Radiolab - UnErased: Smid

Episode Date: November 28, 2018

Today on Radiolab, we're playing the fourth and final episode of a series Jad worked on called UnErased: The history of conversion therapy in America. Imagine... You’re openly gay. Then, you become the leader of the largest ex-gay organization and, under your leadership, many lives are destroyed. You leave that organization, come out as gay - again - and find love. Do you deserve to be happy? This is a story of identity, making amends and John Smid’s reckoning with his life.  UnErased is a series with Focus Features, Stitcher and Limina House in conjunction with the feature film, BOY ERASED. Special thanks go out to the folks at Anonymous Content for their support of UnErased.  If you want to hear the whole series, you can find UnErased in all the usual podcast places.  Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.     

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C.

See? Yeah. Okay. Are you there? Bobbert. Hello. Okay, there you are. I'm Chad Abumrod.

I'm Robert Krollovich. This is Radio Lab? Yes, sir. And so, okay, we're going to continue with one more episode from the series Unerased. But you did for somebody else? But we're including it here. It was kind of for somebody else but also for us at the same time. It all was kind of squishy, to be honest.

So I've produced a four-part series along with Focus Features, Stitcher, Limit House, that was about the history of conversion therapy in America. That's people who are gay who are being pushed to or asked to or want to be straight. Yes, and sometimes it's a therapy type situation, science-y, sometimes it's a church-type situation. Here's a funny thing, Robert. you would think it's kind of you would think it doesn't happen a lot, right? These days? I would think certainly less, certainly less than before.

Well, there was a survey done recently. By? By a group at UCLA at the Williams Institute in conjunction with Gallup, Gallup polling. They did a survey that looked at of the people in America who identify as LGBTQ, which is about 4.5%, roughly, 13 million people.

How many of those people have gone through something like conversion therapy. And the number was completely shocking to me. Shockingly small? What kind of shocking? Almost 700,000 people. In the 1970s and 80s and so on? Yeah, I mean, but also recently, like recently, this was a survey that's done in 2012.

And I just want to give you a sense of scale. Okay. 700,000 people. That is the equivalent of the city of Boston. That's the number of people where, talking about. That's a lot of freaking people. Now, to your question, you would think it would be mostly older folks? Yes, from the days when it was an abomination and now no longer, really, from any family. No, it was actually equally prevalent in all age groups. I mean, the survey found

that just as many young people, you know, teens, were being put through these kind of programs as people of older generations. Wow. That is a very important. The prevalence wasn't going down. You know, if anything, like just as LGBTQ people are being embraced in the wider culture, there has been a kind of silent re-entrenchment in certain communities in America. And so that was part of the whole reason to do this project is that there's this thing happening that we're not really looking at. And it's got a whole history to it that's troubling but also kind of fascinating. So I want to play the final episode in the four parts.

series. It deals with, well, it deals with one of the central guys in that history. This main character that you found, this is a really complex fellow. Yes. You turn this thing on and you think, no, well, well, he, oh, hmm. And then I don't know. I don't know what your face will look like at the end of this. Yes. So I just want to say a few things before we start. This whole project was done in conjunction with the Focus Features film Boy Erased, which is out now. And that film was based on a wonderful memoir by a guy named Garrett Conley.

And this story was the story everybody told us we had to tell if we were going to do a series about conversion therapy in America. And it's about a guy named Smith. News cameras started showing up. Bullhorns came out. And all of a sudden, I heard, John Smith, we know you're in there. John Smith, we know you're here. It was as though a torpedo had just hit the side of our ship. The ship that John Smith captained before it was torpedoed was the largest ex-game ministry in America.

It's called Love in Action. It's called Love in Action. For almost 25 years, from 1994, two years. 2008, if you were an evangelical Christian who had a gay son or daughter and you wanted to convert them to straight, you might have sent them to John. And for maybe $7,000, he would run them through his program. And I want you to tell him how affected. He is the guy in Boy Erased that torments Garrett Conley. Tell him how you hate him for the things that he's the way.

You sit down. Sit down. But I'm not angry. Yeah, no. But you are. You just. Let me down. You're angry, but you don't.

Why do I have to be angry? I don't like my life to be painted as a villain. And that's kind of the way I feel about this movie. It's like, I don't like it. It's uncomfortable. I don't like the movie. I don't like the book. I don't like what people are saying.

