On gay adolescence, Christian faith, reaction formation, and the difficult work of learning to love oneself
The church doors open, and a boy steps inside.
He knows where to go. His family has occupied roughly the same pew for years, somewhere near the middle, close enough to see the pastor but far enough back that no one notices if he becomes distracted. He recognizes the smell of old hymnals and polished wood, the familiar voices rising around him, and the gentle rustle of people settling into their seats. He has been coming here for as long as he can remember.
This is where he learned to sing, where people remember his birthday, where adults ask about school and tell him how much he has grown. He knows the stories of Noah, Moses, David, and Jesus. He knows when to bow his head, when to stand, and which words to say at the end of a prayer. He believes in God, deeply.
But lately, church has become a more complicated place.
He has begun noticing other boys in ways he cannot explain away as admiration. Sometimes the attraction surprises him in the middle of an otherwise ordinary day. He finds himself looking at a classmate's face, remembering a friend's smile, or longing for a closeness he has no way of asking for.
And almost as quickly, he feels ashamed.
So when the congregation bows its heads, he prays a little differently than he used to.
He asks God to forgive him. To help him resist temptation. To make him stronger. Sometimes, when he is especially frightened, he asks God to change him.
He may be only thirteen or fourteen years old. And he has already begun to believe that something about the way he loves could separate him from everything he knows.
There is a peculiar cruelty in this kind of conflict. The boy has not necessarily lost his faith. He may love the church, its people, its rituals, and the sense of being connected to something larger than himself. Religion may offer him real comfort. But the place he turns to for comfort has also become a place where he fears being discovered.
He begins bringing his shame to the very institution that may have helped him acquire it.
For some gay men raised in Christian homes, coming out is never simply a matter of telling people whom they are attracted to. It can involve confronting an entire psychological world: the God they imagined loving them, the parents whose approval felt essential, the community in which they belonged, and the version of themselves they believed they were supposed to become.
The closet, in these circumstances, may begin to resemble a church. It has rules, rituals, confessions, prohibitions, and an ever-present force of condemnation.
And sometimes, the boy discovers that the person most committed to keeping him inside it has become himself.
When Love and Condemnation Come From the Same Place
It would be easy to describe conservative religious environments exclusively through the language of rejection. But that would miss something essential about why these experiences can become so psychologically complicated.
For many children, church is not merely an institution that communicates moral rules. It is woven into the fabric of life: Sunday mornings, Christmas services, weekly youth group activities, shared meals, summer camps, and friendships all carry emotional significance.
A boy may love his pastor. He may admire his father for serving in the church. He may remember his mother singing hymns while preparing dinner. Religious faith can provide continuity, identity, and protection during periods of uncertainty. These attachments do not become false simply because the same environment communicates that homosexuality is sinful.
This is part of the difficulty.
A young person may receive genuine love from people whose beliefs leave little room for an important aspect of his emerging identity. Perhaps his parents are affectionate and attentive. They help with homework, encourage his interests, and celebrate his achievements. They might describe their love as unconditional.
But he has also heard what they believe about homosexuality. He remembers a comment made during a sermon or a conversation about same-sex marriage. Perhaps his parents discuss homosexuality with pity rather than hostility. They may say that they love gay people while believing that same-sex relationships violate God's design.
For a child who has not yet disclosed his sexuality, the distinction may provide little reassurance. He knows he is loved. He is less certain whether the love will survive being known.
Research on family rejection underscores the importance of this uncertainty. Ryan and colleagues (2009), studying 224 lesbian, gay, and bisexual young adults, found strong associations between recalled family rejection during adolescence and subsequent mental health difficulties. Participants reporting high levels of rejection were substantially more likely to report depression and suicide attempts than those reporting little or no rejection.
These findings do not mean that every conservative Christian family rejects its gay children. Nor do they establish that religious belief itself produces these outcomes. What matters is how beliefs are expressed, how children experience them, and whether belonging becomes conditional upon concealing or changing their sexuality.
The psychological burden can begin long before any explicit rejection occurs. A boy does not necessarily need to hear his parents say they would reject him. He may only need to believe that telling the truth would place their love in jeopardy.
And because childhood attachment is fundamental to our sense of safety, the possibility of losing that love can feel catastrophic.
