When Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez first realized he was gay, he knew he was in trouble. Growing up in 1990s Illinois, there were no safe spaces for a young queer kid, and he feared his conservative Christian family and community would shun him if he were to come out.
So he sought out Exodus International, an “ex-gay” conversion therapy organization, and spent the next decade attending Christian counseling sessions, attending conferences, reading volumes of literature—and spending thousands of dollars in the process—all with the aim of being “cured” of his affliction.
A nervous breakdown and relentless suicidal ideation eventually led him to turn away from this harmful pseudo-science (which has been rejected by mental health professionals for many years) and embrace the LGBTQ+ community of Chicago’s “Boystown” neighborhood. T
Schraeder-Rodriguez continued to lead a double-life of managing the social media presence of some of the biggest mega-churches in the world by day, while partying as his authentic self by night. After several years of living torn between two identities, the tragedy of the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting drove him to take a stand, forcing churches to publicly declare whether they supported LGBTQ+ rights or embraced the archaic bigotry that psychologically scarred him and millions of others like him.
His new memoir, Conversion Therapy Dropout: A Queer Story of Faith & Belonging, happened to drop days before Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy was overturned by the Supreme Court, thrusting him into the national spotlight on an issue that continues to impact him to this day. Shortly after that, former president of Exodus International, Alan Chambers, was arrested and charged with sexual solicitation of a 14-year-old male.
Schraeder-Rodriguez will be appearing at the Tattered Cover Bookstore on Friday, June 5, discussing his memoir with local journalist and author (On Fire For God: Fear, Shame, Poverty, and the Making of the Christian Right – A Personal History) Josiah Hesse.
Hesse recently spoke with Schraeder-Rodriguez for OFM in advance of their conversation at Tattered Cover, discussing gay porn in the 90s, the lies of “cured” ex-gays, and the erotic irony of conversion therapy.
Going all the way back to being a young man in Peoria, Illinois, what was the first moment that your sexuality presented itself?
Like for most queer kids, it was subtle. It was just little things. Like when a neighbor kid brought out a Playboy, I was just kind of, “Eh, OK, whatever.” I wasn’t as excited about it as the other guys were. I had this Greg Louganis Olympics trading card—I didn’t do, like, normal baseball cards—that I would just stare at all the time. And so there were these subtle cues where I started to realize I was not wired like the other boys in my neighborhood.
I thought I’d grow out of it, honestly. I was like, “Well, maybe I just haven’t, like, matured enough,” or “I haven’t gone through puberty yet”. Maybe that’ll change me. But when nothing changed, it quickly became inextricably linked with fear and shame.
Did you have any context for what you were feeling?
There was nothing queer around Peoria, but when America Online came around, the first thing I searched for was “naked men.” And so there was this, like, rush and thrill of it all that was exciting and exhilarating, and I was like, “OK, cool. Maybe this is what I’m into!”
But as I got older and began attending (church) youth groups, sexuality was being talked about more openly, and I started to realize what I was experiencing was in conflict with what I was being taught. And so it was a learned behavior to fear that feeling, but the feelings all felt so natural and normal before that.
There’s a kind of dark irony in your book when you first enroll in ex-gay therapy because it was the first time you discovered other men who had the same orientation as you, and there was a kind of relief in no longer being alone with this secret. I don’t want to use the word “validation” because it wasn’t a validating environment, but for the first time you found a community of men who shared your secret desires.
So it was kind of liberating, even though it was so toxic.
Yeah, that’s tricky. I mean, there are so many insidious things about conversion therapy, but it did give us this sense of belonging, this connection of community that we never had in our lives.
When I rolled into one of those conferences for the first time, I had already been following the rules of conversion therapy for a while. There were, like, 300 of us, all under 25, and there was this energy and this excitement about it because I didn’t have to worry so much about lowering my voice or trying to act like “a guy.” Even though we were in an environment that was trying to reinforce those messages, it was the first time I felt like I could actually be myself around other people. And so it was weird. For all of us, it was the first taste of queer community we’d ever experienced. It gave us this sense of acceptance and belonging, but only long enough before we were told that we had to snuff that out.
Something that’s always fascinated me about evangelical culture is how they create and amplify sexual taboos. There’s been some research on how this can create a kind of pressure cooker of desire. The more you drill into someone, “No, you cannot have this! It is forbidden! Don’t think about men in the shower, all muscled and dripping wet! It’s bad, it’s naughty!”
Obviously your orientation was already set in stone, but I imagine this dynamic created some extra fuel of desire, being constantly pressured not to do this thing.
Oh yeah. Getting ready to go to a conversion therapy event meant getting to a tanning bed—because we still did that back in the early 2000s—going to Abercrombie or The Gap and getting the new wardrobe, doing the teeth whitening, getting the haircut. You wanted to show up and get that attention, that validation and affirmation that you’re wanted, that people think you’re attractive.
