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How can a deeper understanding of mental health help us see our world, and ourselves, differently? Hosted by therapist Kurt White and journalist Mary Wilson, each episode of Unravelling explores a complex mental health topic with insights from both professionals and people with lived experience. Whether you're trying to make sense of the world or just the slice of it inside of your head, Unravelling is here to foster a more compassionate and informed perspective on life.
The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. Always consult with a qualified health care professional for any health concerns. Take care of yourself out there. Welcome to Unravelling, a podcast that sees the world through the lens of mental health. I'm Curt White, a social worker and psychotherapist.
Mary:And I'm Mary Wilson, a journalist. Hi, Kurt.
Kurt:Hey, Mary.
Mary:Well, guess what? It is pride month. And here at Unravelling, we have a tradition. This is our third year so far of highlighting topics that are important in the LGBTQ plus community. And this month, we're going to be diving into what you may know as conversion therapy.
Kurt:Yeah. This has been in the news a lot lately, hasn't it? There's a supreme court ruling related to this that struck down some bans on the practice for minors. There's such a ban in Vermont, actually, where we are, and this has largely been a discredited practice that is sometimes illegal and largely spoken against by, you know, professional organizations, at least with respect to how it exists in the field of psychotherapy.
Mary:Sort of confusing because it's called conversion therapy, but that's why we're going to be calling it conversion practices because it indeed is not a therapy and instead is very harmful.
Kurt:Yeah. And that, is true whether or not it is done within the context of psychotherapy or some other kind of context, because I think we're going to see over the next three episodes where we talk to really some very interesting different folks looking at this through the kind of macro lens, we would say, in social work. How do how do these things affect large economic factors, the life course of folks with LGBTQIA plus identities of it?
Mary:Yeah. We wanna start by really putting a face to these conversion practices. And so that's why we are interviewing doctor Lucas Wilson, who has a personal experience with conversion therapy, actually sought it out, which, we learned is quite common because of these sort of broader societal impacts. And he also collected other stories, wide ranging stories of conversion practices, put them all together in a book to really humanize this issue and show everyone just how harmful it is.
Kurt:It's a really wonderful collection of, of different short creative nonfiction essays about folks that have encountered these kinds of practices. And I'm so happy that you were able to interview him directly.
Mary:Doctor. Lucas Wilson is a public facing interdisciplinary scholar of history, religion, gender, and sexuality at the University of Toronto, Mississauga with multiple publications, including the one we mentioned, which is titled Shame Survivor's Stories of Conversion Therapy.
Kurt:Well, let's take a listen.
Mary:Well, doctor Lucas Wilson, thank you so much for joining us on Unravelling.
Lucas:Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Mary:Yeah. Well, I had the privilege of reading Shame Sex Attraction, which you are the editor of and also contributed your own essay as well. And, wow, there was some really heartbreaking stories, some really traumatic experiences with conversion practices. Even someone undergoing an exorcism was particularly memorable. As someone with lived experience yourself of conversion practices, was there a moment when collecting these stories that it it really felt close to home?
Lucas:Yeah. I think going into it, I had this idea of what conversion therapy was, and it was largely based on my own personal experience as well as, you know, a few filmic and literary representations, specifically, you know, Boy Erased by Garrett Connolly and then the film, which was based upon on the memoir. And so doing this collection really exposed me to the breadth of conversion practices, That it's not just within high control Christian context. There are, you know, other places and spaces where conversion therapy happens. That it's not just with a pastor.
Lucas:It's not just with, you know, an unlicensed professional, it's with licensed professionals. It's with, you know, doctors. It's with parents. It's with one like oneself can be, you know, one can be one's own conversion therapist. The collection has a number of stories coming from a high control Christian context, from evangelical white Christian fundamentalist and Pentecostal spaces.
Lucas:And so reading those stories, it was like holding up a mirror to myself in many ways. All of the stories are different, but they certainly rhyme. One story in particular, is a story that's set in Australia. The author was writing about his experience in a traveling band and that he had these flashbacks essentially to his time in conversion therapy. And so I remember reading his story where he was talking about the anxiety of showering.
Lucas:And for most people showering is, you know, well, hopefully a daily thing, but, you know, something that people do quite regularly and don't even think about, you know, such a such a normal sort of mundane practice. Well, when I was in the church and when I was in conversion therapy, this was a site of anxiety for me showering because it was always this, you know, sort of trepidation that I was going to be tempted to sin sexually. Reading that story revivified these memories, revivified these anxieties that I had about things like showering, things that were so, again, quotidian and and mundane.
Mary:Can you talk a bit about what led you into conversion practices?
Lucas:Yeah. It was something that I chose for myself when I was in high school. Not a decision today that I would make again. I think that that ship has sailed. But, for me, I I come from a family where my dad was agnostic, and my mom was, I always say, haunted by her Baptist demons that she grew up with.