The Bible, the Body, and the Fear of Sin
For some adolescents, the conflict becomes organized around particular biblical passages.
Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 contain prohibitions concerning sexual relations between men. Romans 1:26–27 describes same-sex sexual behavior within Paul's broader argument about idolatry and estrangement from God. Other passages, including 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 and 1 Timothy 1:10, have been translated and interpreted in ways that condemn certain same-sex practices.
These texts have occupied a prominent place in Christian debates about homosexuality. Their interpretation, however, remains contested. Traditional Christian readings frequently understand these passages as establishing moral restrictions on same-sex sexual behavior. Other Christian scholars emphasize the historical settings in which the texts were written, the limitations of translating ancient categories into modern understandings of sexual orientation, and questions about whether the passages address committed, mutual same-sex relationships as understood today (Gnuse, 2015).
A comprehensive theological treatment would require more space than an essay on psychological development can offer. But the existence of these disagreements is significant.
A young person may encounter one interpretation of scripture as though it were the only possible understanding of God's will. He may not know that Christians disagree about these passages. He may never have been invited to ask how ancient cultural practices, translation choices, or historical context influence their interpretation. He simply hears that what he feels and desires is wrong.
Imagine what this can mean during adolescence, when sexuality is often experienced with considerable confusion even under supportive circumstances. A boy begins to recognize attraction to another male. He feels excitement, curiosity, and longing. Perhaps he has an ordinary sexual fantasy, something that would scarcely concern him if its object were a girl.
Yet the fantasy may immediately evoke thoughts about sin, punishment, or eternal separation from God. Sexual arousal becomes followed by prayer. Pleasure becomes followed by guilt. The body begins to feel like something that must be vigilantly watched.
For some, this creates a painful cycle in which the very attempts to suppress desire make it more psychologically preoccupying. A boy tries not to think about another boy, only to find that the effort repeatedly returns his attention to him. He resolves to stop having particular fantasies, then experiences them again and interprets their recurrence as evidence of moral weakness. The experience may become increasingly solitary.
He cannot easily ask his parents for reassurance without revealing the content of his distress. He may be frightened to speak with a pastor. Even ordinary conversations about sexuality become difficult because they threaten to expose something he believes should remain hidden. The boy can confess his sins in prayer while remaining unable to tell another human being what he is actually feeling.
He may become exceptionally practiced at asking for forgiveness without ever allowing himself to be understood.
When Prayer Becomes a Defense
Psychoanalysis offers a useful framework for understanding what may happen when desire becomes associated with anticipated punishment or the loss of love.
Freud described defenses as psychological processes that help the mind manage experiences of anxiety and conflict. These processes are not simply conscious decisions to avoid something unpleasant. They can operate outside awareness, shaping how individuals experience themselves and organize their relationships.
One such defense is reaction formation.
Reaction formation involves responding to a feeling, wish, or impulse that is experienced as unacceptable by developing or emphasizing its opposite. The person may express an attitude that stands in sharp contrast to the underlying feeling, sometimes with an intensity or rigidity that helps keep the original experience outside awareness. In his early writing on sexuality, Freud (1905/1953) explored reaction formation in relation to the development of shame, disgust, and moral restraints.
Consider a hypothetical young man who experiences same-sex attraction but believes that acknowledging it would threaten his relationship with God, his family, and the whole world he knows. He may begin devoting himself more intensely to religious observance. He volunteers for additional church activities, memorizes scripture, prays for long periods, and becomes especially concerned about sexual morality. All of these activities can be sincere expressions of faith. Religious commitment itself provides no evidence that a person is defending against unacceptable sexual feelings.
But for some individuals, a more complicated process may be occurring. The young man may be attempting to establish, both to himself and to others, that he is the opposite of what he fears he might be. He is not sinful. He is devout. He is not sexually undisciplined. He is morally vigilant. He does not welcome forbidden desires. He condemns them. In this defensive arrangement, the more threatening the attraction becomes, the more urgently he may need to identify with the values that oppose it. His religious commitment may be genuine, and the defensive function may exist alongside that genuineness. Human motives are rarely pure or singular.
This distinction is particularly important because reaction formation should never become a casual explanation for religious conservatism or opposition to homosexuality. A person's public beliefs cannot establish the presence of an unconscious same-sex attraction. Nor should we assume that a gay adolescent's devotion is merely a disguise for his sexuality.
