(RNS) — When I was 19, I found myself abandoned at a Super 8 motel near the Portland, Oregon, airport, where I had been dropped by the youth pastor at the church where I had been working. Nine months into my internship at the church, the youth pastor had looked at my internet history and discovered that I had been spending time in gay online chatrooms.

There was “no place for people like me” in the church, he had said before depositing me at the motel. Five days later a family member came from Illinois to fetch me. 

Desperate, I spent the five days before a family member could come to bring me back to Illinois reading “Growth into Manhood,” a book that promised to “fix” my sexuality. It began my eight-year journey through the grueling world of conversion therapy — the roundly debunked practice of attempting to deter homosexuality by psychological means.

In January, I was back in Portland to speak at the Q Christian Conference, one of the largest gatherings of queer-identified people of faith. They had invited me to talk about the harms of the “pray the gay away” movement, the subject of my forthcoming memoir, “Conversion Therapy Dropout: A Queer Story of Faith and Belonging.”

Being in the city where I once bought the book that tried to erase me, only to return years later with a book of my own, felt like the ultimate reclamation. But the most significant moment of my trip occurred at a quiet breakfast spot as I sat across from the man who was once the face of the movement that nearly cost me my life: John Paulk.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Paulk was the “poster child” of the conversion therapy movement. An “ex-gay” man who married Anne, a former lesbian, he was held up by many in the conversion therapy world as living proof that homosexuality could be overcome through faith in God, adherence to its practices and heterosexual marriage. 

While working for Dr. James Dobson at Focus on the Family, Paulk founded the Love Won Out conferences, which were held across the United States and abroad, regularly drawing thousands to hear testimonies from people who claimed to have “left the gay lifestyle.” The events presented a pseudopsychology that framed same-sex attraction as a preventable, treatable and, most of all, spiritual condition. Pastors, Christian counselors, concerned parents, church leaders and LGBTQ+ people struggling with their sexuality all came — and I did too, having devoured Paulk’s books, desperate for answers.

Paulk later became chairman of the board of Exodus International, the umbrella organization for more than 400 conversion therapy ministries in 17 countries. He and Anne appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “Jerry Springer” and “60 Minutes” and made the cover of Newsweek, presenting their marriage and three children as the ultimate proof that change was possible. 

After photos of Paulk leaving a gay bar in Washington, D.C., shattered his public image, the conversion movement simply reframed the story as a cautionary tale. It reminded all of us that even a “healed” man had to remain on guard against temptation.

But the public performance became unsustainable. Paulk left Focus on the Family in 2003 and moved to Portland with his family to make a fresh start.

In April 2013, Paulk issued a formal apology, dismantling the very foundation of the “ex-gay” testimony he once popularized. “I truly believed that it would happen,” he wrote of the promise of change. “And while many things in my life did change as a Christian, my sexual orientation did not… I do not believe that reparative therapy changes sexual orientation; in fact, it does great harm to many people.”

Following this bombshell, Paulk’s marriage dissolved, and he faded from the spotlight. He spent the next decade establishing himself in Portland’s culinary scene, mostly distant from his “ex-gay” past and far from the church pulpits and national talk shows he once frequented. 

But while Exodus International closed and Love Won Out has withered away, conversion therapy is not a thing of the past. In the last year alone, according to research by The Trevor Project, the number of LGBTQ+ youth threatened with or subjected to conversion therapy doubled in a short period, rising from 11% to 22% between September 2023 and March 2025.

And Paulk’s own movement continues under familiar leadership. Although Love Won Out is gone, Anne, his ex-wife, serves as the executive director of the Restored Hope Network, a group of more than 30 ministries that continue to promote conversion therapy across the country. While John has spent a decade in the slow, difficult work of rebuilding his life, the organization his ex-wife leads has simply rebranded the same ideologies he now seeks to dismantle.

So even as the public view of LGBTQ+ issues has shifted, Paulk seemed to realize his hard-won private peace couldn’t outweigh his public responsibility. His first public reappearance in nearly two decades came in the 2021 Netflix documentary “Pray Away,” where he admitted: “My role was to get the message out that homosexuality was changeable, but I ached to love and be loved by a man.”

Now, John is taking part in a new six-part narrative podcast series, “Atonement: The John Paulk Story.” “I agreed to do this because silence doesn’t undo harm,” Paulk told me. “I want to pull back the curtain and show how these ministries operate and their goals, their ambitions and how far they stretch. For many years, I perpetuated an idea that hurt people. This is my attempt to tell the truth plainly.”

Paulk isn’t the only voice on the podcast. He’s joined by conversion therapy survivors, therapists, one of Paulk’s sons and even gay activist Wayne Besen, who had released the photo that outed Paulk. They echo what the American Psychiatric Association and other mental health organizations have said for decades: that any effort to change one’s sexuality is harmful.

The stakes of this truth-telling are personal and painful.

For conversion therapy survivors, encountering a former leader like Paulk can be triggering. We’ve seen too many perpetrators publicize their “redemption arcs,” prioritizing their healing over justice for victims. Victims’ stories shine a light on the damage caused by conversion therapy; focusing on a former leader, even if he is repeating his admission of the lie, undermines the anti-conversion movement. It validates our truth from the inside out.

Paulk seems to understand that atonement isn’t a plea for absolution. “I’m not returning to public life to recast myself as a victim or a hero,” Paulk said to me. “I’m here to tell the truth, to call out tactics that still exist and to support the broader work of protecting LGBTQ+ people.”

Our conversation felt particularly urgent given the current legal climate. In October, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Chiles v. Salazar, a case in which a Colorado therapist argues that her state’s 2019 ban against practicing conversion therapy on minors violates her First Amendment rights. Paulk warns that if the court decides in the therapist’s favor, it will award conversion therapy a “veneer of legitimacy.”

“Once something is labeled ‘therapy,’ it sounds safe and credible—especially to fearful parents,” he said. “That legitimacy creates a pipeline into shame-based interventions that teach young people to distrust themselves. These practices rarely look overtly abusive. They are framed as love.”

Paulk had once used “theological hooks,” as he called them, to achieve the same erasure of the self. “The lie I most regret perpetuating,” he admitted, “is that abandoning your homosexuality was the only way to be acceptable to God.”

Paulk, who no longer attends church, didn’t mince words when I asked what message he would preach to churches today. “The church should judge its teaching by its fruit. If it produces despair, shame and harm, it is not the gospel,” he said.

Paulk and I are not the people we were two decades ago. I am no longer the scared kid in the Super 8 parking lot, and he is no longer the man on the cover of Newsweek. We are both survivors of a machinery that demanded we trade our truth for a highly conditional belonging.

“I live today with a deep respect for the people who were harmed, a clear-eyed understanding of my role in that harm and a quiet hope that honesty — however delayed — can still help prevent it from being repeated,” Paulk told me. “If there is any grace in telling this story now, it is found not in being seen, but in helping others live without shame, fear or conditions placed on who they are allowed to be.”

While we cannot erase the past, we can dismantle the systems that try to repeat it. If there is grace to be found in the ruins of the ex-gay movement, it is in the quiet, rigorous work of telling the truth, no matter how long it takes to surface.

Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez is a writer and LGBTQ+ advocate whose work explores the intersection of faith, sexuality and belonging. His forthcoming memoir, “Conversion Therapy Dropout: A Queer Story of Faith and Belonging,” tells the story of his eight years in conversion therapy and his journey to healing.