I don't like hearing Garrett talk about it. I don't like it. It's uncomfortable. At the same time, there is truth in that I was a forerunner. and a spokesperson and a national and international leader that said you must eradicate homosexuality from your life. That's just the price. These days, John Smith is living a very different life.

My life has been reinvented several times, majorly reinvented. He now lives in Paris, Texas, with his husband, Larry, and he makes furniture. Is this way? Yeah. Okay. Producer Shima Oliai and I paid him a visit. Well, we're going to my workshop, which is off the corner of our house. John and Larry live in a tiny one-story house bordering an enormous horse farm.

So what you see as we walk to the garage out of his house into the garage is rolling hills in one direction, epic Texas flatlands and another, and a sky that is so big it kind of hurts your head. The shop itself is... Is it in here with the cars? It's a divided shop. Okay. The cars are in the next space. John also collects and restores old cars. Oh wow, look at this. I'm a person that uses every scrap that I can. I have a lot of used wood, old wood, like over there is a whole bunch of... These days, what he does, instead of trying to eradicate homosexuality, I'm going to get a book.

John will spend his days taking old copies of readers digest books and carving them into letters of the alphabet. This large bandsaw really cuts a nice refined... edge, there's no frayed edges. Or he'll also... And I'm going to router these out. Do carpentry work for local designers. I know he'll make a column, paint it white.

When you're making something, what are you thinking about? Most of the time, I'm thinking about relationships. I'm thinking about life, people, history, future. A lot of times it's processing painful things. you know, difficult things. How to think about John Smith is a difficult question. He is undeniably warm and funny and honest and engaging. At the same time, many people told us before we came,

don't forget, this is a guy who ran a program where people in the program tried to commit suicide and in some cases succeeded. And now that he's out himself and married to a man and vehemently opposed to the whole idea of conversion therapy. It does beg the question, what do we do with that past? How should we think about it? Is he allowed to just move on?

Where'd you grow up? I was raised in Omaha, Nebraska. It was 1959. Life was the 50s. Life was good. All the moms walked up and down the street in their shirtwaist dresses and had coffee with each other. I mean, it was a stereotypical,

1950s suburban American neighborhood experience. And I remember feeling at five, I remember sitting back in our backyard on a summer morning. School was out, sitting in the play sandbox, and feeling the warm sun. And I remember just feeling life's good. I was so at peace. It was this one moment of calm, he says,

where he didn't have to worry about who he was. Now the story, as it goes from here, of John becoming and then unbecoming the Elvis of the X-Game movement, is complicated, to say the least. You could start the story in the fourth grade. I remember in fourth grade having an emotional affair with Steve. I wanted to carry his books. He had a broken arm. I wanted to hold his hand.

Of course, I was a gay boy, but I didn't know how to work that through. What does a little boy in that situation say to him? self. I didn't have words. Then there was fifth grade for the first time his school gets a male teacher. All my teachers were females and all of a sudden we had this male teacher. I remember just fantasizing, just looking at him, being drawn to him, being attracted to his maleness, not knowing what to do with that. Jumping forward a bit. Dated several girls in high school. Ends up marrying a girl named Chris. How old were you at this point? I was 17, 16. Like him, she had a tough family Life. Alcoholic father, parents were divorced, felt like they just kind of got each other. And we

created two children. And then you get to the first in a series of violent shifts in John Smith's life. Many years later when he was like firmly embedded in the ex-gay movement and preaching against homosexuality, he would give a sermon that sort of talked about this moment. I just want to share a little bit about my personal story so you know who I am and where I'm coming from. He describes being 23, newly married with kids. and then falling into this funk, like suddenly being very uncertain about his marriage, about the future. At the time, he was working in a department store,

and he meets a guy named Leonard. He called me one night. We wonder, you know, it's funny how the enemy works in our lives, and he works in those intimate times of darkness, of secrecy. It's not in the light. It's not above board. It's always somewhere sinister that he sneaks in. And one Friday night, 9.30 at night, my wife was bowling.

