Mr. Pate was quick to note: “I hear a lot of our [gay] siblings say, ‘I’m a survivor of conversion therapy,’ and I don’t put myself in that category. I don’t see it as something that was entirely or even mostly detrimental.” Even so, he described feeling pressured to accept reductive theories of homosexuality from a therapist who he felt was so eager for Mr. Pate to get married that he could spare no empathy for a potential partner, a sentiment echoed by several interviewees about their respective therapists.
Mr. Pate now thinks his therapist did not leave enough space for the Cross—and for the possibility that he, as the