With the Supreme Court of the United States set to hear a challenge to a Colorado law banning conversion therapy – a range of harmful, dangerous, and widely discredited practices that claim to change a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression – it is difficult to overstate the urgency behind giving voice to survivors of the practice.  Shame-Sex Attraction, the first volume of short stories on conversion therapy ever published, edited by Dr. Lucas Wilson, arrives at a moment when it is perhaps most needed. Wilson, himself a survivor, can shift easily between sharp, incisive directness and disarming charm and is the exact sort of person who might look back on his experience with Evangelical Christian conversion therapy and think “this needs a punny title.”

While we always enjoy each other online, I was especially happy to get a chance to sit and talk with him more intentionally about his work on this collection – how he balanced the wide range of survivors’ accounts against one another, writing his own addition to the collection, Gay Christian Speed Dating, and his time at the gayest place on Earth, the evangelical institution, Liberty University. 

We’ve talked about this a bit, but I like checking in. You mentioned how some of these stories have triggered memories of experiences you’d buried, and it seems like sharing your conversion therapy experience has helped you connect with other survivors. How have interviews and press been for you? What sorts of responses have you been getting from readers?

Shame-Sex Attraction was my first anthology intended for a wide readership (I had previously published an edited collection about the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, but that was for an academic audience), so it has been very fun to see the book popping up in various online forums like, for instance, Publishers Weekly. I have graciously been invited to discuss the collection on several podcasts and YouTube channels, like the fabulous Fundie Fridays and the wonderful Outward: Slate’s LGBTQ Podcast. These interviews have been an honest treat to do, and the other press that Shame-Sex Attraction has received has also been so cool to see. I have been overwhelmed with the positive response.

It is unsettling, however, how many people have reached out to tell me that they, too, underwent conversion practices. Folx have contacted me on social media or by way of email to tell me their stories—and they are, to put it mildly, heartbreaking. I only hope that the collection continues to find its way into the hands of others who survived conversion therapy and/or the conservative Christian world.

Could you share your own experience with conversion therapy?

My experience in conversion therapy happened at Liberty University, the world’s largest evangelical university located in Lynchburg, Virginia (there is so much to say about the name Lynchburg, but I’ll leave that for a later date). For four years, I met with an on-campus pastor by the name of Pastor Dane Emerick, a paid university employee who was in charge of “helping” male students who either were “addicted” to porn or were queer, which also was framed as an addiction. Our initial meetings were intended to find out the root cause of my queerness; he employed a pseudo-Freudian approach, asking me about my family relationships, not to mention highly personal and invasive questions about my teenage sex life and erotic proclivities. These sessions framed the remainder of our one-on-one meetings over the tenure of my undergrad. We met regularly and talked about my “victories” and my “slip ups,” that is, times I avoided temptation and times I gave into temptation, respectively. Together, we would read scripture; discuss Alan Medinger’s Growth into Manhood: Resuming the Journey, a conversion-therapy manual that he assigned me; and pray. Emerick would also always begin and end our sessions with big, overzealous bear hugs, in addition to putting his hands on either my shoulder or my thighs when we prayed; this tactile aspect of our private meetings, especially the leg-touching, was a bit strange for me even then, but I used to chalk it up to him demonstrating the difference between “good touch” and “bad touch”—in retrospect, a super infantilizing (and creepy) gesture. Throughout these meetings, Emerick always promised me that if I kept my eyes on Jesus, I would one day find victory over my sin and could even find myself a wife. This cruel optimism that he instilled in me resulted in years of frustration and guilt, which led to self-abnegation and shame and ultimately to hating myself when I realized that nothing about my sexuality was changing. It was awful. 

I also was a part of his group conversion-therapy program, but I only went once. This is the story I recount in Shame-Sex Attraction; it’s entitled “Gay Christian Speed Dating,” and it gives readers a peek into the upside-down world of conversion-therapy groups that end up being underground hook-up rings for queers who might not otherwise find each other in conservative Christian settings. I wrote about this experience in this collection, so that I could recount my experience in the one-on-one meetings with Emerick in my next anthology. In other words, there is more to come.

Can you talk to me about how the idea came to you and how you went about gathering these stories?

