CNN
August 6, 2025
He remembers walking towards the worst experience of his life. The dorm hall was a concrete tunnel, with chipped white paint on the walls and a stench of sweat trapped inside. The stairs, he recalls, squeaked underfoot. They led to a wooden door, which Andrew Pledger pried open.
He stepped inside, sunk into a peeling black couch and locked eyes with the man sitting across the desk.
And then something happened.
“Everything around me just faded away,” Pledger says. He floated out of his body. “I almost couldn’t hear him anymore … time just completely slowed down.”
The next thing he remembers is leaving the office, a pounding pain in his chest. An hour had passed. Whatever happened in that room had shaken Pledger, then a tormented, depressed student at a private evangelical university in South Carolina. A voice filled his head, telling him: “You cannot do this. This is unhealthy. This is not good.”
Pledger had just experienced conversion therapy – the discredited, pseudoscientific practice that purports to help a gay person change or resist their sexuality. The practice doesn’t work: Virtually every major medical association denounces it as junk science. A flood of studies has warned of its dangers; young people who experience conversion therapy are more likely to suffer depression and attempt suicide, researchers have found.
But conversion therapy is still practiced in nearly every state, monitoring groups say. Efforts by right-wing lawmakers to repeal city and state-wide bans have claimed their first successes. And former leaders of the “ex-gay” religious movement told CNN the practice is enjoying a resurgence — this time in more cloaked, subtle, secretive forms.
Pledger wasn’t sure that he wanted to change his sexuality, but he needed something to change. In the months before he sat on that dusty couch, he had been relentlessly bullied, he had harmed himself, and on one dark evening in his dormitory, he’d held a bottle of medication in his hand and considered ending his life. He remembers it all.
And yet the meeting itself is lost to the deepest recesses of Pledger’s mind. “I just disassociated,” he says. His response is not uncommon — multiple conversion therapy survivors told CNN they had blocked out the details of the practice. It might as well never have happened.
Except that there is one more thing that Pledger remembers: fumbling into his pocket in the moments before the session began, pulling out his phone, and hitting “Record.”
Pledger said he was told in a conversion therapy session on the BJU campus: "We’re going to deal with this sin like we would deal with any other sin."
Pledger says he always felt different. That was a problem, because he grew up in an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where followers are expected to follow a strict rulebook of conservative teachings. No dancing, secular music or friends from the outside world were allowed, he says. And from a young age, he heard a bad word a lot: sodomite.
Then, at 16, his worst nightmare came true: he got a crush.
“I would just pray and pray to God — ‘just take this away from me, change me, change me,’” he told CNN. “I was so terrified of my sexuality being found out … (I thought) if I don’t change my sexuality, God is going to kill me.”
For this story CNN spoke to several people who have undergone conversion therapy over recent years and decades, as well as former practitioners and leaders of the “ex-gay” movement. The practice took different forms for each of them, but aspects of their experiences were strikingly similar.
Everyone was pushed into the practice at a vulnerable moment, some after suicide attempts, by parents or figures in their church. It was never labelled as “conversion therapy,” and some did not realize its true nature until years later. The experiences were painful, twisting their tortured minds towards a breaking point. Some, like Pledger, blocked the sessions from their memories.
They left – still gay – and endured years of depression or addiction. Some again attempted to take their lives. And months, or years, or decades later, they reckoned with the true toll the therapy had taken.
Pledger arrived at Bob Jones University in South Carolina in the fall of 2020 adamant on hiding parts of his life. The private evangelical school is renowned for its own strict conservative teachings – it only allowed interracial dating in 2000, and its student handbook calls homosexuality a “sexual perversion.”
“I wanted to be as small as possible and unnoticed, like a fly on the wall,” Pledger says. He didn’t make friends. He shrunk into silence.
But fellow students identified something unique about Pledger anyway. Some followed him around campus making kissing noises. A hallmate stood outside his dorm room, yelling down the corridor that a “gay boy lives in this room.”
Pledger said he was given an "ex-gay" book by a BJU staffer, which was discussed in his conversion therapy session. After leaving the school, Pledger tore the book up.