Lucas:And so, of course, there was this, you know, haunting in the house, and I certainly did see and hear things that were clearly a function of my mom's religious upbringing, you know, with her parents. But for us, I mean, we went to church up until about grade two or three for me. And I'm the youngest of five siblings. You know, all of my siblings had much more exposure to church and Sunday school and this kind of stuff. Whereas I did it.
Lucas:My mom had told us, you know, how to say our prayers at night, how to say grace before meals. But otherwise, there really wasn't anything that we that was religious in nature in our home. If anything, after we we came home from church, it was kinda like you'd go to Sunday school, you'd go to church, and then you'd shut the heck up about Jesus when you got home. You just didn't talk about it. And so I think for me, once I got into high school, that was actually when I I converted.
Lucas:I I became a, you know, a religious zealot, I suppose, a young excited evangelical. And And it was largely through the creation versus evolution debate, blah blah blah details. Well, once I was in the church and, you know, I was active in my youth group and, you know, going to services on Sunday morning, Sunday night, you know, volunteering, going to Christian camps, all this kind of stuff. I of course was thinking about, and in a lot of ways obsessed about my sexuality because it was made into this problem. It was something that was to be cured, to be fixed.
Lucas:And so I tried my best to hide it. I don't think I did a great job. I mean, watched a lot of HGTV. I think that I thought that going to church and becoming a Christian really was gonna be a cover for me, that no one would be able to tell my sexuality because if I was a Christian, well, I couldn't be queer, at least in the evangelical imagination that was pervasive at the time and still pervasive today. But as I was progressing through high school, of course, it was time to think about which university I wanted to go to.
Lucas:And by the end, the decision was between two schools. University of Toronto, which is, you know, arguably one of Canada's best schools, and Liberty University at Lynchburg, Virginia. And I made the, unfortunate decision to attend Liberty, and and what really motivated that decision was that I knew Liberty had a conversion therapy program. And I didn't call it conversion therapy at the time. I didn't conceptualize it as conversion therapy, and a lot of folks who undergo conversion practices don't think of their experience as conversion therapy.
Lucas:However, I knew that they had on campus a paid university employee who worked with two groups of students. The first group, those who were quote unquote addicted to porn. The other group, you know, homosexually, you know, addict those who are addicted to homosexuality, not an addiction. But this is again really what the way it was framed for me. And so I knew that I had this guy on campus.
Lucas:I knew that he worked with folks like me. And so I said at the end of the day, know, if I'm gonna make my decision, I think that this is really the place for me because if I want to remain within the fold, if I wanna remain an evangelical, I either have to become celibate, and that doesn't sound like the most exciting, you know, prospect, or become straight, find attraction to women, and then marry a woman, you know, and then off, you know, go off, I'll go and live my life of godly normalcy. It didn't work out that way. You know, I'm I'm a I'm a still a big old homosexual today. However, you know, this was how it was set up for me.
Lucas:This is how I understood it at the time and how I was led to believe that I had to, again, pursue something like conversion therapy if I were to remain a religiously committed person.
Mary:Wow. And I understand this institution would penalize people for showing same sex attraction. It was a very strict campus. Right?
Lucas:Still is. Yeah. You know, the school was started by Jerry Falwell. And if anyone knows who Jerry Falwell is, he was the one who started the moral majority. You know, there's a direct line between him and Reagan, him and eventually Trump.
Lucas:His son was the first evangelical to endorse Trump publicly. There are so many connections between, you know, the, alt right in The US and Jerry Falwell in the school. And so, yeah, at the school, there were, you know, there was a very strict honor code. A lot of rules. You couldn't wear certain clothes.
Lucas:You couldn't wear certain clothes in certain spaces. You couldn't dance. You couldn't hug for more than three seconds. You couldn't kiss, of course, if you weren't able to hug. And there were, you know, internet blockers for a lot of websites.
Lucas:And most certainly you could not be a practicing quote unquote homosexual. And this was, again, if you were caught in any, you know, sexual relationship between you and anyone, but especially if you were queer, there were consequences for it. And so, I lived in what we called the liberty bubble. I mean, most university campuses have a bubble of some sort, but, you know, liberties was perhaps, you know, a sacred canopy as a way of describing it. Space that was very much separate from the world.
Lucas:I mean, I lived in Lynchburg, Virginia, where the campus was, but was I all that involved with many things in Lynchburg? Not really. We were heavily monitored. We had RAs who, you know, were the heads of our different dorm halls and they could write us up for any infraction of the honor code and, you know, they were watching us constantly and they would warn us, and they would threaten us with punishments and this kind of stuff. And so I knew that I couldn't be, you know, a quote unquote practicing queer while there, lest I, you know, face the consequences that the school had very clearly laid out for us.
Mary:It's so striking that you and other people there, you met many like minded people. You were there to, quote, heal yourself, and the people conducting these conversion practices genuinely thought they were doing the right thing, often to the point of the people undergoing it of of wanting to die by suicide. But how do you sort of, reckon with people that are wanting to undergo these practices with the fact that we know now it is so harmful?
