Photography by Matt Marcinkowski
In middle school, Curtis Galloway was a little heavy, he was in the gifted art class, he had odd hobbies (he’d started a ghost-hunting club), and he was in band. Then it got even better: The other guys in his class started talking about girls. “Oh yeah, she’s hot,” he’d echo, without the same…gusto.
When he reached high school, the bullying eased, and he dutifully found his first girlfriend. They held hands for six months; it was all he wanted to do. Patiently she waited for that first kiss. Other kids weren’t so kind. “You’re gay!” they taunted, and every time he slammed back, “No, I’m not!”
But he’d started feeling that tingly, magnetic pull, that extra charge of energy he’d heard in his friends’ voices. Except it was drawing him to other guys.
At the end of sophomore year, Galloway broke up with the girlfriend, giving no real explanation. Then he took a deep, shaky breath and came out to two friends he’d met—which itself seemed a miracle, in tiny Benton, Illinois—who were openly gay.
He’d denied it for so long, they thought he was kidding.
Galloway’s parents were, like most everybody else in town, devout Christians. They’d never even discussed homosexuality. What if they were the “people being gay is going to destroy us all” extreme?
Maybe it wouldn’t be a total shock, he reassured himself. But the only hint of parental suspicion he could dredge up was his mother’s saying lightly, when he wanted to frost the tips of his hair about five years after it was cool, “Well, normally, only girls dye their hair. Unless you have something you want to tell me…”
He kept his secret. Anxiety was rising in him like floodwater, and he felt sad all the time, set apart from the people he loved the most. But he couldn’t find the right way to tell them.
Then, in the fall of his junior year—November 16, 2010, not that he remembers—Galloway asked permission to drive a friend to the next town so she could visit her boyfriend.
“Why would her boyfriend want you to drive her?” his mother asked. She must have called his father the minute she hung up, because that evening, his father sat him down.
“Normally, a guy wouldn’t be OK with that,” his father ventured, “unless of course he knew that person was gay. Is that the case?”
“Yes,” Galloway blurted, “but only if you won’t be mad!”
They weren’t mad; they were scared. They assured him that they loved him no matter what. He got the impression that they thought he’d been influenced somehow, chosen this “lifestyle,” and that his choice could be undone. Later they said no, they weren’t even at the stage of having theories, just floored. They’d never dealt with “this kind of information” before, and they had no idea what to say or do.
The conversation spiraled, ending only because Galloway had to leave. He showed up at the Christmas madrigal rehearsal with his eyes puffy from crying.
That weekend, while he was away at a speech tournament, his mom checked the family computer and found out he’d been online in a teen chat room and, under the anonymous cover of his avatar, talked about being gay. When he came home, he noticed that she seemed a little bit off; she wasn’t greeting him with her usual warmth, and the air around her was charged with tension. “Have you been talking to people you don’t know online?” she finally asked.
“No,” he said quickly. “No, I haven’t. No.”
She pressed harder. Then his dad came home, and it all came out. They said they’d found his online chats, and he didn’t know whom he was really talking to, and they could be predators who’d find him and do all sorts of horrible things to him.
Now his parents were angry—because he’d lied to them—and their fear was sharper. They took away his phone, his car, and his computer access, lest he meet predatory strangers online. Sick with anxiety, trapped between his internal world and the one around him, he begged to see a counselor. They looked carefully for one who would not discount their Christian faith—and who would help them, too, as they struggled to understand.
Many a “cure” has been touted over the past century. Furious bicycle riding (on the premise that homosexuality was rooted in nervous exhaustion). Hypnosis, a great deal of whiskey, and visits to a brothel. Cocaine solutions and strychnine injections (on the premise that lesbians were inordinately sensitive to stimuli). Drugs to induce nausea while a man sat, surrounded by glasses of urine, and listened to audiotapes of other men having sex. A device fitted over the penis so the man could zap his biceps with electricity the instant he became aroused. Rugged sports, a strenuous avoidance of opera, and the imitation of “heterosexual” ways of walking and speaking.