The night he contemplated suicide, Pledger remembers thinking: “I can’t imagine being alive tomorrow … This is the way that you can leave. You can leave by taking your own life.”
It was at this point in his life that Pledger was offered another way out. He bore his soul to a member of the student-life team, explaining his suicidal ideation, the self-harm, the bullying. In response, Pledger says he was told he was “paying for (his) sin.”
“It was like a knife to my spirit,” he says.
But that winter, in early 2021, Pledger was open to the possibility that his sexuality could be changed. Those who provide conversion therapy often stress that same-sex attractions can be “overcome,” rather than eliminated, and ground their motivation in a strict interpretation of biblical teachings on homosexuality.
“I wanted relief,” Pledger says. He says the Bob Jones staffer gave him a book, written decades earlier by Joe Dallas, a leading figure in the ex-gay movement.
Dallas writes that his book, “Desires in Conflict,” was designed for “Christian men who are sexually attracted to other men but don’t want to give in to those attractions.”
“Expect to grow. Expect your homosexual desires to diminish in both their frequency and their intensity,” he promises readers.
Later, Pledger attended the session that remains blocked in his mind. He has never listened to the audio recording of that meeting, but he shared it with CNN.
“We’re going to deal with this sin like we would deal with any other sin,” the BJU staff member told Pledger, according to that recording. He read excerpts from the book and praised Dallas’ approach.
“I still remember you saying to me early on: ‘This lifestyle disgusts me, I think it’s gross,’” he told the student.
“Without Christ, this isn’t getting solved,” he added. “You were living it — you were seeing it wasn’t getting solved. And that’s what was making you so mad, frustrated, angry.”
Pledger says he never returned for another session. Neither Bob Jones University or the staffer who conducted the session responded to CNN’s requests for comment on Pledger’s account. The session was not formally assigned to Pledger through the school, but its content is in line with the institution’s instructions to students.
Governor Jared Polis banned conversion therapy in Colorado in 2019. A challenge to that ban will be heard by the Supreme Court this fall, and campaigners fear justices could rule state-level restrictions unlawful.
There is no suggestion that the university acted illegally. South Carolina is not among the 23 states that ban conversion therapy, and those bans apply only to services given to minors by licensed practitioners, not to adults in private or religious settings. Four further states have restrictions on conversion therapy but stop short of an outright ban. Only DC bans the practice for adults as well as minors.
Conversion therapy has morphed and evolved since the “pray the gay away” style of camps, conferences and retreats that drew controversy in the 1980s and 1990s.
“Proponents of conversion therapy understand that this is not a popular practice, and in recent years we have seen them once again rebranding and using new terms,” Casey Pick, director of law and policy at the Trevor Project, told CNN.
But the suicide prevention nonprofit for LGBTQ minors said in a 2023 report that conversion therapy was still offered in 48 states and identified more than 1,300 practitioners. Last year, 13% of LGBTQ youths surveyed by the group reported being threatened with or subjected to the practice. Most major medical bodies, including the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association, condemn the practice as unethical, ineffective and dangerous.
More than half of US states now ban the practice for minors, but those bans are under threat. Last month, just 100 miles southeast of Bob Jones University, the city of Columbia, South Carolina, repealed its ordinance banning conversion therapy. Kentucky once banned state funding for the practice, but a Republican-led effort undid that ban in March.
Those rallying to undo the bans say they are an attack on parental and professional freedoms. David Walls, the director of the Kentucky-based Family Foundation which campaigned for the ban to be scrapped, called it “a one-sided counseling ban designed to suppress free speech and religious liberty, while trampling the rights of parents to seek out counseling that they desire.”
“The other side can use terms like ‘torture’ — that’s not what we’re talking about here,” Walls said during a March debate. “I can’t really think of another area of counseling where we would say that you can only counsel someone one way.”
And Elizabeth Woning, the co-founder of the Changed Movement and one of the most prominent ex-gay leaders in America, told CNN: “We believe all people should have the freedom to pursue counseling and personal life changes that bring them true happiness.”
