I was involved in Love In Action for twenty-two years and served on the board for Exodus International for eleven of those years. I entered the ministry with the hope that as self proclaimed experts in their field, they could help me to eradicate homosexuality from my life. It was my belief that somehow through those that ascribed to being professionals in conversion therapy, they would have the answer for my search to find what they said was “freedom from homosexuality.

What I found was further shame and an ongoing message that I needed “healing” from “issues” that may have led me to be gay to begin with. So, after leaving ExGay ministry I have finally come to see that being gay is not something that I need healing from. Rather is is something I needed to accept about my life and embrace the truth. It has been in embracing this truth that I have finally feel the best emotionally and psychologically that I have ever felt in my life. I am more emotionally stable than I’ve ever been. I believe in myself, have tremendously decreased anxiety and I have a far more balanced sense of my whole being than ever.

Through my attempt to gain the healing I believed I needed, I was told that I had an intimacy disorder, that I struggled with misogyny, and that my wounded childhood caused me to have unmet emotional and psychological needs that I used to somehow attempt to repair my same sex deficit. The anxiety that I lived in while I believed I was sick and needed healing was an underlying reality for all of the years I embraced ExGay thinking.

I came to realize that Sexual Conversion Therapy was at the core of my imbalances and anxiety. It contained the message that I was sick, unhealthy, imbalanced, and that I needed healing for sexual brokenness. This was at the core of the anxiety and shame filled thinking that plagued my every day life. I have found it interesting, if not amazing, that today as I’ve accepted myself as a gay man I no longer struggle with any signs of an intimacy disorder, nor the psychological imbalances that I experienced all through those years. I no longer expend the internal energy attempting to cover up the shame that seemed to be a predominant factor in my life. I’m no longer wishing I would die early so as to not have to live in the pain of a broken life that seemed to never be healed.

I am a free man as Christ promises we can be through a relationship with Him!

For this reason personally as well for all of those who have had similar circumstances I stand with this group of nine others in a public statement against Sexual Conversion Therapy (and other terms for it such as Reparative Therapy).

This is our public statement:

Former Ex-Gay Leaders Unite in Opposition to Conversion Therapy

BuzzFeed did an exclusive article about our statement. (click here for article)

Another post by Daniel Gonzales (click here for article)