Curtis Lopez-Galloway was 16 when he told his parents he was gay. And while he didn’t exactly expect them to throw him coming-out a party, their reaction left him stunned: They took him to so-called conversion “therapy”—driving him to a Kentucky therapist, two hours away, who used the sessions to berate him for being gay and for not trying hard enough to change into “the man that God wanted” him to be.
Further, the therapist confirmed to his parents all of their worst fears, telling them, “‘He’s never going to be happy. He’s going to be abused and get AIDS. He’s going to die,’” Lopez-Galloway, now 30, tells Fortune.
It was “mentally and emotionally abusive,” he says of his experience with conversion therapy—organized attempts to deter people from expressing non-heterosexual or transgender identities, which can include the subject receiving insults, threats, prayers, or physical abuse that can be severe.
The scoldings that Lopez-Galloway received from the licensed therapist led to screaming matches between himself and his parents that he says “tore my family apart.” It also pushed the teen deep into the closet, leaving him anxious and depressed for years to come.
Today, luckily, it’s behind him—and as the founder of the Conversion Therapy Survivor Network, created as a support system for others who have been subjected to such treatment, Lopez-Galloway knows that it could’ve been even worse.
“I know people that have been locked in church basements while exorcisms were performed and they were sexually assaulted,” he says. “I know people that had electrodes strapped to their genitals while they were shown homosexual pornography, and I know people…whose families locked them in their bedrooms because they felt they were a danger to the rest of the family.”
It’s why he’s been “angry and dismayed” over news from earlier this month that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case questioning the legality of Colorado’s conversion-therapy ban for LGBTQ children—despite the fact that the practice has been denounced by every major medical association, from the American Psychological Association (APA) to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and that studies have found the practice leads to increased suicidality, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
With bans enacted in roughly half of the states, any decision regarding Colorado will have far-reaching effects.
What is conversion therapy?
Over the weekend, actor Bowen Yang shared on his podcast to guest Lady Gaga that he had been subjected to conversion therapy, also called “reparative” therapy, as a teen, something he’s talked about before. There have also been a handful of films, including 2018’s Boy Erased and Ryan Murphy’s 2021 Netflix documentary Pray Away, depicting conversion therapy—which refers to a range of dangerous, medically discredited, and unscientific practices that attempt to change one’s LGBTQ identity, according to the Trevor Project, the leading suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ young people, which is careful to always put quotes around “therapy.”
“‘Therapy’ gets quotes because conversion therapy is not therapeutic at all,” explains Casey Pick, director of law and policy at the Trevor Project, which has denounced the Supreme Court’s latest move.
“It completely fails to abide by the ethical standards, the science, the research, and the best experience of decades of actual therapists who know that attempting to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity is actively harmful,” she says. “So what this situation is about is when you have state-licensed mental health professionals who are harming LGBTQ kids by trying to change a part of them that can’t be changed.”
While it’s unknown exactly how many youths are subjected to such practices each year, a 2023 intergenerational systematic review—analyzing 14 survey studies of LGBTQ people between 2011 and 2020, across several countries—found that between 2% and 34% of people globally, with a median of 8.5% and estimate of 13% in the U.S., had experienced conversion therapy.
The Trevor Project found, also in 2023, that there were over 1,300 conversion practitioners in the U.S.—46% of whom held active professional licenses and 54% who were operating in a religious or ministerial capacity.
When licensed therapists “abuse their position of trust” to “push an agenda” that queer youth should change, Pick says, research has shown that it puts kids at high risk of suicide attempts, depression, anxiety and other mental health harms.
“These are pressure tactics that can be deeply harmful. It can contribute to feelings of shame and failure,” Pick says. “The idea that I’ve heard from so many survivors of these practices is, ‘We were just told that they weren’t trying hard enough.’ And when you try and try and fail and fail, so many find themselves in a place of anxiety and depression.”
The organization’s peer-reviewed research has found, in fact, that young people who reported experiencing conversion therapy were twice as likely as other LGBTQ youth—who already have a disproportionately high suicide risk—to report a suicide attempt in the previous year, and two and a half times as likely to report multiple suicide attempts.
A large Stanford University study on the practice found it was linked to higher rates of depression, suicidality, and PTSD, and the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law found came up with similar findings to the Trevor Project regarding suicide attempts, with researcher Ilan Meyer, senior scholar of public policy, noting, “This is a devastating outcome that goes counter to the purpose of therapy.”
A historically harmful approach
Practices that try to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity go back well over 100 years, says Pick. “As soon as psychology began to understand that sexual orientation was a part of who a person was, you had parts of the psychological profession that were trying to find ways to change that,” she says. “But even Freud rejected these practices as ultimately being harmful and not good for patients.”
The American Psychological Association declared that homosexuality is not a mental illness back in the 1970s, with gender identity following some years later. It’s why the APA, AAP, American Medical Association, National Association of Social Workers, American Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry, American Counseling Association, and 22 other medical associations have condemned conversion therapy as ineffective and harmful—and how, as of 2013, states (and several countries) began to ban the practice.
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In 2020, United Nations expert on sexual identity and gender identity Victor Madrigal-Borloz called for a global ban on conversion therapy, telling the Human Rights Council that such practices are “inherently discriminatory, that they are cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and that depending on the severity or physical or mental pain and suffering inflicted to the victim, they may amount to torture.”
Pick says the medical establishment has known since the ’70s that the best way to improve the mental health of LGBTQ people is “acceptance, affirmation, and helping folks to cope with what it means to be different in our society, rather than trying to change their identity to meet a therapist’s or a counselor’s own agenda.”
Lopez-Galloway is hoping that logic holds for the Supreme Court justices. “Even agreeing to take it up is giving credence to the practice itself,” he says. “And it’s just astonishing to me that it has become such a political issue when the fact of matter is that it’s child abuse.”
More on LGBTQ mental health:
- Fleeing the country and rationing testosterone: Transgender Americans’ new reality under a Trump presidency
- American troops describe their fear, anxiety, and whiplash following Trump’s transgender military ban
- The truth about how many transgender kids are using hormones and puberty blockers, according to a new study