Lucas:Yeah. You know, people who who really do, and I think a lot of conversion practitioners really do think it is the right thing to do and that they're helping people, that they're pushing them in the right direction. And I do think that my conversion therapist to this day, I think that he thinks that he has done the Lord's work. I think that he thinks that he did what was right. And so I look back at him, honestly, not with a lot of anger per se.
Lucas:I'm angry at the years I lost. I'm angry at the consequences of conversion therapy. But do I think he was motivated by hate and spite? In a certain sense, yes. Right?
Lucas:Like, homophobia and transphobia are definitional forms of hatred. But do I think that he was doing anything other than what he thought was, you know, God's will and again, what was right? No. I think that he really did believe this. And I don't hold a grudge against him, I would say.
Lucas:But I think that a lot of people do for their conversion therapists and a lot of people from Liberty have a lot of hatred for, you know, Dane Emrick who was our conversion therapist.
Mary:The community that you found there in college, there were other people like you who were desperately trying to change themselves. Walk me through sort of that process and the camaraderie you found with each other.
Lucas:Yeah. You know, the first person I came out to was at Liberty, and he was a friend of a gal I was half heartedly trying to pursue. I was like, I need to find a a girlfriend. And so he he was her best friend, and we became just pals, and we started hanging out. And I remember, he came to my my work.
Lucas:I worked at the university switchboard. So anytime you called Liberty, you'd get me if you press 0. And so I was allowed to have friends over to my work, and so it was in the north part of campus, the secluded part of campus that no one really, you know, trafficked all that much, especially late at night when I was working. And so he would come and we would do our homework together, and we would just chitchat and hang out. And one night he came, this was in about October, and we were talking about how there had been a problem between me and my one of my spiritual life directors.
Lucas:Well, the problem was that I had hooked up with my spiritual life director and he stonewalled me. He would not talk to me after that. He was, you know, completely ashamed of what we had done. And so I was, you know, left to to think through and to sort of, you know, figure out how to proceed, you know, living in a dorm with someone who, again, for all intents purposes thought I was, you know, treated me like I was just, like, dead. And this was my first, you know, ever sort of, like, romantic encounter.
Lucas:And so I was, like, you know, often my own emotions every single night, just constantly upset, not knowing what to do. And so I, like many angsty teens before me, had had responded by writing a poem. I wrote a poem, and it was called, you ever notice how cold it gets in the fall? Looking back, like, just terribly. But I had written this poem and I told him because I said, yeah, something had happened and I'm really upset.
Lucas:And he said, well, what happened? I said, I can't really tell you. I said, however, I I can read you a poem that I had written. And he was like, okay. So I read him the poem, and I look at him, and he's like, I think I think I I think I know what the poem's about.
Lucas:And I was like, oh, shoot. Like, my cover's blown. And I was like, oh, oh, okay. What do you think the pub's about? And he's like, but I don't really want to guess and be wrong.
Lucas:I said, why would that matter? And he said, because if I'm wrong, then you're going to know that I also struggle with the same thing. And the moment he said struggle, I was like, oh, I'm, you know, I'm in good gay company. So, you know, within a few minutes, we sort of fumble back and forth and he tells me that, you know, I struggle with same sex attraction. Oh, I struggle with same sex attraction, which is the phrasing in evangelical for I'm gay.
Lucas:And he and I would go on these walks and we would talk just for hours and hours, about, you know, what had happened with my spiritual life director, what we were gonna do in regards to us being queer, how we, you know, what God thinks, what other people think and, you know, it was so having him was in many ways a lifeline, but I did not wanna burden him exclusively with this, you know, knowledge and my emotions and me being sad boy all the time. So that's when I eventually went into conversion therapy, and that's when I decided to to meet with my conversion therapist. In shame sex attraction, the book, you know, that came up last year, I write about my experience in group conversion therapy. And I went to that group with another friend who, you know, I'd also shared that I was queer with him, and he, you know, shared with me that he was. But we were both, you know, we were both interested in and and, again, really trying to become straight.
Lucas:But at the same time, we were like, well, also, we wanna know who the other gays are on campus. And so we did, and we found this group. And then, you know, as the story details, I met this other guy on campus who had been one of my campus crushes. I had seen him around campus and we, you know, had made eyes all the time, but I never really knew if he was queer or not. And, of course, seeing him at the group cleared things up for me that, you know, he he was of the persuasion too.
Lucas:And so he and I, again, also formed this bond, this friendship. But I think, you know, part of your question too was what brings people into choosing conversion therapy. Right? And like what, you know, what what motivates us? I think in a lot of ways, we're pushed to choose conversion therapy.
