accountability and apology

I’m David Matheson. Today I’m a gay-affirmative Clinical Mental Health Counselor. But for many years my area of specialty was sexual orientation change efforts, also known as conversion therapy. From about 1996 until about 2016, I provided individual and group therapy for men seeking help in overcoming unwanted same-sex attraction. The methodologies I used as a counselor were mostly mainstream modalities but they were used with a dubious intention—to try to change people from gay to straight—or at least make them less gay. 

I never practiced aversion therapy or used any coercive or punitive methods. And I never worked with anyone who was there involuntarily. I followed standard practices of informed consent, including notifying new clients that “the use of therapy to decrease homosexual desires is controversial and many mental health professionals contend that homosexuality cannot and should not be altered.”

Beginning in about 1992, I was involved in a lot of volunteer and extra-clinical work. I co-wrote a workbook and did volunteer work for Evergreen—a now defunct para-religious self-help organization for Mormon-identified men with unwanted same-sex attraction. I wrote a book and workbook of my own. I also co-created and staffed 2 experiential retreats—Journey into Manhood and Journey Beyond—for People Can Change (now called Brother’s Road), which is a conservative, homonegative self-help organization. And I gave countless classes and presentations. All of these promoted or colluded with the idea that homosexuality is wrong and that it can and should be overcome or repressed. 

I came into this work as a result of my own shame and struggle with my sexuality. As a teenager and young adult, I was attracted to girls and women, but I was more attracted to boys and men. Having some attraction to females isn’t that uncommon among boys who later grow up to be exclusively gay. But Mormonism convinced me that being with a man was not even an option, so unconsciously I clung to and maximized a compulsory heterosexuality. This was where all the trouble started; it was the beginning of my very long and slow collision course with reality.

I found therapy and Evergreen and they helped me believe my orientation was changing, which it wasn’t. But something good was happening there because I felt relief and reduction in shame—so much that I wanted to help other guys find what I had experienced. So I became a “helper.” I turned my homophobia into an altruistic crusade and I gathered a following of adherents in the process in what might be called the “SSA community,” which is individuals who have same-sex attraction, or SSA, but don’t identify as gay and choose to abstain from homosexual behavior. I became quite vocal, sometimes even militant about my views, especially when I was younger and more brash.

The SSA community was a very eager and willing audience because, just like me, religion had convinced them that being gay was not okay. We were all together on this journey of repression and making the best of it—assured of our rightness by religious doctrine and willfully ignorant of our wrongness, which the gathering evidence began to prove. The gratitude among the community toward my work added to my presumption of being on the right side of things. But just as important to me as their gratitude was the approval I wanted from the leaders of my faith, whose homonegativity had turned me against myself in the first place. 

While I was providing this much-appreciated service to the ex-gay community, another community, of which I knew very little, was also watching me. These were the ones who were not denying and repressing their most basic nature, the ones who’d made the choices that were in some ways easier, but in other ways much harder. The SSA community considered them the lost and wrong ones. But now I realize they were right all along. 

The gay community was not grateful for my work. It was hurting them. The very things my SSA friends loved to hear, and the very example they clung to for hope, were very painful to some in the gay community—grinding on their consciences, inflaming their shame, and causing them to requestion hard-made choices.

I was so insulated from the gay community that I had no idea I was harming people there. Like a factory that turns out a product its customers love, but fails to consider the impact of the pollution billowing from its smokestacks, I never thought or cared that there might be downwinders. 

My “onward Christian soldiers” mentality cast my crusade in the mold of “good versus evil.” I thought I was in a battle for the souls of men. And as is typical of warriors justifying such a crusade, I chose not to consider the collateral damage I was causing.

I chose not to know, and wish I had stopped to think. 

With over 30 years of hindsight now, I have to acknowledge that I was wrong about the most basic premise of my work. What conservative religion has taught all of us LGBTQ and SSA people about our gender and sexuality is blatantly false, inhumane, and cruel. I was raised to believe all those falsehoods and I perpetuated them through my work. The harms those falsehoods created have deeply injured both the gay and SSA communities. I was an accomplice in the commission of those harms.

I also wronged myself by resisting the obvious fact of what God created me to be because I was trying so hard to conform to the dubious notions of what religion said I should be. Religion put a rift between my nature and the creator of my nature. And I believed it—to my detriment. 

My personal struggle through all of this has been quite painful. And sometimes I feel like I have paid the price several times over for my errors. But I know that personal pain is not the same as apology or restitution. I’ve apologized before on a number of occasions to the gay community as a whole and to individual clients where it was appropriate and possible. But it has come to my attention that my previous apologies fell short of what was needed so I’m trying again. 