In 1973, Dr. Robert Spitzer persuaded the American Psychiatric Association to stop automatically classifying homosexuality as a pathology. But almost 30 years later, in 2001, he made headlines with a research study in which 200 people reported successfully changing their orientations.
By then, same-sex attraction was no longer officially viewed as a vile perversion or crime. Psychologists were offering “conversion therapy” (also used for people struggling with gender identity) or the “reparative therapy” developed by Joseph Nicolosi, who blamed male homosexuality on a psychological injury sustained in childhood at the hands of the father. Nationwide groups such as Exodus International had formed to coax people into heterosexuality, and an “ex-gay” cottage industry had sprung up, with books and conferences and retreats (many of which used same-sex nudity and cuddling and romps in the woods as techniques they claimed would neutralize forbidden desires). Spitzer’s study was cited again and again.
And then, in 2012, Spitzer announced that his conclusions had been unwarranted. Many of these men and women were deeply religious and eager to be straight; many had been referred by groups that considered same-sex attraction a disorder. The self-reports, by phone, were of changed behavior, not changes in their deepest feelings and impulses. What had been presented as science might have been wishful thinking.
Spitzer said the study was the deepest regret of his professional career, and he apologized to any gay or lesbian individuals he’d hurt. Michael Bussee, one of the co-founders of Exodus International, also apologized. He’d left the organization with another co-founder, Gary Cooper, and they’d divorced their wives to be together. “In the almost 40 years since I started Exodus International,” Bussee wrote recently for #BornPerfect, “I can honestly say that I have never met a gay person who became heterosexual through conversion therapy or ex-gay programs.”
The counselor was in another town, and Galloway and his parents made the long, strained drive in their minivan. He was hoping to talk about the heavy sadness that kept him from wanting to do anything but sleep; the tears that came when he was in the shower; the sobbed “Why does this have to be me?”
But first they had to fill out intake forms. And the counselor wanted to talk to his parents. Galloway sat in the waiting room, surrounded by Christian pamphlets, and tried to breathe evenly.
When their hour was up and it was finally his turn, he described the fatigue weighing him down, the sadness that turned everything bleak. The counselor listened so intently, it almost felt weird, as if he weren’t blinking. He stayed calm and soft-spoken, almost monotone—was that a therapy thing? Galloway decided that it must be. He waited for some kind of helpful advice, but the counselor kept steering the conversation back to Galloway’s being gay and how that would mean he’d be unhappy for the rest of his life.
The “Recommendations and Treatment Plan” (with copies given to Galloway’s parents) grew longer with every session. He was to pray daily to feel more secure as a man. Be bolder in social situations. Limit time spent with “gay-affirming” friends (which would, by definition, be all of his friends). Adopt a more masculine persona and learn to frame things in a masculine way.
Male characteristics included taking charge, being in control, and feeling “competently powerful.” Galloway was to study women to figure out what types were attractive to him. The minute he began to feel attraction toward a male, he was to “bounce” his thoughts to something else. At least twice weekly, he was to read the essay “A Realistic Approach to Attractions” and follow the instructions therein; he was also to read materials on the websites of Exodus International and the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (since renamed the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity).
He tried to do all of it, but what sounded easy on paper was almost impossible in practice. Exactly what should he do to be more “competently powerful” in this situation? And how, again, was he supposed to seem more masculine?
One day he showed up wearing his dad’s combat boots, and the counselor beamed. He also complimented Galloway’s studded leather armband, saying that the gladiators used to wear armbands, and they were very masculine men.
And you do realize they all had sex with one another? Galloway retorted silently.
“Just a couple of years ago, a parent would just Google ‘conversion therapist’ or ‘ex-gay’ or ‘reparative therapy’ to find a conversion therapist,” says Samantha Ames, a staff attorney who coordinates the #BornPerfect campaign at the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “Now our website comes up, and so does a New York Times article explaining the risks.
“The therapists are not gone, by any means,” continues Ames, who runs a survivors’ network that includes several people in Missouri. “They’re just changing their tactics a little bit to make the same practices seem more palatable.” Brothels and nausea drugs and electroshock are gone, replaced with visualization, prayer, hypnosis, and “re-education.”
