I was cheated out of the best years of my life
As a Bill is proposed to ban conversion therapy, one man who underwent the toxic practice says it left him destroyed and feeling completely isolated
ABOUT ten years ago, Garry Adair-Gilliland found himself in a particularly dark place. Since his mid-teens he had struggled with his sexuality — the idea of being attracted to men went against everything his Methodist faith had taught him.
To distract himself from these troubling thoughts, he threw himself into his schoolwork, determined to get top of his class and make his parents proud. He got into medicine at Queens University in Belfast and while there joined a whole host of different religious groups.
‘For years I was trying to be the best academic person I could be,’ says the GP. ‘Then I moved more into my faith, I was trying to be the best Christian I could be.’
It worked for a while, but by his mid-20s most of his friends and family had begun to meet people and ‘establish their lives’.
‘I hadn’t and I hadn’t admitted to anyone else I was struggling with it,’ he says.
‘It was destroying me and in the last couple of years of my university life I felt completely isolated and alone. I felt like I’d lost my way completely.
‘That was the point I started to feel quite suicidal. I self-harmed at times and I spent my weekends downing bottles of wine. I felt I needed to reach out to an organisation because I believed I had done everything I could to change this problem but it wasn’t changing.’
In 2010 he began to research his predicament online.
‘I searched for stuff like, “how I can I not be gay and Christian?”’ he says. ‘If
‘For someone who is already vulnerable, it amplified it’
you search for that now you will still stumble into these organisations. I knew conversion therapy existed and I found True Freedom Trust.
‘I sent them an email and they responded saying they wanted to meet with me. A director came over from England and he said he believed that I could change my sexual orientation and he could see that I could pursue a relationship with a woman.
‘Which of course is exactly what I was looking for, it was the promise I had been tormenting myself with. I believed I needed to do this course, although it terrified me at the same time. I didn’t know what the process was going to be.’
Adair-Gilliland spent the next yearand-a-half going to monthly meetings, support groups and some one-on-one sessions in Belfast.
By the time he was finished with them he says he was in a far worse position that when he started. He describes the entire experience as traumatic.
‘They focus on how innately wrong your sexual identity is,’ he says. ‘That you have no fit within society, therefore you have no future with the feelings that you have.
‘Homosexuality is not biblical and not something our society tolerates and not something you yourself [as a Christian] tolerates.
‘It was a complete feeling of cognitive dissonance, your brain is thinking one thing but your feelings say another, which is just pure trauma.
‘I’d been doing that internally for most of my life up to that point. Then to begin to do it out loud, in a setting with others, to be told it constantly to your face... the trauma just piled on.
‘For someone who is already in a vulnerable situation, it just amplified it 100 times.’
In the end, the depression he was sinking into even deeper made it impossible for him to continue with the process.
‘I was so low at that point that I couldn’t be bothered going on with anything,’ he says. ‘I didn’t feel like it was helping, it was making things worse. At the end I felt like I had nowhere to go. I felt completely destroyed by it in terms of my faith and I felt completely isolated by it.’
Last week, politicians in Northern Ireland passed a motion calling for a ban on gay conversion therapy ‘in all its forms’. Those putting the motion forward argued it is ‘fundamentally wrong’ to view the LGBTQ community as needing a ‘fix or cure’.
It passed by 59 votes to 24 — but not before an amendment by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) was rejected. They wanted the Bill to include a clause that would state ‘legitimate religious activities’ do not constitute conversion therapy.
These activities would include preaching, prayer and pastoral support, which the DUP argued ‘must be protected’.
The proposed amendment was defeated by 59 votes to 28, after which the majority of DUP members opposed the motion.
First Minister of Northern Ireland Arlene Foster abstained from the vote, which is thought to have helped hasten her resignation this week as leader of the DUP. It’s believed that up to 22 of the party’s 28 Stormont Assembly members and four of its eight Westminster MPs signed a letter of no confidence in her, just days after the vote.