I was taking care of the kids. Leonard called me. Hey, John, I'm at the bar. Why don't you come over and we can talk? Well, now, he had strategically placed himself at a bar right across the street from where I lived, and I found out later that he was already surmising what I was looking for, what I was curious about, where I was headed in his mind. I went across the street. That evening ended up in a very mutually seductive homosexual encounter. I came home from that 4 o'clock in the morning, which is, again, something I never did. I never ever went out and stayed out. Of course my wife wasn't stupid. She knew that why was he out so late? What was going on? So she began to ask me questions, what went on. And I immediately went to her and I said, Chris, I'm gay. Do you see how quick that identity

got stuck? I had one sexual encounter, one outside of marital sex, which was the only other experience I had ever had sexually. One sexual encounter. and I'm signed sealed delivered. I'm gay and I want a divorce. What do you think when you hear that now? My first thought was my verbiage and the way I described that story and the way I would describe it today

would be so violently different. Those terms were inflammatory. I mean, I filtered that story through my theology at that time. I walked away from that marriage, abandoned my children, adultry and dove into headlong, full force, the homosexual subculture. I lived in a gay apartment building, frequent gay businesses.

Anyone who wasn't familiar with or didn't like my homosexuality, I just crossed them off the list. In a later, a TV interview, John would say that during this period, he even became the guy that young gay men who were new in town would call to sort of get initiated. I had taken people to the gay bars for their first. time I was instrumental in helping people involve themselves in that lifestyle. Four years I lived in that lifestyle, four years of active pursuit. And all along, thinking in my head, I'm looking for monogamy.

I'm looking for a life partner. I'm looking for that one person that can satisfy all my needs and never let me down. What makes John's backstory so interesting and also difficult to wrap your head around? Are these wildly different poles that he travels between in one life? I mean, he starts off living the sort of 50s American suburban dream, wife, two kids, swings into the gay subculture, as he calls it. And then, as he puts it, what happened was he started to get his heartbroken a lot. The first guy that I lived with, I mean, I just really loved him as a 20-something-year-old can.

He came home one day and he says, I can't be with you. I'm a size queen and you don't measure up. The guy basically told him, you're not enough of a man. down there for me. That was a shocking, deeply, deeply wounding moment. He says he struggled with his confidence, got into a series of very bad dysfunctional relationships, and began to feel like something was wrong with him. And it was at that point with this four-year experience in the gay culture where a girl I worked with... At the time, he was working for the railroad as a clerk. She was an evangelical Christian, started talking with me about Jesus and the Bible.

and she was very open about her own struggles, very vulnerable with me. And she invited me to church and kept inviting me to church. And eventually I went. It was a Christian revivalist church service. This is the kind where people speak in tongues, talk about the devil a lot. So I went, and sure enough, I was sitting in the pew and this guy was speaking, and I don't know what the heck he was talking about, because God was too busy speaking to me personally. And I was sitting back in this pew, and I'll never forget God said, John,

you don't have to live this way any longer. What was it that, I mean, this is always the hard. I asked John like, what? How does he, how does he explain that moment now? Because everything that follows really flows from that moment. As honest as I can be about it, because I don't really understand it myself either.

But as much as I can process it, it was built on the hope of, not the experience of he told me later that you know the conversion moment that god's voice in his head that he can't explain but all the moments after suddenly having this whole new belief system

reframed everything first of all he was reborn so literally everything before that point was no longer important it was only about what comes after and also he now had this book which seemed to say that the way he just was was a sin which you would think you wouldn't want to hear but he said it was actually a relief to hear that

because he could now take all of those really hard questions about himself and who he was as a man and he could now put it into a box called sin and say to himself, oh, that's why I was feeling so bad because I was committing sin. It was what I was doing. It's not necessarily who I am. It was my behavior and that can change.

I believed that all the, this pain, Jesus could heal, and that he could bring meaning and sense and comfort and peace into my life. And so in another violent shift, John Smith becomes really only one of two people I've ever heard of to come out of the closet and then go back in. He starts going to this church regularly. I felt free. I felt liberated.

Tell them about your clown ministry. Yeah, I was a clown. I became a clown. You were a clown? Yes. I was Rainbow the clown. I love you how you say that so matter of factly. Yeah, well, we were trained.

We went through clowns school. You were a Christian clown? Yes. And my clown stick was I would walk in with an umbrella because I was underneath the clouds of life and the rain. And I had a trick umbrella that when I would shake it, it would fall. And it put it down and the rainbow would come out, the promises of God's future.

