There’s a photo on my phone from April 28, 2014.
I’m grinning at the camera like everything is fine. Wide eyes, big smile, that particular brand of cheerfulness I had perfected over decades — the kind that says I’m okay so convincingly that even I almost believed it.
I was not okay.
That version of me had just helped dismantle Exodus International, the largest conversion therapy network in the world. It should have felt like triumph. It did, a little. But mostly it felt like standing in the wreckage of a building you helped demolish — and realizing you’d been living inside it.
My income was gone. My savings were bleeding out. My identity — the one I’d been carefully constructing and protecting for decades— had crumbled along with that organization. I was terrified. Not just of what came next, but of who came next. Because I knew, somewhere in the rubble, was a gay man who had been waiting a very long time to exist, and I had absolutely no idea what to do with him.
The church I had trusted was busy minimizing its own scandals. The community I had belonged to felt like a house of mirrors. And at my lowest moments, I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay around to figure any of it out.
I had suicidal ideations. I’m saying that plainly, because plain is the only honest way to say it.
That was 12 years ago.
Here’s what I want to emphasize — and I hope you really understand, not just intellectually nod along to — the story does not end there.
That scared man in the photo didn’t disappear. He grew up. He came out. He fell in love. He got married. He became a father to a daughter who has absolutely no patience for bulls**t just like her Bonus Dad.
He found a job he has loved for nearly nine years. He built something he’s proud of. He became, against considerable odds, genuinely happy.
Not perfectly happy. Not Hollywood-ending happy. But actually happy — the kind that lives in a Tuesday morning, in the weight of your husband’s hand, in the ordinary extraordinary fact of being alive and knowing who you are.
That’s the part of the conversion therapy survivor story that doesn’t get told enough.
We talk about the damage — and we should, because the damage is real and the reckoning matters. But we have an obligation to keep talking after that (and I am especially looking at you fellow former exgay leaders). To tell the world what it looks like on the other side. Not because the road is easy, but because it exists.
Healthy is possible. Whole is possible. Happy — really happy — is possible.
If you’re in the middle of your own 2014 right now, I need you to hold onto that and will walk alongside you as you journey.
The story keeps going. Keep going with it.
— Randy