As debates around so-called conversion therapy continue to reach the national stage, LGBTQ advocates are renewing calls to end practices aimed at changing a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, particularly within religious communities where those experiences often go unspoken. A new essay spotlighted by GLAAD examines the lasting impact of conversion therapy on Black LGBTQ people in the South, centering the stories of two men who say they were subjected to harmful religious pressure by family members and church leaders.
Penned by Mashaun D. Simon, From The Pulpit to the Pews: How Black LGBTQ People are Escaping Conversion Therapy explores the intersection of faith, identity and survival while highlighting voices from LGBTQ-affirming clergy and advocates working to dismantle the practice. According to data cited in the piece from The National Black Justice Collective, Black LGBTQ youth who experience conversion therapy face significantly higher risks of depression and suicide attempts, with many of those experiences occurring not in clinical settings, but within churches and faith-based spaces.
From The Pulpit to the Pews: How Black LGBTQ People are Escaping Conversion Therapy in Religious Spaces
By: Mashaun D. Simon
In 20 states across America and Washington, D.C., so-called “conversion therapy” practices have been banned, with every major medical and mental health association recognizing the practice is not only ineffective, but harmful to young people subjected to it. A recent ruling by the Supreme Court against Colorado’s ban has reignited alarm among LGBTQ people, allies and advocates. The disproportionate impact on Black LGBTQ youth is also deeply troubling and only just beginning to be understood.
The practice has a harmful and traumatic history. Survivors describe enduring shock therapy; others were subjected to surgical procedures like lobotomies and other personality-altering techniques, like hypnosis. There are also stories of spiritual practices like exorcisms. In recent years, less invasive yet still dangerous methods have become more widely known, including practices disguised as a form of talk therapy. Instead of improving health and mindset, these practices push debunked and ineffective tactics to remedy or” heal” people of same-sex attraction, sexual orientation, and/or gender identity.
According to Dr. David Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Collective, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Chiles v. Salazar does not legalize these practices, but it does open the door to the possibility.
“We need to be precise about what has—and hasn’t—changed,” he wrote via Substack the same day of the ruling. “The majority ruled that Colorado’s law went too far because it stopped therapists before any harm occurred, rather than holding them accountable after the fact.”
In other words, he points out, the government cannot preempt harm.
A brief released by the National Center for LGBTQ Rights and The Trevor Project takes an analysis of the ruling further. They point out that the issue is about the free speech rights of practitioners, but the Court did not decide that the practice is safe, effective, or ethical.
But as Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson points out in her dissent, the case shouldn’t have been a free speech issue at all, but about regulating mental health treatment.
Conversion Therapy, Faith and the Black Community
In his Substack, Johns points out that when it comes to conversion therapy, there is a greater burden on those who identify as Black and LGBTQ because they are more likely to be forced into conversion practices.
“Nine percent of Black LGBTQ+/SGL youth report having undergone conversion therapy, with 82% experiencing it before the age of 18,” he writes. “And Black LGBTQ+/SGL youth who go through it are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide.”
And for many within the Black community subjected to these practices and harmful outcomes, Johns points out that they “are delivered not in a therapist’s office but in a church pew—wrapped in scripture, sanctioned by religious authority, and tied to belonging.” This was the case for Blair Dottin-Haley as well as Daniel Downer.
Dottin-Haley was a junior in high school when his journey began.
“It was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 1995. A gentleman saw my number on his home caller ID and made an assumption that his boyfriend and I must be [fooling around],” Dottin-Haley remembers. “So, I’m home with my mom, and it’s just the two of us, and this man showed up at our door. My mom answered the door and had this conversation with him [about what he’d assumed].”
The man had inadvertently outed Dottin-Haley. When his father arrived home later that evening, his mother told him about the visitor and the conversation she had with him earlier. While he likes to believe his sexuality may have been obvious, Dottin-Haley wasn’t “out,” per se. Believing queerness was a sin, his parents were unsure of what to do. They enlisted the help of a family friend who was also a family counselor. The result? For three or four months, Dottin-Haley met with the counselor for an hour once a week.
“His intention was to educate me out of what he saw as miseducation about my purpose in the Black community,” he asserts. The counselor believed homosexuality was a tool of white supremacy to destroy the Black family and take down Black men.
