Q&A with McKrae Game: Former Conversion Therapist & Founder of Hope for Wellness

Contributions by Nidia Torres | Design by Itzel Montoya

1. What year did you found the Hope for Wholeness Network program center?

A: It originally started as the Truth Ministry in 1999 … I called my website guy and my board, and we basically created a national network and it started the very minute that Exodus closed. We turned Truth Ministry into Hope for Wholeness and it became a national network and took in all the ministries that were within Exodus.

2. What was the main goal Hope for Wholeness wanted to achieve?

A: Ex-gay ministry is a very ethereal framework where we used language like hope, freedom, change. The slogan we had was, ‘Freedom from homosexuality through Jesus Christ,’ and trying to define the parameters of what that meant was not easy. It’s primarily trying to help people to live according to their own religious framework. Basically, helping them to live life that is congruent with their religious and personal beliefs. It’s not trying to make people straight. Now there are people that believe that’s possible. I never believed that was possible. I never believed people can get past their same-sex attractions, but there are organizations and therapists out there that promote such. I never did that.

Hope for Wholeness was primarily an organization trying to encourage people because so many people deal with suicidal thoughts because they have gay attractions. [We were] trying to encourage them to let them know they’re not alone in that. We were never going as far as to say you need to accept your homosexuality and be gay. We never would go that far, but I was going so far as to say you need to accept this about yourself. This is not something that’s going to change and there’s no point in hating yourself over something that’s not going to change. I would get some flak for telling people that it’s not going to change … I never met anybody that I genuinely felt their attractions had changed. I felt like I had met a lot of people who were repressing their attractions, like myself, but I had never met anybody who’s attractions had genuinely changed. I wasn’t trying to promise or promote something that I didn’t feel like was possible. I was trying to promote something that I felt like was possible. But eventually, I was run off and they tried to do it without me. They closed in … June of this year, not sure the exact month.

3. How was the faith-based approach supposed to help people?

A: Ex-gay ministry or conversion therapy is not just limited to Christian faith. It’s also in Catholicism and Mormonism … It’s all very similar in that people that are firm believers in their faith, that is what they live their lives by. That was the primary reason for starting Truth Ministry and Hope for Wholeness was because at the time, that was my biggest focus and it was always the biggest focus of the people that would come to see us. I would say to those people it’s everything. You know everything else doesn’t matter to them. To people who don’t think like that, that doesn’t make sense, but people who do think like that, that is just their framework of living. The only thing that matters to them is what God thinks, what their church [and] family thinks. The only way you’re actually going to find happiness is to accept yourself and to allow yourself to be who you want to be. But people from religious backgrounds, that’s extremely difficult for them to change the framework of how they think. I was blessed by being shown the door and kicked out. I was being essentially kicked out of the cult … Cults have their particular language and their particular processes and procedures that are only understood by the cult.

That’s very much how ex-gay ministry and conversion therapy organizations are. People who are not in them, [it] doesn’t make sense to them. But people who are in them, it’s all they know, it’s how they think and process. It’s scary for them to even contemplate not being in that framework.

4. When you were a therapist, did you know that conversion therapy was illegal in other states?

A: Conversion therapy is actually not illegal in any state … There’s no state that has banned it. There is no restriction against nonprofit religious organizations, even to minors … Most all of the conversion therapy [and] ex-gay organizations are not professionally licensed therapists, so that rule does not have any bearing against them.

5. What can you tell me about certain practices or treatments used in conversion therapy?

A: It’s mainly talk therapy. If you go in the framework of reparative therapy (another term for conversion therapy) that was under the model that was passed down by a gentleman named Joseph Nicolosi and a woman named Leanne Payne. The organization that’s still around that still heavily subscribes to this type of information is called Restore Hope [Network]. It’s a very religious, very hard right-wing organization. It’s basically trying to explain the origins of same-sex attractions.

So much of conversion therapy is trying to help people understand why they think the way they do. Their belief of if they curtail some of their behaviors and try to have close relationships with the same sex but not sexual, that they will repair essentially what they believed is broken. They believed that there is no such thing as a homosexual. Homosexuals were just heterosexuals but needed and I quote ‘tweaking.’ That seems ludacris but that’s what they thought. Countless men tried to pursue that type of counseling because they believed it and they wanted it to be true. But I don’t know if there’s anybody who is around to actually admit to having opposite sex attractions now because of their counseling they had with anybody. They would say it made them feel better. They would say it made them understand themselves better.