It was my testimony, kind of a story of how I came out from under the rain clouds and found the sun. Oh. I made all the wigs for the clowns, and I made the props, and it was really a significant two and a half years of my life when I didn't have any outside pressures. He says it was a little bit like that moment when he was four. He was totally at peace, super happy, but then he starts getting lonely.

And I needed a companion. So I dated a couple of girls, and those things didn't succeed. And finally I met Villeen, and we started kind of dating. He said initially things were going well, and he felt like, Maybe I can change. Maybe I have. But then as he describes it, that funk returned. Like those old feelings, but even more unspoken than that, that's just a kind of panic would come up.

And I started feeling really, really scared. While I was in that place. Today on Family Talk. I heard a radio program. Welcome, everyone, to this edition of Family Talk. Focus on the family, James Dobson. James Dobson, by the way, is maybe one of the most influential evangelicals. voices of the last 50 years as a hugely popular radio show.

Today we're addressing the tough subject of same-sex attraction, which affects millions of people and their families. And the guest on the radio program was Barbara Johnson. So when I learned that he was homosexual, I thought this couldn't happen to Christian families. Barbara Johnson was a mom of a gay son. And at the end of that program, homosexual feelings can and do dissipate. They offered information sheets on ex-gay ministry. John says they basically said, For all you who are struggling with same-sex feelings, there is a program out there that can help you. First time I'd ever heard gay anything in the context of Christian Anything. So I set folks on the family a letter.

And to make a long story short, he ends up getting connected with the guy who many people sort of believe to be the father, the spiritual godfather of the ex-K movement. We talked about him a bit in episode one. Like John, Frank Worthen was a guy who had been in the closet, come out. out of the closet, but then at a low point heard a voice from God. And I heard God say, I want your back. And he went back in the closet. And this was 1973, right in the middle of the Jesus movement. Frank starts going to church, and after service one day...

After church, three young men came to visit me, and they were all gay. And they said, I heard you made a recommitment to Christ, that you're leaving the gay lifestyle, and we would like to leave it, too. And so that kind of, you know, within three days, we have a little group going. As Frank Worthen tells it, that's how the ex-gay movement began, casually, one day after church. One of the members named it Love in Action. We did feel that it was God's answer to the APA saying homosexuality is normal. And God is saying, not really.

What he's referring to there is sort of the beginning of the scientific community, washing their hands of the whole idea of the gay cure, which we talked about in the last episode. They're not Christian. They don't know what they're saying. John says at the time that really spooked a lot of evangelicals. The scientific communities were accepting homosexuality, and they were saying that it's not a disorder anymore. They were removing it from the DSM3, which is why we need to do what we're doing. So it was very explicit in your mindset. Oh, yeah. In any case, John and Frank Worthen and Frank's wife and Nita Worthen, they started corresponding. And I said I was capable, I was trust

worthy, they could count on me. Can you help me? What do you have? And so Anita called me. She says, we are hiring a house leader for one of our houses. We want to know if you want to apply for it. So John goes out to San Rafael, California. And I volunteered for love and action. And so begins a very bizarre, very dramatic, 25-year odyssey to try and stamp out homosexuality in Christian men everywhere and especially in himself. That's after the break. Unerraced will continue on Radio Lab in just a moment. Hi, this is Jack from P.Ralton, New Mexico. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,

enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www. Hello.com. Hey, I'm Chad. I'm Boomerad. I'm Robert Kovic. This is Radio Lab. Yes, and we're listening to Episode 4 of Unerased on Radio Lab. And let's get back to the story of John Smed. At this point in the story, John is searching for a way to rid himself of gay attractions

and to make himself attracted to his wife, his second wife, because he does end up marrying a second time. He goes to San Rafael, California, to volunteer for a new ministry run by Frank and Anita Worthing. That promises a solution. They loved me. I became an office manager. I managed all kinds of stuff. I became senior house manager. Fast forward a couple years, Frank Worthen decides to go to the Philippines on sort of a missionary.

trip, and John takes over the ministry. So when he left, we completely redecorated, moved everything around, changed everything. I mean, like, I mean, the moment Frank flew out, which was a symbol of this is now mine. And here's where John's story morphs into something quite different, something much bigger and maybe darker than just one man's journey towards accepting who he is. as John tells it, the moment he showed up, love and action caught a wind. From Los Angeles, welcome to Larry King Live. I went on the Larry King Live program six months after I got there, which is insane.