They also made him join Free Indeed, an unofficial ex-gay ministry at the church they attended. They’d switched their membership from the most prominent Black Catholic church in New Orleans to the prominent Full Gospel Baptist Church in the city. The clear goal of the ministry was to convince those involved that homosexuality was not the life for them. But by that July, Dottin-Haley quit Free Indeed.
“I was so disengaged. I was there,” he remembers, “But I was going through the motions so I could live in my house in some sense of peace. I played the game and reconnected with a girl I once dated.”
When he graduated from high school, he moved away to attend college at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
Downer’s conversion journey began in junior high, about sixth grade.
“[What] the conversion therapy people don’t talk about is the emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual abuse. They don’t talk about the prayer services circles that may have been a five-minute prayer,” the Florida native reflects, “But ended up being an hour-long and then five-hour-long tarrying services. The laying of hands becomes intensified.” (In Pentecostal-leaning, Black Church culture, tarrying services are designed as an intentional time of waiting, through prayer, for the “Holy Ghost” to move, act, or heal, depending on the need and request).
As a preacher’s kid, he says, he couldn’t escape. He had to endure at church and at home. He remembers moments when his father would become enraged by how he sat in a chair, slanting his legs and crossing them at the ankles. He was being made to feel as though the authentic person he was was wrong. In the same way, things intensified at church through language and prayer circles; at home, things became unbearably violent. There were even moments when he was being deprived of food, he says.
Because his father was a faith leader in the community, there were power dynamics. People knew what he was experiencing. He remembers a time when he confided in a friend at the church about what he was going through. An adult overheard them talking, told his father, and was later chastised. He even remembers talking to the youth pastor once, and that conversation got back to his father.
Eventually, it got to be too much. After an altercation with his father where he feared for his life, he ran five miles to his grandparents’ house and never went back. Some years later, they adopted him and legally became his parents.
Love God, Love Self, Love Others
For Kristian Smith, pastor of The Faith Community, a virtual community of faith, any practice that consistently harms others should not be supported by people who claim to follow Jesus. And as far as he is concerned, so-called “conversion therapy” is a form of harm.
“I always think about how Christians quote scriptures that talk about fruit. ‘And you will be known by the fruit that we bear.’ That’s how we should judge a thing,” he says. “Christians will quote that scripture, then promote a practice that has borne the fruit of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. Are we not considering the documented emotional harm? – of something that has consistently resulted in people having higher levels of depression, higher levels of detachment from themselves, self-loathing, anxiety, wanting to take their lives, attempting to take their lives, and some of them actually succeeding? That is the problem.”
He relates the issue to what he calls “sin consciousness,” the state of being almost exclusively focused on one’s sins or imperfections. When people see the world through the lens of sin consciousness, then they see anything and everything as sin, amplify it, and obsess over it.
“And we see same gender loving people as inherently sinful.”
Which is why he believes many of the ex-gay movements, especially in Black communities in the South, are so prevalent today. When one has been told time and time again that their being is sinful, and it becomes tied to their eternity, they will become attracted to anything that promises to rescue them.
One example of that is the work of Apostle Reginald Robinson, pastor of Veir Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and co-founder of Brand New You, a men’s mentoring group “designed to help men break free from the limiting cycles of sexual sin, including same-sex attraction.” The purpose of the initiative is to help men “discover their identity in Christ.” They are actively promoting their “BNYCON26: Marked by Mercy” conference, scheduled for Atlanta in June 2026. Guest speakers include Bishop Keith McQueen, a former affirming faith leader who denounced his same-sex attraction in 2025.
Robinson did not respond to multiple requests to be interviewed.
Smith, who is a cisgender, heterosexual man, says leading a ministry that affirms all is central to his approach he calls the Greatest Commandment Theology.
“I constantly reinforce the greatest commandment,” he said. “That your love for God is displayed through how you love your neighbor, which reflects how you love yourself. So, loving yourself is at the core of the gospel message.”
Today, Dottin-Haley is happy to report that things with him and his parents eventually evened out. His parents realized that their love for their son was more important than trying to change who he is. So much so, that his younger brother, who is also same gender loving, didn’t have to go through the experience he did.
Downer is grateful for his grandparents stepping up the way they did. They probably saved his life, he says.
The experience has also motivated him to share his story with others. Why?
“Because there is a Black queer boy, living in the South, having or has had a similar experience as I, who will connect with a piece of my story, and I might help them.”