Crazily enough, an editor sent me a DM on X (the artist formerly known as Twitter), inviting me to edit the collection. At first, I honestly thought it was a joke or a scam, but when I looked up the editor and the publisher they worked for (JKP – Jessica Kingsley Publishers), I realized it was legitimate. They had been following my public-facing work on conversion therapy for a while and thought I might be the guy to put together an anthology of stories on the topic. JKP specializes in edited collections, and up until Shame-Sex Attraction’s release, there had never been a volume of short stories about conversion therapy published, so I jumped on the opportunity. Because some recent representations of conversion therapy have been fictional, and some focused more on conversion practitioners as opposed to survivors, [my formal proposal] explained that I only wanted nonfictional accounts of conversion therapy written exclusively by survivors. I wanted my collection to center the voices of survivors — and the press agreed. 

Once the proposal was accepted, I started soliciting stories through my networks and on social media. Because my previous work about conversion therapy had connected me with a number of folx in the survivor community, I began asking them if they might be interested—or knew someone who’d be interested—in submitting a story. I also have a few friends who are heavy hitters in what is known as the exvangelical (that is, ex-evangelical) community, so when they retweeted and shared my call for submissions, I received a hearty number of stories. Thankfully, this process was relatively painless.

What struck me about the collection was the varied weights, textures, and tones of the voices in each of the essays. Your academic background shows in your intro – footnotes and everything – so it was a bit jarring to move from that to a mostly gross but somewhat humorous story about a “therapist” instructing a client to huff jars of feces to cure them of their gayness. How did you think about the structure of the collection on a whole and the order of the stories in the editing process?

You can take a boy out of the academy, but you can’t take the academy out of the boy! You’re right: my academic training certainly shaped my introduction to the collection. In the intro, I wanted to offer a brief history and overview of conversion practices to set the stage for the creative nonfiction accounts that follow. And yes, the tone drastically shifts once we hit chapter one, which was very much intentional. Immediately after the intro, I wanted to throw readers into the dark, and often shocking, world of conversion therapy, which is why I started the collection with the story you mentioned about the author huffing a jar of shit.

Although the first chapter is shocking—and there certainly are other shocking chapters in the collection—not every story leaves the reader aghast; however, this in no way means that the not-as shocking stories are any less sobering or tragic. It just means that the stories included in the collection present a variety of experiences—some that align with readers’ assumptions about conversion therapy, albeit told from a fresh perspective, and some that no doubt defy expectations. 

The structure of the book is intended to mirror this variety. I didn’t want to group the narratives together by way of so-called shock value, theme, or any other categorical distinction. I wanted readers to discover, story by story, how conversion practices can be and often are wildly different from one to the next. With no set groupings of stories, readers are unprepared for what each chapter holds which, in a small way, mirrors how many of us who underwent conversion practices did not know what our futures held once we were subjected to such “therapy.” Chapter after chapter, readers encounter different contexts (whether they be in conservative Christian ministries, an Orthodox Jewish organization, a secular family, or a Chinese cult), different tones (soberingly serious, wryly humorous, or a combination thereof), and different endings (some with a sense of narrative resolution, most others glaringly without) to show the range of survivors’ experiences.

Dipping into “Gay Christian Speed Dating” for a moment, I was curious about so much of the world you placed us in. How did you come up with the title?

I actually got the idea for the title years ago, when I was still at Liberty, from an RA of mine (who unsurprisingly also came out of the closet after we graduated). I didn’t tell most people that I was in the conversion-therapy group on campus, but he knew that I had gone. When we were talking about the group afterwards, he made a passing joke about the group being a kind of gay Christian speed dating. I thought this description was hilarious, and it stuck with me. 

Pastor Dane often describes women exclusively in terms of their function and utility to men, basically as approved receptacles for male desire. Were men in these settings ever encouraged to think about women as whole people?

Pastor Dane’s directive for us to think of women in terms of their bodily utility was a function and prime example of evangelical purity culture. Purity culture teaches that women are not whole humans but are rather submissive bodies, those who/that are duty-bound to evangelical men, particularly to their husbands and their sexual needs. Pastor Dane taught us that we needed to find a woman—any woman—to whom we could find attraction. This teaching of his is so wild because he didn’t say we should find a woman with whom we were in love; instead, we just needed to find a woman to whom we were attracted (of course an impossible [t]ask)—and once we found her, we needed to marry her. The focus was on the physical, not the rest of the woman. Women were and are just bodies in evangelicalism—those which are good for sex and carrying babies—so Pastor Dane’s teachings were unsurprising to us. We were used to, and no doubt believed in, this sort of misogyny. 

