"Conversion therapy" is a discredited practice of trying to change an individual's sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Lucas Wilson is a Liberty University grad who took part in the university's ongoing "conversion therapy" program. Now a writer and scholar, he shares his experiences and those of others who endured the efforts to change their sexual orientation.
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Axis Mundi Hello, welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Skidmore College.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center, University of California, Santa Barbara.
I'm here today to talk with Lucas Wilson, who is a PhD candidate at Florida Atlantic University, a dissertation fellow through the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, and a sessional lecturer at the University of Toronto.
His work has appeared in Queerty, LGBTQ Nation, and RVA Magazine.
We're here to talk about his new article at Religion Dispatches.
The article is called Liberty University's In-House Conversion Therapist Retires, But Will the Christian School Cease This Discredited practice.
So Luke, I'm really happy that you were able to join me today.
And I think I just want to begin by asking for you to tell us a little bit about your story.
We're going to talk about what's known as gay conversion therapy and your experiences at Liberty and others that you convey in the article.
But first, tell us a little bit about your history with evangelicalism.
So I became an evangelical in high school.
It was in grade 9 that I decided that I wanted to, as I said then, follow Jesus.
And I really didn't stop going to, you know, youth group, to church, to camp, Christian camp, of course, Bible camp.
For years.
I mean, I was a diehard evangelical, and I was one of very few at my high school.
I mean, Canada is not necessarily known for its evangelical, you know, community, but I certainly was a part of Toronto's evangelical community, and I went to an art school, which was not necessarily an in vogue thing to be a Christian, but I was!
And I heard about Liberty because my, actually my family, I have family members who work for Liberty and my uncle was, or he's technically my mom's second cousin, he was the national recruiter in Canada for Liberty.
And so I went down initially on this free bus trip that they have, it's called CFA, College for a Weekend, and they get you, they convince you to come down there and then have a lot of fun and then apply and then Go to Liberty Ultimate.
And I went down six times.
I apparently had a lot of fun.
So six coach buses down from Toronto, Ontario to Lynchburg, Virginia.
And I was hooked.
I mean, it felt exciting.
It was bigger.
Everything in America is bigger than it is in Canada, particularly around the college experience.
And I just thought it was so exciting and neat and new.
And I was a young I guess at the time when I first went down 16 year old and 17 year old and I even got my acceptance in grade 11 and I mean like looking back it's like how does that how does any university offer acceptance to you know a 17 year old in grade 11 but I did and I went and in fact in large part the reason why I went I mean I did receive a scholarship to go and that was of course incentive but Really, I mean, the number one reason when I went was the conversion therapy program.
And I even remember I had made this little tally, this little list where I said, you know, one point for University of Toronto and one point for Liberty for, you know, separate, you know, different things.
And the only thing that I put two check marks next to when I was deciding where I wanted to go was the conversion therapy program.
And that obviously speaks to how important that was to me at the time, because I truly did, of course, believe that it was possible to change one's orientation.
Well, thank you for Telling us that part of your story.
I think my next question before we jump into the details of the article is just, would you mind helping us understand exactly what is gay conversion therapy and what it entails?
I think many people out there will be familiar, but there might be others who have heard the term but don't know the details.
So would you mind just giving us a short summary?
Conversion therapy, also known as reparative therapy, also known as change therapy, and has a bunch of other names.
And in fact, nowadays, it's not even labeled conversion therapy by a lot of conversion therapists.
It's more so, you know, pastoral counseling or some other euphemism they use to code or to mask, to veil what they're doing, which of course they know, as well as everyone else knows, that this is something that shouldn't be done.
And I think that's exactly why they don't Call it conversion therapy, even though, of course, it is.
So conversion therapy, the long and the short of it is that it is an express attempt to change one's sexual orientation and or gender expression.
So if I don't align with the capital M masculine or the capital M man, then I need to, of course, align with that.
And the way to do that is through a number of exercises.
So conversion therapy at its core actually believes that it's not so much a sexuality issue as much as it's a gender issue.
In the sense that they believe that for me, somewhere along the line, I didn't really identify with, you know, with men and I need to get involved in the world of men in order to be a man and to function as a man.
And of course, you know, implicit within that argument is heterosexuality, right?
That to be a man is to be attracted to women.
And so the way to reform someone's sexuality is to reform their gender identity and their gender expression.
And so they'll oftentimes say something along the lines of, you know, it's not a matter of, you know, doing certain things that'll make you straight, you know, doing certain manly things that'll make you straight.
It's just instead that you have to do certain manly things to make you straight.
And you're like, wait a second, did I just hear you correctly?
You know, they'll say it's not performance based, but really if you perform like a man, then ultimately you'll become a man.
And you're like, so it is exactly what you're telling me it isn't.
So this is the core of conversion therapy, and they'll offer you tips and pointers on how to become a man.
And for me, some of these tips and pointers came from my workbook, which when I was working with Dane Emmerich, he gave out different workbooks to different students.
And mine was Alan Mettinger's Growth into Manhood, Resuming the Journey.
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