It’s primarily because these types of people are unwilling to accept who they are and it’s kind of like people who take a placebo and they are convinced that it’s helped them even though it’s just sugar water. That’s essentially what ex-gay ministry is: creating a placebo effect to make people feel better. That they’re actually not being helped but they think they are. I was a client for eight years before becoming a leader. I was in that same boat and even still as a leader, I was still buying into it and kind of trapped in that frame of thought or belief. It’s a hard way to escape. If you don’t escape early it’s hard to escape that way of thinking.

6. Once you were let go, what helped you get through the hardships created from your former occupation?

A: I was fighting when I got fired … I was trying to fight off a once again, nervous breakdown because I was on my fourth [episode]. I had gotten a job working at a catering events company. That’s the job I have now. Then I started pursuing becoming a ski patroller in the wintertime. I had done all that before the year prior … Those two part-time things became full-time things the second that I was let go. In those things, especially ski patrol, I had friends that I had established relationships [with]. They were … very gay affirming. They were encouraging me to accept myself. That was difficult because for someone who had been in that framework of thought for 28 years, the idea of accepting your sexuality and allowing yourself to live within that framework was completely foreign to me. My ski patrol friends said to me ‘We’re going to love and accept you, but we really wish you would love and accept yourself.’ At the time, I thought I did love and accept myself, but they meant as a gay man. I knew that’s what they meant. They knew I wasn’t happy. They said, ‘You’re not happy, we want you to be happy.’

They saw me for who I am: a loving and caring person that’s not judgmental towards people despite what people might think. They wanted me to be able to find out who I was, potentially find love and at the very least love myself. They were a big part of that journey and in that, because so much of the religious world works on guilt and shame … I came to the decision that I was no longer going to allow guilt and shame to play a role in my life.

That’s pretty much how people live within religious frameworks, especially when it comes to their sexuality. It’s certainly how I had lived. I think it’s much of the reason why I had nervous breakdowns because I was trying to control something and limit what was really core to who I am as a person, and so I wasn’t being able to truly breathe and live who I was meant to be.

That’s completely opposed to how I had been taught over 28 years from the church and the ex-gay leaders that had mentored me. Everybody’s being mentored by somebody. Just like I said how Joseph Nicolosi was taking Elizabeth Moberly and Leanne Payne’s work, everybody’s taught. Everybody’s listening to somebody.

There’s always a predecessor to something you’re pedaling. There’s a gentleman named Mike Williams; he was one of the first conversion therapy leaders back in the early 70s. Well today, he’s an out gay man that spends a lot of his time teaching the Bible and explaining why it’s not what the church teaches.

There’s always somebody that’s being mentored by somebody, and so I was being mentored and led. I had to come to a realization that I no longer believe and accept what those people taught me. That is a big reason why I’m able to have the peace that I do today because I don’t follow that framework that used to make me feel terrible.

7. Are you involved with any advocacy groups for the LGBTQ+ community?

A: I’m involved in PFLAG [National] and … I regularly raise money for the Trevor Project and I’m involved in the Born Perfect program. I spoke for them in Utah to help get conversion therapy banned.

8. What are your hopes for the LGBTQ+ youth struggling with their sexuality?

A: I encourage them to reach out to a gay-affirming therapist or a friend to be able to talk about their fears.

If you live your life to please other people because those people are rejecting you or you think they will reject you, it’s a very miserable way to live. There is a family of your choosing out there for each one of us. If our families reject us, we can go make another family. My sister and I have reconciled. My sister had a really hard time when I came out, especially with all the media. We’ve reconciled, and I think we each need to be able to be who we are and not count on people’s framework.

I think if we are living our lives to make a straight world comfortable, we are helping to continue homophobia. I think it’s people that are being brave enough to walk down the street holding hands with their gay partner that are helping change things.

I’m just who I am. I was telling my best friend, (I was at the checkout at Home Depot) … about some cute guy that I saw at the mechanic and how I said to my sister I said, ‘I don’t know if it makes you feel uncomfortable or not but that guy in there was super cute.’ I said all of that in front of all the people at the checkout line at Home Depot, not because I’m trying to show off or anything but you know I’m not going to curtail my conversations to make them feel better because a straight person would have said [the] exact same thing about a girl.

We’re just normal people, but if we live our lives in front of them, they will see it’s not a perversion. My name is McKrae and I happen to be gay. But without me living my life in front of them, they don’t know that. They’re just left with their preconceived ideas and if I leave them in those preconceived ideas, that’s my fault. It’s not anybody else’s.