He started appearing on various talk shows. Homosexuality, from my experience, it stemmed out of a need to know I was okay as a man. And he very quickly realized that his story was like rocket fuel. I had a phenomenal, miraculous testimony. This is him in a phone interview. I mean, I was one of those people who had a dramatic transformation from where I was. One day I'm sleeping with my gay partner, and the next day I'm 100% sold out to God, committed, faithful. So people saw my life as the dark versus the light.

It was almost like St. Paul on the road to Damascus. He says people would come up to him at Christian conferences and say that they were actually jealous of him. And once he saw the power in his own story, We became much more extroverted as a ministry. And perhaps as a result, Love and Action started to gain converts by the week to the point where they could no longer fit in the small church in San Rafael. And so, around 1994, they go off in search of a bigger church. We go to Memphis. Memphis, Tennessee.

So we go to Memphis, big church, large community. They hire staff. At this point, John is flying high. And Love and Action was advertising these staggering success. This is something we heard from Garrett Conley. My mom says, they said that there was an 87% success rate of conversion from gay to straight. I internally, underneath it all, while I couldn't verbalize it, I had to admit somewhere in me that we were not seeing success.

We were not winning. They were successful while they were in the program. As soon as they'd leave, boom. They had fallen. I knew it wasn't working, but I couldn't admit that. that. So the only way I could acknowledge that would be to adopt something new that might work better. So when he got to Memphis, he decided to go a totally different route. He figured if people were, quote, relapsing, which they were, let me draw inspiration from other modalities that also have to

deal with the problem of people relapsing. And so he ended up visiting a local drug and rehab center. It's called Second Chance. It's a drug and alcohol rehab for teenagers. Wonderful success. rates. So we all talked about it as a staff and we sat down and we said we really think they have something valuable. We adopted their philosophy. They decided they would define homosexuality. Homosexuality is an addiction. And maybe they could just treat it with something like 12-step. The 12-steps seemingly were the best way to rid people of drug and alcohol abuse and had a track record. And I'm thinking, well, maybe that'll, if homosexuality is an addiction, we need to remove the sexual drug long enough for these people to detox from it.

And so starting in 1994 and going through his whole 14-year stint at the Memphis Clinic, John basically implemented a system where young men and women would come in, anything that they had that could be remotely construed as homosexual. Which we called FIs, false images. Their homosexual look, their homosexual books, their homosexual concepts, friends, people associations, drug and alcohol, recovery centers have seen these things as contraband, and it has to be removed. They can't come here with that. They have to be separated from it so they can think without it, because it's their coping mechanisms. It's their addiction. After they were

then separated from their homosexual paraphernalia or what have you, clients would then go through you know, endless rounds of pseudoscientific talk therapy. And so it became this elaborate 12-step program where we had to write down every week three different sexual experiences that we had in our lifetime and do a moral inventory about each one. This is Peterson Tuscano. We heard a bit from him in episode one. He did two stints at love and action.

A sexual experience would be well beyond just physical. having sex with someone, but a fantasy, an obsession over someone, a romantic crush that you had, an encounter you may have had with an inanimate object. They use this very, this very, like, strange language to talk about this stuff. And some of it was like, what are you talking about? And they were like, you know, did you ever use shaving cream when you masturbated? I was like, no, but now I'm thinking of that. Thank you for that. So you're writing about these really intense sexual encounters, and it becomes like a butterfly with pins in it,

that you're splayed out and you're analyzing it and dissecting it and tearing it apart. Peterson also told us that there were times when these kinds of techniques tipped into just abject cruelty. Sometimes they would be asked to confess some of these stories directly to parents on friends and family night. He told us about a mock funeral that was staged for a young man named Aaron Operally. Peterson remembers candles. I'm not sure if I remember that or not, but maybe there were.