Woning herself claims to have formerly been a lesbian but now runs the influential California-based group, which pledges to help people leave “LGBTQ subculture and identity.” Its website states: “When a person is no longer compelled or controlled by same-sex sexual desires, that person is free.”
The group is one of the leading proponents of conversion efforts in the US, though Woning distanced herself from the term “conversion therapy” in a statement to CNN, calling it “a broad and ill-defined term that is often used to include forms of physical violence, force, manipulation, shame, or humiliation. We reject these practices as ineffective and harmful.”
Soon the ex-gay movement will have its day in court. A challenge to Colorado’s law prohibiting conversion therapy on minors is under consideration by the Supreme Court, in a case that imperils all existing bans against conversion therapy in the US. Justices are expected to hear arguments this fall, with a ruling expected by next June.
John Smid has a list, and every so often, he’ll look it over. It contains the names of every person whose sexuality he tried to change. “I think about all of these people from time to time,” he says. “I remember their faces.” There are 475 in total.
Smid is one of the people most responsible for the rise of conversion therapy in America. For two decades he served as the director of Love in Action, an influential branch of the Exodus International organization, which ran programs that promised to eliminate homosexuality from people’s lives.
Smid preached at conferences across America, using his own compelling story as an example: He used to be gay, he said, but now was happily married to a woman.
“We all knew it didn’t work,” Smid tells CNN now. Other once-prominent ex-gay leaders say the same.
“I don’t think anyone changed,” says Randy Scobey, the executive vice president of Exodus until the group disbanded in 2013.
“I do not believe that you can change a person’s sexual orientation,” adds Bill Prickett, who founded an ex-gay ministry in Alabama.
All three men stopped preaching conversion therapy in the 2000s, then denounced the practice altogether. Each now has a husband. But regret pains them like a knot in their shoulders.
“We hurt people,” Prickett says. “We didn’t do it intentionally. But I know we did.”
Scobey estimated that during the peak of Exodus’s influence in the mid-2000s, about 10,000 people attended one of its many local ministries across the United States every month.
Smid too has quantified his impact: He estimates 38,000 people watched his speeches over two decades until he left Love in Action in 2008. “My influence, globally, was really quite extreme,” he says.
He has reached out to most of the people on his list who directly attended his program. Some have forgiven him. He is friends with many on Facebook, watching their lives from afar, wishing them a happy birthday. But “there have been some that are very, very angry,” he says.
And a small handful – three or four, he estimates – have since taken their own lives.
Suicide is an inescapable shadow that haunts many of those involved in conversion therapy. UCLA’s Williams Institute found that those subjected to the practice are almost twice as likely to consider or attempt it. Scobey and Prickett both lost friends to suicide who had tried, and failed, to change their sexualities.
“It tore the blinders off my eyes,” Scobey says through tears, remembering a friend who took his life. “I knew this man. I knew that this ideology had just killed him. I really wish I’d listened.”
These three men straddle a delicate line between victim and perpetrator. Without their influence, conversion therapy may never have become so widespread. But they subjected themselves to the same beliefs they now consider poisonous, and each suffered in silence too.
One evening in 1990, in a rented one-bedroom apartment in Birmingham, Alabama, Prickett’s suffering nearly overtook him. He cradled a bottle of bourbon in one hand and a revolver in another.
“The plan was to get myself drunk enough that I could go through with it,” he says. “At one point I screamed out: ‘I’m done.’ And inside me, I felt this voice that says: ‘I’m not.’”
For a few years, as they built new lives as openly gay men, the three former conservative leaders and others like them formed an unlikely alliance: ex-ex-gay figureheads finally embracing their sexuality. They would speak occasionally – Prickett is part of a messaging group with a few of his peers.
And they took solace in one hopeful belief. Prickett recalls a conversation they had five years ago. “We said: It’s dying. It’s going away. Ex-gay conversion therapy groups will be extinct shortly.”
He pauses. “Well, then the climate changed.”
The revitalization of the Christian far right lit the tinder. For the three men, there’s now an urgency to their remorse: The practice they promoted, then condemned, is alive and unbound.
