**From Chicago to an Indiana Church Basement:\
A Conversion Therapy Survivor’s Story\
**by Darren Calhoun

When I was a 17-year-old college freshman in Chicago, I wrote a coming
out poem to say, “I’m black, I’m Christian, I’m gay—get used to it.”
But soon after writing that poem, a church pastor targeted me for what
would turn out to be four grueling years of efforts to change my sexual
orientation. At the end of those four years, I found myself living in an
Indiana church basement after having quit school and abandoning my
family and entire life\–only to realize that I didn’t need or want to
change.

It began when the pastor of a friend’s church promised to help me:
assuring me that if I loved God, prayed enough, and did the things he
wanted me to do, I could become “pleasing” to God. In other words, he
promised that if I did exactly as he told me, my sexual orientation
would change from gay to straight so that I could go to heaven.

As part of his directives, the pastor told me that I needed to “get
serious with God.”

Over time, he directed me to quit school so that I could focus all my
energy on doing everything he told me to do, including leaving Chicago.
Eventually he convinced me to move to and live in a church basement in
Indiana. He manipulated me, and made me feel that being gay was so
terrible, I needed to do everything I could to focus on changing the
unchangeable. I felt like this core part of me was wrong, and he made me
feel like I was dependant on him to get right.

Like many conversion therapy survivors, I did not seek out a church that
would change my sexual orientation. For me, conversion therapy was a
byproduct of being told that that to go to heaven, you had to be
heterosexual.

Also called “ex-gay” or “reparative” therapy, conversion therapy seeks
to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. This
dangerous practice—denounced as ineffective and harmful by the
American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association,
and the American Academy of Pediatrics—has been shown to lead to
higher instances of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and even
suicide.

But despite its dangers, nearly 700,000 LGBTQ adults in the U.S. have
been subjected to conversion therapy, according to a recent report by
the Williams Institute, with half this number receiving treatment as
adolescents (ages 13-17). And approximately 57,000 LGBTQ youth will
receive the treatment from a religious or spiritual advisor.

For me, my faith community was everything to me. I trusted this pastor
to be my spiritual advisor and dutifully followed his advice, even as
the things he said to me became more and more terrible and isolated me
from friends and family. At one point he even told me that the devil
wanted me to be “full of AIDS” as if HIV/AIDS were a punishment for
being gay. I spent two years under his strict control in Indiana — one
of 40 states that currently does not protect youth from this practice.

As his demands became more and more restrictive, I began to feel that
there were many things that I needed to work on in my life—but being
straight was no longer one of them. I recognized that no matter what I
did, I couldn’t change. And I didn’t need to.

I decided to return to Chicago, where I found another church that
accepted me as I was and committed to helping me put the pieces of my
life back together. I reconnected with my mother, and she was thrilled
to have me home.

I am now an active member of an anti-racist and LGBTQ-affirming church
in my hometown. For the first time I feel normal. I no longer feel like
I need to limit or mute pieces of myself to be in community. Finally, I
am home.

Even today there are things I’m still unlearning. There are moments
where I’m reminded of the kind of toxic theology I received at 17. In a
redemptive way, those debilitating messages trained me to become a
grassroots community organizer, to help churches learn how to engage
LGBTQ people in their congregations.

I have also begun working with NCLR’s Born Perfect Campaign to end the
practice of conversion therapy and protect LGBTQ youth. To date, ten
states and numerous municipalities have passed laws protecting LGBTQ
youth from conversion therapy

We must be and do better for our LGBTQ siblings. No one can mute a part
of themselves. And no one should ask them to.