This episode of Atonement includes references to sexual abuse and assault, including rape.

There's also the use of historical language around sexuality.

There's a video from two thousand and one.

I'm on stage at a book launch at the peak of my ex gay career working for the organization Focus on the Family.

I'm walking up and down the stage in my gray suit, no notes, just speaking into the microphone.

And there's a moment where I say I was seduced into homosexuality.

That is a lie.

I was not seduced into homosexuality.

That's a lie.

This was my response to the footage the first time I saw it, more than twenty years later.

Do you note, in my knowledge, I had never said that total lie.

You don't remember saying it to see self saying I mean is a surprise.

There's nothing true about it that makes it sound like someone seduced me into homosexuality.

That didn't happen at all.

That was a very right wing thing that I was saying there to appease people and to put fear in them.

That's exactly what it was for.

And I was paraded in front of all the luminaries that would come to focus on the Family ministry leaders, pastors and high places donors.

I felt like I was being marched into a room like a wind up soldier to tell my story for financial reasons.

But when I see myself telling an audience and that I was seduced into this, that's a bold face.

Lie.

Welcome to Atonement.

The John Polk Story.

I'm John Paulk.

And I'm Kate Holland.

Episode two.

There's no place like Home.

Okay, so I am.

Let's see.

It is nineteen eighty seven.

I'm twenty three years old.

Now, I was sober and you know, working my twelve steps, and life was good.

I had gone back to school and I was now the manager of this copy shop that I worked at on campus.

There was this married couple, this man and woman, who came into the copy store frequently, numerous times, and I would copy their material.

Well, it was apparent to me it was of a Christian nature.

I just kept running into them all over the place, and I could tell as weeks and probably months went by, that they took an interest in me.

It felt as though they could see right through me, like to the deeper parts of me.

This is probably going to sound extreme.

Predators can spot a vulnerable person.

Back in nineteen eighty seven, when the married Christian couple came into my life, I was in AA.

I'd gotten rid of candy and all the paraphernalia that went with my drag persona.

I'd heard what I believe to be God on the dance floor, but I didn't have a faith, and I certainly wasn't calling myself a Christian.

But that couple took an interest in me.

The husband was a pastor.

One night he invited himself over to my place after work and I was making beautiful Valentines for all of my friends, my gay friends.

It was a picture of Marilyn Monroe and I was glittering the lips.

Just hella, good fun.

So we had never discussed the topic of me being gay.

Ever, the topic never came up, and he said, I wanted to talk to you about the salvation that Jesus Christ can offer you.

I said, I know all about this.

I became a Christian when I was younger, but I know God can't love me now because I'm gay.

My Christianity as a child had been fleeting but significant.

When I was ten years old, I walked myself to a church and joined the Sunday School.

I even wrote in my school work about wanting to be a pastor when I grew up.

He said, whatever made you believe that God can't love you because you're gay?

And it was like this question just slapped me in the face.

And I said, well, because Christians line the sides of gay pride parades and protest and yell and scream and speak in tongues and have these horrible signs that say gays are going to hell, It's understood in our community that if you're gay, God can't love you.

And he just shattered that right then and there.

He said, there's no truth in that whatsoever.

And he said, if you subscribe that you were born as sinner and Jesus Christ died for you, and you've accepted his gift of forgiveness, you will go to heaven.

I said, that's great, because what I want to do is, as I get older, I want to meet some amazing man.

I want to settle down and have a house with a white picket fence and live my life.

He said, while you might go to heaven, God would be very unhappy with the life that you lived.

I started pondering that over the next few days and that God as from a little boy, awakened in me again.

I thought, well, I don't want God to be unhappy with me.

I don't want to live a life that's not pleasing to him.

It started that simply, and the pastor said to John.

Then what you have to do is abandon your homosexuality.

And I remember saying to him, what do you mean abandon my homosexuality?

As it were like a coat that I could put on and take off.

I didn't understand because I didn't do gay.

I was gay, so it wasn't a thing that was separate from who I was in my identity.

Like, what in the hell are you talking about?

So the couple started to tell me about, as they saw it, the reasons I was gay.

He was starting to tell me things like, you were not born this way.

You became this way through a combination of inborn genetics, personality, temperament, but primarily through your life experience.

And if we could go in and change all of that and repair it, your homosexuality would fade away and a different narrative to go over inside my mind, it's being gay that is making me miserable.

I imagine this is hard to get your head around if you've never encountered these ideas before, perhaps even harder if you don't have a religious faith.

It was like I was in the middle of a pincher.

One very powerful spiritual side is saying that your sexuality is displeasing God.

