Joshua Proctor

Joshua Proctor was not a reluctant participant in conversion therapy. He was one of the most motivated young people anyone could find. A Southern Baptist kid from South Florida, he genuinely loved God, genuinely wanted to change, and genuinely believed that if he just tried hard enough, it would work.

He went through conversion therapy eight different times between fourth grade and early college. It never worked. What it did do was push him toward depression, suicidal thoughts that began around age 16, a suicide attempt in high school, and a period of dangerous behavior in college that he traces directly back to the shame those programs built into him.

Today, Josh is a church leader, a spiritual director, a trainer of thousands of pastors across the Americas, and still a committed, theologically conservative Christian who holds to a traditional view on marriage and sexuality. His rejection of conversion therapy has nothing to do with a change in his beliefs. It has everything to do with what those programs actually did to him and to the young people he has worked with ever since.

Snapshot of This True Story:

• Josh grew up the youngest of five in a devout Southern Baptist family in South Florida, in church constantly, and always knew he was attracted to men, even before puberty.

• His parents discovered he had been looking at content related to his attractions online when he was in fourth grade. A year later, they took him to his first conversion therapy counselor.

• Over the following years, spanning grade school through early college, he went through conversion therapy eight times, including individual reparative therapy with a counselor affiliated with NARTH under the supervision of Dr. Joseph Nicolosi Sr., ex-gay ministries, prayer ministries, conferences, and eventually a live-in program.

• Some of these were initiated by his parents, some by church leaders, and some he sought out himself, believing fully that change was possible if he just tried hard enough.

• The therapy blamed his attractions on his relationship with his father and a lack of healthy connection with male peers, putting strain on a father-son bond that had been healthy before treatment.

• By his mid-teens, he was experiencing heightened depression and suicidal thoughts. He attempted suicide in his later years of high school. In college, the shame from years of being told he was failing produced risky behavior he describes as a direct consequence of what conversion therapy had built into him.

• Today, after years of honest theological work and real healing, Josh is a celibate gay Christian, a pastor, a Doctor of Ministry, and a trainer who has spent a decade helping conservative churches care for young people who are gay or transgender without resorting to the practices that nearly destroyed him. He urges parents to understand: he was the best-case scenario for conversion therapy, and it still caused lasting harm.

He Put Everything on the Christmas List

Josh was in fourth grade the first time he sat across from a conversion therapist. His parents had found content related to his attractions online and waited a year before bringing it up. When they finally did, they took him to a counselor.

He did not like it. The therapist spent sessions explaining what a man's role in marriage was supposed to be and what masculinity was supposed to look like. Josh had no idea what he was feeling yet or why. Being told to perform a role he did not understand while no one tried to help him understand himself just brought on shame.

Eventually he asked his parents to stop going. He says he put it on his Christmas list. They did stop, and the family went quiet about it for several years.

But the issue did not go away, and neither did the pattern of reaching toward conversion as a solution. Over the years that followed, Josh went through the process eight times in total, through individual therapy, reparative therapy, ex-gay conferences and ministries, and a live-in program. Some were his parents' decision. Some were pushed by pastors who, when he came to them about his attractions, sent him to a counselor or a conference rather than sitting with him in it. And some he sought out himself.

"I went through it eight different times," he said, "throughout grade school years, all the way into early college. Some of those were voluntary. Some were by suggestion. Like I would come to a pastor and share about being attracted to men and then they would send me to a conference or to a counselor or to a ministry."

The Pendulum

The message Josh received from reparative therapy and ex-gay ministry was simple and binary: you cannot be attracted to men and also be a Christian. Being gay was defined as a lifestyle of sex and drugs and everything that came with it. So the options laid out in front of him were to become attracted to women through therapy or to go live that life.

When the therapy did not work, and it did not work, the programs never acknowledged failure as their own. There was always another reason, always another instruction. He needed to go deeper into his childhood trauma. He needed to pray more. He needed to be more open. He needed to do more. The biblical story of Naaman having to wash in the river seven times was used as a motivational image: what if you are just on your sixth time?

"One of the biggest issues with a lot of reparative therapy and ex-gay ministries is that there's never a moment where someone says, ' Oh, this might just not work for you," Josh said. "No one ever says, maybe this is our fault. It's always you need to push farther. You're not working hard enough. You need to keep going."

So when the Christian straight path felt like an ongoing failure, he would swing toward the only other option he had been given. And when that life looked as destructive as he had been warned it would be, he would swing back to trying to change. The programs had created a pendulum with nowhere safe in the middle.

By his mid-teens, he was experiencing deep depression and suicidal thoughts. In his later years of high school, he attempted suicide. He entered college carrying everything those years had built into him.

What the Therapy Did to His Father

One of the defining features of reparative therapy during Josh's treatment was its explanation for why he was attracted to men. His NARTH-affiliated counselor believed his attractions were rooted in his relationship with his father and a lack of healthy connection with male peers.