It's one of these pretty traumatic things that I didn't ever really want to bring back to the light. This is Aaron. We called him up. He says he is okay talking about it now, especially since it's a scene in the boy-erased film. But essentially what happened is that Aaron had, I guess, relapsed. Or fallen or whatever with someone outside of the program, I guess is how they stated it. So they asked him to lie on a table, close. his eyes. They brought in, they had some pretty gaudy flowers in their office. I mean,

John Smith's probably going to laugh at me for saying that, but I did not like the flower arrangements, but anyway. But I do know that I was on a table, that my eyes were shut, and then they wanted all the people in the program to say their goodbyes to me. Wow. Yeah. When we asked John Smith about this, like, come on, really? This is what he said. It was a directive by the professional counselor that was our consulting psychologist. They made this up and they said you should do this. And he said the reason we're doing this is because this man has had a pattern of destructive behavior.

He says it was just something that was suggested them by an actual counselor. He said this is called Gestalt Therapy. He says a guy suggested it, they did it, and it also just seemed like another one of those things they could borrow from drug and rehab clinics that apparently do this sometimes if somebody is using drugs and maybe might die. needs to be scared straight, I don't know. When we were chastised for our rules, which we were, and I was, and I have been, I know I understand that now, but we were chastised for it, and we would internally say

we are not doing anything different than the local successful drug rehab. John says he knew that some of these techniques were confrontational, maybe even traumatic. But at the time, I believed at the time that a temporary pain to rid your life of the horror of homosexuality is worth it. It gets me upset thinking about it too, just how crazy some of us got there. This is Peterson Tiscano again. This is actually him in a film made by a director Morgan Fox, who was nice enough to let us use the footage. One of my closest friends there attempted suicide. and I found his truck at the end of the driveway

with all these photographs of his children. And he had this note. He had this note of just about what a horrible person he was and he gave up. You know, and then he's such a bad person. And he took all these pills and went off to the fields to die. Peterson told me he knows of at least five students from Love and Action who at one point,

either in the program or afterwards attempted suicide. Smid himself offered a story of going with a colleague to a Christian conference in California looking on the wall and seeing a plaque with the name of a former student. This room dedicated in the memory of David Bilbre King, I said, Alan, what happened? He says he committed suicide five years ago. I asked John about a letter that he wrote in 2010,

where he, I know this, is jumping forward just a bit, but where he ultimately apologizes for everything he's done. And below that written apology, a commenter said, I don't accept your apology. And then they listed a series of names. Aidan Sheaf, 17, committed suicide. Dominic Crouch, 15, jumped to his death from a six-story building. Billy Lucas, 15, hung himself in his family's farm. Asher Brown, 13, shot himself with his father's gun. Seth Walsh, hanged himself from a tree in his backyard, didn't die immediately. He was taken to a hospital where he's placed on life support, died nine days later.

Janine Blanchette, 21, Pills, Terrell Williams, 17, hung himself in his bedroom closet, and on and on. About 20 suicides, no, not all of them happened at Love and Action. What do you, how do you hold that? How do you... The only thing I could say to that is, in all honesty, in some levels of this process, I have to use some denial. I have to. And I don't mean denial it didn't happen.

Denial of my feelings. There have been many times through life experience where I have perceived, if I truly felt everything that there is in there, I would die. And I also have to release people to their own process. And I cannot take responsibility for their process.

I can't. All I can do is acknowledge and release the rest. John then told me something that could sound offensive, but actually I think is a truth that needs to be acknowledged. The idea that he was selling at Love and Action, or perhaps that he bought into, ultimately goes way beyond him. The sources of all that shame are as much the families of those kids,

the peer groups, the schools where they went to, certainly the churches, the society at large that creates the conditions for love and action to exist. He says he cannot take responsibility for all that. And I think that's right. This is an album that the guys in the program actually made for me. And it has pictures with statements from each one of those clients. While we were there, John showed us a kind of yearbook of the Love and Action class of 1993.

These are students? Yeah. Oh, wow. First picture was a kid who's maybe 18, husky, thick black hair. This guy here, you know, you've been an inspiration to me from the first year I met you. I've learned from you that you have to face life and death and then go through it. you're a good leader and a shepherd and I'm so grateful to the Lord for you I love you and this is a guy that today is married to his husband and and we are in contact regularly

and it's a very affirming and positive relationship this man I was in contact with tall thin blonde hair but this is one of the one of the circumstances where this man he died of a drug overdose about two years ago they didn't believe I don't believe it was a suicide, but he's no longer with us. Let's see, here's one. This guy, he says, Smitty, they called me Smitty back then. So much of my heart has gone into preparing this keepsake for you. Each time you look upon it, may you know my love for you.