But only so much. We couldn’t all sleep with one another. All of us had spent a lot of money to be there, had lied to people about where we were going, had taken a week off of work. We all showed up there because we were desperate, because we believed that there was something that could help set us free, or change us, but that didn’t mean we didn’t show up wanting to be seen, wanting to be validated.
Flirtation did happen. People did hook up. But I would say, across the board, it was just that weird tension of, like, wanting to be wanted, but not too much.
I’ll share a funny story related to showers, since you mentioned it. These conferences were usually held on the campuses of Christian colleges, and so we would stay on campus dorms. One year we showed up, and the showers didn’t have any curtains. They were shower stalls, and they were individual, but there were no curtains. And so we all pooled some money, went to Walmart, and bought shower curtains and rods because we didn’t want our “brothers in Christ” to stumble.
It was crazy, but I kind of love that story. It’s something very adorable wrapped in something so sinister.
That’s one of the most intriguing things about your book—that a lot of this was coming from you. You were pursuing conversion therapy yourself, in secret; you weren’t there against your will. You were working at Starbucks to pay for your conversion therapy.
Though the therapy itself seemed to lack a cohesive strategy: One counselor is telling you, “Never look at pornography of any kind. And never masturbate!” But then another says, “If you look at straight pornography, and imagine yourself with a woman while you masturbate, then you’ll start feeling straight.”
You were instructed to play tackle football with other men with the aim of bolstering your masculinity, but this could also arouse desire for physical intimacy with men. There were so many contradictions in conversion therapy; it was so new and experimental, it seems they were building the plane while flying it.
Oh, absolutely. That’s the one thing a lot of folks don’t understand about conversion therapy: There was no certification, no accreditation. There were different books written with different ideas about it, but a lot of it came from the McCarthy era of the 1950s and 60s, that employed things like the electroshock and military-style boot camps to try to toughen people up. All of that was discredited in the 1970s when homosexuality was removed from the DSM.
But then churches and Christian therapists picked up that (discredited science) and applied a kind of spiritual layer to all of it, developing their own ways of doing conversion therapy. These conferences I would go to were hosted by Exodus International, an umbrella organization that over 200 ministries were a part of, and every single one of those ministries had different approaches, different theories, different ways of approaching conversion therapy.
So, as you described, we’d be told not to watch pornography or not to masturbate because it reinforced same-sex behavior, because it’s self-pleasure: You’re a man pleasuring a man. There were so many things about it that just didn’t make sense. But even if it didn’t make sense, I would tell myself: There are thousands of people at the conferences; there are these incredible people on stage who have these tearful testimonies talking about how they changed, and so who am I to question whether or not this is wrong?
All of the confessions I was making in (ex-gay) talk therapy were used as proof as to why I was in despair. And so it was just this toxic mix of psychotherapy and behavior modification. You know: “Act like a man; dress like a man; listen to music that men listen to,” a lot of policing of our behavior. And then the spiritual component was the most dangerous part of it. This isn’t just about you; this is about you and God and your eternity. I mean, I was 19 years old when I started in it. I didn’t even know who I was as a person yet. And I was blaming myself all through this time for the lack of resolution, that God had not unburdened me of this desire for men.
And I think it’s difficult sometimes for people who didn’t grow up in those environments to realize how insidious that is. It’s kind of Orwellian. Like, “don’t just say two plus two equals five. We need you to believe two plus two equals five, and we’re going to break you down until you believe that.” And I think for people on the outside when they look at this world, they think, “Who could believe such a thing? It’s so ridiculous.”
But you don’t question the leadership. You don’t question the curriculum. And like you were just saying, you saw evidence that it worked: Look at all these people at Exodus with success stories, look at this institution. And then all the while, you’re thinking, “The reason it’s not working for me is that I am weak. I am not enough. I don’t pray enough. I don’t read my Bible enough.” And I imagine that shapes a young mind in a very toxic way, even beyond sexuality.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I think that was the biggest struggle while I was in conversion therapy. I was also working in churches at the same time. So if anyone was set up for success, it should’ve been me. I was in an environment where, it seemed, I couldn’t fail. I couldn’t not change; because if I didn’t, I would lose my job. I would lose my community.
And it was always told to us that if people fall away, if people embrace “the lifestyle,” which happened, it wasn’t something wrong with the program; it was something wrong with them, that they weren’t trying hard enough, that they didn’t surrender enough, that they hadn’t done enough work or weren’t spiritual enough. And so it just perpetuated self-hatred, self-loathing. You’re constantly policing and moderating yourself and constantly questioning, “Am I doing something wrong? I’m not changing, but all these other people are.” And that does something to someone’s soul. It does something to someone’s psyche. Eventually it all caught up with me.