Lucas:We're made to want conversion therapy. I mean, what does it mean to say that you want to erase a constitutive part of who you are? It like, no one wakes up in the morning without, you know, the influence of others to say, I absolutely hate this part of myself that again is as natural as a hair color. It's you're you're made to want to change. You're made to hate that part of yourself through the eyes of others.
Lucas:And so, you know, I conversion therapy is definitional abuse according to all research. According to the UN repertoire on torture, certain instances, not all, but certain instances of conversion therapy constitute torture. So what does it mean I consent to abuse? What does it mean I consent to torture? What does it mean I want to be abused?
Lucas:What does it mean I want to be tortured? Right? These things don't make sense. And so whenever I think about the idea of, you know, agency and choice and what pushes people into this, it's not ourselves. We're not choosing this.
Lucas:We're pushed to choose this because the idea is if you don't change this part of yourself and you don't and or don't accept, you know, a life of celibacy, the other option is living that big old gay lifestyle that we're warned about and then therefore going to hell. And of course, when hell is your motivating, you know, sort of motivation for anything that's, you know, it's like having a gun held to your head. And so, of course, so many folks who are in high control Christian spaces are gonna choose what they're told they have to do because the alternative is eternal damnation. That's what I think about when I think about conversion therapy and what motivated us to go into it. Looking back, I mean, was such a sad group of guys.
Lucas:I even write about this in the in the story. It really was like wildly depressing to go into that room. I was like, I don't belong here. Like, it was just this anti community. It was a community that self cannibalized that worked against its own, you know, vitality and livelihood.
Lucas:The thing that brought us together was the thing we were trying to erase.
Mary:Wow. You mentioned these mental gymnastics, and it's just that the hole that it must have taken to constantly be trying to change and hide who you are while at the same time maybe acting on sexual desires and then feeling the shame and the guilt? I mean, what did this this do to you?
Lucas:Yeah. So for me, I always think about the violence of conversion therapy for myself being taking place after I went through conversion therapy, not so much in the moment. Because when I went through conversion therapy at Liberty for the four years I was there, I was always encouraged by my conversion therapist. His name was Dane Emrick, a pastor, who again, you know, was on staff at Liberty through the campus pastor's office. He he would always encourage me in a sense, right, where he was saying, you're doing the right thing.
Lucas:You're going in the right direction. Keep it up. You know, this is what God wants for your life. And so when you have that sort of cheerleader coach mentor pushing you and encouraging you, it's not as bad in the moment or it doesn't feel as bad. And the way that he oftentimes framed it was that he said, guilt is good.
Lucas:Shame is bad. Even though it was clearly, like, a lot of shame involved, and we can talk more about that after. But he would always separate. He would say it's not that you as a person are bad per se, even though evangelicals do believe that people are bad as people per se, he would say that for that individual action. So if, you know, I looked at a guy lustfully or if I was tempted to look at porn, whatever, you know, the temptation or the action was, he'd say, you are guilty for that individual action, but it doesn't reflect you as a person.
Lucas:He would always say that we weren't gay. We were just struggling with same sex attraction. So we were heterosexuals, latent heterosexuals who just had this, you know, pesky issue of, you know, homosexuality that would plague us clearly. But, again, he separated that out from us. He said that you as an individual, you as a person, you're a child of of God.
Lucas:You're, you know, an image bearer. You are not a a gay or a queer man. You're a straight man who's just struggling with this, you know, sin. And so because of that, it was very much okay. So if I'm just struggling with this and I did that one bad thing, but it doesn't necessarily reflect me as a person, then you felt in a lot of ways encouraging good, and you're like, okay.
Lucas:I can keep doing this. I can keep doing this well. The moment I left Liberty and I went to grad school, I went to an actual university after once, and I was there and I started to quickly realize nothing had changed. And this was after again, four years of meeting with with Dane. This was after if you added up the weeks that I fasted, it would have been a cumulative of months that I just over, you know, span of four years just didn't eat because I wanted to, again, essentially like beg God and get God's attention to change me.
Lucas:Prayer, you know, asking people to pray for me when I did eventually start coming out to more people and saying, you know, I struggle with same sex attraction. Can you pray for me? And having this coercive prayer. Went I through an exorcism myself once at liberty. There was all of this, and I thought to myself, like, you know, and I remember one day one night I was about to go to the pub to to visit a buddy on campus, and I was praying.
Lucas:I was saying to God, I was like, God, what the hell? Like, I have tried, and I have tried, and I have tried. Done all these things, met with Dain, again, prayed, read my Bible, whatever. Like take your pick on any spiritual exercise. And certainly I had done it.
Lucas:I said, nothing's changed. What is going on? And so for me, when I realized that it wasn't just that I was doing this one action here or one action here that, you know, I was quote, unquote guilty for. It was that I realized that I, as a person, really was gay. And when you understand yourself as gay within the evangelical imagination, emphasis on imagination, that is a bad thing, and that's a negative, you know, pejorative descriptor.
