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Prominent Mormon Ex-Gay Author Comes Out as Ex-Ex-Gay

Prominent Mormon Ex-Gay Author Comes Out as Ex-Ex-Gay

Prominent Mormon Ex-Gay Author Comes Out as Ex-Ex-Gay

Out and proud, but is he aware of the damage he's caused over the years?

rachelkiley

A prominent gay conversion therapist in the Mormon church has decided it’s time to start dating… men.

David Matheson, an author and creator of programs designed to “help” men quit the “homosexual lifestyle,” was outed as an ex-ex-gay in a Facebook post by the director of one of his programs, Rich Wyler.

“David…says that living a single, celibate life ‘just isn’t feasible’ for him, so he’s seeking a male partner,” Wyler wrote.

Pro-LGBTQ group Truth Wins Out (TWO) contacted Matheson and received a response confirming Wyler’s statement, but also proving that Matheson hasn’t fully changed his tune.

“My time in a straight marriage and in the ‘ex-gay’ world was genuine and sincere and a rich blending to me. I remember most of it with fondness and gratitude for the joy and growth it caused in me and many others. But I had stopped growing and was starting to die. So I’ve embarked on a new life-giving path that has already started a whole new growth process. I wasn’t faking it all those years. I’m not renouncing my past work or my LDS faith. And I’m not condemning mixed-orientation marriages. I continue to support the rights of individuals to choose how they will respond to their sexual attractions and identity. With that freedom, I am now choosing to pursue life as a gay man.”

The dissonance between realizing pretending you’re not gay is killing you but not understanding that having devoted your life to telling other men to do the same was harmful is astounding.

Chaim Levin attended Matheson’s ‘Journey Into Manhood,’ which is somehow an ex-gay program and not a super-duper gay program, wishes Matheson would own up to the harm he caused.

“…I can’t help but think of the hundreds if not thousands of people who are still stuck in the closet, a closet that was created in part by Mr. Matheson himself,” he said. “I hope that Mr. Matheson will do whatever he can to rectify the harm that he’s inflicted on many people in the LGBTQ community, myself included.”

Matheson ultimately posted a lengthy statement of his own on Facebook in the middle of the night.

In it, he insists that his marriage “truly did work for us both” and that it was personality differences that did them in, while also saying the attraction he experienced towards men was “very intense and led to pain and struggle in my marriage.”

But one of Matheson’s main points with his post seems to be to condemn the articles being posted about his sexuality. Not for reporting on a private matter, but for pushing an agenda, and widening the feud between the “right” and “left” and how sad it is that the sides “don’t know how to dialogue.”

Hopefully Matheson takes some time to dialogue with the men who were harmed by his ex-gay programs and papers, and realizes that pushing that perspective on people who come to a supposed leader or teacher already in pain and confused only causes more pain and confusion

After all, as TWO directed Wayne Besen pointed out, “If conversion therapy does not work for authors like David Matheson who write books on the discredited practice, it is naive to expect it to work for those reading such deceptive publications.”

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Rachel Kiley

Rachel Kiley is presumably a writer and definitely not a terminator. She can usually be found crying over queerbaiting in the Pitch Perfect franchise or on Twitter, if not both.

Rachel Kiley is presumably a writer and definitely not a terminator. She can usually be found crying over queerbaiting in the Pitch Perfect franchise or on Twitter, if not both.