Netflix’s disturbing new doco Pray Away is a must-watch

A chilling new documentary now streaming on Netflix provides a deep dive into the world of gay conversion therapy.

The first thing that Netflix’s Pray Away documentary does is remind viewers that gay conversion therapy is not a thing of the past.

The film — directed by Kristine Stolakis and produced by Ryan Murphy and Jason Blum — opens with a man named Jeffrey McCall accosting shoppers leaving a supermarket.

McCall wants to share his story as a man who once lived as a transgender woman, but claims Jesus transformed him.

“This was me,” he says showing shoppers a photo. “I lived transgender. Drugs, alcohol, homosexuality. I was really deep in sin, and I left everything to follow the Lord.”

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The doco looks at real-life families who’ve embarked on ‘ex-gay’ therapy.

It’s shockingly similar to the testimony given by the leaders of the ex-gay movement over thirty years ago, several of whom are featured in Pray Away after leaving the movement and formally apologising to the LGBTQ community.

John Paulk, for instance, was the poster child for the “former homosexual” who successfully converted to the straight lifestyle. He appeared with his wife Anne on the cover of Newsweek magazine in 1998, and both of them appeared on talk show after talk show to recount how both of them were gay, but made a conscious effort to change. Paulk soon joined the board of the Christian anti-homosexuality group known as Exodus International, which was founded in 1976 and disbanded in 2013.

Being interviewed in the present day — looking far more comfortable in his skin than he does in the talk show clips from the ’90s — Paulk frankly admits that he lied to the public when he told them he was no longer attracted to men. And, perhaps more damagingly, he lied to the young queer people who turned to Exodus because they felt there was something inherently wrong about their desires.

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The film is a deep dive into the ‘ex-gay’ movement.

“I did lie, and I can say that now with guilt and shame,” Paulk says. “I realised that my dishonesty hurt people. Because I was dishonest, it caused people in the audience — people that were struggling with homosexuality or had gay feelings — to feel like, ‘there must be something wrong with me, because I’m not like him’.”

Paulk left Exodus in 2003, three years after he was photographed going to a gay bar. (Paulk’s wife Anne declined to be interviewed for the documentary and continues to spread anti-gay messaging as the head of a new Christian ex-gay ministry.)

Then there’s Julia Rogers, who is preparing for her wedding to a woman in the present-day, and who as recently as 2011 was speaking at Exodus’s annual conference about her “conversion” to being a straight woman.

Her story is particularly tragic — after coming out to her mom at 14, she was forced to see a man named Ricky Chelette who ran another religious ex-gay therapy organisation called Living Hope.

Julia was desperate to be the good, Jesus-loving, straight daughter that everyone told her she ought to be, and when she couldn’t suppress her attraction to women, she became depressed. She began inflicting burns on herself. Reading back her diary from her teen years, she astutely observes, “I was a really good teenager, I just thought I was so bad.”

Rogers finally left the ex-gay movement after bearing witness to an emotional, televised group therapy session in 2013, in which survivors of the ex-gay movement unloaded their trauma onto Exodus president Alan Chambers.

“I felt like I was on the wrong side of the table,” Rogers says. Chambers, too, was so shaken by the stories shared by the “ex-ex-gays” that he and others disbanded Exodus that year, issuing a public apology to the LGBTQ community.

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The filmmakers interview survivors of the ex-gay movement.

But perhaps the most striking segment of the documentary is the admission from Randy Thomas — formerly a prominent member of Exodus leadership, who is now engaged to be married to a man — of just how involved Exodus was in pushing an anti-LGBTQ+ political agenda.

“There was a huge push to do everything that we could, while Bush was in office and both houses of Congress were Republican-controlled, to stave LGBTQ+ rights as much as possible, and maybe forever,” Thomas said.

That included the fight for Prop 8, the ballot proposal that banned same-sex marriage in California. After the proposal passed, Thomas remembers watching the protesters, who were crying in the streets.

“I’ll never forget, that night watching the news, seeing my community,” Thomas says, choking up with emotion, “Watching my community take to the streets and mourning the passage of Prop 8. When I looked at the TV, a voice inside me said, ‘How could you do that to your own people?‘”

After witnessing the regret, shame, and atonement attempts, it’s all the more painful watching McCall carry on the twisted tradition by targeting the public’s growing fears about transgender youth.

We witness a disturbing phone conversation McCall has with a woman who refuses to recognise the gender of her 20-year-old transgender daughter. McCall tells the woman she did the right thing, even though it’s caused her daughter to leave home and cut off contact with her family. The woman is clearly grateful for McCall’s validation. You can’t help but wonder if McCall, like the ex-gay leaders before him, will ever look back on that phone call and acknowledge how much damage he likely caused. One can only pray.

This story originally appeared on Decider and is republished here with permission.