I appreciate the distinction you draw between shame and guilt in the introduction. I’d love to hear how you remind yourself of that distinction in your daily life and how that might help you avoid a shame spiral.

As guilt is a negative emotion that is attached to a specific action one does, and as shame is a negative emotion directed at one’s very being, I can confidently say that I no longer struggle with the latter even if I still feel the former from time to time. When I was an evangelical, I constantly felt ashamed of my many “sins,” which of course included me being a big ole homo. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it: within evangelical traditions, being queer and being a Christian are believed to be mutually exclusive because queerness is considered sinful. Conversion therapy amplified this shame surrounding being queer—I felt like I, as a person, was defective, dirty, and disgusting simply because I liked men—and it took years of deconstructing my faith in order to undo this damage. By separating myself from my former religious community, finding queer friends, working with a real therapist, and pursuing graduate study, I was afforded the time and space to come to terms with what happened to me in conversion therapy and the shame that resulted from it. I learned that if anyone ought to be ashamed, it was my conversion therapist and the wider evangelical world.

Because of these many years of work, I now know that queerness is something to be celebrated and thoroughly enjoyed. There’s no longer any room in my life for such shame except, perhaps, for the fact that I was once evangelical. After giving up the main source of shame—my former faith—I increasingly didn’t have to remind myself that I’m not defective, dirty, or disgusting; I know that I’m not, despite evangelicalism’s best efforts to convince me otherwise. At this point, the only thing of which I have to remind myself on a daily basis is to take my PrEP. Yes, sometimes I feel guilty for certain things—like if I polish off a whole box of Crunch cereal by myself on a Tuesday night—but no, shame is not something that defines my day-to-day life. 

How common do you think it was, relationships like the one you had with Mac? Was it an open secret that accountability partners were often acting out sexually with one another?

Liberty was sincerely the gayest place I’ve ever been in my life. The male student leadership teams alone were hella gay. I had multiple RAs who were gay. Each dorm also had Spiritual Life Directors (SLDs) and Prayer Leaders (PLs) as part of its leadership team, and I knew countless gay SLDs and PLs. Then there were the rest of us plebeians who lived on the dorms, those not on the leadership team, who were also raging homosexuals. On such a thoroughly queer campus, there were of course numerous relationships like the one between me and Mac. In fact, I was told after graduation about a number of gays who had romances with other Liberty gays but were unable to talk about them openly—for anyone who talked about such flings risked being disciplined—so they kept their mouths shut. Had leadership caught wind of any sexual relationships, especially if the administration had been privy to this knowledge, students would have been in immediate trouble. Although there were open secrets about students being gay (or, as the school called it, about students “struggling with same-sex attraction”), there were no open secrets about students being sexually active; the former was permissible, whereas the latter was punishable. 

One thing that struck me in this story was how Luke, even as he’s attending a same-sex attraction support group, refuses to let go of his queerness. Have you met other survivors who attempted to subvert these conversion therapy groups and used them to find like-minded people?

So many queers I know who went to conversion-therapy groups tried to find other queers in their group sessions, whether at Liberty University or elsewhere. Yes, there were some who kept their eyes on the “prize” (if we can call heterosexuality a “prize”) and tried to become straight, but many queers were only able to fight their natural attractions for so long. When put into a group with other queers, it was not uncommon for them to pursue something with another fellow “struggler.” I sincerely think that conversion therapists are some of the dumbest people in the world; if you put queers together in a hot, sweaty room or a hotel with numerous anonymous rooms or a camp with stacks of dark bunkbeds—queers who would likely not otherwise find each other—and expect them not to have sex, you are some kind of stupid. And that’s precisely what goes on in these groups—many of those involved do precisely what we think they do. A bunch of geniuses, eh?

One of the interesting themes that kept coming up for me was how some survivors didn’t recognize that they were being or had ever been abused. Do you ever encounter survivors who are unaware of their situation? If so, how do you approach them?