Lucas:And so it wasn't just that I had done something bad here and there. It was that I, as a person, was bad. And so that negative energy wasn't directed towards that discrete action there over there. It was directed inwards at the self, at me. There was a shift from guilt to shame and that shame turned into self hatred and metastasized.
Lucas:Right? And just really created this beast, this monster of how I understood myself and how I thought of myself in relationship to God and relationship to other people. And then by the end of that, I again, I started to to reconsider my relationship to faith, my my relationship to sexuality, to gender, all these things. The aftermath was once I left that space, how that work that was done by Dane Emerick shaped my self perception and how I related to myself again for a good year and a bit, if not longer. And of course I think it did take longer if you think about again, the fact that I was in therapy afterwards, the fact that I was still writing and thinking about this kind of stuff years after.
Lucas:And so maybe it's a lifelong process of, you know, unlearning a lot of this and healing. I'm not clueless. And I do know that, again, these things run deep and that the wounds are deep. And so for me, I would say that was really the violence of conversion therapy for me and the consequences thereof.
Mary:In the years afterward, and it sounds like it got really dark for you, was there a breaking point when you were able to start to reconsider some of these things that had been drilled into you?
Lucas:I remember I went to New Mexico for a conference. This was my first academic conference. I thought it was so cool. The university was paying for it. I thought I was, you know, really, making my way in the world.
Lucas:So I go down to New Mexico, and I had looked up, you know, gay bars. And so I went to a gay bar, and I remember I was standing in line, and there was this group of guys ahead of me, and they were chitchatting. And I heard someone say something about a cover for the bar. So I said that the guy ahead of me, I was like, yo. How much how much is cover here?
Lucas:And they're like $20. I was like, what? I was like, I can have, like, two beers after this. What in the world? Or like three beers.
Lucas:And so I was like, gosh. Darn it. And he was like, why? Where are you from? And they said, I'm not from here.
Lucas:He goes, where are you from? I said, Toronto. And he's like, oh, Canadian. And I was like, yeah. So we start talking.
Lucas:They bring me into the group. We're chitchatting. Anyhoo, the point of this story is that I remember being in a group of gay guys for the first time and being like, what is this? Like, this is not what I had been sold up until this point that it was, you know, a bunch of, you know, depraved, crazy, you know, unhealthy, you know, sexually sort of like charged, whatever. It was not aligning with the image that I had been given up until that point.
Lucas:And I was like, gosh, I'm really I would love to have a friend group like this. This would be so neat. So I went back to Canada, and I only had stray friends. And so I remember just being like, I need to figure this out. Like, I can't continue living this really, you know, dark sort of, day to day, and it was, I mean, in a very literal and figurative sense.
Lucas:Like, Ontario in the winter is a is a dark, dark time. And so, you know, it does weigh on you. And so I remember thinking, like, I need to figure out my relationship between my faith and my sexuality. And so that's when I applied to divinity school. That was really the place where I began to reconcile those the relationship between, again, my faith and my sexuality.
Lucas:And it was a time when I went down and I said, I'm going to allow I'm gonna let myself live first and theorize later. Because up until that point, I'd always put my theology, which at the end of the day is just theory, first, and that framed how I acted in almost every way. And so I said, I'm gonna live first and theorize later. And that for me was this massive shift because up until that point, you know, and I think anyone who comes from this high control Christian world knows that that that is this like, you know, tectonic shift. Whereas for people outside of that, you know, world probably think like, is the big difference?
Lucas:For us, when we were, you know, again, in the church, it was everything. Your theology, your theory was everything. And so I shifted that. I switched the order and I said, I'm just gonna live as a gay person first and then see what God thinks afterwards. And so I did.
Lucas:And that's really, you know, in large part how I started to extricate myself from the system was realizing my lived reality, my day to day does not align with this theory. I can't do this anymore. It's clearly leading me to a very dark place. And if I continue down this road, who knows where I'm gonna end up? Mhmm.
Lucas:And so I decided that I needed to, again, separate myself from this this religious system because, again, it was doing absolutely nothing for me other than harming me in really significant and and deep ways.
Mary:Yeah. And you mentioned the lasting impacts. So what kind of supports did you find for yourself in getting out of that life?
Lucas:I always say academia saved my life. Because if it weren't for academia, I think that I wouldn't have had that concentrated time and space to think and to feel. I think that the beautiful thing about Dib School was that it was both academic and also confessional. And so it allowed me in a very concentrated space to work through and come to terms with what it was to be an evangelical for and and again, to go through conversion therapy as an evangelical. You know, and I think about that phrase to come to terms, like define terms, to find language, to articulate yourself.
Lucas:And there's one German theologian, Dorothy Sole. She says that it's a radical act just to name what is. And that for me has stuck with me. Right? Because like just to for the first time say, I'm gay.