‘I was so relieved the religious protections they were trying to be put into the bill were removed,’ says Adair-Gilliland. ‘That was causing a huge amount of anxiety and panic. If that had gone through it would have allowed it to continue in the only setting that conversion therapy really happens.
‘The majority happens in a religious setting and the idea it was going to continue and be protected felt like a slap in the face to anyone who has been through such a harmful practice.’
For some time, there have been calls to make conversion therapy illegal across the world. Last December, more than 370 global religious leaders called for a ban on the practice, including South African cleric Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former Chief Rabbi of Ireland David Rosen and former president Mary McAleese.
In recent weeks, Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman announced his intentions for conversion therapy to be banned in the Republic, and has instructed officials to look at how such a law can be implemented.
Conversion therapy, also called gay-cure therapy, is the practice of trying to change someone’s sexual orientation from homosexual or bi-sexual to heterosexual. It can range from talking therapies and prayer to more extreme practices like exorcisms, physical violence and food deprivation.
There is no scientific basis for conversion therapy and it is not medically certified. Indeed, advocacy and support groups claim it more often causes harm.
‘People don’t realise how widespread it is’
A couple of years ago, The Family Acceptance Project in the US released the results of its study on LGBTQ youngsters and their conversion experiences with parents, practitioners and religious leaders. It found: ‘Suicide attempts nearly tripled for LGBT young people who reported both home-based efforts to change their sexual orientation by parents and intervention efforts by therapists and religious leaders (63%).’
While high levels of depression ‘more than tripled for LGBTQ young people who reported efforts to change their sexual orientation by parents, therapists and religious leaders’.
Last month, the Anti Conversion Therapy Coalition (ACTC), a new cross-party all-island organisation, was set up to advocate for the practice to be banned in Ireland and to raise awareness of the harm it can cause.
‘I don’t think a lot of people in Ireland realise how widespread it is,’ says Tiernan Mason, an ACTA spokesperson. ‘Most of what goes on here is not what you see in American movies, where you’re sent to a camp. A lot of it is just talking to a religious leader, such as a priest or a pastor.
‘It’s people who come out to their parents who then tell them they need to seek spiritual guidance and support.’
There is at least one registered charity in the North, Core Issues Trust, which offers support to gay men and women who seek to change their sexual preference.
Run by Mike Davidson, who describes himself as a member of the ex-gay community, the vision on its website states that: ‘CORE seeks to provide support for relationally and sexually damaged and wounded adults who seek wholeness, and desire to walk in obedience to the Gospel of Christ.’
‘Conversion therapy is an imposed title and one that we reject,’ Davidson told the BBC. ‘What I underwent was standard psychotherapeutic and counselling support from registered psychologists and a psychiatrist. I found as I worked on my behaviours, the feelings subsided.’
‘We’re not aware of any practising centres here [in the Republic] that would do conversion therapy like in the States,’ says Mason. ‘But I know in the UK there are a few centres that offer it.’
ACTC plans to continue lobbying for the Bill banning any such practices happening in Ireland.
‘The Bill would ban anyone trying to change another person’s sexuality,’ says Mason. ‘Anyone from a school principal trying to persuade a student to go back in the closet, to religious leaders telling people they shouldn’t be gay. It would also prevent someone from trying to open a centre here in the future.’
In the Republic, it would seem, any such practice is done mostly in an insidious manner.
‘Someone can be coerced and not even realise it at the time,’ says Mason. ‘There are services telling LGBTQ people they’ll never live a happy life and that God or your family will never accept you.’
It certainly had a detrimental affect on Garry Adair-Gilliland, one he feels lucky to have recovered from.
Growing up in a small village just outside Lurgan in Co Armagh, he says his Methodist upbringing was religious in ‘the traditional sense, not in an evangelical zealot sense’.
The younger of two boys, he began to be aware of his sexuality by his mid-teens.
‘I steered towards the Christian community because it’s safe for a queer little kid,’ he says. ‘You don’t talk about girls... it’s a place to hide when you don’t want to go out drinking and chasing girls, when you’ve no interest.
‘The closest I came to being attracted to a boy was David Boreanaz [the actor who played Angel] from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he became a slight obsession and it was only on reflection when I realised I was attracted to him.