One hundred percent yes. A number of survivors did not previously conceive of themselves as having gone through conversion therapy, myself included. I had never thought of my experience as conversion therapy until one of my colleagues in grad school described it as such. Up until then, I understood my time in conversion therapy as a form of “pastoral counseling,” a term that is often used as a dog whistle for conversion therapy. In fact, because many conversion practitioners use euphemistic language like “pastoral counseling” to cover up their dirty work, many victims don’t recognize their conversion-therapy experiences for what they were. Moreover, as many victims undergo conversion practices in conservative Christian contexts, and as many of these individuals were indoctrinated for years, they ironically used to believe that what happened to them was actually good or profitable for them. This is because conservative Christianity is structured around an upside-down moral system—where what is right is considered wrong, and what is wrong is considered right—so victims were not uncommonly disabled from seeing that what they experienced was abuse. 

When I speak with survivors who are unaware that they underwent conversion therapy, I never tell them what they went through was, in fact, conversion therapy, even if their experience definitionally aligns. Instead, I ask questions, in addition to sharing my story, which often engenders a lightbulb moment as they realize that they too underwent conversion practices. In truth, most folx know that they underwent conversion practices, but some do not, and it sometimes takes a gentle nudge for them to come to terms with their experience—that is, find terms or language to describe what happened to them. Some reading this might wonder why it matters that folx recognize their experiences as conversion therapy, and to them I would say that it is important for survivors to understand their experiences as conversion therapy because when they recognize the reality of their abuse, they can start to address the damage done to them and begin to heal. As Jesus reportedly once said, “The truth will set you free”—and girlfriend was right. 

A stray observation: Queerness can inherently be an isolating experience in many mainstream social contexts. Conservative religious groups, because they’re so positioned outside of things that are “of the world” can compound that isolation, especially when their children are homeschooled.

Yes, it is a doubly isolating experience to be queer and in conservative religious contexts. The silence, secrecy, and shame that often defines the experiences of queer folx, especially when they are young, are compounded in conservative religious settings. Many queers know from an early age that if they are to be honest about their non-normative sexualities or genders, they will be chastised or punished by their religious communities—and potentially be expelled. Of course, most of these young queers would be better off cutting ties with their conservative communities, but the emotional and psychological power of such high control religious groups often keeps them tethered to those who seek their very erasure. It’s a Stockholm Syndrome sort of situation. 

Were you surprised by any of the stories or did they, as the forward suggested, all follow familiar patterns and rhythms for you?

I wouldn’t say that I was surprised by the stories per se, but I will say that a few stories unearthed memories that I had clearly buried. For instance, the story “Into the Dark,” written by the brilliant Chris Csabs, references the anxiety he was made to feel whenever he would shower. Conversion therapists (and their coreligionists more generally) often harp on the lurking temptation to masturbate when showering. I remember recurrently feeling nervous before I would shower – not to mention when I showered – that I was going to touch myself too long and succumb to temptation. Something as simple and mundane as showering was overloaded with an excess of spiritual significance, as is almost everything in the evangelical world. Every activity is said to have eternal consequences—whether good or bad—and so evangelicals must constantly and carefully weigh and measure how they act to ensure they are following God’s so-called will. Such spiritual and emotional labor is beyond exhausting, so when I read Csabs’ story in which he referenced the dilemma of showering, I was confronted with something that had plagued me on a daily basis but had forgotten about since leaving the faith in my mid-twenties. Csabs’ narrative reanimated the anxiety I used to feel when it was just me, myself, and I below a gushing shower head; in truth, his story got me worked up and feeling on edge. But that’s what good literature does: it stirs us.

Showers and long car rides, anywhere you might be lulled into hazy daydreaming, can be dangerous places for creatives. All my best ideas come to me in the shower, especially after a hard workout. Now that you’re not consumed by shame, what’s occurring to you in the shower these days?

Like you, my best ideas come to me outside the 9-5 workday, particularly in the shower or while sweating it out at the gym. On my phone, I keep a running list of ideas that come to me in these moments, which has proven to be a treasure trove of inspiration later. This was actually how I came up with the title Shame-Sex Attraction, a play on the evangelical phrase same-sex attraction (which, by the by, is code for queeness in Christianese). 