The psychoanalytic question concerns the individual's experience. Does religious activity feel freely chosen, meaningful, and enlivening? Or has it become increasingly compulsory, driven by the fear that any relaxation of moral vigilance will expose something dangerous? Does prayer offer comfort, or does the person feel compelled to pray until he has temporarily relieved an intolerable sense of contamination? Has faith become a source of psychological integration, or is it being recruited into a struggle against identity and parts of the self?
Sometimes the same practice serves more than one function. A young man may genuinely love God while desperately hoping that his prayers will make him heterosexual. He may find peace in worship and experience profound shame when the service ends.
What makes reaction formation worth considering is not the presence of faith, but the possibility that certain forms of religious striving have become necessary to protect the person from feelings he cannot yet tolerate.
The God Who Never Looks Away
There is another psychological dimension to growing up within a religious tradition that emphasizes divine awareness. Psalm 139 describes a God who knows the individual intimately, including thoughts and movements that remain unseen by others. For many Christians, this is a deeply comforting image. It suggests that human beings are never abandoned, forgotten, or beyond divine understanding.
But for a child who has come to believe that his desires are unacceptable to God, the same image may acquire a frightening meaning. He may imagine that God notices everything. The look he gave another boy. The fantasy he had before falling asleep. The moment of pleasure he wishes he could take back. Even when no one else knows, God knows.
Psychoanalysis has long been interested in the ways moral authority becomes internalized. Freud's concept of the superego describes, in part, the development of an internal moral agency shaped by identifications with parental and cultural authorities.
An interesting detail is that Freud did not originally use the terms id, ego, and superego. Writing in German, he referred to das Es (the It), das Ich (the I), and das Über-Ich (the Above-I, or Over-I). The more familiar Latinized terms were adopted in James Strachey's English translations, giving these concepts a somewhat more technical and impersonal quality than they carried in Freud's original language. The distinction is worth considering. The It refers to the instinctual, often unconscious wishes and impulses that move within us, sometimes without our understanding or consent. The I is the part of the mind that experiences itself as a person, attempting to navigate the competing demands of desire, reality, and conscience. The Above-I represents an internalized moral authority, shaped partly by parental expectations, prohibitions, and cultural ideals. It is the voice that tells us what we should or should not want, and sometimes punishes us simply for wanting it. For a young gay man raised in a religious environment where same-sex attraction is condemned, this distinction can be especially meaningful. His It may carry desires that emerge spontaneously, his Above-I may condemn those desires as sinful, and his I is left trying to negotiate a conflict between what he feels, what he believes, and whom he fears disappointing. What appears outwardly as a struggle between sexuality and religion may therefore also become an intimate struggle among different parts of his own psychological life (Freud, 1923/1961). More contemporary readings now describe the superego as the inner critic.
The superego, or above-I, is not synonymous with religion, and religious conscience cannot be reduced to psychological pathology. But the concept helps explain how external moral demands may become experienced as an internal authority capable of judging, criticizing, and punishing the self.
For some young men, religious teachings about sexuality may become incorporated into a particularly severe internal moral world. The boy may no longer require a pastor to condemn him. He has learned to condemn himself. He may become preoccupied with whether his thoughts are sinful, whether his repentance is genuine, or whether he has sufficiently resisted temptation. A moment of sexual pleasure may be followed by an extended period of self-reproach.
He may bargain with God, promising to become better, more disciplined, more devoted. When desire inevitably returns, he may experience the recurrence as a failure of faith. There can be something especially agonizing about feeling that one's body repeatedly betrays one's most cherished beliefs.
This is also where a distinction between religious commitment and religiously themed obsessive-compulsive symptoms becomes important. Some individuals experience scrupulosity, a form of obsessive-compulsive symptomatology involving intrusive religious or moral fears and repetitive attempts to obtain certainty or relief. Not every intense religious concern represents scrupulosity, and not every conflict about sexuality is obsessional.
Still, clinicians working with religious sexual minorities should remain attentive to whether prayer, confession, reassurance-seeking, or other rituals have become driven by anxiety rather than freely chosen spiritual practice.
The boy may experience himself as failing God when he is actually struggling with an internal conflict he did not choose.
The False Self in the Fellowship Hall
Donald Winnicott's work offers another way of understanding what can happen when a child feels that important aspects of himself must remain concealed.