‘I would never have said at that time that I was gay. I never wanted to admit it to myself.’
Starting college at Queens, although busy with his medical studies and heavily involved in a number of Christian groups, he was still extremely troubled.
‘At that stage in my life I could not allow myself to think about the future,’ he says. ‘Because my future either involved me being alone or not being here because of the way I viewed myself. Life wasn’t worth it for me.’
Turning for help to True Freedom Trust, he found himself talking about his sexuality for the first time out loud.
‘It was the first time I was admitting it to someone who was in a position of leadership and they told me they could change me,’ he says. ‘It was everything I was searching for since I was a teenager.’
He describes his conversion therapy experience as traumatic.
‘It’s not only negative for telling you that you’re going to become straight, which doesn’t work,’ he says. ‘But also because it’s traumatising you against your own identity.
‘It was the first time I’d ever spoken to a group of gay men, there were monthly meetings with oneto-one and group work.
‘There were about six of us, sitting in a room with one person leading, our counsellor. Throughout it all it they were compounding the shame you felt. They also offered psychotherapy options, which I declined, I only went through the counselling process.
‘You paid a suggested donation, they’re a registered charity. I don’t remember how much, it wasn’t a significant amount, the guts of £40 maybe.’
The Irish Daily Mail made several attempts to contact True Freedom Trust this week, but all were unsuccessful. On its website it says it rarely responds to media queries, instead it has the following statement:
‘True Freedom Trust offers biblical support and encouragement to adult Christians who, for reasons of faith, choose not to embrace a gay identity or to pursue a samesex relationship. We are not a therapeutic organisation and do not engage in nor endorse conversion therapy.’
‘They also had support groups,’ says Adair-Gilliland. ‘Which is where I met other men who were struggling and I made some very good friends.’
Does he know of anyone who completed the course, who believed they had been converted?
‘Yes, there are people who I’m aware of who have remained in the Church community and who have gone on to get married to women,’ he says. ‘In fact I went on to date a girl, she was working with me and is a very lovely person. We got on really well and I was encouraged by my Church community, after some of the therapy, to pursue a relationship.
‘It was very easy to be standoffish, because not only was I gay, but I was adhering to a Christian belief system, so I wasn’t going to be getting wild and frisky.
‘But after two months I felt like it was possibly the worst thing I could ever do and I’m so glad I had the insight not to hurt her.
‘It really made me distrust the Church community, that they would encourage that.’
After 18 months he was so depressed that he dropped out of the course and began drinking heavily.
‘The therapy was a turning point in a way,’ he says. ‘I was going to have to go through some kind of coming out process, and I did it through that conversion therapy process, which led to more trauma.
‘I hated myself, to the point of I didn’t want to be here, so I thought, I’ll just go meet up with some man and I don’t care.’ For a while he was reckless. ‘I was promiscuous, but it wasn’t fulfilling because I wasn’t doing it for fun,’ he says.
‘It’s a great thing to do when it’s for fun but I just thought, this is my life now, I have to do this and hide it.’
It took several years, but he began to make friends and ‘find my feet a little bit in the LGBTQ community’.
Through the Rainbow Trust charity in Belfast he accessed counselling services which helped him come to terms with who he is. He also met his partner Gary, and six years ago they were married.
He wants young people who are struggling and toying with the idea of conversion therapy to know that there are alternatives.
‘There are ways to reconcile your faith with your sexual identity,’ he says. ‘Speak to someone you trust, there are organisations out there you can trust.
‘Conversion therapy is dangerous,’ he adds. ‘It’s unregulated and it’s known to cause harm. It’s telling someone who identifies or feels they might be homosexual, bisexual or transgender that they are inherently wrong.
‘I do feel, although I rarely admit it, that I was cheated out of the best possible years of my life.
‘There were years in my life when I was so alone. I wasn’t able to live, at all in any way, because of the oppression that was put on me as an LGBTQ person. It doesn’t have to be like that.’
‘It’s traumatising you against your own identity’