As for what I’ve been preoccupied with lately, I would have to say that, in tandem with perpetually thinking about work (which, thankfully, I sincerely love), I have been mulling over the idea of writing a story cycle or perhaps a novel based, in large part, on my experience as a gay undergrad at Liberty University. A few years ago, I typed out a shitty first draft of a chapter, but I have not returned to it since, other than recently while in the shower. Perhaps I should go back and give the draft some more, love. I sometimes think I should just set up shop with a waterproof notepad and pen and write from there, though I suppose I hazard being visited by Satan himself insofar as old temptations die hard behind closed (shower) doors… 

Speaking of what stirs us, the literary traditions of LGBTQ2S+ people don’t have any specific boundaries, but many of us are borrowing from the same toolkits. There’s humor, magical realism, non-linear structure, and so much more to pull from. What are some of the techniques that most strongly resonated with you in this collection and what are you hoping to see more of in the future?

Perhaps the most common technique that authors in the collection used was nonlinear narrative structure. From time to time in several stories, traumatic moments (or, bare minimum, difficult moments) from the past come to impinge upon the present. As trauma is in part understood as a breach in the mind’s experience of time—that which disrupts traumatized individuals’ sense of chronology and continuity with the past—the authors’ stories give voice to their wounded and wounding experiences through momentary flashbacks or intrusive memories. The past extends into and continues to rupture the present, resulting in a disrupted and disruptive temporal order. This indirectly gives voice to their traumatic, or difficult, experiences in conversion therapy specifically and in their conservative religious communities more broadly. 

Another literary technique I found to be arresting—one used by the seriously talented Nathan Xie in his story “Away and Away”—is repetition. Xie’s story gives voice to his experience of undergoing conversion practices at the hands of his mother, who was a part of the Chinese cult, Falun Dafa. His story further details his father’s abusive and controlling grip on his life, both of his parents’ explicit and consistent homophobia, and how they constantly threatened to throw him out onto the street. Throughout his story, Xie repeatedly refers to subjects and life events that did not fit into his autofiction novel, but in doing so, he commits those theretofore unarticulated stories to paper. His use of repetition assumes an overwhelming tone that evokes a palpable, affective response, one that mirrors the merciless insistence of his parents and their demands on him to become straight. The repetition is suffocating, pointing to the emotional suffocation he felt at the hands of his maternal conversion practitioner and his father and the traumatic wounding he endured. It’s a haunting and difficult story, and it is just beautifully written. 

In the future, I hope to see similar collections that give voice to conversion practices and the harms done in conservative Christian contexts. This is why I am currently working on a new anthology about queer experiences at Christian colleges, universities, and seminaries.

How might this book have helped you when you were younger? Do you think it could even have made it into your world?

I wonder if this book would have helped me to be honest. I only say that because at the time I believed that my meetings with my conversion therapist were good for me, and if anyone would have tried to tell me otherwise, I’d have said they were demonically influenced (yes, I really was that crazy). It took years for me to deprogram from evangelicalism, so if at the time I was religious someone had given me a copy of Shame-Sex Attraction or a collection like it, I probably would not have read it—and if I did, I would have scoffed at its contents. Regardless, I don’t think that a book like this would ever have made it into my closed-off sphere of existence. Evangelicalism is a world unto itself, an isolated and isolating cosmos that does its best to keep its members separate from “worldly” life. As such, I think a book like Shame-Sex Attraction would, sadly, never have been on my radar.

Now that your book is out in the world, what life do you imagine for it?

I am hopeful that it reignites conversations surrounding conversion therapy and, more broadly, discussions surrounding homophobia and transphobia. Just recently, North Dakota House Bill 1430 was introduced by Rep. Lori VanWinkle (R-Minot) in order to endorse and legalize conversion-therapy practices in the name of providing “alternative” counseling. It is this sort of dangerous stupidity that needs to be talked about in order to stop it, and I hope that my book can be a springboard for the fight against such death-dealing work. There are of course a litany of other threats and attacks against LGBTQ2S+ communities, especially against trans folx, that have been ballooning lately. No doubt, since Trump entered office, these threats and attacks have only continued, and bigots have become even more emboldened. I hope that Shame-Sex Attraction will be helpful in the fight against these threats and attacks, and I hope that those who are feeling the weight of intensified homophobia and transphobia as of recent can find some sort of solace in the book, that they read stories of others who have been threatened and attacked but who have nonetheless survived and thrived despite attempts to erase them.