In his discussion of the true and false self, Winnicott (1960/1965) explored how adaptation to environmental demands can become organized around protecting the more spontaneous aspects of personality. A false-self organization is not simply dishonesty. It may represent an attempt to preserve psychological continuity and maintain important relationships under conditions in which spontaneous self-expression feels unsafe.
Imagine a boy who becomes known throughout his church as unusually mature. He is respectful, helpful, responsible, and serious about his faith. Adults praise his character. He volunteers without complaint, avoids behaviors that might attract criticism, and becomes especially attentive to what others expect of him. People describe him as a wonderful young Christian man. Perhaps he is.
But he may also be learning that the safest version of himself is the version that never causes discomfort. He discovers that approval becomes especially available when he conforms.
Over time, the performance may become difficult to distinguish from his ordinary personality. He may no longer consciously experience himself as hiding. He simply knows how to become the person everyone expects. There is something tragic about being celebrated for an adaptation that has required the concealment of one's inner life. The praise may feel good, but it may also deepen his uncertainty. If these people knew what I wanted, would they still think I was good? He receives affection for the person he presents while remaining frightened that the person he experiences internally would be less welcome. A boy can become the pride of his church while privately believing that he is its disappointment.
This is one possible psychological consequence of growing up in an environment where love is experienced as dependent upon particular forms of self-presentation. It is not inevitable. Many religious communities offer children genuine opportunities for spontaneity, emotional expression, and secure belonging. But when a child experiences significant portions of himself as unacceptable, compliance may become an essential means of preserving attachment.
The cost may not become fully apparent until adulthood, when he begins to wonder why he is so uncomfortable disappointing others, expressing anger, acknowledging desire, or making decisions that differ from family expectations. He may have spent so many years asking what a good Christian man should want that he has difficulty recognizing what he wants himself.
The Fear of Losing More Than Faith
Coming out in a conservative Christian family can involve losses that are difficult for outsiders to appreciate.
The young man may fear rejection from parents, siblings, grandparents, childhood friends, pastors, and mentors. But he may also fear losing the story that once gave his life coherence. He knows where he came from. He knows what his family believes. He knows what kind of man he is expected to become. There may have been an imagined future: marriage to a woman, children, family holidays, church involvement, and a shared religious life. Recognizing same-sex attraction may unsettle this future before he has had an opportunity to imagine another.
He may need to grieve a life he has not lived.
Perhaps he worries that his parents will never attend his wedding. Perhaps he imagines his mother crying when he tells her. Perhaps he fears that his father will regard him differently, or that his siblings will be discouraged from speaking with him.
There may also be a frightening question about the afterlife. If he has been taught that same-sex relationships place salvation in jeopardy, coming out may feel like a decision with eternal consequences.
This is a psychological burden of extraordinary magnitude to place upon an adolescent and young adult.
Research offers reason to take these conflicts seriously. Kubicek and colleagues (2009), studying young men who have sex with men, documented experiences of internalized religious condemnation as well as efforts to find more supportive religious identities. Pietkiewicz and Kołodziejczyk-Skrzypek (2016), in interviews with eight gay Catholic men in Poland, identified several ways participants navigated religious and sexual identity conflict, including attempts to reject their attraction, questioning religious authority, and seeking alternative interpretations of doctrine. Neither study suggests that all religious gay men experience this conflict. Rather, they illustrate the range of psychological negotiations that may be involved.
Some young men distance themselves from faith. Others remain deeply religious but reconsider particular teachings. Some compartmentalize their religious and sexual lives, while others gradually construct an understanding in which both can coexist.
For the individual, however, these are not simply abstract identity strategies. They will likely involve grief, anger, loyalty, longing, and the fear of losing relationships that have shaped an entire life.
The Anger That Cannot Be Spoken
There is an anger that can develop when a young man begins to recognize that the people and institutions he loves have also contributed to his shame. It may emerge slowly, long after he has learned to explain away his hurt. Perhaps he remembers a sermon in which homosexuality was described as sinful, the laughter of other boys during a church retreat, or the way his father's expression changed when a gay couple appeared on television. At the time, he may have said nothing. He might even have laughed along, nodded in agreement, or silently reminded himself that these were good people who wanted what was best for him. Years later, the memories may acquire a different meaning. What once seemed ordinary begins to feel painful. He realizes how much of his childhood was spent listening to people speak about someone they did not know was sitting among them.