The other is saying that all your problems in life are caused by your homosexuality, and both are saying it can be changed.

But I think he implanted these ideas in me when a time when I was very spiritually vulnerable.

I'd been raped, I'd been threatened with a knife, I'd been involved in sex work, I was a recovering alcoholic.

I was lost.

As all of this was percolating in my mind.

The couple were fueling a fire inside of me that said homosexuality was something to be ashamed of, and they were giving me information that claimed to show me how that change was possible.

So he found a book in a Christian bookstore called Steps Out of Homosexuality.

It was the story of a man named Frank Worthen who founded a ministry in the Bay Area of California called Love and Action.

And Love and Action had a one year residential program that men and women would travel from all over the country and the world to participate in a year called Steps Out of Homosexuality, where you would be with other men, you would live in residences together, and you would go through these steps to leave your homosexuality behind.

And that was that I had to go to Love in Action.

I filled in the long application form for a place in the year long residency program.

Many people, especially young people, are forced into conversion therapy.

There are so many stories of people being dragged into it or manipulated into it by parents, family members are trusted adults.

But while I was introduced to it by a pastor.

The way I saw it, love and Action was my opportunity and I had to grab it.

I could please God instead, I could change and I could leave homosexuality behind.

But that meant leaving the rest of my life behind too.

I wanted to go to Love and Action so bad.

I used to say I would have crawled through broken glass to get there.

My ex boyfriend turned friend Kurt was there through it all, Hugh.

I remember when I learned John was leaning towards leaving the gay life.

I think that's how they called it, leaving the gay life.

He was very happy.

You know, he just had the aura that was unexplainable.

I didn't judge it because you know, he had been so unhappy and so many times that I was like, well, who cares, whatever it is.

If he feels better, then go for it.

John just seemed like a different person, still funny, still sarcastic, but willing to do whatever it took.

And I'm putting my own words when I say this.

To feel normal, my drag friends had the hardest time with what was happening to me, and instead of taking a compassionate approach to try to rescue me from this, it became known to me that a few drag queens said, if we see Candy out, we'll kill her.

Where do you think that was coming from?

For them?

At the time, homosexuality was preached from pulpits of thousands of churches that you are an abomination to God if you commit this sin or engage in this behavior.

It was almost placed above murder that the worst thing you could possibly be was gay, and that was clearly understood by gay people.

And so the reaction if we see her, will kill her.

I know what that's coming from.

I so get it.

I so understand it.

Friends of ours were horribly angry with John.

The message they felt he was giving was that we could change if we really wanted to.

I had a really close friend that I had come and speak to John.

Doug was fairly religious, but he was a big queen who was out and you know, Doug talked and I remember Duck was crying.

He was so passionate, and John was very strong and said, no, this is this is something I need to do.

It took six months before I heard back from Love and Action, but one day I got word of my acceptance.

I cannot convey to you the sense of relief and joy that I had.

I just felt, like, you know, I was saved by being able to go there.

Before I packed up and started my own journey to California, there was some crucial calls I had to make.

I spoke to my dad, Norman, and my stepmom Vicky.

Love in Action was an interesting proposal.

If it was something John thought would be helpful, then I was supported.

I had a reaction when and John called to tell us about Love and Action.

When we hung up from the phone call, I said to Norman, that makes me very uncomfortable.

And the reason is it sounded like, and this is the word I used, a cult, and I said, I'm concerned for him.

I don't want him to get caught in something that is going to be a bad situation for him.

I wouldn't have he did that warning, even if she'd said it to me directly.

Love an Action here I come.

I was not in any way aware that what I was doing was significantly harmful.

This is John Smith.

Because everything I did through those years I believed was based on a biblical viewpoint that any homosexual behavior was wrong and sinful and would distinctly harm any relationship that one would have with God as they knew God to be.

John Smid joined the Ex Gay Ministry in nineteen eighty seven to be an assistant house manager, a volunteer role.

He would oversee the day to day running of the house.

Twelve men would live there while trying to change their sexuality.

He'd signed up to be a staff member for just one year, but one became two, and ultimately John Smid became the director of Love in Action, spending more than twenty.

Years there, and it was quite a journey.

Under John Smid's leadership, Love in Action grew and it wasn't just adults it attracted.

There were programs for teenagers too, many of whom were forced by family members to attend.

John Smid resigned in two thousand and eight.

I really came to the place where I realized that the ex gay world X gay culture had really many lies in it and desces in it.

There were many things about it that were wrong.

And then I really started to dig deeper and discovered that what I had been doing, although there were many good things in our ministry, we did so many wonderful things for people and for families, but the underlying message that being gay was sinful and wrong and broken was desperately harmful.