He looks like early 20s, tall, thin, Adam's apple, kind of bushy black hair, big smile. I've had conversations with him. He doesn't completely... completely accept necessarily where I am today, but he's very warm and friendly. He doesn't accept where you are. He doesn't completely embrace someone being gay and being married. So he's not openly gay, or is open to gay? He talks about being gay, but he's married to a woman, and he has a family.

I've not had communication with him. I have had communication with him. All-American guy, freckles. But he actually continued working for a very anti-gay organization. And it got to the point where I just was just in turmoil when I would see things he would post on Facebook or things he would say. And so I really chose to kind of not be affected by that. This is a guy. Sandy Hare, radiant smile.

He was a guy that was HIV positive when he came in the program. and three years later he died. In California, there were people that were in our program or in our support group ministry in California. The years I was there, 22 of those people died from HIV. Are you in touch with all these people? I have had communication with him, yes. Him, yes.

Yes, actually. In the last five years, since he's been high in drive, love and action, John says he has made it his mission, to reach out to everyone he can to try and engage with them, support them if they want to be sported, make amends if that's what they want. For him, his sort of clean break really began in 2005. June 6th, 2005, we moved in, and that was our first day.

They just upgraded their headquarters a second time, hired more staff. We had just started a new group of teenagers. Everybody was there. We were excited. 8.30 in the morning, our office manager came running in my office and said, John, there are protesters outside. I was horrified. Horrified.

Oh my gosh. What has happened? How did they know? This is when the torpedo struck. A young kid in the program named Zach had posted a message to Myspace saying his parents had put him in this straight camp. It was like a boot camp. He wasn't sure he was going to make it. News cameras started showing up.

Well, Ursula, the demonstrators today say they basically are here today to show their support. Three of them. For those who are enrolled in the Love and Action program, we're going to pan over. We support you. Bullhorns came out, and all of a sudden, I heard, John Smith, we know you're in there. John Smith, we know you're here. Gay Rhyne's activists are raising their voices in front of Love and Action's new recovery treatment center in Raleigh.

They were there in the morning and the night. From the protest, I started entering into an absolute days. Just a cloud. I don't even know. The protest lasted for eight solid weeks. International media started coming in. There was so much attention that the state of Tennessee actually started cracking down, performing inspections.

John Smith ends up countersuing the state. I was so desperate to make this work. And he says now, looking back, what's amazing is how long it took him to wake up, how all throughout his mind would contort. itself to push away doubt. I would drive through the protesters. And I remember them saying, we love you, we love you to me. He says, amazingly, he interpreted that in that moment as God speaking to him. I know you're here and I knew you were here and I didn't want you to hide. I wanted to celebrate you being here. And I did it through these protesters. That's the way I interpreted it.

Wow, there's some mental gymnastics. Yes, it is. The honest truth is what brought John into the light, or what needed to happen before he could be able to see the light, is that his organization collapsed. The protesters created division in his staff. One of his managers tried to force him out. He didn't know what to do. Eventually, he resigns. And so when I resigned, I sat in my newly designed home office, and I said, God, I have no idea what you have in store for me for the future. surprise me. From that point forward, he says it was like slowly sobering up after you've been

drunk for 25 years. This time it wasn't a violent shift. It was a series of tiny micro steps. Like one day he's sitting in his computer and decides to click on gay porn for the first time in his life. Immediately feels horrible, racked with shame, decides he's got to go tell his wife, who he was still married to at the time, by the way. But then he thinks, no, I'm not going to tell her. A short while after that, he's at a Christian conference, and he announces to the audience that he, John Smith, the Elvis of the ex-gay movement, was in fact not cured. I vocally said, I'm a gay man. I'm a gay man. And I'm in a mixed orientation marriage. Mixed orientation, by the way, means a marriage between a homosexual and a heterosexual. It's a term you sometimes hear in this world. But that process, that slow, gradual awakening, John says it is still happening.