Yet allowing himself to feel angry with these people can be surprisingly difficult. His parents may have been loving and attentive in countless other ways. His pastor may have offered comfort during periods of grief, encouraged his education, or helped him feel that his life had meaning. The church may contain some of his happiest childhood memories. How does he reconcile these experiences with the recognition that the same people and teachings left him frightened of his own sexuality? He may feel disloyal for even asking the question. There can be an unspoken expectation that gratitude should cancel out anger, as though acknowledging what was good requires him to minimize what was painful.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, this conflict can become especially difficult when anger is directed toward figures upon whom we depend for love, security, and belonging. A child needs to preserve his attachment to caregivers, even when those relationships are complicated by disappointment or hurt. Sometimes it feels safer to locate the problem within oneself than to recognize that the people one loves have caused pain. If his parents are good and their teachings are right, perhaps he is the one who must change. His anger may then become guilt, self-criticism, or a renewed determination to become the kind of son and Christian he imagines they want.
There may also be anger toward God himself, and this can feel even more forbidden.
Imagine a boy who has spent years praying for his attractions to disappear. He kneels beside his bed, closes his eyes, and asks God to help him become different. Perhaps he promises to read scripture more faithfully, resist temptation, or devote himself more completely to the church. He prays with the sincerity and desperation of someone who believes that his future happiness, his family's acceptance, and perhaps even his salvation depend upon the answer.
But the feelings remain.
He continues noticing other boys. He continues longing for affection. The desires he has asked God to remove return with an ordinary persistence that he experiences as evidence of spiritual failure.
Over time, the prayers may begin to change. Beneath the requests for forgiveness, anger develops. Why did you make me this way if you do not want me to be this way? Why give me the capacity to love another man and then tell me that loving him is wrong? Why have you allowed me to suffer when I have tried so hard to be good?
These may be among the most frightening questions he has ever allowed himself to consider.
God is supposed to be loving, merciful, and just. The boy may have been taught that God knows him more completely than any human being ever could. Yet he may also have come to believe that God disapproves of something fundamental within him. He finds himself longing for acceptance from a divine figure he experiences as withholding it.
The emotional contradiction can become almost unbearable. He wants to move closer to God for comfort while feeling wounded by the God he has come to imagine. He may experience anger toward God and then immediately feel ashamed of that anger, adding another perceived sin to an already exhausting list.
Psychoanalysis offers a way of thinking about this conflict without reducing religious faith to a psychological defense. Our representations of God can become intertwined with earlier relational experiences, cultural teachings, and internalized expectations of authority. For some individuals, God may be experienced as a loving and forgiving presence. For others, or even for the same person at different moments, God may feel demanding, disappointed, absent, or punitive. These experiences need not correspond neatly to the person's conscious theology.
A young man may sincerely believe that God loves him unconditionally while remaining emotionally convinced that divine acceptance must be earned. He might recite passages about grace while feeling compelled to repent for desires he cannot control. The God he describes in conversation may be considerably more compassionate than the God before whom he privately judges himself.
We might wonder whether his difficulty expressing anger toward God resembles the conflict of a child who cannot safely acknowledge resentment toward a beloved parent. To feel anger is to risk disturbing an attachment that seems necessary for survival. The person may therefore defend against the anger by becoming more submissive, more self-critical, or more insistent that the authority figure is entirely good. In some circumstances, reaction formation or identification with a punitive authority may contribute to this arrangement, although neither should be presumed from religious behavior alone.
There is an important biblical irony here. Scripture itself contains expressions of anger, protest, and bewilderment directed toward God. In Psalm 22:1, the psalmist cries, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (King James Version). Job challenges the apparent injustice of his suffering and demands an audience with God, while the prophet Habakkuk asks why God seems unwilling to intervene in the face of suffering (Habakkuk 1:2–3). Even Jesus, in the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion, speaks the opening words of Psalm 22 (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34).
These are not portraits of faith entirely free from anguish. They suggest that the biblical relationship with God can contain lament, bewilderment, accusation, and protest. Christian traditions differ in how they interpret these passages and what they permit believers to express, but the presence of such language complicates the notion that anger toward God is necessarily incompatible with religious devotion.