This theory did not describe Josh's life accurately. His relationship with his father had been close. But because he trusted the process, he internalized the narrative anyway. That trust put strain on a bond that had not needed repair.

"Not only did this belief put strain on my relationship with my father as the cause of my attractions," Josh wrote in his brief to the United States Supreme Court, "but it caused my father to struggle with unnecessary guilt because of this narrative."

It took honest conversation and years of intentional work for Josh and his father to rebuild what conversion therapy had strained. Today their relationship is, in his words, the strongest and healthiest it has ever been. But it did not need to be damaged in the first place.

The Shame That Outlasted the Sessions

By the time Josh left his last conversion therapy program, a live-in arrangement he entered after a period of deep spiritual upheaval, he had already seen firsthand what those programs produced in the people around him.

"I met hundreds of other children and youth who underwent conversion therapy throughout my childhood," he wrote in his Supreme Court statement. "There was never a case where such attempts actually worked to change the person's internal attractions, even in cases where the person went on to pursue opposite sex marriage."

The majority of those young people, he observed, ended up leaving their Christian faith altogether. The therapy had been so closely tied to the harm they experienced that they could not separate one from the other. They left not because they rejected God but because they had been taught that God rejected them unless they changed, and change had not come.

The shame built by years of that message did not end when Josh walked out of his last program. It followed him into college, where it contributed to a period of risky behavior that he describes as a direct consequence of what the programs had instilled in him over years. When your relationship with God is conditioned on a change that does not happen, and when you have been taught that who you are attracted to is your failure, the harm does not stop at the exit.

Coming to Faith for Real

The most striking part of Josh's story, and the part most worth sitting with if you are a parent of faith, is what happened after all of it.

Josh came to what he describes as his true coming-to-Christ moment not through conversion therapy but through the wreckage that followed it. Realizing he needed to get his life together, he leaned on Christ not as a program to be completed but as a presence that could actually hold him. He enrolled in Bible school. He studied biblical literature. He eventually pursued a Doctor of Ministry, with his thesis exploring how ministry leaders who hold a traditional Christian view on marriage can walk alongside gay and transgender people in their spiritual formation.

He went through a long, open-handed theological journey, not assuming where he would land, reading widely, sitting with the hardest questions. He arrived at the same traditional Christian view on marriage and sexuality that he had been raised with, but this time it was genuinely his own, reached through honest study rather than through programs that told him change was the condition of God's love.

"I did everything advised of me," he wrote in his Supreme Court brief, "yet my attractions to men remain as present as ever. It became increasingly clear that my attractions were not rooted in these relationships as my therapist claimed. Instead, it was the false promises he made and the lack of dignity he attached to my persisting attractions that instilled deep shame, which has taken me years to heal."

He trains pastors now. He has trained thousands of church leaders across the Americas from conservative Christian denominations on how to care for young people who say they are gay or transgender while maintaining traditional views on marriage. The faith he holds today is one he arrived at through genuine wrestling, not through programs that told him change was the only way to be loved.

Key Lessons from Joshua's Story for Parents

Your child's motivation is not the determining factor. Josh was, by his own description, the best-case scenario for conversion therapy: a deeply committed Christian minor who truly wanted to change, in some cases asking his parents to let him attend. He still experienced heightened depression, suicidal thoughts, a suicide attempt, and years of downstream harm. Willingness is not protection.

The program will never name itself as the failure. Josh noted that in reparative therapy and ex-gay ministry, the failure is always placed on the child. More prayer, more effort, more willingness, one more time. If your child is not changing, the message they receive is that they are not trying hard enough. That message is what builds the shame.

Blaming family dynamics causes real damage. The theory that Josh's attractions came from his relationship with his father strained a relationship that had been healthy. It burdened his father with unnecessary guilt. It is a common feature of these programs, and it causes harm to families that did not need it.

The harm extends well past the sessions. The risky behavior Josh experienced in college was not separate from the conversion therapy he had been through as a child. It was a direct consequence of the shame those programs built into him over years. The harm does not end when a program ends.

Faith can be found on the other side, but it has to be real. Josh is a theologically conservative Christian today, not because conversion therapy led him there but in spite of what it did to him. He arrived at his faith through honest, open-handed searching, not through a program that told him change was his only path to God's love. Conversion therapy did not protect his faith. It nearly destroyed it. The faith he has now is one he fought for himself.

Josh has spent a decade asking conservative Christian churches to do better. Not to abandon their beliefs, but to recognize that forcing change on young people is not the same thing as loving them. He has seen what happens when minors in traditional religious communities are told their salvation depends on becoming someone they are not. He watched most of them walk away from the faith entirely.

If you are a parent trying to hold your child and your convictions together, Joshua Proctor is someone worth listening to. He held both. He just had to find his way there without the help of the programs that promised to make it easier.