The painful history of antigay ‘therapy’
‘Pray Away’ shows how churches offer the faithful both love and selfhate
“Pray Away” is a wise and compassionate film about antigay conversion therapy as it’s practiced and encouraged by the evangelical church. As a therapy, it’s destructive and a disaster, and the documentary doesn’t shy away from saying so. At the same time, “Pray Away” demonstrates an understanding of the warmth, welcome and fellowship that make church such a powerful and, to some degree, nurturing influence on people’s lives.
Thus, the movie’s compassion is not limited to the therapy’s victims but to its practitioners as well, some of whom are also victims. Like few things in life, the evangelical church offers to take people in with unconditional love and offer them friends and community, if only they will speak the truth about themselves.
But there’s a catch: If you’re gay, the truth about yourself is precisely what you then must give up. You’re expected to “pray away the gay.”
Director Kristine Stolakis presents nothing in black and white. The documentary has a point of view, but it doesn’t have villains. You don’t come away with a sense of righteous anger. but instead with wistfulness and melancholy. The movie shows people who lost years of their lives trying either to deny themselves or hide themselves. They embraced the church for the love, which was genuine and real, but they ended up staying for the selfhatred — or killing themselves.
“Pray Away” spans about 50 years of the churchled exgay movement, concentrating on a number of people who participated in the movement at a high level, only to turn against it. In that sense, the movie has the feeling of a pilgrims’ progress, in which the pilgrims experience redemption, then realize it was a false redemption, and then open up into another layer of realization where they understand that selflove has to come from within. Though there are political elements here, to be sure, “Pray Away” has more the feeling of witnessing multiple spiritual journeys.
These journeys are, by their very nature, moving. Julie Rodgers was a young lesbian who became a powerful antigay figure, speaking to congregations about her own conversion. But then she started burn
ing herself with cigarettes and heatedup coins. When we meet her, she’s fully open about her homosexuality and planning a church wedding with her girlfriend.
John Paulk is a fascinating figure, the former executive director of the antigay Exodus International and formerly the country’s leading spokesman for the exgay movement. We see him in archival footage looking withheld and repressed, and then see him today, looking open and relaxed, his entire essence transformed by no longer living a lie.
One of the film’s most powerful moments comes when Randy Thomas, former executive vice president of Exodus International, talks about his work to pass Proposition 8, the 2008 samesex marriage ban, in California. He recalls how, in his moment of triumph, he saw a demonstration of distraught gay and lesbian protesters, and had a sudden epiphany: These were his people.
In the end, the stories in “Pray Away” are not only about selfdiscovery, but also of people juggling competing longings. The evangelicals offered them love but not the freedom to be themselves. And now the secular world offers them freedom and acceptance, but without the structure of a loving, tightknit community.
The ideal, obviously, would be a little of both — a situation in which people could feel loved for being themselves but for really being themselves. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask.