- If you were alone in a room
with someone who willingly went
through gay conversion therapy, what would you ask?
(gentle music)
- Hey.
- Hi.
- You feeling good?
- I'm feeling great.
- Who are you?
- My name's Chris.
- Would you mind telling me a little bit about yourself?
- I'm 40 years old. I live in Los Angeles.
I was born and raised in Canada.
I came to the United States to study ballet and dancing,
and I was a professional dancer for about 12 years.
- What was the moment
that made you feel being gay was wrong?
Can you take me back there?
- I struggled with that my whole life.
I can't pinpoint an exact moment
'cause I think I knew that I was gay from a young age,
since I was four or five.
I always felt like it was not right, you know?
'Cause I grew up in the church in a conservative family,
and they had certain expectations of genders and sexu-
of our roles, you know?
And guys don't like guys. They like girls.
As far as the decision to go into conversion therapy,
that was a decision I made when I was about 19 years old.
- And what was the deciding factor
for you to go to conversion therapy at 19?
- When I was 19,
it was around the time that 9/11 happened then.
I feel like a lot of people felt very lost
and felt very scared.
And there was a lot of uncertainty in the air.
And when that happened,
I was living far away from my family.
I was still relatively new to being on my own.
And so I was just desperately seeking a sense of comfort
and a sense of security and just someone to just protect me.
So I thought I needed to go back
to the church, to my faith,
but I felt like my homosexuality, you know,
being gay was holding me back from having, you know,
a relationship with God.
So I decided at that time to go into conversion therapy.
That's when I spent two years in ex-gay ministry.
I don't look at it so much as conversion therapy.
I look at it as healing sexual brokenness.
People sometimes are just born gay.
And sometimes I do think that they're gay based
on things that have happened to them in their life.
- Are you a devout Christian?
- I am a Christian.
I consider it one of the most important things in my life.
I believe in God.
I believe that Jesus is the son of God.
I believe that the only way to God and to heaven
is through his son, Jesus Christ.
So I believe that school of thought.
- Can you give me a little bit of background
on maybe what your childhood was like and upbringing?
- I grew up in a really conservative family.
We were a part of the Christian Missionary Alliance,
really active in church.
And my mom and my dad probably had more concern for me.
You know, they still love me,
but they didn't like the fact that I was gay.
I think my family still kinda has that attitude,
but there's no tension there.
I think my family's still pretty accepting of me,
and they still love me regardless.
- What did the gay conversion therapy consist of?
Was it just like counseling sessions?
Was it overnight stays or anything like that?
- It was one-on-one counseling as well as group meetings.
It was a faith-based program.
So I found it beneficial.
I thought that it was good
because I liked the one-on-one counseling
and I liked that, you know,
these were therapists that are, you know,
helping you work through things
that have happened in your life.
Nothing really traumatizing happened
to me sexually as a child,
but there's other things in my life
that they sort of feel like probably maybe made me gay.
- I don't know if you feel comfortable saying, you know,
all the things that went on
'cause I know that they do shock therapy
and different tactics.
Would you say that there was a form of abuse?
And then if there were abuse, you know,
were there any minors involved?
Because I know that a lot of teens,
young adults get sent there.
So would you say that it was child abuse in a way?
- That's one of the misconceptions
with conversion therapy that, you know,
when you sign up for conversion therapy,
you're going for shock treatment,
you're signing up for a lobotomy.
Someone would have their license taken away
so quickly if they-
- Well, what about mental abuse?
- In my experience, there was never any type
of demonizing of any behavior.
It's based on love. It's based in love.
That's what their whole mission is.
- It's based on love, but heterosexual love, correct?
Not like the, you know, the quote, "Love is love."
I don't think that that would apply in this instance
because they're not saying love is love.
They're saying love is a man and a woman.
- They're trying to work on self love
and forming your identity and who you are as a person.
It should be in Christ.
It shouldn't be in who you have sex with.
So just because they have sex with a guy
or they have some type of intimacy with a man
or get drunk and have sex
or kiss or whatever that physical act may be,
that doesn't mean necessarily that they're gay.
'Cause I think that-
- But that ain't straight.
The definition of conversion therapy,
to my knowledge is, you know,
you are converting someone who is homosexual,
homosexual urges to heterosexual, heterosexual urges,
man and woman, you know, that kind of thing.
So just to be clear,
would that be your definition of conversion therapy?
Going from gay to straight.
- There's this obsession in our culture
to know the the answer to those questions.
This obsession of putting labels on ourselves
and each other.
I'm saying that it's not always black and white.
- Do you wanna elaborate
on what you specifically got out of going
through gay conversion therapy?
- I don't know.
It just kind of helped me see sexuality sort of differently.
And I think that maybe
it wasn't necessarily the best thing for me,
but I don't think that it's good to suppress that
or to prevent anyone else from, you know,
exploring that if they think that it would help them.
So maybe some people,
they have just a smaller attraction towards men.
So they go into conversion therapy
because they kind of wanna work on those attractions
so they can have a relationship with a woman
and a sex life with their wife and lead that kind of life.
So those are factors that come into play
when you're defining who you are sexually, you know?
- Would you do it again?
- Possibly.
I think I'm at a weird place
in my life where I would say that I'm gay just based
on the fact that I like to have sex with men.
I left conversion therapy in my early twenties.
And then after that,
I went into the world of adult entertainment,
and I did porn and escorting
and traveled the world for about eight years.
- Do you mind me asking what kind of porn you did?
- Yeah, I did gay porn and I did it over 150 movies.
- So does that go
against what the conversion therapy was about?
Did they say being gay was wrong?
- It's very complicated.
If you figure out some time in your life that,
"Okay, I'm gay. I like sex with the same sex.
I'm gonna live that life.
I'm gonna get married to, you know, a man and I'm a man."
We all end up in that place for different reasons.
And it's not the same for everyone.
- Queerness, homosexuality, this spectrum of sexuality,
the spectrum of gender,
do you think that's a bad thing that we're pushing
for the normalization of those things?
- This whole idea that, you know, it's all about love.
Love is love, man.
Just love what you wanna love.
It's like, I feel like that's the problem, and that's toxic.
And I feel like people- - Why?
- Because love is love?
Okay, so here's the thing.
You have a girl who's madly in love
with this boyfriend that beats the (beep)
out of her all the time.
And you know, she stays with him for years.
She keeps trying to leave him. She can't.
It's like this, you know, toxic (beep) up relationship.
Love is love. It's just about love.
It's like, no, love is a feeling.
And I think that you cannot base your life
and your decisions on a feeling
because feelings change all the time.
Just 'cause you label something
as love doesn't mean that it's right.
And that's what I feel like there's this push to do.
It's like-
- So you think being gay is wrong?
- Mm...
- That's what it makes me sound like,
that you're comparing homosexuality to an abusive boyfriend
when I think those two things are different.
- I can only speak for me 'cause I'm one gay person.
I do not speak for all the gay people.
You know, at first, yes.
When you are coming out in your sexuality,
it is something that you're struggling with,
it's something that, you know, you're battling,
you don't really know,
"Okay. Do I like girls? Do I like guys?
I don't know what I like.
My family don't like me."
It's all these different emotions that you have.
And then you got the world going on.
You got the world's opinions.
You got everybody down your throat asking what you wanna do.
And you know, when you finally do come out
and you realize, "Okay, this is what I like.
This is who I love."
It feels like a weight is lifted off your shoulders.
If you can't love yourself, you don't love nobody else.
So for me, being gay is being proud
of who you are, what you represent.
- So yeah, I understand what you're saying,
but I just think this push in the gay community
and the LGBT community,
it's become very militant,
and it's become very oppressive in the way that they think.
It's like if you don't believe these certain beliefs
or these certain values or morals or whatever,
then you're sort of rejected from the gay community.
And that's where I kind of feel like I'm in right now.
And that's what I don't like.
And I feel like it's happening more and more to people.
- Something that I think is kind of doom and gloom right now
in the world are the laws that specifically,
especially in the United States that target queer people.
In Florida with the Don't Say Gay bill
and in Texas with the bills trying to attack trans children,
how do you feel about like those laws
and kind of the laws about conversion therapy
that people are trying to outlaw conversion therapy?
- So I believe that this whole ban on conversion therapy,
I feel like it's a huge waste of time.
I feel like it's sort of being used as a distraction.
The thing is conversion therapy
is something that some people
are willingly choosing to go into
because they're not content with their sexuality
or the way things are going in their life.
Not everyone was there
because they struggled with same sex desires.
There was men that had been cheating on their wife,
and they had, you know, obsessions or addictions to porn.
So they wanna work on these issues, you know?
And I think what's even worse than conversion therapy
is this active push to ban conversion therapy
because I think the government is using that
as a way to suppress the voice
of the church or certain therapists
and not allowing them to say what they wanna say
and believe what they wanna believe.
And I feel like that's even worse than conversion therapy
is trying to control what people say and people think.
People should be able to explore that if they want
and decide if it's right for them
'cause I feel everyone's situation is different.
- If you could press a button
and become straight, would you?
- Yeah, probably.
- Why?
- So I'm 40, almost 41.
Things aren't necessarily bad in my life,
but I feel like I've kind of done this whole gay thing.
And if I could change it, I'd be like, "Yeah, change it."
'Cause I'd like to see what it'd be like to be straight
and have a wife and have kids.
- Yeah, I'll share that I did some form
of conversion therapy myself.
For years ever since I was a kid
I prayed that God take this sin away.
It wasn't until I got to a place of real depression,
similar to you, except my answer was to lean into who I am.
And I was laying in my bed, depressed,
my skin started changing colors terribly.
That's how stressed I was.
And I heard the voice of God say,
"Get up and be who I called you to be.
Whoever is going to love you will love you
and whoever doesn't just won't."
And still after that, after I came out,
I could not answer the question
of whether I was gonna go to hell.
I actually asked a group of ministers
who were proud queer ministers, imams, priests,
in the Buddhist community,
and I asked,
"How do you all know you made the right decision?
How do you all know
that you won't spend an eternity in hell?"
And unfortunately, not many of them had an answer.
- You know, people debate whether or not being gay
is the result of nature or nurture.
You know, I feel like that's a-
it's an ongoing debate 'cause we really don't know.
And I think that it doesn't matter
because I feel like even if it's nature,
then if we're gay because of it's a result
of all this bad stuff that's happened to us
and things that were beyond our control,
then why would God punish us for that?
I don't think He will.
- I was born gay.
Nothing bad happened to me, no traumatic experience.
And what I learned in how being gay became the biggest sin
in the world is 'cause of messaging.
The word homosexual did not get into the Bible until 1946.
You talked about building a relationship with God,
and you felt being gay kept you from that relationship.
What changed?
- At that time, I still viewed being gay
and homosexuality as a sin.
And I felt like sin is what separates us from God.
What changed?
I came back to my faith, I would say,
about three or four years ago,
and it's been a positive experience.
And I've sort of made peace
with this whole idea that I have to change my sexuality,
my sexual identity, if I'm gonna be a Christian
'cause I don't feel like it's necessarily
as big of a deal as people make it out to be
in our culture today.
And I don't think that it's as big of a deal to God.
There's this push in our culture to be obsessed with,
"Am I gay? Am I straight?
And then if I'm gay, I have to have gay sex
and have a gay lifestyle and be, you know, do these things."
And it's not necessarily the case.
They just need to maybe chill out
and kind of let things happen organically
and not stress about, you know,
what label they have or what their sexuality is.
- Hi. How you doing? - Chris. Nice to meet you.
- [Minister] Good to meet you.
- Thanks for coming in. - You do hugs?
- Yeah, sure. Of course.
Appreciate it.
- [Minister] Absolutely.