I tried to convert myself from gay to straight. It doesn’t work

When I was growing up, I didn’t want to let myself exist.

In 2004, I thought I was a normal boy. But puberty’s tsunami of hormones changed everything. When I watched footy, I suddenly noticed my favourite AFL players’ bulging muscles. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

WA author Holden Sheppard tried to ‘pray the gay away’ and now knows the trauma associated with the practice.Credit: Holden Sheppard

It was a hell of a discovery: I was attracted to other men.

At sixteen, this terrified me. I grew up in Geraldton in regional WA, in a working-class, Sicilian- Australian, Roman Catholic family. The dice had not landed in my favour. In my world, same-sex attraction was beyond the pale.

Priests railed against deviants. Teachers said homosexuals made them sick. Mates joked about faggots. Family members screwed up their faces when gay politicians were mentioned. This was regular, casual and normal: every lesson I’d ever imbibed about homosexuality was that it was bad.

And I’d grown up watching a fundamentalist Christian show, The Donut Club, which preached, in a creepy kids’ song, how “life without God’s love is like a donut, ’cause there’s a hole in the middle of your heart”.

So, 16-year-old me went looking for answers, and found some messed-up gay conversion therapy websites.

I don’t remember what these sites were. One talked about how gays had some kind of “broken mirror” and needed to repair it. Others told me I could cure myself by giving myself over to Jesus.

I didn’t want to have a hole in the middle of my heart, so I did what the websites said.

For three years, from 16 to 19, I tried to pray the gay away.

I was never forced into a coercive gay conversion therapy program. Nobody made me do what I did. Nobody even knew I was doing it. I’ve only spoken about it recently.

Holden aged 17.

Many people are forced into programs designed to convert them from gay to straight, including American author Garrard Conley. His compelling memoir Boy Erased, recounted how he was put into such therapy by his fundamentalist parents.

I saw the film of Boy Erased at a cinema in 2019. When the credits rolled, I keeled sideways into my husband’s lap and sobbed uncontrollably for 10 minutes. Conley’s pain was identical to my own.

I’m not sure what the right term is for what I did to myself. I am reluctant to name it ‘conversion therapy’ because, though inspired by fundamentalist websites, it was ultimately self-driven.

But I did spend years trying to convert myself. I prayed extensively, asking God to help me stop being evil. I wrote letters to God begging Him to fix me. Please make me straight. Save me. Don’t let Satan win. I am too embarrassed to share the full letters. I sounded like a 16-year-old indoctrinated into a fundamentalist cult. I guess I kind of was.

Holden Sheppard with his husband Raphael Farmer.

I pored over our family’s Bible nightly, clinging to impossibly thin pages for salvation. I nodded at the passages decrying homosexuality, copied them down in a notebook.

I dug up my baptismal crucifix and wore it like a talisman. If Jesus was around my neck at all times, maybe he could save me.

I felt immense, crushing shame for my sexuality just as my teenage testosterone was surging. Even masturbating became a moral battleground.

I prayed more fervently. Confusion became depression became self-loathing. By 18, I wanted to die. By 19, I thought about killing myself every day.

Eventually, I managed to detach from these beliefs. I reached out to a mental health crisis service and got help. I jumped off the train before it went off the rails.

The upshot? Three years of torture hadn’t made me straight. If anything, the self-denial only made me even hornier for blokes.

My experience is borne out, over and over, in the stories of anyone who has been through gay conversion therapy.

I am now married to a man and we’ve been together 13 years. Conley is married, too, and the people who facilitated his conversion therapy have since admitted they are gay, and severed their ties to the ex-gay movement.

Invisible Boys, by Holden Sheppard.

This is because conversion therapy doesn’t work. It is a colossal waste of time and energy. The process doesn’t make anyone straight, ever: merely ashamed for being homosexual.

And unlike a placebo, conversion therapy – either coercive or self-imposed – causes tremendous harm. Trying to convert myself caused me major psychological trauma: depression, anxiety, panic disorder, suicidal ideation, complex PTSD and more. It has taken years of therapy to recover.

My hometown, Geraldton, is four hours north of Perth instead of four hours south like Albany, where the Albany Baptist Church recently hosted its Real Lives event, inviting guests to “hear stories of hope, vision and dignity beyond LGBTQ+ ideologies from those who have previously lived and identified as LGBTQ+ but who are now finding new life in Jesus Christ”.

I have nothing to say to this church. Its leaders know exactly what they are doing. And as my experience shows, a “gentle nudge” towards conversion is often all it takes.

So, I feel compelled to speak about my experience to discourage any religious LGBT person from making the same misguided decision I did.

To them, I say: Do not do what I did. You aren’t evil, sick or broken: you are good as you are, and many people, Christian or otherwise, will love and support you. Stay with yourself. Let yourself exist.

Holden Sheppard is an award-winning author whose debut novel Invisible Boys (Fremantle Press, 2019), is available now in bookstores.

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