Suicide shadows Colorado’s ‘pray the gay away’ debate
Former OUT FRONT writer Kyle Harris — who’s now the current managing editor of The Colorado Independent, way to go, buddy!— leapt into our inbox with a story he thought our readers would appreciate. After a quick gander, we certainly agreed.
Author Corey Hutchins nailed this gut-wrenching piece and we’ve been given permission to share. With that:
Suicide shadows Colorado’s ‘pray the gay away’ debate
Brad Allen was 31 when he planned to stage his suicide to look like an accident. He wouldn’t leave a note.
“I would just leave a destroyed car and another dead, gay Christian,” he told a bipartisan panel of a dozen Colorado lawmakers in a several-hour hearing Tuesday at the Capitol. He’d planned his suicide because he was a gay man in a Christian conservative family who had gone through therapy and had been told his homosexuality was pathological, something he needed to fix.
Allen never went through with the staged suicide. Instead, he came out to the world as gay. And so he was excommunicated from the church where he was a pastor. His friends ostracized him.
“I’ve worked tirelessly to rid myself of the shame that nearly robbed me of my life and help others understand that there is no belief that is worth their lives,” he said. “I pray daily that the deadly and discredited practice of conversion therapy would be banned forever so that LGBT people can stop hating themselves, shaming themselves and killing themselves in the name of therapy.”
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