For a gay adolescent who has learned that even questioning his religious authorities may be sinful, this possibility can be difficult to imagine. He may have spent years trying to preserve a relationship with God by suppressing precisely the feelings that would allow him to engage with that relationship more honestly.
The anger may therefore find other expressions. It may turn inward as shame, emerge as resentment toward openly gay men who seem comfortable with themselves, or appear as an unusually rigid insistence upon moral rules. Occasionally, he may become critical of those who have found ways to reconcile Christianity with same-sex relationships. Their freedom may evoke not only disagreement but something more personally troubling: the possibility that his own suffering was not inevitable.
There may be envy in this recognition. Perhaps another gay man speaks comfortably about his faith, brings his partner to church, or describes a relationship with God that is not organized around fear. For someone who has spent years treating his own desire as an offense, witnessing such ease may awaken longing alongside resentment. He may feel that the other man has permitted himself something he was never allowed to have.
But anger need not take these forms. It may also become an important part of psychological development.
The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein's account of the depressive position offers a useful way to understand this possibility. In Kleinian thinking, a developmental achievement involves becoming increasingly capable of recognizing that the same loved person can be experienced as gratifying and frustrating, good and disappointing. Love and anger need not be kept entirely separate. The capacity to tolerate this ambivalence creates greater room for concern, grief, and the wish to repair relationships without denying their painful aspects (Klein, 1935, 1940).
For a young man confronting the consequences of his religious upbringing, this may mean recognizing that his parents could have loved him deeply while also communicating beliefs that caused him harm. His pastor might have offered genuine guidance while remaining limited by theological assumptions he now questions. His church may have provided belonging and contributed to shame.
Allowing these realities to coexist does not necessarily make the anger disappear. In fact, it may initially make the anger more available. For the first time, the young man can recognize that he has been hurt without immediately concluding that he is ungrateful, disobedient, or morally deficient.
He may also begin to distinguish the God he was taught to fear from the God he now understands or hopes to encounter. For some men, this opens the possibility of a different spiritual relationship. Others may find that their anger leads them away from Christianity altogether. Still others remain ambivalent, neither able to return comfortably to their childhood faith nor ready to relinquish it.
There is no predetermined psychological destination.
What matters is the growing capacity to acknowledge one's experience without immediately converting it into self-condemnation.
A man may eventually find himself able to say that he is angry with his parents, angry with his church, and even angry with God. He may feel grief about the years spent praying to become someone else, the adolescence he could not fully inhabit, or the relationships he avoided because they seemed to place his belonging at risk.
He may still love his family. He may still believe in God. He may still remember his childhood church with affection.
But perhaps he no longer needs to protect those attachments by denying what they cost him.
And perhaps the anger he once feared would separate him from everything he loved becomes part of discovering that he, too, deserves a place within those relationships. Not because he has finally become the person others wanted him to be, but because he is beginning to recognize how much of himself he was asked to leave unspoken.
When Coming Out Feels Like Betrayal
The popular language of coming out often emphasizes courage, authenticity, and liberation. These are important dimensions of the experience. But for someone raised in a strongly religious community, disclosure may also feel like betrayal.
He may believe that he is disappointing his parents, embarrassing his family, rejecting his upbringing, or abandoning God. Even when he has reached some acceptance of his sexuality, the anticipated pain of others may remain difficult to tolerate.
He imagines the conversation before it happens. Perhaps his mother will cry. Perhaps his father will sit silently. Perhaps someone will ask whether he has prayed about it, whether he has acted on his attractions, or whether he is certain this is not a phase. He may spend months or years preparing for reactions that cannot be fully predicted.
Coming out requires him to tolerate the possibility that the people who have known him longest may need to revise their understanding of him.
Yet there is another loss involved. He may need to relinquish the hope that he can preserve everyone's approval by continuing to conceal himself.
For some young men, secrecy becomes a way of protecting loved ones from difficult feelings. They tell themselves that disclosure would hurt their parents, disrupt family relationships, or create unnecessary conflict. There may be truth in those concerns. But concealment can also preserve a familiar relational arrangement in which the young man's own emotional life remains secondary to the anticipated reactions of others.
He becomes responsible for maintaining everyone's comfort. Sometimes he pays for that comfort with his own isolation.
