The founder of one of the nation’s largest conversion therapy programs, who spent decades leading the organization, now says he is gay, apologizing for his role in the practice.
McKrae Game, who founded and led Hope for Wholeness in South Carolina, publicly announced he was gay in early June, more than two years after the organization’s board of directors abruptly fired him.
In a Facebook post last week, Game, 51, said he was “wrong,” adding: “Please forgive me.”
“I certainly regret where I caused harm,” he wrote. “Promoting the triadic model that blamed parents and conversion or prayer therapy, that made many people believe that their orientation was wrong, bad, sinful, evil, and worse that they could change was absolutely harmful."
“It’s all in my past, but many, way TOO MANY continue believing that there is something wrong with themselves and wrong with people that choose to live their lives honestly and open as gay, lesbian, trans, etc.,” he added. “Learn to love yourself and others.”
He was gay when he received counseling from a therapist who assured him he could overcome his same-sex attractions.
He was gay when he married a woman and founded what would become one of the nation’s most expansive conversion therapy ministries.
He was gay when thousands of people just like him sought his organization’s counsel, all with the goal of erasing the part of themselves Game and his associates preached would send them to hell.
For two decades, he led Hope for Wholeness, a faith-based conversion therapy program in South Carolina’s Upstate. Conversion therapy is a discredited practice intended to suppress or eradicate a person’s LGBTQ identity through counseling or ministry.
But the group’s board of directors abruptly fired Game in November 2017.
In June, Game publicly announced he was gay and severed his ties with the organization.
Now, the man once billed as a leading voice in the conversion therapy movement is trying to come to terms with the harm he inflicted while also learning to embrace a world and community he assailed for most of his adult life.
Also, I feel like we should not call it "conversion therapy" ... That's what its proponents want it to be called, but I feel like that gives it some credibility it does not deserve.
At the very least, we could make it a habit of saying "so-called conversion therapy."
He wholly deserves every last shred of opprobrium leveled at him. It’s one thing to delude oneself, but it’s an entirely different evil to coerce others into deluding themselves, and harming them irreparably in the process.
He has a monumental amount of work to do to atone for such monstrosity. Otherwise, he can fu*k the hell off and die in misery.
Read an account by a hetero journalist who went to a conversion camp posing as gay. Group hugs were done with the counselors sitting against the walls and the camper sitting backed up against him. The campers including the journo reported the counselors had erections.
-------------------------------- Several people have eaten my cooking and survived.
Posts: 25850 | Location: Still living at 9000 feet in the High Rockies of Colorado | Registered: 20 April 2005
My mother wanted to send me to be converted. I was not surprised. I was in my 50s as I recall. I declined. Knowing her minister, I told her to talk to him.
-------------------------------- Several people have eaten my cooking and survived.
Posts: 25850 | Location: Still living at 9000 feet in the High Rockies of Colorado | Registered: 20 April 2005
Not to paint with too broad a brush, but I have long believed and seen evidence that a whole lot of people involved in various psychological therapies got into it to fix themselves.
-------------------------------- "A mob is a place where people go to get away from their conscience" Atticus Finch