And it was in twenty ten that I wrote an apology and I began making amends, and I'm still pursuing reconciliation, a listening ear, and a reasonable relationship with people who had been through our ministry.

Not long after that apology, John Smid also publicly came out.

He's in his late sixties now and living in Hot Springs, Arkansas, with his husband Larry.

His story echoes mine in many ways.

Before love and action, John lived a few different lives.

When he was just eighteen, he married a woman he knew from high school.

Divorest after he came out, and he started living life as a gay man in his twenties, just like me and my younger life.

John Smith didn't have a religious faith either, but when he was struggling with relationship problems, he found solace in a woman he worked with, and she introduced him to Christianity.

She began to teach me or talk to me about Jesus and about the Bible, and she said, well, you know, being gay has a lot of problems in it, and you know it's not right, and God's word says it's not right.

And in my insecurity and in inadequacy, I thought, you know, these people know more than I do.

She seems to have found a better life for herself.

Maybe that's the answer for me.

So John Smith joined a church and entered the ex gay world.

So I turned away from all of my gay friends.

I took him out of my contact list.

I just put that all behind me and completely embraced this Christian world.

Only in that Christian world, I found that there was someone else that was a part of our ministry that was gay, and he was really struggling, And I thought, you know, I'd like to help this guy, because at that point I was kind of in a like a honeymoon phase where I really thought I was moving forward.

Being gay was behind me.

I was still had attractions, but it was behind me, and I didn't know what to do.

How do I help this guy.

It was at that point I found out about X Gay Ministries Love in Action.

Within three months, I sold everything, I had, my house, everything in my possession, and drove fifteen hundred miles across the country to Santra Fel, California and started my position there.

I really believe that's what I needed.

And I was finding my own way to Love in Action.

With my place secured and goodbye, said, I packed a bag with everything I'd need for one year in California.

It was the day before New Year's Eve.

The course would start on the first day of January nineteen eighty eight.

So here he was in San Francisco.

It's funny how you fly to San Francisco to not be gay.

And I remember I had took the shuttle bus from the airport to Marin County city of sant Rafel, where Love and Action was headquartered at the time, and this seventy something year old man was waiting to pick me up, and that was Frank Worthen.

It was Frank's book Steps out of Homosexuality that had got me here, and now I was meeting him in the flesh, and I remember seeing him and I walked toward him and I started to cry, and he wrapped his arms around me.

I never even met this guy.

He wrapped his arms around me.

He goes, You're a home and I just cried in his arms.

Frank Than was one of the founders of Love in Action.

He died in twenty seventeen in his late eighties and remained a prominent and unwavering part of the ex gay movement until the end.

When John Smid became director, it was Frank that he was replacing.

Love and Action as an organization had several versions of itself.

It started out as a residential home for people who were gay to live and to grow together and support groups.

It was fairly minimal in many ways.

When I became the director, we began to look at ways that we could be more successful because I knew most of the people who went through Love and Action did not remain away from their gay behaviors, The vast majority did not.

We knew that.

I knew that, and so I'm thinking, Okay, what can we do to have more success?

Because if God says we need to deal with this, then there must be a way to make it better.

And so I began to implement more structure into the program, more accountability, more rules.

I thought that would help people to to minimize negative behaviors while they began to adopt positive behaviors.

And how were you defining success?

I wanted to define success that people were finding freedom from homosexuality.

But I knew that wasn't happening, and we saw that as their fault.

You know, it's like, well, they're not following their program, they're not doing their journaling, they're not following God's standards, they're not going to church, they're not you know, they're not doing the right things.

So it's obvious that they're not going to find success if they don't do the right thing.

But inside, when people would ask me, as the director of the ministry, you know, what's your success rate?

And I said, okay, this is our success rate.

Everyone leaves our program closer to God than when they came.

Don't you think that's successful because I knew I couldn't say anything else.

Then I have.

To ask, in all those years, did you ever believe you were heterosexual?

Oh?

No, absolutely not no, no, no.

On the Kinsey scale, I'm way over on the gay side.

No, I've never I've never been heterosexual.

Everything about my sexuality and my relational motivations and my thinking as it has to do with those areas of my life, I'm a gay man.

I mean I always have been since as small as I can remember.

It's never been changed or it's never been No, not an inkling.

But in spite of his own internal contradictions with the program, it was John Smid who was going to guide me through my steps out of homosexuality.

He was my house leader, and I would be living with eleven other men, all going through the same teaching.

It was people from all walks of life, black, white, Hispanic, all there to leave homosexuality behind, and so we were all in the same boat.