Lucas:For the first time to say, I went through conversion therapy. I remember for a long time, I just said it was pastoral counseling. It was just that I met with pastor Dane blah blah blah. But all of a sudden, when someone gives you language and it was someone giving me language, my office mate said when I described what I had gone through at Liberty, she said, oh, so you went through conversion therapy? And I was like, baby?
Lucas:And I had never thought about it in those terms when she, named that. And I was like, oh, that does map onto my experience. That is accurate. All of a sudden, when you have the ability to name something, your world opens up a little bit. Right?
Lucas:That language is, you know, a world creating, you know, tool. And for me, it was a language and recognizing what was, what happened in language allowed me again to come to terms, to find ways of describing myself, to articulate myself ultimately as a queer person. I also think that academia and the beautiful part of academia is encountering difference. I mean, I grew up in Toronto, which is considered one of the most multicultural cities in the world. I went to a public high school, so I had a lot of friends with a lot of different beliefs, but I did not have conversations like I had in grad school where these are, again, very concentrated spaces to talk about very particular things in a very particular space.
Lucas:And so having that luxury of sitting with other folks who were invested in these conversations and thinking through questions of race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, all these different important parts of our day to day lives, it was a way of realizing, oh, you see the world this way, and I've never even considered that possibility. And I am rubbing up against this, you know, really, sharp difference in how you see the world. It forces you to reconsider and to at least reevaluate. You might come to the same conclusion, but bare minimum, you've thought about it. And for me, I was I was pushed to think about things I had never thought about other than, you know, through this very rigid theological theoretical, you know, approach to the world.
Lucas:So I think the grad school gave me the community, like the community of of other, like, thinkers and and learners and also pushed me to see difference and to encounter difference in an open way and say, maybe my, you know, heretofore understood sort of conclusions of the world that I said, like, definitively, this is the case. Like, Jesus is the answer over everything. Maybe Jesus isn't. And it was funny because it was in div school. Right?
Lucas:So of all places where where you'd perhaps expect you to reinforce your beliefs, for me, it challenged them to such an extent that I eventually walked away from religion. Though I will say that the Holocaust and researching Holocaust was actually the straw that broke the camel's back. It wasn't actually my gender or sexuality. But it was all of these things in concert. Again, putting my theory second and my lived experience first, meeting folks who were different from me, and then again, really thinking, in an intentional intentional way way about about a a lot lot of of these different topics that ultimately gave me the tools or the keys to get the heck out.
Mary:Do you ever look at conversion practices through that lens with your, academia hat of studying the Holocaust? Is that sort of an angle that you've looked at?
Lucas:Yeah. I mean, there are so many parallels between the Holocaust and Nazi ideology and where North America is today. And to zoom out beyond just conversion practice, but I'll zoom back in in just a second. I mean, even if you think about, you know, what was the quote unquote problem in Nazi Germany, Jews, and what was the percentage of the population in Germany of Jewish folks? 1%.
Lucas:Today, there's 1% of the population in The US is trans, and these are, again, the the folks who are being scapegoated. You know, you can think about how during the Holocaust, if you were able to prove that you were able to change your sexuality, if you were an imprisoned queer person, you could get out. Right? So this idea that sexuality is mutable, know, mutable, that it's changeable. These aren't new ideas.
Lucas:Right? I think that if ever, you know, your way of seeing the world aligns with Nazis, you should probably reconsider your way of seeing the world. And a lot of this, you know, ideology that undergirds conversion therapy, right? Again, the belief that one can change one's sexuality, This is borrowed from a lot of these folks, a lot of these thinkers. Right?
Lucas:And so if we can draw a line between Nazi understandings of sexuality and conversion therapists understanding of sexuality, and they they match up, again, maybe it's time to reevaluate. Now, do I think that the conversion therapists have the moral courage and the intellectual ability to to make these connections and then therefore to to say, oh, maybe I should give up these beliefs? No, I don't. I think a lot of these people are, again, morally and intellectually bankrupt. However, for those who do have a heart in their chest and a brain in their head, I do think that this is a pretty convincing argument that if we can, again, say that that, you know, Nazi understandings of sexuality map onto conversion practices today, at least onto conversion ideology today, then, yeah, that that's a pretty damning critique.
Mary:Do you ever think of the other folks who were with you during these conversion practices in that group? And do you wonder, you know, if they're still battling this or if they, like you, have come to live their true and authentic lives?
Lucas:Yeah. So the buddy I told you about, the one who who had come to me to to work with me, he eventually did get married to a woman. He had a few kids with her, and then I was I had written an article about, don't know, maybe 2021 or 2022. It was an RVA magazine. And in that story, again, I describe our relationship and the role that he played in my life at the time.
Lucas:Well, one day, it was, you know, a few years ago, I just get this message and the name I gave him in the story was Gabriel. And so he says, all of a sudden, I just get this Facebook message that says Gabriel, and he puts it in quotes. In other words, him. And I always wondered, had he had he read the article? He says Gabriel is no longer married.