Your journey out of all that toxicity is a slow burn with many small revelations leading up to a big life-change. My two favorite lightbulb moments in the book are 1.) When you’re sitting at a Christian conference, you get on Grindr, and you suddenly see loads of profiles popping up inside the venue of the conference. And 2.) When you’re interviewing for a job at Hillsong, and homosexuality comes up, and the guy says, “If we got rid of every gay person working on our team, what you see here would not happen.”
Did that make you reflect on the efficacy of conversion therapy, realizing that no one has been “cured, ”and everyone knows it? They—and everyone behind the scenes of churches— are all just participating in this ruse of conversion for the sake of maintaining a business.
When I started in conversion therapy the literal banner for Exodus said, “Freedom is possible.” That was the promise. That was the message. But over the course of my time there, that messaging started to gradually shift because a lot of people were not experiencing any change. Their sexuality, their desires, were not transforming. And so the last Exodus conference that I went to, they said, “Hey, this might not go away, and so the choice you have is whether or not you choose to honor God and do what you know is right.” And they would always say this one line, that “the opposite of homosexuality isn’t heterosexuality, it’s holiness.” And so they would be very honest and say “You might not get married. You might not find a spouse of the opposite gender, and that’s not the goal. The goal is that you’re living the way that we believe God wants people like us to live.”
And yet all the people that they would trot out on stage to share their testimonies and talk about how God had saved them had a spouse of the opposite gender by their side and a picture of their happy family on the PowerPoint screen behind them. And so there was always this idea that (hetero sex) was the end point. That’s what healing looks like.
There was a session I went to that year where one of the leaders of Exodus openly said that on his wedding night he could not perform his husbandly duty to consummate the marriage, and that his wife said to him, “I didn’t marry you to have sex with you. I married you because I love you and I wanna spend the rest of my life with you.” And everyone’s, like, clapping and cheering, saying “that’s so beautiful.” And I’m like, “Wait, what?” They got into details about how it took them, like, six months and a lot of experimentation to find what it took to make (hetero sex) work. And I just remember thinking, “I can’t keep doing this. This is not what I wanna do with my life. I can’t keep faking it.”
But in that moment you didn’t make a full 180 turn from “I can beat this,” to, “This is me; it’s beautiful, and it’s nothing I need to fight any longer.” How long did it take to get there?
It was not easy. That process had a really difficult start; I recognized the change (to heterosexuality) wasn’t happening, and I knew I needed to step away from Exodus and conversion therapy. But I was still working in churches. I was a bit stuck. And rather than acknowledging it, I just said, “You know what? I’m gonna get so busy doing good work for God, I will get so focused on my career, that maybe just focusing on that will dissipate my need to worry about this other side of my life.”
So I kept a busy schedule, and my career in church did take off. But I knew that if they found out the truth of who I was, and especially if they knew I was beginning to accept who I was, that all of that would go away in an instant. And that led to a nervous breakdown and suicidal ideation.
Eventually I realized I could not keep doing this to myself. I could either end my life or I could end the way I’d been living it. Thankfully, I had friends that I had known in conversion therapy that (came out). And they introduced me to an organization; back then it was called the Gay Christian Network. Today it’s called Queer Christian Fellowship.
I was reluctant, but one of my friends paid for me to attend their conference, and it was a really mind-altering experience because it was a very familiar setting. It was a lot of the same people that I had been at Exodus conferences with. Only this time it was OK for us to sleep with each other, or just admit that we were into each other. Grindr had just come out that year, and everybody was on it. It was a very weird experience for me.
The last day of the conference, they had a communion service, and I just remember sitting there and kinda taking in and reflecting on everything I had heard that weekend and just thinking: God’s lack of an answer to my prayer was the answer. There was nothing wrong with me. There was nothing broken. There was nothing that needed to change. What needed to change was my perception of myself, and of God.
And that was the first time in 28 years that I prayed and said, “Thank you, God, for making me gay.”
That was the beginning of a long journey. It’s not like the minute I decided to stop conversion therapy I was instantly free. There was a long process of untangling and healing from all of those things that I went through.
But then at the same time, your career in churches was taking off, working with Hillsong and Willow Creek; and at that time, in the 2000s, a lot of big churches wanted to use this nebulous language around LGBTQ+ issues, saying “love is love,” or “all are welcome,” without really committing to affirming or disavowing gay marriage.
So I quit conversion therapy, and I thought my career in churches was over. But it was just beginning. I had a skill set churches needed. I was doing social media, digital marketing, and a lot of these churches wanted their pastors to become influencers, their churches to become lifestyle brands. They wanted their worship bands to be on top of the charts on Billboard. And so I became an asset, but I was also a liability. And so a lot of these churches were willing to work with me as long as I was, like, signing NDAs, or I was not so vocal about my work with them. And I went along with it for a while because I understood why queer people were leaving churches, and I thought nothing will change unless some folks try to stick it out and try to be a force for good and for change from within.