Just north of Golden Gate Bridge, Sanrafell had a small town feel, but the house itself was massive, bunk beds in every bedroom, a huge dining table that could sit eighteen comfortably.

I met John Smith on my very first day, and we became close.

John was a very present person.

He was larger than life in many ways, his clothing, his fashion sense.

He always wanted to get the absolute best of everything.

We would always get together and have dinner together as a quote unquote family.

That was tremendous fun.

I had felt lonely before leaving, but now I wasn't lonely anymore.

The program that John went through was very unique.

It was the only program that was ever a part of the ministry when I was there, where every person that entered the program finished the program.

And during the twenty two years I was there, we had four hundred and seventy five men and women who went through our residential program.

So here are pictures from Love and Action.

Here.

I'm in the second row on the left, long hair, kind of still a mullet.

There are twenty one people in the photo John showing me.

John asked me if I wanted to know how many of those twenty one eventually came out and embraced.

Being gay seventeen eighteen Eighteen of twenty one people eventually embraced homosexuality eighteen of twenty one, and that was just one year.

Back.

In my first year, as we began the Steps Out of Homosexuality program, our time and Love and Action was pretty regimented.

We each had a job to pay for the program itself, and then.

A typical week we start Sunday morning that would go to church.

They would oftentimes have some kind a home group or a Bible study or a Sunday School class that they would also attend, which was more relationally connected to the church.

We would get up at some point and introduce ourselves to the congregation, and the congregation completely embraced us.

Monday night they have a group study.

Tuesday night they'd have a Bible study at someone's home.

Wednesday night was their family meeting in the house.

Thursday night was a book study, and Friday night was an open time.

Everything was about the Steps Out and learning and following the program.

Twice a week we'd go into the Love and Action Office for class and it was lesson plans under the covering of here are the Steps out and away from homosexuality.

So we would go and let's say, for example, the topic was idolatry, Well I do all Tree was worshiping anything other than God and anything in life could become an idol to you.

In our case, many times it was the male form or the male physique, which could be an idol or an idol could be worshiping sex or physical intimacy with a man, emotional intimacy of a sexual nature with men.

And how did you surrender?

What would that take?

Oftentimes you would get in a circle and you would sit in the middle of it in a chair, and it would be through prayer, and you would bow your head and they would gather around you and put lay their hands on you, on your shoulders and your head, and you would relinquish whatever your idol was to God and ask him to fill that empty space and to take away that idol in your life.

Men were to be men and women were to be women in the most stereotypical way at points in love and action.

Clothing was controlled.

You couldn't work alone, women had to carry a purse.

The sobriety was the focus.

Sobriety from anything gay, anything associated with it.

And so, of course we had a lot of rules in place that helped to create that environment.

No pornography and nothing that related to gay relationships, nothing that related to gay culture, nothing that related to secular culture.

You weren't allowed to watch TV because homosexuality could visually creep in.

You were not allowed to associate with anybody on the outside pretty much anybody, but especially if they were gay or lesbian.

If you engaged in any kind of sexual activity, that was grounds for immediate dismissal.

But we also believed that homosexuality was not created in the person.

We believed it was created psychologically or sociologically.

This was the crux of the message.

If you can find the cause, you can find a fix.

And so we worked a lot reviewing our family history, doing timelines, doing family systems theories to see where the flaws were because we believed we could find the broken areas, that those could be healed, those could be reconciled, pulling the power away from the same sex drivenness.

That was our theory.

That's what we functioned out of.

What were the kind of things that you at that point believed could be a root or cause.

Well, when we looked at child development theories from our perspective at that time, because we believed at the base that homosexual ruality came out of dysunction.

So when we looked at that particular aspect, we thought, well, okay, if a young boy grows up and he doesn't have a healthy development of his gender, meaning during puberty, he doesn't have a healthy association with other boys, other men, with his dad, then it creates a void, and that void is something that creates a search to fill it.

When an adolescent reached puberty.

We believe the hormones then would attach to the broken places, the places that are unmet needs, creating a sexual desire out of that unmet need.

For women, we believed it was primarily out of sexual abuse that most lesbians were sexually abused.

Therefore, the hated men couldn't connect well to men, say, to look to each other for a comforting place, for resolution, for association with something that seemed to be meaningful.

And we ever really left.

That there is no scientific evidence to show causation between abuse and homosexuality, but John and his classmates had to find a cause to focus on a reason.

Casey Pick from the Trevor Project says that going over and over traumatic events true or not, is a dangerous practice taught by people who aren't trained.

