end of the 1990s into the 2000s saw a number of ex-gay leaders fall from grace—especially as they were caught engaging in queer sex—the ex-gay movement did not end. Rather, ex-gay ministries and ex-gay researchers persisted in their dirty work, although they redirected their energies almost exclusively on those within the high-control Christian camp.
Conversion Practices Today
At present, conversion practices happen disproportionately in high-control Christian contexts. Typically, the churches, ministries, educational institutions, and individual practitioners who promote and practice conversion therapy come from evangelical, fundamentalist, Pentecostal, and Mormon faith traditions. This is not to say that other religious traditions or non-religious organizations and individuals don’t practice conversion therapy—far from it. However, the majority of conversion practices that activists and academics know about come from conservative Christian spaces.
Most of the prominent “ex-gay” ministries today are based in the United States, but these ministries often deny they are practicing conversion therapy because they know the optics of these discredited practices. They oftentimes claim that they are helping people to find “wholeness” and “holiness” through relationship with Jesus, as opposed to changing people’s non-normative genders or sexualities. They typically frame what they are doing as “pastoral counseling,” “Biblical counseling,” and/or “Biblical worldview counseling.” Despite these rhetorical moves that obfuscate the work they do, they are nonetheless practicing definitional conversion therapy.
The most prominent organization today is the CHANGED Movement, affiliated with Bethel Church out of Reading, California. This organization is by far the most vocal ex-gay ministry, as they make frequent public appearances and are extremely active on social media. Their online presence is quite different from other ex-gay ministries because most other ex-gay organizations are not nearly as loud about what they do. Although there are other ex-gay organizations—including the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity, Rainbow Revival, and Living Hope Ministries—the CHANGED Movement is certainly the most public-facing.
Along with these organizations, countless churches and Christian schools practice conversion therapy behind closed doors. Because these groups do not advertise and since many who undergo conversion therapy remain within their faith communities, it is difficult, if not impossible, to gauge how prevalent these practices are. In 2019, the Williams Institute out of UCLA estimated that 698,000 U.S. adults had undergone conversion therapy. However, the number is probably much higher. Given how the vast majority of conversion practices take place in high-control Christian contexts—and because high-control Christian communities are wildly distrustful of research, academia, and evidence-based claims (we can look at anti-vaxxers, for instance)—many who were subjected to conversion therapy would not participate in such surveys or questionnaires. As a result, the estimates we have likely do not reflect the actual number of survivors.
As the vast majority of conversion practices happen in Christian spaces, it is my contention that it is chiefly the Church’s responsibility to try to put an end to such dehumanizing practices. More broadly, I think it is incumbent upon believers to do the hard work of challenging the death-dealing work of homophobia and transphobia that conversion therapy champions. It is high time that Christians confront their spiritual siblings who do this dirty work and seek reconciliation with survivors specifically and LGBTQ+ communities more broadly in the name of Jesus. Amen.
Lucas Wilson is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Toronto Mississauga. He’s the editor of Shame-Sex Attraction: Survivors’ Stories of Conversion Therapy. His public-facing writing has appeared in The Advocate, LGBTQ Nation, Queerty, and Religion Dispatches. He’s currently working on two new short-story anthologies: Don’t Ask, Tell All: Stories of Christian Colleges’ Anti-Queer Regimes and Queer and Trembling: Stories of LGBTQ+ Religious Trauma. You can follow him on Instagram and Threads at @lukeslamdunkwilson.
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