I want to tell you about a conversation that changed my life.

Not the kind of “life-changing” people throw around casually. I mean the kind that cracks something open in you — the kind that leaves you walking back to your car afterward, gripping your keys, unable to fully breathe.

This was the first time I had ever sat down with someone from the LGBTQIA+ community and actually listened — not to debate, not to counsel, not to fix. Just listened.

I had a lot to learn about loving people well. More than I realized that day. More than I probably still realize now.

A Café, a Phone Call, and Someone Who Thought I Was Safe

We’d met randomly at the gym. Nothing dramatic about it — just two people sharing space. But somewhere in those brief exchanges, this person decided I was safe enough to call.

I remember sitting in that tiny café, the kind with mismatched chairs and the smell of espresso soaked into the walls, thinking I knew what kind of conversation this would be. I didn’t.

My friend sat down across from me and said something I wasn’t prepared for:

“You follow Jesus, but you always seem so different than all the other Christians that have come my way.”

I sat there stunned. Different? I didn’t feel different. I just knew that I loved people some would tell me I shouldn’t. Like the girl who got hooked on drugs real bad and made a string of choices she wasn’t proud of — I never held that over her. I loved her anyway. That felt less like virtue and more like just… being human.

But apparently, in some circles, that’s rare enough to be remarkable. And that should tell us everything we need to know about the state of things.

What He Carried

He began to share his story with me. And I want to tell you some of it — carefully, with the reverence it deserves — because stories like his are the reason I do what I do now.

He knew from a young age that he was different. While his older brother wanted to play with trucks, he wanted to fix the stain on the bedroom carpet. Details like that. The kind of memory that tells you someone has been cataloguing their own “wrongness” since before they had words for it.

He was always an outsider. Got picked on when he showed no interest in girls. And his father — a preacher — was all hellfire and brimstone. The kind of theology that leaves no room for nuance, no room for a child still trying to figure out who he is.

His father was not having it.

In his teens, he met another boy who was different too. They became close friends. They got caught kissing. When word reached his father, the man beat his son with everything he had. Beat him so badly that he had to be sent to a religious hospital upstate to recover.

And when he was well enough — when the physical wounds were manageable — his father sent him to a conversion therapy camp to pray the gay away.

He spent almost a year in that place.

What They Call Therapy

I want to be honest with you about what happened in that camp, because softening it would be a disservice to every person who has survived it — and to those who didn’t.

They call it therapy. It is torture.

They psychologically dismantle a person until what remains is barely recognizable. They use shame as a scalpel. They use Scripture as a weapon. And yes — electroshock is part of the treatment. A live current run through a human body in the name of God.

My friend described it with a calm that I now understand is what happens when someone has told their story enough times to survive the telling of it. The calm of a person who has had to make peace with what was done to them because the alternative is too costly.

I sat across from him and listened in horror.

The Weight of My Own Silence

Here is what I have to confess to you, and I say it because I think it matters:

In that moment, sitting across that café table, I understood that I had been complicit.

Not in what his father did. Not in what that camp did. But in the theological ecosystem that made those things possible — that gave them cover, gave them language, gave them the audacity to call it love.

I had upheld beliefs. I had stayed quiet in rooms where harmful things were said. I had called certain relationships “sinful” without ever once sitting across from a human being and asking what their life actually felt like.

I cried at that table. Not performatively. The kind of crying that surprises you — that comes from somewhere below your theology, down where the actual human being lives.

I hated myself a little, in that moment. Not the productive kind of self-examination — the ugly, paralyzing kind. The kind that is, ultimately, still about you.

But my friend — with all the grace that survivors somehow carry — didn’t need my guilt. He needed my presence. And slowly, I began to understand the difference.

What Changed

That conversation was one of many that would follow. Each one peeling back another layer of the framework I’d been handed — frameworks built to protect systems, not people.

I am not the same person who walked into that café.

What I know now is this: when someone trusts you with their pain, the worst thing you can do is make it about your own discomfort. The second worst thing is to walk away unchanged.

I chose not to walk away unchanged.

I don’t know if my friend knows how much that afternoon cost me — not in suffering, because I was not the one who suffered. But in certainty. In the comfortable theology I’d been leaning against like a wall.

The wall came down.

And I’ve been building something different ever since. Something with more room in it. Something that doesn’t require anyone to make themselves smaller to fit.

If you’ve been raised in a tradition that told you someone like my friend deserved what happened to him — I’m not here to shame you. I was there too.

But I am asking you to sit down. To listen. To let someone’s real story reach the part of you that exists beneath the doctrine.

That’s where the actual transformation happens.

And it is worth every single thing it costs you.

If you or someone you know has experienced conversion therapy or religious-based harm, you are not alone. Healing is possible, and there are communities that will walk with you — not to lead you somewhere, but to accompany you where you already are.