Welcome back to other people's lives. I'm Joe Sanigato. I'm Greg Divek and we just want to give a quick shout out to our patrons who are supporting the show at patreon.com slash opl show if you do sign up and support the show. You get bonus episodes and you know access to a discord where sometimes we follow up with our guests and you get to chat with them. So yes and today we are speaking to a man who has experienced conversion therapy in an attempt to change his sexual orientation from gay to straight.

One of the most bizarre slash interesting topics to me personally really excited to learn more about this and what goes on. So thank you for being on the show today.

Your welcome. It's my pleasure.

So I think a good place to start would be your life right before you experience the conversion therapy. I guess where you are at and what led you to be subject to this therapy.

I've been dealing with basically shame for being homosexual for most of my life because I grew up in a Christian household and it was a pretty conservative Christian household.

I myself was and still am a Christian and I had been consuming books that were meant to help me you know become straight and I had you know my family knew all my siblings knew that I had tendencies to work with my family.

I had tendencies toward this at the time I said that I struggled with same-sex attraction. I was still a virgin at this time and I wanted to remain a virgin until I could get it sorted because you know in conservative Christian circles it's all about saving yourself from marriage and of course marriages between them and a woman.

So my mother and father had found this they found this it was within our city and they suggested it to me and I joined it willingly.

So at this time you were communicating with your parents that I guess you were having feelings related to homosexuality but this is something that you had a desire to change.

Yeah, like I looked at gay pornography and like I had crushes on guys that I didn't want any of this because I wanted to fit in with the rest of my family we're all getting you know married to the opposite gender and having kids and I was getting older I think this was around I think I was around 18 when this happened.

And yeah, I told them they knew about it they knew that I was you know gay or struggled with same-sex attraction. So I was pretty open with my family about it because it was something I was ashamed of and it was something I wanted to get out of my life so yeah it wasn't a matter of me being forced to go at all.

So did they at any point you know it like it was it always shame did they always like kind of bash you for this thing not bashy but just kind of you know talk about it in a negative light where it's like yes we need to get this out we need to fix this problem.

Yeah, like it was like I don't know at what point it started but I like I always knew being gay was wrong like I took violin as a kid my violin teacher was gay and I remember my mom talking about him and and that was the first time I'd ever heard about you know man having sex with another man I was homeschool they lived on the prairies so I didn't go to school I didn't hear it interact with lots of other kids I didn't hear you know.

I was I was very closed off so the idea of being gay was introduced to me as a sin like smoking or drinking or having sexually poor marriage it was lumped in with all of those.

Wow so an ultra conservative Christian environment to the point that yeah you're being homeschooled and it was pretty much all your family's teachings wow.

That's true yeah like my only my only social interactions were on Sunday with other you know people in our

around the countryside that went to the same churches I did that was really my only social interaction so yeah very conservative.

So when you so when this happens and you just and they bring it up to you like okay there's this conversion therapy you know you join that wing willingly so like where was your mind at at that point where you hopeful of that okay this can this is the answer to all my prayers of like trying to get this you know bad thing out of my life did you were you hopeful in that or where how are you like

mentally going into this.

Yeah I was as far as I remember because this was over a decade ago but I was extremely helpful or hopeful that that things were going to go well you know because I thought okay well now I'm going to go to a place where I can do really open with other people who struggle with the same things and you know when you start communicating and interacting with people with the same struggles it starts to ease the burden and make it easier to come through struggles triumphant on the other side so I think I do.

I did have a I did have a positive outlook on it before going before going into it.

Were you were you upset with yourself because you had same sex attraction where you was like a part of you like I don't want to say hate yourself because that's like a little extreme but you know did was there a part of you that was upset that you had this.

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