This story was originally published by Uncloseted Media, an LGBTQ focused investigative news outlet.

This story contains mention of suicide and self-harm. If you or someone you know needs support, resources are available here.

At 12 years old, upon returning home from school, I saw my dad sitting in the living room. I immediately knew something was wrong.

“Come here,” he said, with my computer in his lap. He proceeded to show me the pictures of men kissing that he had found in my search history.

“If you live this way, either you’re gonna kill yourself or someone’s going to go out and kill you for it,” he told me. “And neither of those things matter because God will never love you again.”

I couldn’t say anything. In our world, my dad was the one with the answers. He was an elder in our church, the second-highest rung in authority and the highest form of control. If he said it, it had to be true.

For the next two years, I pretended like my feelings weren’t there. I felt like I was just waiting for the rest of my life to collapse. I knew being gay wasn’t an option.

So when I found conversion therapy at 15, it felt like the answer. I didn’t know it would cause me to spend the next seven years of my life undoing myself.

I became one of the nearly 700,000 Americans who have gone through conversion therapy. Though 23 states have implemented some bans on LGBTQ kids from receiving the discredited practice, the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that Colorado must relegalize it.

When I learned the news, my heart sank. The Supreme Court made the decision to side lawyers from Alliance Defending Freedom, a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group.

I was horrified. I understood the pain. I had experienced suicidal thoughts. And I knew that this decision would cost lives.

I was raised in Seattle in the International Churches of Christ, a high-control religious organization that was founded in the 1970s and spread to over 130 countries.

Church was not just something we did on Sundays. It was our social life, our worldview, our moral code, our hierarchy, and our family reputation. It was the way we understood what was good and what was dangerous.

The messaging was constant: Church services, Bible talks, discipling times, camps, small groups, leadership meetings behind closed doors where I was told not to listen.

Everyone watched everyone. If you sinned, you confessed. Information traveled upward. Shame traveled downward.

So when a camp counselor told me in the ninth grade that he used to struggle with same-sex attraction and that he could help me, it felt like I had a way out.

He introduced me........

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