And all of those churches behind closed doors were loving and affirming and accepting of me as much as they could, but they would never publicly affirm queer people or speak out on behalf of our community. I did not work with any organizations that were outwardly anti-gay, but I was in all of these churches that were living in that gray zone like you described, saying things like, “We don’t wanna offend anybody, so we’re not gonna say anything pro-gay or anti-gay.” And so it was just kind of this like practiced ambiguity that a lot of these churches were embracing in their messaging and their sermons. And that drew a lot of queer people to their churches because on the surface they looked very progressive; they were in big urban areas; everything about it felt like they weren’t a part of the Christian right.
It all really came to a head for me personally in 2016 when the Pulse Orlando shooting happened. That was a moment that every queer person felt because that was the largest attack on our community in U.S. history.
And so that morning, I’m messaging all these churches like, “Hey, like please don’t post anything, and if you wanna say something, here are some suggested things that I think you should say,” acknowledging the LGBTQ+ community, acknowledging what happened in Orlando. And none of the churches except one posted anything, and that said a lot to me because it felt like a personal attack. It wasn’t just that these churches weren’t acknowledging my community. It was that they knew me, and they knew what this meant to me, and they knew how hard it must have been for me to write that email and to know that, like, we’re just gonna ignore it.
And so that was sort of my signal that if I need to make change, I want it to be from the outside. I can’t keep being the inside person. And so I got together with some friends and we launched a site called Church Clarity. The whole idea was to provide a resource for people seeking information on where churches stood on LGBTQ+ issues. We didn’t want to change anyone’s theology—though that would be nice—but to force some clarity.
We wanted to save queer people from having experiences where churches’ ambiguity or their lack of clarity caused harm. Like when churches look inviting and progressive, until a queer person wants to get married or wants to get into a position of leadership or have their kids in the children’s ministry, then they’re told by the church, “Actually, no, you can’t do that.”
And so we wanted to score churches based on what we could find publicly accessible about their beliefs and their doctrine. We would scour their website, listen to their sermons, read their doctrinal statements or anything that we could find that was publicly accessible and say whether or not a church was clear or unclear on their policies towards LGBTQ+ people. And so Westboro Baptist Church, as an example, scored incredibly well, because they are very clear. And we’re not saying that being clear is being safe, but it’s clear enough that you can make an informed decision.
And what we found was a lot of those churches that were unclear were the ones that were most upset about what we were doing because they didn’t want to be put into a corner to actually say what they believe. They wanted to kinda thrive in that ambiguity.
And at the same time there were a lot of, like, really traditional (anti-gay) churches that were grateful for what we were doing, because they said we were helping call out churches that were lukewarm in their theology. And so it was kind of a fun little virtuous cycle, but it felt really good for me to kind of employ everything that I knew how churches were working behind the scenes and kinda turn it against them and say, “Listen: Clarity is kindness.” Brene Brown said that. And being unclear is unkind.
So where do you see the issue of gay marriage in churches and politics today? You’ve lived through the Defense of Marriage Act in the ’90s, the 2004 election where attacks against gay marriage were front and center, and then Prop 8, eras when the Christian right was so galvanized around fighting gay marriage. And it does seem like we’ve made some progress with that, while the new boogeyman has shifted to trans people. But is there as much political momentum for churches to fight gay people?
So Exodus International, the organization that I was involved in, shut their doors in 2013 and said, “This doesn’t work. We have, like, a 1% success rate. We don’t really believe anyone’s changed their sexuality.” So that, on the surface, feels like a victory, but the reality is, conversion therapy didn’t go away. Exodus was just that umbrella organization. There were more than 200 groups that were under it, and not all of those groups aligned with the decision, so they splintered off, and conversion therapies continued to persist underground, mainly in religious communities.
There are conversion therapy bans in over 20 states right now, but those bans only prevent conversion therapy from happening in therapeutic settings, and so anyone who is seeking to change their sexuality on religious grounds have access to some form of conversion therapy. The Trevor Project has been tracking this and found conversion therapy has only continued to increase since Exodus closed down.
Colorado recently had their conversion therapy ban rolled back, but then a new bill just went out this week that’s gonna kinda stabilize that a little bit, which is good. But I would say hit the nail on the head that the trans and nonbinary community are probably gonna be the biggest targets. One of the bigger conversion therapy organizations wants to advocate for insurance companies to pay for detransition services.
And so there’s still a proliferation of these things. And it’s still largely being funded and supported by the church.
Photos courtesy of Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez
