You're listening to serious inquiries only. Oh, Hello and welcome to serious inquiries only Only, this is episode 140.

I'm your host Thomas Smith, and before I get to today's show,

just wanted to say a huge thank you to New Orleans Secular Humanist Association, Beth, and Sharp. Thank you so much for having me. If you get the chance to work with them

I met that were really awesome there. Thank you so much for having me.

If you get the chance to work with them or go to their events, if you're anywhere near,

please check them out. That's nocha. info. I had a great time and I delivered what I thought was a pretty

interesting talk to an audience that was not necessarily

familiar with a lot of the online atheism drama kind of stuff.

So it was fascinating to do and I loved it and I had a great time.

I recorded the talk and I have made the audio available for patrons. That is one of this month's bonus episodes.

It's actually all told with the Q&A it's like an hour

and 40 minutes so it's almost a double. So I hope you enjoy that and I'm really looking forward

to what you think. I talked about ideology and identity and sort of the downfall of online atheism and I have a lot of interesting

social science I brought into it so check that out if you're a patron or a supporter. I hope you enjoy it.

Now for today's episode, well I am speaking with Tim Rymel, who is a survivor of gay conversion therapy. He was an evangelical minister for nearly 25 years.

He was in what I can't believe is seriously called ex-gay ministry. But I mean it's it's really no laughing matter but also just the idea

that there are a lot of people in the world who think you can just be ex-gay, you know, as though you could be ex-strait or

ex-black or something like that doesn't make very much sense. Well, Tim has a very

compelling story. I think you can hear just how damaging it is to grow up with

this set of beliefs and fundamentally just the idea of being taught that something

about you is just not not just like kind of wrong but just

fundamentally wrong is really traumatic I think you can definitely hear that in Tim's story. So here it is Tim Rymel, really compelling interview. Tim, nice to have you with me today. Thanks for having me, Tom. It's good to be here.

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