“There’s a resurgence,” Prickett says. “You have churches that are pushing it, parents that are pushing it, and now politicians who are pushing it.”
“Unfortunately, I think it’s a lot bigger than it was before,” adds Scobey. “It’s just not as organized.”
And Smid is clear-eyed about his own influence. “Conversion therapy happens in pastor’s offices, and those pastors were educated by the ex-gay movement,” he says. “That’s where they got their exposure. That’s where they got their experience.”
“Our dogmatism was just wrong. And that dogmatism is still present today.”
Rhonda Tishma’s son was running late for school, and he hadn’t come downstairs for breakfast. “I shook him,” Rhonda recalls. But Rocky, her 16-year-old whose grades and charm filled her with a fierce pride, didn’t wake up.
Hours earlier, Rocky had called “good night” to his mother, then snuck into his parents’ gun cabinet. He held the weapon in his hand, until a voice – the same voice, perhaps, that had crept into the tortured minds of Andrew Pledger and Bill Prickett – talked him down. Rocky instead took a handful of his father’s sleeping pills.
The dose wasn’t deadly. At last, Rocky’s tear-soaked eyes opened.
In the blurred aftermath of his suicide attempt, Rhonda paced a hospital corridor near their Las Vegas home as doctors pumped her son’s stomach. “I blamed myself,” she says. Rocky had told his mother what had pushed him to the verge of catastrophe: He was gay.
“Rocky, I’ve known since you were little, and I love you anyway,” she recalls telling her son in the hospital.
But several years of strict conservative messaging at church and in school pulsed through Rocky’s head. “It wasn’t enough,” Rocky says, remembering the same conversation. “I still had that feeling inside that God hated me.”
Rocky says he would pray every night, asking God to “please change me, please change me, please fix me – I’m broken. Help me, help me, help me.”
Nearly three decades have passed since Rocky tried to take his life. He reflects on the ensuing years with anguish flooding his face: several sessions of conversion therapy; excommunication from his church; a devastating crystal meth addiction that brought fleeting release from his pain; a distant relationship with his mother; a years-long quest for belonging.
His story is a warning. Conversion therapy is not one experience — for many, it is a wound that takes decades to heal. In his sessions, which he says were administered through the Family Services arm of his Mormon church, Tishma says he was asked to detail his sexual experiences to a room full of adults.
Rocky says a climate of secrecy shrouded his sessions, which he says took place after school once or twice a week.
“They told me that it was very bad and very wrong, and they said: Do not tell your friends, do not tell anyone else at church, because once it’s out, it’s harder to fix.”
He recounts other details, his eyes welling and his features straining as he does.
“If you live this life, you will get AIDS and die alone,” he recalls being told. “If you live this life, you will be ostracized by everyone you know … if you choose this, it’s because you’re weak. This is just an addiction.”
“They would talk about masculinity, about lowering my voice, about (my) facial expressions: ‘don’t be too expressive, because that would be a cue to other gay people,’” he says. “I’ve worked on myself a lot,” he adds, “but to this day, I have a hard time smiling in pictures because I feel like I’m too effeminate.”
“When I meet people, my first five sentences are an octave lower than my regular voice, because I’m afraid of being seen,” he adds. He would frequently wake up in a sweat, having dreamt he was in a room filled with people from his past, laughing at him. “All of that shame came right back up to the surface.”
But Rocky found a way to heal. He trained to become a psychotherapist, then specialized in treating other conversion therapy survivors. And when the pandemic brought his world to a stop, he founded a group that provided support for those reckoning with the experience.
Today, at his practice in New York City, he listens to stories that mirror his own. “I get to be the therapist that I needed,” Tishma says.
But there was one more conversion he needed to have. He told his mother every detail of his conversion therapy sessions, and how it impacted his life. He even brought her to a retreat with more than a dozen other survivors in the Adirondack Mountains.
“A lot of the kids’ parents just abandoned them,” she says. “I don’t know how a mother can kick out a child.”
Rocky and Rhonda had stayed in each other’s lives in the decades since his conversion therapy, but they had never spoken about its impact. Their conversations broke a 23-year silence.
“I’ve been sending you your whole life to this church,” Rhonda recalls telling her son. “That’s who I should have been protecting you from.”
“What kind of people are those? What God would tell them to do that? That’s not the God I believe in.”
Curtis Lopez-Galloway made a similar journey. As a 16-year-old, he would sit silently in the back of his parents’ minivan, making the nearly two-hour drive from the family’s southern Illinois home to a Christian counselor in Kentucky.
Curtis would gaze out the car window, staring at “a whole lot of nothing,” watching the sun slip from the sky until the glass blackened to reflect his own tormented face. Occasionally, an argument would shatter the silence. His relationship with his parents became more strained with each session, and he contemplated running away — to his grandparents, to an aunt, to anyone that would take him.
Years later Lopez-Galloway obtained his counselor’s file, filled with detailed notes from his conversion therapy session and a 14-step treatment plan, which he shared with CNN. Anxiety and shame spills from the pages.
“Curtis is going to limit his time with friends who are gay affirming,” his treatment plan instructs.
“Curtis is going to do more masculine characteristic activities and adopt a more masculine persona. He will learn to frame things in a masculine frame. Male characteristic activities could be taking charge, being in control, and feeling competently powerful.”
“Curtis will study women to figure out what types and characteristics are attractive to him.”
“Curtis will bounce his eyes and thoughts to something else whenever he begins to have an attraction toward a male.”
Other details stick in Lopez-Galloway’s memory, some of which still make him shudder.
His counselor told him that “some people are predisposed to be murders, rageaholics, rapists, and child molesters, but they are not born that way,” and that “homosexuality is similar,” according to the counselor’s own notes.
Lopez-Galloway, who now lives in California, would ultimately mend his relationship with his parents. Then he advocated in support of a proposed ban in Kentucky on licensed professionals receiving state funding while administering conversion therapy to minors. The ban went into effect last year.
But in March, Republican state lawmakers voted to overturn the short-lived ban. Treatments like the one Lopez-Galloway received are legal and protected in Kentucky again.
Wisconsin Republicans did the same last year, and similar efforts have been raised in other states.
Lopez-Galloway made amends with his parents, then set up his own support group, the Conversion Therapy Survivor Network, after Tishma’s wound down. His is the only major such group in the US. One person showed up to its first meeting in 2019; now it counts more than 100 members, and dozens join a weekly online meeting to share stories.
“It is a specific kind of trauma … only someone who has been through it would know what it’s like,” Lopez-Galloway says.
Conversion therapy, he says, “ruins lives.”
“The stories (members) tell are world-ending for them – it’s the darkest time in their life,” he says. “It takes years and years for (people) to get some semblance of peace. Some people never do.”
Tishma and Lopez-Galloway represent the pain and despair that conversion therapy can cause. But they’re also proof that there is an escape.
Andrew Pledger, whose conversion therapy at Bob Jones University became a watershed moment in his life, is following that path. After leaving the school, he earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Southern New Hampshire University. He now works as a social media manager in South Carolina, focusing his efforts in helping publications and organizations that work with cult survivors, including the Lalich Center on Cults and Coercion.
He still struggles with expressing his sexuality and his sense of self. But he says: “I am at peace with who I am, and my sexuality. There’s no desire to change that.”
Pledger was asked to leave Bob Jones University in the months that followed his session. After he renounced his faith in a live-streamed conversation on social media, he says he was told his values didn’t align with the school’s. For him, it was a release.
As he ate his last meal on campus – a deluxe sandwich, fries and a lemonade from Chick-fil-A – he “felt a weight lifted.”
For a couple of days, fate played one final joke on Pledger: a rare snowstorm trapped him at the school, delaying his departure. But at last the snow melted, and the world finally started to feel solid beneath his feet. Pledger packed his belongings into a friend’s car, ignoring the prying eyes of other students.
“I looked back at the buildings for the last time,” he remembers. A smile crossed his lips. “I got out.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: If you feel you are in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the 24-hour Suicide Crisis Lifeline.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/06/us/gay-conversion-therapy-lgbtq-resurgence-cec
