Extreme way Humphries tried to change his sexuality: ‘it was this pure disgust’

Isaac Humphries is the only openly gay man in top tier basketball globally. He’s opened up in a brutally honest, wide-ranging interview about the challenges he faced.

Isaac Humphries was so desperate to conform to societal norms of heterosexuality he sought help from a hypnotherapist.

In 2022, the now 26-year-old was the first professional male Australian basketball player ever to come out as gay and the only active openly gay man currently playing in a top tier league anywhere in the world.

“I definitely had the self-homophobia and the shame and the hatred that a lot of closeted gay people go through,” Humphries said in the latest episode of the Mental As Anyone podcast.

Adelaide 36ers basketballer Isaac Humphries. Picture: Brenton Edwards

“But then I had the layer of this super public, masculine persona, as a professional athlete, that I had to sort of think, how does this marry, how does this sort of go together? No one’s really ever done it. Because of this thing, I feel this way therefore, because of this situation, I can’t ever date, I can never get married, I can never have a relationship, I can never find anyone … then I’m just gonna be lonely my whole life. And what’s the point of that? You just go down this big spiral. Sure, in the grand scheme of things isn’t a massive deal in this day and age at all, but the residual effects that was having on my life was very much the reason why I was falling in such a dark space.”

Humphries now plays in the Aussie NBL, firstly with the Sydney Kings before moving to Adelaide, and previously played college basketball in the US for the University of Kentucky.

It was in the darkest of times Humphries sought help.

“The disgusting word was one I could have just tattooed on my forehead at that point. I thought about it all the time. It was this pure disgust … for what I was thinking or how my brain was working. And I tried everything, like hypnotherapy. I was trying everything to like rewire my brain into not feeling this utter disgust for myself,” Humphries explained.

“I went to a hypnotherapist and opened up to them and said, ‘can you try to hypnotise me out of thinking this about males and rewire maybe my thought process to think about women that way so that I just didn’t have to deal with it.

“I was like, ‘I want a wife and kids and a house and family. So we started then hypnotising me into only thinking about that and nothing else and these bad thoughts. I was just like, ‘whoa, this is crazy’ but I’m doing it because I just could not handle that idea of being gay at all. It obviously didn’t work.”

Isaac Humphries playing for Australia.

Humphries has a tattoo on his wrist that reads, ‘the silence is loud’. It is the name of one of his songs, but also represents the deepest of feelings when he was most depressed as “a reminder I was there”.

At around 23, Humphries planned to take his own life. It was the height of Covid. The world was locked down. Humphries was stuck at home in Adelaide and he remembered sitting at his piano crying playing his song, Be Alright, a track he wrote to come out to his mum.

“I went to my room, I had everything laid out,” the Adelaide 36ers player said.

“I’d written all my like letters to my closest people and then I just remember thinking about my nephew. I was in such a state. I was so chaotic in my brain is like my bodily function just went, go to sleep.”

Humphries never got as far as to attempt suicide. So distressed, his body shut down and he slept.

That moment was the wake-up call he needed.

“It was sort of like, ‘okay, well, if you’re gonna do this, you’re going to try again and properly do it or you’re going to get your shit sorted and get your life sorted. It was a bit too intense of a wakeup call for me that night and I chose to really help myself and I found psychologists and other opportunities that came up where I could remove myself from this environment and deal with what I needed to. So I chose to walk away from the life I had and just be fully prepared to never go back to that life. I was fully prepared to never play basketball again.”

Isaac Humphries attends the 2022 GQ Men Of The Year Awards.

Isaac Humphries speaks his truth. Picture Instagram.JPG

Humphries made international headlines when he came out and received overwhelming amount of support from all corners, including celebrities like Dannii Minogue, Tones and I and Calum Scott.

He appeared on the cover of GQ magazine and became an ambassador for R U OK Day, determined to use his voice to help others.

“It was so overwhelmingly positive,” Humphries said of his coming out experience.

“It opened up so many doors for me in my life. No, the world didn’t end, everything kept going, society kept going, basketball kept going. It gave lots of people something different to talk about.”

* A new episode of Mental As Anyone drops each Tuesday morning at 6am.