There is no standard of care or protocol, so effectively, these people who are operating at the fringes of mental health are making stuff up.

They are rooting it in outdated and debunked theories, and so what you wind up with is somebody who keeps digging and digging and digging into a traumatic experience, and while that doesn't do anything to change their sexual orientation, it does re traumatize them.

I spend a lot of time looking back at my childhood, and when we went to visit my dad and stepmom, Kate asked him what I was like when I was a kid, and it stung to hear him describe me as a child.

John was different.

I remember him sitting on the floor in front of the radio, just kind of rocking back and forth, listening to the music, which in itself wasn't different, but there was just a sense of him being searching for something different in his life.

I haven't been able to shake that since I heard him say that.

It like visits me all the time, and I thought, how sad for him that he missed out on all the wonders that could have been between us.

But then again, my dad was so young.

He was twenty one.

So I'm able to look at my dad now with eyes of compassion, and I don't hold those things against him, although hearing that it did hurt.

I was a weekend father from when John was I don't know what, age eight or nine or something like that.

I never missed weekends with my children.

It was very important to me.

But I wasn't part of his daily life for so much of his growing up.

Really didn't know John through his teenage years into early adulthood.

My dad used to love to take Vicky, my sister, and I to parks.

Then there was this particular park called the Park of Roses, and he took us out.

We were playing and on the jungle gym, and at the end of the afternoon, he knelt down on the ground and he very tenderly said, I'm not going to be living with you anymore.

It was like my security walked out the door.

Because my dad has always been very steady, very stable, no highs or lows, very constant, very consistent, and my mother was raging, narcissistic, alcoholic, and with his departure, it just I felt lost.

My mom is no longer with us.

She died in nineteen ninety seven, and she changed a lot by then.

But during my childhood it was my mom who I lived with, and things weren't easy.

Alongside newman arriving in my life via her relationships, there was her drinking to contend with.

I felt like my mother's caretaker.

My needs, they weren't even acknowledged.

They were completely invisible.

When I was remarried and had two young children, my second wife was very protective of those children.

And John was having problems apparently in his living situation, and he asked to meet with me.

He put on a suit, or at least a sport coat, and he met with me and asked if he could come live with me.

I spoke with my second wife and she was not for that, and I had to tell John no, and that was a very difficult thing for me to do.

So I was to stay with my mom, and at home, she'd found another fixation.

My mother was so obsessed with her piano.

We were not to interrupt her.

What mother would stop what she's doing and greet you when you walk in the door after school, you know, and it just reinforced you're not important.

But at the same time, I held my mother on a pedestal an hour after hour, I would listen to her play.

I had her songs so memorized I could tell if she hit a wrong note.

Yet it was my mother I went to When things at school got worse.

I was diagnosed age ten with ADHD and dyslexia, which was enough to make an isolated child film more alone.

And on the long journey back from a school field trip in eighth grade, I was sat next to a boy from cal and I unintentionally gave the bully something else to torment me with.

I had fallen asleep and my head leaned over and I was resting on his shoulder, completely unaware I was asleep, and someone took a picture of that, And it was at that time that I first heard the word homosexual being thrown at me.

From that day forward, I was picked on for being something that I didn't even know what it was.

I was being called gay and a faggot, and a sissy and a queer.

But I remember going home one afternoon and saying, can you tell me what means?

And you know, this is one memory of my mom being very tenderhearted with me.

She said, you know, it means you're different.

She said, all the most brilliant, wonderful people in the world have been different.

And she said being different is good, but at love and action, looking back at our childhoods and finding something to blame was key.

There was a list of things to look into.

My relationship with my parents.

I'd seen pornography at an early age.

My mom had a string of terrible relationships, bringing men in and out of my life throughout my childhood.

And so what I was being taught felt like it made sense.

I could point at things in my history and say, yes, that's it.

I fit this program.

Like if there was a questionneer of ten things these things made you gay?

I would fit ten out of ten based on what they were laying out.

I guess also, we were running the risk of being just indoctrinated by these theories.

These commonalities amongst us as men were so overwhelmingly similar that it was uncanny.

We all seemed to just fit into this you know, puzzle of where our homosexuality came from?

When, what the origins were.

This process of looking back at childhood and childhood trauma is very typical of conversion therapy and the X gay movement.

It reminds me a bit of horoscopes or personality tests.

It's accurate enough, you say that's me but broad enough that so does everyone else.

And let's be honest, pretty much everyone had something not great happen in their childhood, certainly anyone seeking help because they're unhappy.

So when you make those categories broad enough, it strikes me that anyone can pinpoint something that the so called therapist can focus on.

And you see, the thing is, there's got to be somebody to blame.

There has to be somebody who's responsible for causing this.

Finding out the roots of your own homosexuality was of paramount importance because if you couldn't, you couldn't change.

Casey from the Trevor Project says, these ideas cause immeasurable hurt.

A person's sexual orientation or gender identity really is something that is as much a part of who that person is as the color of their skin, the hand that they used to write.

It's not chosen.

But by pressuring and shaming someone to try to suppress that, to change it, what ultimately results is a feeling of deep frustration, shame, isolation, and so often because of the nature of the theories that go into this kind of so called therapy, the idea that it was an absent father, an overbearing mother, conversion therapy causes deep rifts and pain within families.

Later, when I was deeper into the movement, my dad came to visit.

As he introduced me to different i'd say executives, people of note, it was always the same.

I noticed a very cold aloof reaction on their part to meet John's father, and I ascribed this to the fact that if there's a god, there must be a devil for there to be a competing influence, and that if John was gay, it had to be me.

I asked Norman how he looked past.

That I experienced it and then moved on.

There was nothing in ad no impact in my life.

It's just something I experienced and noted, and that's why it appeared to me.

When I saw this sort of thing happening with Norman with my husband, I was very angry about it.

I thought, that's so unfair for any father to automatically be the person who is blamed for a child being gay.

I mean, to me, that's how I looked at it, and I was very angry at the fact that my husband would be put in that position.

There was a point during the residential year that I went back and looked at the letters my dad had written to me over the years.

Dear John, for a long time, there's been an unspoken tension between us.

Some of this was bound to arise since neither of us have made much effort to maintain communication.

I'm making an effort to change that from my end.

If there are other reasons on your part, I would like to see them slip away.

If part of the problem is that you think I don't care, then put that feeling aside.

I do care.

You are carrying a burden because you have not chosen to tell me that you are gay, and I would like to address that.

It's not necessary for a son to have approval from a father to be able to go forward with life.

What does make a difference is that two people accept each other with individual rights, ambitions, and choices.

I accept you as an individual.

You are your own man, but you are still my son.

All I ask is your acceptance and return.

We don't have to be the same kind of men to love each other.

I love you.

Don't let bitterness about your life interfere with living it.

Love Dad, Come.

On, come on leave that.

Who writes letters like that?

When I read that letter originally, I didn't hear love.

I believed he didn't really care.

I was pointing a finger.

Later I reread and saw what I couldn't before.

Well, my god, my dad's left me all these years.

And been there.

Why didn't I see that?

I have all the letters John wrote to me, I just don't know where they are.

As time went on in the Love and Action House, there were, of course times when people broke the rules.

They fell, as we'd put it, into sinful behavior.

They were all about confessing your sins to one another that you may be healed.

You know, it was so based on shame.

You ran the risk of being dismissed if you all were honest about what you did.

It was also your thoughts were sinful, So if you thought erotically about men, even the object of your desires were sinful as well, and you had to tell the leadership.

People like John Smid.

The Christian movement leads heavily in terms of the confessional one way or the other, and the confessional does nothing usually but bring even more shame.

And oh boy, do I wish I could go back over those four hundred and seventy five people and have a completely different program for every one of them, how much better life would have been for them.

There's an irony.

I think of taking a group of gay men or lesbian women and having them live in a house together to try and be straight.

I felt and saw it.

John Smid did too.

One of the big big issues was what we called emotional dependency, and that was if a person became emotionally attached so much that their entire focus was on that person.

That was one of the hardest things for us to deal with because we didn't know how to separate the emotional attraction from the relationships.

We didn't know how to break that, and we'd call it being on level.

And being on level meant that you couldn't talk to this person, you couldn't walk next to this person, you could sit next to them in a class.

You had to say separate yourself, which must have been horrifically terrible for these people to go through.

We didn't know what else to do with it, and we certainly didn't understand that what the attraction that was there was absolutely totally natural for them.

But when we separated it, it just made it worse, It made it stronger, it made it harder.

I have firsthand experience of exactly what John Smith describes.

My first day at Love and Action, I met a guy.

He was from Toronto, Canada, and like we instantly fell in love.

Within the first week, we were French kissing and making out with each other.

And that whole first year we were very much in love with each other, but we were separated, which they say made it easier.

It didn't.

The end of my oh my gosh.

At the end of that first year, he ended up flying back to Ohio, where I was from, and we spent two weeks together, and then we went up to Toronto to meet his family and we had sex, and I that's something that I think I have buried all this time.

And I remember having to say goodbye to him, and he gave me his robe to take with me.

Having to say goodbye to him was excruciatingly painful.

He took me to the airport and I couldn't get out of the car.

I couldn't let go of him, and then I had to leave and he didn't continue on with his quest to be x gay.

I had his robe and I took it back to California with me, and I would go into my closet and hold that robe and smell it, and I could smell his fragrance, and I remember just like holding it like a dear treasure.

I'd wrap it in my arms, that robe and smell him.

And I talked about this to my roommate who was the leader.

He said, well, you need to throw that away.

You have sultie with that.

You need to have that soul tie broken, and he prayed for me to have that soul tie broken.

I didn't want to throw that robe away.

That was my last connection with this person.

But I was a dutiful, obedient little man, and I remember throwing that robe away and I never saw him again.

I changed a lot through the year long residence, but my desire to leave my homosexuality behind was stronger than ever.

By now I was calling myself x gay.

That became our label.

So we weren't gay, we were ex gay.

That was an identity that I clinged to with my life, and I was very comfortable saying I am ex gay.

One reason being that after that first year in love and action in my experience with the Canadian man, I didn't have sex with a man for twenty five years.

My behavior certainly changed, but the deep desires and longings were always there in one degree or another.

However, I embarked on on a journey that I never looked at gay erotic material.

I wasn't affectionately involved with men.

You know, you're living day to day to day with the thoughts of you're not doing this, you're getting away from it, you're celibate.

You know, you've committed yourself to God and living a holy life and living by his rules.

Things do start to change.

And I think a very good question that someone could have is, yeah, but does that mean you've really changed, haven't you?

You've never really changed inside?

Anybody can change their behavior?

Well, no, not anybody can.

This was not an easy thing to do.

John has never been anything but gay.

I mean everything about him.

He's just always been a gay man.

And but he really tried hard not to be, you know, he really really did.

And his motivation was his relationship with God.

Mine was my fear of God.

John's was his love of God.

It was a distinct difference, and he still feels that way today.

You know, he still has a deep love for God.

On December thirty first, nineteen eighty eight, I successfully completed my residential year at Love and Action.

I'd taken the steps as to fined in the Steps Out of Homosexuality program, so I stayed.

I entered leadership training.

I became an assistant house leader.

Over the next few years, I climbed the ranks.

As a child, my mom had put me into kids' theater school, I played Charlie and You're a Good Man Charlie Brown, and I had a lead in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor dream Coat.

I did TV commercials too, and in the X gay world.

These were praised skills ones that make a leader.

It's not that I ever thought in my conscious mind I was performing and faking it, but that was mixed in there somewhere.

I have been accused through the years of being a total fake and a phony, or my entire life was a lie.

I've even said that myself.

But there's truth mixed in.

There's nuances, you know, throughout life, and so you could live at one level up here.

I was living as this celibate X game man, towing the line, you know, believing in the company message, and starting to give talks on my own audiences, share my quote unquote testimony or my story.

Who are you going to promote I was no shrinking violet, so I was in deep.

I was asked to be the administrator of the Love and Action Office, and that's where I went.

This office was shared by the umbrella organization of Love and Action called Exodus International.

Exodus International no longer exists, but for nearly forty years, it was a non profit group of individual ministries that did what Love and Action did, basically an evangelical umbrella to connect organizations that believed in conversion therapy and the idea that it was possible to change your sexuality.

Exodus was huge.

At one point, it had offices on five continents.

At its peak, it included over two hundred and fifty ministries in North America and had over one hundred and fifty ministries in seventeen other countries.

They had a conference that they held every single year in various locations where hundreds and hundreds of people would come to a five day conference from these ministries all around the nation, all with the common purpose under the Exodus umbrella of supporting that homosec Shwadi was a changeable condition.

When you see hundreds of people standing in an auditorium worshiping God all from the background that you had, it only reinforced that what we were doing was right.

So Exodus started taking on a pre eminent place in my life and the direction that I would later go in.

But first I needed something I'd wanted my whole life, something that symbolized to me what I thought of as normal.

A gold wedding band.

And Edward and I actually met a year earlier at a Friday night support group where she was a worship leader.

She was looking to become an ex lesbian and and I didn't hit it off.

I had a very strong nature and she had a very strong, controlling nature.

When I began the leadership program, Ann entered her own residential year, and in my new job at the Exodus office, we'd be working just around the corner from each other, and the only way I could get there was to carpool with Ann.

Not ideal, but when we would write to work together back and forth, we actually got to know each other as people.

We started, I think, softening toward one another.

During this time, I started dating as an ex gay man.

I dated girls when I was at school before I ever came out, and I'd always enjoyed the trappings of it, the romance of it all.