Lucas:And I was like, what? What? What? And so, you know, it's our message. I mean, find out that again, he had come to terms with his sexuality.
Lucas:He and his wife, you know, ended things. And obviously it was a difficult situation, but, you know, no real hard feelings, I don't think. But he was one who was who was sucked into that world. Another buddy who was in the story I referenced, it's the friend who introduces me to my crush on campus. He also got married.
Lucas:He also had kids. He's now out of that marriage and, you know, living that big old gay lifestyle we're all warned about. But then the the crush in the story, this guy, you know, he's someone who I know where he's at today because my friend who I told you about first, they when he was eventually again leaving that marriage, he was he was still friends with the guy who, again, the story is about. And that guy is still in the warp, is still in that evangelical world. He's still and he was really, really angry with my friend for for divorcing his, you know, the woman to whom he was married.
Lucas:And I think in a lot in large part, it's because that's that anger that he feels towards my friend is really anger that he feels towards himself. Right? That he knows that he's imprisoned in this system, and it's a prison of his own making. He does have the power to get out, but, of course, a lot of things would, change. A lot would crumble.
Lucas:His entire social network, which is, know, within this high control evangelical space, would disappear as it has for all of us. Like all of us who left these spaces, we don't have almost any contacts there anymore. Most people will immediately turn their back on you, and it's been the case for me. It's been the case for my friends. And so it would be the same for him most likely.
Lucas:And so certainly, there are a number of people who are still in this world. I will also say that just last week or the week before, I was on Instagram and all of a sudden they get this message and it's a current student from Liberty who says they're putting me through conversion therapy like I don't know what to do. So this is something that's still happening. This is something that's happening where it happened to me. It's not with the same conversion therapist.
Lucas:He retired, but I know there are other offices on that campus that continue to do that dirty work. And so, you know, again, I have friends who have gotten themselves out, but I know a number of folks who are still in. And then the next generation and the next generation, it's probably just going to be the exact same. History doesn't repeat itself, but it certainly does rhyme.
Mary:Wow. To know that it's it's still going on today and certainly is not just a thing of the past. What do you think people should know about these conversion practices?
Lucas:You know what? Some people ask like, who's your ideal reader for the book? And I said, my ideal reader is very different from who's actually gonna read the book. And the ideal reader would be conversion therapist. It would be people who are putting their kids through conversion therapy, people who are putting themselves through conversion therapy.
Lucas:This would be the ideal reader. I want them to read these stories, and I want them to read the introduction so that they know a few things. And the two things that I would really want them to know, you can be conservative religiously. Right? You can have really conservative, I.
Lucas:E. Homophobic and transphobic, you know, beliefs, theologies, but you also can be someone who doesn't put, you know, yourself or others through conversion therapy. Conversion therapy doesn't work. We don't have one confirmed case of it ever working. Right?
Lucas:In all the years that it's been practiced and the range of practices that have been practiced, not one person has changed their sexual orientation, their gender identity, and or their gender expression. Maybe their gender expression in the sense of that they perform a certain brand of masculinity or femininity. Yeah, you can affect a certain brand of you know gender but it doesn't mean that you yourself are changed. It's a performance. It's you know, you're acting.
Lucas:But we have documentation, right? Evidence based claims that conversion practices are not benign, but instead are wildly harmful. So not only does it not work, it has really, really, you know, negative consequences. So even if you do have homophobic beliefs and transphobic beliefs and heterosexist beliefs, it doesn't mean that you should therefore be like, okay. Let's either put myself or someone else through conversion therapy.
Lucas:Instead, it should you you again, I don't know what the next step for for those folks is. Like, what do you do if in fact you think homosexuality is wrong or gender diversity is wrong? You know, what do you do? I don't know. What I do know you shouldn't do is put someone or yourself through conversion therapy.
Lucas:There are gonna be a lot of homophobes, lot of transphobes out there. What they need to know is that, again, it's not only it not only does it not work, but it's also not benign and it actually has a litany of psychological, emotional, spiritual, and in some cases, physical consequences.
Mary:Is it hard to find any hope in this world knowing that this stuff is still going on, or are you seeing any sort of change within these faith communities, mental health communities, survivor networks? Is there anything that can give you hope?
Lucas:You know what? I think that there there have been numerous examples of why we should be hopeful, but I I temper that with what I'll say afterwards. I mean, there are so many organizations, you know, that have actively attempted to fight against conversion practices. So there are faith communities. I mean, lot of mainline denominations, you know, United Church of Canada, Reform Judaism, you know, a lot of different congregations who are in the within that tradition.
Lucas:Certain Catholic groups digging into USA. There are so many different organizations, churches, and individuals that push against and and combat conversion practices. In the, you know, other contexts, secular or non religious contexts, you know, of course, there are numerous, professional organizations. Right? The American Psychiatric Association, you know, American Medical Association, you know, so many really any any professional organization that's is respectable or a legitimate or credible organization fight against and and speak against conversion practices.