Doesn’t matter, she adds. Or rather, it does—“I still have survivors who can’t touch someone of the same sex without feeling an electric shock.” But the deepest damage comes from the attempt to force change. “It has to do with being told that who you are is wrong, and the only reason you are failing to change is that you don’t love your family enough, you don’t love God enough.”
Today’s route to such therapy is word of mouth, or through clergy. “Many of them are religious, not all Christian, some completely secular,” says Ames. “It’s sometimes a doctor’s office, sometimes in a church basement, sometimes at a summer camp, and sometimes out of the country—kids get whisked off to Central America or South Africa.”
One young man was told, while in South Africa, “that back in the U.S., they were killing everyone who was gay because of AIDS,” she says. “He was 10. He believed them.”
“Conversion therapy was much more popular in the ’80s and ’90s, but it still occurs,” says Katie Heiden-Rootes, assistant professor in the medical family therapy program at Saint Louis University. Sometimes it’s not branded as “conversion” or “reparative” therapy at all, she says, but simply carried out by a therapist whose personal belief is that sexual orientation can (and should) be changed. “We are currently collecting data from [gay or lesbian] people who came from religious homes, and so far maybe a fourth have experienced some kind of conversion therapy.”
Most research has been focused on the aftereffects, she adds, “the increase in depression or suicide after reparative therapy.” Parents seek this help for their children out of love, not malice. “But when Mom and Dad say, ‘This is what’s going to help,’ a teenager feels betrayed, not protected—because it doesn’t feel like love.”
Caitlin Ryan runs the Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State University, which she says is the only project in the world trying to find common ground between kids who aren’t heterosexual and parents who find any other orientation or gender identity immoral. Ryan has identified more than 100 signs of rejection or acceptance that parents, often unwittingly, give a nonheterosexual teenager. Not letting children talk about who they are, not insisting that extended family members treat children with respect, saying things like “You’ll grow out of it” or “It’s just a phase”—all can be experienced as rejection.
Ryan’s also crunched the numbers: LGBT adolescents who feel rejected are more than eight times as likely as their heterosexual peers to have attempted suicide and nearly six times as likely to report a high level of depression.
The Galloways had always been a close family—the kind whose members went on hikes and picnics and bike rides together, teased each other with warm affection, had one another’s backs.
After therapy started, Galloway tried to avoid those family outings. When his parents insisted, his presence was a lead weight, sinking their cheerful little boat.
His little brother must have wondered at the shift: All the joking around had skidded to a halt, and his brother had gone quiet, lost inside himself. Their parents’ desperate attempts to draw him closer—asking what he was doing, how he was doing, what thoughts were running through his head—only shut him down more. Which meant, according to his counselor, that he wasn’t trying hard enough.
“In seven sessions,” he’d realize later, “this man was able to completely destroy my family.”
His father was now ridden with guilt, because the counselor said an absent father (he’d worked midnights when Galloway was younger) and overbearing mother (Galloway and his mom had always been close), plus the bullying in middle school, had made him crave male attention. “But I was close to my dad,” Galloway tried to protest. Some of his best memories were the times they played with action figures, Batman especially. And he’d been bullied by girls and boys alike…
He slept whenever possible. His grades slid lower. Emotional storms rose up fast, like tornadoes in the Dust Bowl. The outbursts of fury or utter sadness left him emotionally drained, as if he couldn’t feel anything at all, because it was exhausting even to try.
Soon he’d receded so far inside himself, he wasn’t sure who he even was. He’d tried to change and it hadn’t happened and he felt like he was failing. The message was that he was inherently broken and that—even though he’d always thought of himself as male—he lacked sufficient masculinity to be a real man. The gay community supported pedophilia, the counselor said. They were all about pedophilia and incest, and they were dying of AIDS left and right. And they were immoral, and they pretended to be happy but they weren’t, and he would be unhappy for the rest of his life and never be fulfilled. Great.
Was it true? He didn’t know enough people to be sure, hadn’t seen enough of the world to gauge truth. Doubts played over and over, and he talked back to his own mind, trying to silence it, trying to shift his desires.