But now it was different.

I was dating with a purpose.

I remember one day a group of people, including Anne, praying over me, hands on my shoulders, on my head, and I remember someone saying, Lord, we just hope that you show John who the right woman for him is.

And I felt the Holy Spirit say to me, it's Anne.

It felt like definitive approval.

I remember our first date at a California restaurant with such fondness.

We would go in and we'd, you know, have pie and coffee, and we would chit chat and chit chat, and we were all excited, like when you first have the blushes of a crush or love.

And I remember my pastor taking me out on a hike in the mountains of Mount tamil Pius, and he sat me down on a bench during the middle of this hike and he said to me, you know, John, to get married and live a successful heterosexual life, you don't have to be attracted and fall in love to all women and just one woman for you.

For X gays, the way it works is you first get emotionally connected to a woman and you feel safe.

And once you feel safe, he went on you'll develop an emotional attachment, and as time goes by, you'll start God will start bonding you together, and a sexual attraction will flow out of that.

And he reassured me again the checklist isn't you have a raging erection for every woman?

Just one?

And he would say, actually, a woman is very lucky to have an ex gay man as a husband, because he's never going to commit adultery on her with another woman.

I remember the first time we kissed.

I go back and tell people, and you know, my friends, the congregation, they were all in this with us.

I'm wondering whether in that as well, there's a feelings of accomplishment.

It felt like I was going through adolescence all over again.

That's just what it felt like.

And as a matter of fact, that was one of the premises of love and action, that if you get to that place, you will experience adolescence all over again, in the right direction this time.

And so for me it was happening at the age of twenty eight years old.

Does that make sense?

Two things I think are coming to my mind because my instant reaction when you said going through puberty or going through adolessons again is to think, were you broken down to the point of having to rebuild?

And then secondly on whether it makes sense.

Are you saying.

That that's what you believed then or what you believe now.

It's not at all what I believe now.

I'm talking about In the whole manufactured confines of this world I was in, it was laid out that homosexuality was the result one of the results of broken masculinity, damaged masculinity, and so for your homosexuality to be arrested and for heterosexuality to grow, you needed to work through all of those things that you believe.

You need to be around heterosexual men, you need to feel comfortable with heterosexuality, the trappings of all of those things.

For women, you need to grow your hair out, you need to wear a makeup, you need to wear, you know, feminine clothing.

And everybody interpreted those things a little bit differently.

I grew up around very feminine, very glamorous women in my life, and I wanted my wife to be that very same person, you know, beautifully quaffed, manicured nails, high heels, full makeup.

That's the kind of women I personally was attracted to.

What crosses my mind is how John reinvented Anne physically.

John Smith again, he helped her with hair and makeup and clothing, and I believe that he believed what he was doing was good.

But I also remember thinking, you know, John is a dominant force, and I'm concerned about the dominance here, that he is trying to make his world into what he needs it to be and needed to fit that surrounding.

I think John needed her to do that because if we look at former pictures, which their public and presentation changed dramatically, But of course we at the time thought, well, Anne is learning more about her own femininity, She's discovering and John is helping her do that.

It was New Year's Eve nineteen ninety one that I proposed.

I planned the perfect night, gorgeous dinner followed by front row tickets to hear Rosemary Clooney sing, and then we walked over to the Palace of Fine Arts.

I was so nervous all I could do was giggle.

Finally I was able to get down on one knee and she said yes.

We drove back over the Golden Gate Bridge.

We went to where she lived and there was a party waiting for us, with helium balloons, congratulations, because they all knew what was going to happen.

We celebrated a man getting married to a woman because it was like a trophy.

It was like, you've accomplished something phenomenal.

Oh my god, how could you have a bigger success story?

Given the backgrounds up to this point, there was no one in common knowledge where a lesbian and a gay man had changed and gotten married.

No one knew even any case where the situation was similar to ours, and we kind of delighted in that, you know, talk about a miracle.

You both changed and you found each other.

I remember people would start saying to us, you know, when the world finds out about this peculiar story, they're going to want to hear about it.

We had a wedding to plan, one that would be the center point of our whole ex gay and ex lesbian worlds.

And it was while we were engaged that the first phone call from a TV show came.

When I'd step into the spotlight and be put under a microscope, He's.

Like, you know, a car wreck, and if people can't keep their eyes off him, he evokes a reaction he did with me.

I hated him.

I hated young Paul because he was very good at what he did.

That's next time on Atonement, The John Polk Story.

Atonement is a production of iHeart Podcasts and gold Hawk Productions in association with Mark's Media Co.

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