Yes. In the car, he told us even about the shoes he was wearing, how that brought it up. I have bright blue tennis shoes on today. I bought those a month ago. I love bright colors. I've always loved bright colors. I stood in the store for 20 minutes looking at gray or turquoise blue shoes that were identical. And I made the decision, the conscious decision, and I feel very emotional about this crazy, about blue tennis shoes. But I hadn't to make the decision to buy the blue tennis shoes because I love turquoise blue. And it's that, it's, it's still, I'm still coming out.

I'm still having to open myself up to the reality of who I am, of who I was wired to be from the moment I was born. It just, there's this constant battle within me to deny, to push away, to surgically cut off a major component of who I am. And so even though I was an ex-gay leader, and one of the instruments of abuse, I'm also a person that was subjected to ex-gay ministry for 25 years. And so I have the same kinds of anger and the same kinds of wounds, the same kind of pain. And that complicatedness about John Smith, that he is both the instrument of abuse and also a subject himself of that same abuse, It might color how you see the final chapter in his journey from straight to gay to ex-gay to ex-gay. It has to do with this guy. I grew up about eight miles west of this place.

Community called Maxi, Texas. Okay. This is Larry McQueen, John's husband. He works in the engineering department of a company that manufactures pipes for oil rigs. Third generation, Pentecostal. Comes from a very religious family. And so before he and John connect. about five years ago, he had never been with a man.

He'd tried dating women, it didn't work, knew he was attracted to men, pushed those thoughts away. Up to that point, I had lived my life alone, and in fact I had come to the point where I was crying myself to sleep because I was so lonely. And that's what actually led me to say, look, Larry, you know, you're 40-something years old, you're lonely. I don't think God really really. I don't think God really wants me to be this way any longer. The first night that they were together, which initially wasn't romantic, it was they had gotten together as friends to do some home improvement projects.

I don't know if I want to talk about this. Do it. Do it. Well, no, it's like, well, okay, so I walked, we went out to dinner and came back, and we just really had a comfortable time. And Larry came to an amazing awareness at that point. He said, you know, what I'm feeling with you really confirms to me that I'm gay. And he said, and by the way, we're sleeping in separate beds. Next morning, Larry walks into John's room, lays down beside him on the bed, puts his arm around him.

He just put his arms around me. And I was reading an email. He had his arms around me, and I just started to sob uncontrollably. You know, I had never in my life ever cried with another human being. And for me, it was like almost a physical. sensation inside me that as if there were cogs that never were quite aligned properly. But that weekend, I felt within my body these cogs coming into place and clicking, and I felt whole for the first time.

I was Larry's first kiss. Yes. Wow. At 52 years old. A few months after that weekend, John got a divorce from his second wife, Baleen. John and Larry got married in 2014, and these days they sing in their church choir. They're the only openly gay couple in their church,

and they continue to nudge to church very gently to take a stand in support of gay marriage. At the end of the day, it's still difficult to know how to reconcile John Smith's past with his present, whether he's taken enough responsibility for his actions or not. We spoke to people who are all over the map on that question. John would say, however you feel, the lesson from his life is that very simply people can change.

Humans are teachable. The human mind is infinite. Robert, I want to just offer one side note to the story. In the time that we were working on this series, something like four states, I may have that number wrong, outlawed conversion therapy for minors. And if you look just more broadly

in the last few years, there's been this wave of legislation, that's trying to stamp this out. Really? Yeah. On what theory? That's cruel. I mean, especially when you're talking about offering it to minors.

So I think something like 37 municipalities in the last few years have outlawed conversion therapy for minors. And at the same time, you have a lot of debate about this sort of expanding idea of religious freedom, that protection that's written into the First Amendment. And a lot of these groups are arguing successfully at times that they have the constant. constitutional right to offer these programs. So it's a really interesting and confusing moment right now. This episode of Radio Lab was drawn from Unerased,

the untold history of conversion therapy in America, a series that I worked on with Focus Features, Stitcher and Lemon House in conjunction with the feature film Boy Erased. Huge thanks to the production team, Shimo Eli, Kat Aaron, Alice Quinlan, Michael Alsessor, David Craig, Garrett Conley, to anonymous content for their support of Unerror. If you want to hear the entire series, I hope you will. You can find Unerased in all the usual podcast places.

Okay, well, I guess we should go. Yes, let's go. We can leave now. Bye.