Then a new worry hit: What if he tried so hard not to be gay that he just became asexual, and he stopped being able to feel anything at all? And his counselor seemed fine with that, said that would be OK; it was OK to abstain; in the Bible, eunuchs are praised.
Psychology Today provides an online directory that includes a category for Christian therapists. Not “conversion therapy”—nobody dares advertise that anymore—just practitioners with a Christian orientation. I contact three in the St. Louis area who see adolescents and who list struggles with sexual orientation as one of their treatment areas.
Nick Symon, a recent graduate of Covenant Theological Seminary, says he doesn’t work with clients who are seeking orientation change; if asked, he’d refer them elsewhere. “The research doesn’t support that that is an effective means of therapy,” he says, “so my emphasis is more on identity synthesis.” Sexual orientation is only one part of someone’s identity, he explains, and he helps clients figure out, “Is this a big part of my identity, or do other things have more weight, like my commitment to my faith or my family?”
Symon believes that homosexual acts are sins, yet he wants young people to know that the attraction they feel is not abnormal or shameful. When I ask how he reconciles this, he points out that “Christianity itself is full of tension.” Does he believe that sexual orientation is a choice? “I don’t think we are given that answer.”
The next therapist I interview is Perris Monrow, a psychologist with a long-established private practice in Olivette. He expresses disappointment that even “the churches have gone P.C.” When clients are struggling with sexual orientation, he says, “I try to rationalize with them. Why they seem to be going against the grain; why they think that is right. I’ve run into plenty who are going the gay way—this is typically females—because they have been sexually abused. I think there’s a bunch of men out there that go gay because men have this fear of rejection and they have low self-esteem. They feel if they asked a pretty girl out for a date and she said no, they’d be crushed.”
The younger someone is, Monrow says, the more impressionable, “and the more chance you have before their thinking gets so rigid and set in.” He sighs. “I’m just starting to believe that this is a fad. Bipolar’s a fad; before, it was borderline [personality disorder]. Everyone’s looking for attention. You’ve gotta have your iPhone, you’ve gotta have Facebook, you’ve gotta be bisexual.” Parents forget what it’s like to chase what’s cool, he adds. Furthermore, they often “don’t see where their parenting styles played into this thing. Arguing between husband and wife, no model of a good marriage… The kid decides men and women don’t get along.”
Has he ever had success helping someone change sexual orientation? “No. I’m too logical and rational, I guess. Once people spend three or four sessions with me, a lot of times I don’t see them again. I think they see they are not hiding anything from me, and I kind of understand what the gig is here. As long as they can bluff you, they will keep yakking.”
What if a teenager wanted to be a devout Christian and was really struggling? “Obviously I’m going to have a heart for that person,” he says. “I’m not going to Bible-beat them, just see, did they have bad modeling from Mom and Dad, were they sexually abused by Uncle Joe, are all their friends going this way so they want to, too…and in the end make them feel really good about themselves. That there is a God and he loves the dickens out of them and wants them to have a good life, and they don’t have to go this route. They can go the more natural way.”
The third therapist I interview, Ricky Lomax, has a master’s in psychology from Webster University and is assistant pastor of the Greater Pentecostal Church of God. “Most people don’t come to me with a mind that they want to change,” he says. “If there’s an issue, it’s ‘Which do I choose?’” He’s all for banning conversion therapy: “I don’t believe in it; I don’t trust it; it’s not scientific.”
Lomax ascribes homosexuality to either sexual trauma or absence of the father. Yet when it comes to a homosexual act, he says, “I believe what the Bible says: It’s sin.” And does he share that belief in his practice? “I’ve had clients ask me many times, and I would never lie to a client, but I don’t argue my own beliefs with them.”
Still, if it’s sin, that would mean it’s a deliberate choice? “I can’t even answer that,” he says, “because I don’t understand it. It’s possible they are drawn to some kind of proclivity for sin, but I don’t believe anyone in this lifestyle is setting out to sin. I’ve known too many who are just fine people who happen to love a different lifestyle.”
Is the solution celibacy, then? “We have a great desire and need to reach out to other human beings, feel physical touch, be intimate,” he says slowly, “so that is not always the answer, no. What I say to them is ‘What will cause you the least amount of pain?’”