To the gay community, I acknowledge that my activism and zeal negatively impacted some of you directly and intensely. I apologize for those effects—specifically, for amplifying religion’s condemnation by heaping on you more of the same shaming ideas and examples that religion has inflicted on LGBT and Q people for centuries. I apologize that, for too many years, I chose not to see you; that I chose to characterize all of you as militants and threats to myself and my SSA flock while in reality I was a militant threat to your sometimes fragile wellbeing.

To the SSA community, I owe a much greater apology. First, I apologize for colluding with your wrong notion that your sexuality is anything other than beautiful and right. I must acknowledge that a lot of what I gave and did with you was true, good and helpful. There was no lie in the work on trauma, shame, self-acceptance, masculine self-empowerment, community building, addiction recovery and all the other standard therapeutic efforts we did together. 

But the foundational belief—that your sexuality is wrong and needs to be changed or controlled—that belief is wrong and harmful. It causes false hope. When your efforts fail, there tends to be disappointment, anxiety, guilt, shame, and despair. And then there is the sheer loss of years chasing the elusive orientation change or temptation reduction until finally the rock you’ve been rolling up the hill for so long rolls back and crushes you.

If I were to work with you again, I would help you heal your trauma, reduce your anxiety and depression, and come out of your shame, just like I did before. But I would never collude with you again around the belief that your homosexuality is bad or wrong. And I would never support any attempt to change or repress it.

I also apologize for hurting you with my seeming betrayal. Rather than seeing me as a traitor, I hope you will consider my hard-won wisdom when I say that therapy doesn’t change sexual orientation. And so many of us who have tried repression have found it left us empty, bitter, and lonely. Coming out can also be very difficult and painful—it has been for me. Even so, I would do it again if faced with the choice, even knowing the terrible consequences of it. And I would do it earlier if I could because the happiness I eked out during all those years of repression came at an extremely high cost. 

Now, to any former clients who felt my work with you was less than you needed or perhaps even harmful, I apologize for my inadequacies as a clinician and for leading with an ideology that research and personal and clinical experience have since disproven. 

And to the former clients who felt my work with you was helpful, I express my gratitude that I was able to get some things right over the past 28 years. And I apologize that my recent life choices have caused some of you to feel doubt, despair, disappointment, or confusion. I wish I could protect you from the pain of my changed reality, but I can’t. If you find this particularly disturbing, maybe that is a call for you to reconsider your own truth. 

My change actually began 11 years ago in 2013, while I was still doing conversion therapy. I found in myself a surprising curiosity and openness toward the gay community. I began a dialog with a few gay-affirmative therapists, which led to the founding of a group called Reconciliation and Growth Project (RGP). Together, we created a document considering the harms being done to the gay and SSA communities by religion and sexual orientation change efforts. The hundreds of volunteer hours we spent talking—many of which were very uncomfortable for me—and the personal relationships I developed with them, gradually changed my views and altered how I was conducting therapy. Our document is still available at ReconciliationAndGrowth.org.

In 2014, I gave a highly controversial presentation at the annual meeting of an SOCE professional organization wherein I pushed back on some of the members’ more common harmful beliefs and practices. That began to alienate me from the organization I had participated in for over 15 years.

In 2015, I spoke at the annual conference of North Star, another conservative para-religious organization catering to Mormon-identified LGBTQ and SSA people. I spoke about “befriending my enemy” through the RGP process and how it had transformed me. I also stated that continuing to live in resistance to their same-sex attractions would be a continuing process of conflict and friction for them that would remain difficult. They’ve not invited me back since.

By 2016, I had discontinued every practice and technique of conversion therapy though I still believed God required homosexual desires to be repressed. I also began taking gay-affirmative continuing education courses and have completed many course hours since that time. 

By early 2018 I realized my ability to sustain a heterosexual marriage was gone. I divorced my wife and began dating men. Without my consent, my coming out became highly publicized. The next few years were very difficult and traumatic for a number of reasons. I went to therapy and stepped away from pretty much everything else while I worked through the massive changes in my life. I only recently began taking new clients. 

I hope that the efforts I just described are a beginning of restitution for my past harms. My current work with clients as a gay-affirmative therapist will also be an ongoing process of restitution. And I hope to create and participate in more formal restorative justice processes in the future. I welcome help from anyone who has the knowledge and means to accomplish that.