Hate, shame and redemption: The road back from conversion therapy
Friday, 10 September 2021
One man underwent four years of conversion therapy. The other was a leader in the church which performed the controversial treatment. Eleven years later they have united as a force for dignity and faith in the rainbow community, Sinead Gill reports.
As a conservative Christian, being gay wasn't an option for Rhys Walker.
There was no way his family, peers or church would allow it. Most of all, he couldn’t allow it for himself.
At 14 years old, the Tauranga teen’s sexuality became too certain to ignore, he let his concerns slip to a family member, and word spread.
**READ MORE:
* Gay conversion therapy is harmful, hateful, and doesn't work
* Conversion therapy centre founder in US says he's gay, rejects 'cycle of self shame'
**
“My mum rung me and said, ‘Dad said something is wrong with one of the kids’.”
Something had to be done. It was his peers more than his family who forced him to begin conversion therapy.
“I didn't want to lose them.”
Walker dropped out of school to join a fundamentalist church he thought could save him.
“It was everything you'd imagine… we’d spend at least five hours a day in prayer, but that was just the start of it.
“I’d meet with religious leaders who'd give me anti-gay resources, would try to ‘pray the gay away’… that led me down a four-year journey of bible college, going on missions, going through therapy. My whole life had been built around that church environment.
“I didn't want to be gay, but all the while I knew I was gay. It was pretty brutal.”
The therapy included exorcisms, some that would last as long as five hours.
Up to six elders would stand or sit around him, “praying, commanding demons to come out”.
“It bullied you into a corner, beating the gay out of you with words… but it had to work, I had no option. I couldn't bear being an openly gay person.”
This self-hatred translated into Walker’s participation in others’ conversion therapies: Walker was a poster boy for the sect and other fundamentalist Christians that homosexuality could be cured.
But it couldn’t.
“I knew I had two choices. I had to kill myself, or come out.”
He happened to meet an Anglican minister, and asked: “If I were gay, could God love me?”
She said yes.
“Three days later I came out.”
Walker was swiftly excommunicated from his church. If people he once considered family saw him on the street, “they would refuse to talk to me, or tell me to go die and burn in hell”.
One of those people was Andy Hickman, an elder in the church.
Hickman wasn't raised religiously, but at 20 years old, like his peers, he wanted to find a community to belong to.
Finding God was “second life-giving,” he said.
“I didn't know what fundamentalism was… I got absorbed into that world.”
Five years later, he was a leader of a fundamentalist church, the same one Walker belonged to, which followed the teaching of American evangelists.
“We became indoctrinated.”
Hickman was not directly involved in exorcisms, but approved of the practices at the time.
When he realised how much his understanding of God had been filtered through the lens of others, he left the church and begun a new religious journey.
“I got to know people, love people, then find out, shock horror, they're gay. But they had faith. Some had more Jesus in them than me. I began to have coffee with them… ask them questions.”
After years of study, including a Bachelor of Theology, he became an Anglican pastor at All Saints in Palmerston North.
“I am 100 per cent convinced that being gay is a gift from God, the original blessing.”
During this time he and Walker reconnected. They were now closer than ever, and using their shared experience and journeys to help others.
Walker moved to Manawatū, and in August they created Faith Space, a group for queer people in Palmerston North who wanted to heal their relationship with God, and for open-minded people who wanted to understand and learn from queer people.
The Government is considering over 100,000 submissions on a prohibition of conversion therapy bill, which proposes up to five years imprisonment for practices intended to change a person's sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression – a practice already illegal in some countries.
Faith Space has submitted in support of the law change.
“Banning conversion therapy is not an attack on straight people,” Hickman said. “It’s not saying you can’t feel anxious if you or someone you love is gay… it's dignifying the humanity of the people we know and love and are in our society.”
Walker wanted his story to be a sign of hope to anyone who feels how he felt. Four months ago he got married, and his mum walked him down the aisle.
“Conversion therapy doesn’t work, because being gay isn’t wrong.”
For more information about the Faith Space, email: andy@allsaintsnz.com
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