And if their answer is one that he believes will lead them to damnation and hellfire? “In that case, I always tell them, ‘Go talk to your pastor.’”
Even in states that have banned conversion therapy for minors, there are all sorts of gray areas and legal loopholes, and the pastor—or pastoral care counselor, or priest, or Orthodox rabbi—is the biggest. Clergy can say whatever they like to a teenager in God’s name.
The Rev. Jim Venice and his wife founded the Pure Heart Ministries in St. Peters. He’s vaguely aware of a law against therapy with minors one state over but thinks it’s only in Chicago. “We don’t work with minors unless they have a parent or guardian with them,” he assures me.
Therapy can be easier when someone’s younger, he continues, “especially if they have not been active. The longer they have been in it, the longer it takes to come back out of it.” His goal is “just getting them to understand that you are not born gay and you have a choice in this matter. There is not a gay gene.”
(This is true. After several studies hinted that there might be, studies of identical twins pointed to something subtler, an interaction of genetic predisposition with environmental factors, such as a wash of hormones at a certain point in a pregnancy. The mainstream scientific consensus is that sexual orientation begins well before any possibility of conscious choice.)
Venice says there’s a cultural backlash against ministries like his, even though “there are stories a dime a dozen of people who have found help or relief or change through the kind of counseling we do.”
He’s one of them himself.
In his own struggle, and now in his counseling, Venice uses a concept called “arrested gender identity development.” People experience same-sex attraction because they never became secure in their own gender identity, he says, describing that identity as “a bowl that needs to be filled.” His father wasn’t around, he explains, and his bowl of masculinity was maybe half full. “At puberty, that deficit—that hunger to connect with the same gender—becomes sexualized.”
Venice emphasizes that his ministry is “not therapeutic; we are pastoral. The licensed clinical approach, you go through a whole list of schooling. Our ministry is, well, it’s just ministry. We are dealing with similar psychological components, but we are using the spiritual back door to get into where their behavior conflicts with their belief system.”
The most mortifying session for Galloway was the one in which his counselor brought up Pavlov’s dogs, explained conditioning, and said his brain had been conditioned by masturbating to the image of men. He needed to reroute his neural pathways to experience sexual pleasure differently, so he should begin masturbating to the image of women.
“Excuse you?” Galloway said. They’d never talked about anything this personal. How could this guy even know whether he masturbated? And the counselor wanted to put this advice on the recommendation list that Galloway’s parents saw?
“Do not put that on my list!” he exclaimed, and his voice was definitely bold and competently powerful. “I do not need my parents reading that and talking to me about it!”
Last straw. No more. He was never going back.
Luckily, he didn’t have to. The double sessions were racking up costs, and he was becoming more withdrawn and angry. His parents decided to end the therapy.
As soon as the dreaded visits ended, Galloway’s depression started to ebb away. He found a new group of friends; he opened up again, bit by bit, to his parents. He woke up.
That summer, he found his first boyfriend.
The following fall, his first year at Rend Lake College, he confided in one of the professors, and she told him that what he’d been through was called conversion therapy. She also showed him how to report it to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
His parents didn’t like that idea at all—way too uncomfortably public—but he did it anyway.
It was time for a little distance, so he applied to Monmouth College, about four and a half hours from home. His dad drove up with him on Scholars Day. About 20 minutes into the drive home, his father said, “Curtis, I need to talk to you about something.”
Oh, my God, he thought. We have four hours left in this car.
“I might get emotional,” his dad warned.
Jesus Christ.
The words were as much a prayer as a curse; he wasn’t sure he could take this. His parents had this gift for pursuing difficult conversations at the worst possible times…
“But your mom and I have been talking,” his dad continued, “and we realize that what we did with the counselor was not right. It was a mistake, and it hurt you. If being gay is something that is going to keep our family apart, then it doesn’t matter. We don’t want that to come between us; there is nothing in this world worth dividing our family over.”
Out of the blue. There it was. Galloway hadn’t been expecting those words—maybe ever. A huge weight slid from him. Then he started second-guessing, couldn’t help it. Had his father really just said that? Would he shift back later?