Lucas:But, you know, what we've seen in the past few years is, you know, if we saw the pendulum going in, you know, in the right direction, it's it's there's been a lot of regression as of recent. You know, when we think back to 2015 in The US when gay marriage was legalized, a lot of these hate groups redirected their energies away from sexual minorities and really focused on gender minorities and started looking at trans and, you know, non binary and gender diverse folks. And that's where a lot of the concentration has been recently. And again, really the small percentage of the population has been scapegoated. And so seeing a lot of legislation, a lot of policy, seeing a lot of activism, anti queer activism, and anti trans activism as of recent, not only offers you pause, but really causes you causes a lot of anxiety, right, for by especially for my gender minority friends and family.
Lucas:And so that is, of course, something to be, deeply concerned about. I think on top of that, once they're done with the gender minorities, who they come in after next? The sexual minorities are coming right back for us. And so I think that these are things that need to be, addressed, and I think that it's the responsibility of faith communities to stand up and to step up. I think it's the responsibility of allies to stand up and step up.
Lucas:Right? I think that we all need to be working together. When I hear, you know, anti black racism or if when I hear misogynistic language, it's my responsibility too to speak up. Right? I'm not a racialized minority.
Lucas:I'm not, you know, I'm I'm a cis man, but is it not my job to to speak up and just, you know, stand up to folks who do spew hatred? Absolutely. It's all of our our our job. It's all of our work. I think that what I also I I take heart in is that I have a number of allies and I have a number of friends and family and community members who who do stand up and who who do, you know, resist the the hatred that, you know, affects my community and and other communities.
Lucas:And so I think there's a lot of good work being done. I think we just have to keep being loud, being vocal, and not allowing the other side to think that the the battle's, you know, done and over with. Because when I I think that really you know, I'm thinking back to conversion therapy and thinking about, you know, the recent Supreme Court case with, you know the conversion therapist was was represented by the ADF, the Alliance Defending Freedom. And they, you know, have made it seem as if conversion therapy the ban has has been overturned in Colorado and that, you know, all the other bans are gonna be overturned soon too. They want us to think that the battle is over because what happens when we think the battle is over, we stop fighting.
Lucas:But what we need to know is not only is the ban not overturned, there was only one conversion therapist in the state of Colorado that could practice conversion therapy, and that's the conversion therapist who brought forth the case. Otherwise, it's the ban is still in place. But if we aren't vocal, if we aren't active, then yes, that that that is a possibility. But right now, the the case is still alive. The merits are still alive.
Lucas:So we need to continue fighting. We don't want the other side to to, again, claim victory because if they if they do and we believe that, then we stop fighting, but we need to continue.
Mary:I love that. And part of being vocal is sharing your story and sharing the stories of these other survivors in your book. So I really wanna thank you for putting that out there in the world and sharing it with us and for being here on the podcast.
Lucas:Well, thank you. This has been an absolute treat, and I I'm super grateful to have met you and to to chatted with you and for, again, platforming me and also other survivors. I appreciate it a lot.
Mary:And our thanks again to Doctor. Lucas Wilson for sharing his story and for gathering all these voices together to give us a greater perspective of the harms of conversion practices.
Kurt:It means so much to hear from someone who's really been through it in this way and is so generous in the sharing of knowledge, information, and perspective. I hope that will be useful to others, including those who might be in a situation now where they're perhaps even going through conversion practices or something like that and needing needing some help.
Mary:Yeah. That's right. I will put a link to the book, shame, sex, attraction, and also some links so where you can find resources if you or a loved one is going through that, including Born Perfect, which is a national survivor led campaign launched by National Center for LGBTQ rights and also the Trevor Project.
Kurt:I think one thing that we're learning here is that these practices are far from gone and, if anything, have a a new life to them partly because of the way that they're being used for gender identity conversion practices as well as sexual orientation conversion practices. Equally harmful but two different aspects of a discredited kind of practice. You know, we've talked today about some of the individual costs to this, but there are costs at a whole other kind of level, at the social and even macroeconomic level. And next time, we're going to tackle these, same issues through a very different lens.
Mary:Yeah. We're actually going to talk to an economist, someone who you might not, imagine hearing from on this topic, but you'll see why it's very relevant to this issue of conversion practices.
Kurt:I can't wait. I hope you'll join us, and it is always a pleasure to have you, our listeners, with us on this journey. Unravelling is brought to you by Brattleboro Retreat. Our producers at Charts and Leisure are Andrew Adkin, Hans Puteaux, and Jason Oberholzer.
Mary:And you can find us on social media by searching Brattleboro Retreat. Bratiborle Retreat is committed to exploring diverse perspectives on mental health. While we invite hosts and guests to share their insights, the views expressed are their own and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of the hospital or its staff.