The disbelief lasted until the next day, when his mom joined the conversation, and he realized that they both meant every word.
They were still worried about his “becoming an activist,” worried that they’d lose their jobs, worried that he’d ruin his future. But last year, after he’d given his eight-page narrative to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an attorney there connected him with Illinois Rep. Kelly Cassidy (D-Chicago), who was sponsoring the Youth Mental Health Protection Act to make it illegal to administer conversion therapy to minors.
She asked him to testify before Illinois House and Senate committees. And on Advocacy Day, he went to the office of the Republican governor, Bruce Rauner, and spoke about his experience. Said he’d felt like he was disappearing as a person, because his counselor had tried so hard to tear away, and replace, his identity. There were far, far worse cases of conversion therapy than his, he said—and if his experience had hit him this hard, he couldn’t even imagine what those kids were going through.
At that point the Department of Financial & Professional Regulation was neutral on the bill, and it was unclear whether Rauner would sign it. “I firmly believe that if you had not told him your story, he would not have signed the bill into law,” Cassidy later told Galloway, “because he kept talking about what you said.”
Galloway’s mom was listening to the live feed of the Senate hearing on May 29, 2015, when the bill passed. After the governor signed it, Galloway’s dad told him how proud they were of him: He’d turned a really hard experience around and done so much good with it.
Illinois was the fourth state to ban conversion therapy for minors. The Obama administration has urged all states to ban it, and more than 20 states have introduced legislation to do so. Missouri is not one of them.
Every major medical association has called conversion therapy not only ineffective but actually dangerous, increasing the risk of severe depression, anxiety, and suicide. Fifteen years ago, U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher issued a report stating that “there is no valid scientific evidence that sexual orientation can be changed.” In 2009, the American Psychological Association warned mental health professionals not to tell gay clients that they could change their orientation through therapy. A higher court in New Jersey found that conversion therapy was consumer fraud. And this spring, a Federal Trade Commission complaint was filed against the organization People Can Change for “deceptive advertising, marketing, and other business practices” advocating conversion therapy in the absence of any “competent and reliable scientific evidence” that it is effective.
Still, the issue is far from resolved.
The Catholic Medical Association’s publication “Homosexuality & Hope” states, “The good news is that SSA [same-sex attraction] is preventable and treatable.” It lists as possible causes “a failure of secure parent-child attachment in early childhood” and “physical separation from one or both parents in childhood.” For males, it points the blame at a father perceived as distant, critical, selfish, or angry or a mother perceived as controlling or overly dependent. The recommended prevention and treatment? “Early identification of at-risk children, along with appropriate psychotherapy and parental support.”
The Republican Party of Texas officially supported “reparative therapy” as part of its 2014 platform.
In Oklahoma, a state representative introduced a bill to protect parents’ “rights” to pursue conversion therapy for their children. It was amended to exclude the old midcentury aversive techniques, such as electroconvulsive therapy and vomit-inducing drugs.
Nonetheless, legislators refused to even let the bill be heard on the floor.
Liberty Counsel, a Christian nonprofit, sued New Jersey, charging that the state’s ban on conversion therapy violated religious freedom and free speech because it “requires minors to receive, and counselors to provide, only one view on same-sex attractions.”
The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case.
Conversion therapy has fallen out of the mainstream; now it flows underground. “It’s still happening in Illinois, even after the ban,” Galloway says. “There are so many ways around the law. Counselors who aren’t licensed; people who don’t call what they do ‘conversion therapy’; clergy who can’t be stopped because it’s religious freedom…”
When he turned 18, he requested his counseling file. Reading it was painful. He says his parents’ treatment goal was recorded as “We want Curtis to realize that being gay is a choice.”
They don’t remember writing that on the intake forms; what they do remember is a lot of leading questions. “We didn’t know or really understand what conversion therapy was,” his dad explains, “and our knowledge of choices and how to change came from the counselor.”
He’s just glad that love prevailed. He’s watched other families cut apart by anger and resentment for more than a decade. “There is nothing in the world,” he repeats, “worth dividing our family over.”