The decision to come out should never be romanticized as an obligation. Adolescents who depend upon potentially rejecting caregivers may face real threats to housing, safety, financial support, or emotional well-being. Disclosure must remain a choice informed by the person's circumstances.
But when safety permits, the work of becoming more visible can involve confronting the belief that being oneself necessarily constitutes an injury to others. A young man may discover that his parents' disappointment belongs partly to their own expectations, their beliefs, and the future they imagined for him.
He may still care about their feelings without accepting responsibility for making himself disappear to prevent them.
Can Faith and Sexuality Coexist?
One of the limitations of discussions about religious trauma is that they sometimes imply that psychological freedom requires abandoning religion.
For some gay men, leaving a condemning religious environment is indeed an important step toward well-being. It may allow them to separate from relationships and teachings that have become associated with shame.
For others, however, faith remains deeply meaningful. They may wish to retain their belief in God, their Christian identity, and the spiritual practices that have sustained them throughout life.
Research suggests that these identities need not remain in permanent opposition.
Anderson and Koc (2020) examined 183 religious gay men and found that greater integration of religious and gay identities was associated with lower levels of guilt and shame. Rodriguez, Etengoff, and Vaughan (2019) likewise identified distinct patterns of religious and sexual identity integration among 750 gay, lesbian, and bisexual participants, illustrating the diversity of ways people negotiate these dimensions of themselves.
The significance of this research is not that everyone should reconcile religious and sexual identities. Some people find that reconciliation is neither possible nor desirable within the traditions they inherited. Rather, it challenges the assumption that gay identity and religious faith are necessarily incompatible.
There are Christians who affirm same-sex relationships, churches that welcome LGBTQ+ members, and theological traditions that interpret scripture differently from the conservative teachings many gay men encountered in childhood. For some individuals, discovering these communities can be transformative.
Imagine a young man attending an affirming church for the first time. He recognizes the hymns. He hears familiar words from scripture. People greet one another, exchange stories, and settle into their seats. There is something reassuring about the familiarity.
But he notices something unfamiliar too. He sees two men sitting together without appearing concerned about being recognized as a couple. He hears a pastor speak about LGBTQ+ people without describing them as morally deficient. He discovers that his presence does not require an explanation or apology.
Perhaps he feels relieved. Perhaps he becomes unexpectedly emotional. Or perhaps he feels suspicious.
Acceptance can be difficult to trust when rejection has been anticipated for years. He may wonder whether the welcome is genuine, whether the theology is legitimate, or whether he is betraying the faith of his childhood by allowing himself to be comfortable.
The old conflict may continue even in an environment that no longer reproduces it. This is where the psychological and spiritual dimensions of the experience meet. Reconsidering a religious interpretation may be intellectually possible long before the person can emotionally experience himself as acceptable.
He may need time to discover that faith can remain meaningful without requiring hostility toward his own desire.
When Faith Promises to Make You Different: The Legacy of Conversion Therapy
For some young men, the struggle between sexuality and faith eventually moves beyond the privacy of prayer. What began as a boy quietly asking God to change him may become something that parents, pastors, counselors, and entire religious communities attempt to accomplish on his behalf.
Perhaps he confides in a youth pastor after a particularly difficult week. He is frightened by his attraction to other young men and asks whether there is something he can do to make it stop. The pastor listens, places a hand on his shoulder, and assures him that God can change him. He may be told that his feelings are a temptation, a consequence of childhood wounds, or a confusion that can be overcome through sufficient faith and commitment.
For a moment, the boy feels hopeful. Someone finally knows what he has been carrying. He has spoken aloud the secret that has occupied so much of his private life, and he has not been immediately rejected.
But the relief may come with a condition.
He is welcome, loved, and supported in becoming someone other than the person he is discovering himself to be.
This is the psychological territory in which conversion therapy, sometimes described as reparative therapy, reorientation therapy, or sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE), has historically operated. These practices attempt to alter or suppress same-sex attraction, encourage heterosexuality, or produce conformity with particular religious or cultural expectations about sexuality. They have taken many forms, ranging from formal psychotherapy and aversive conditioning to religious counseling, prayer-based programs, and efforts to reinterpret same-sex attraction as evidence of psychological or spiritual injury.
Not every religious conversation about sexuality constitutes conversion therapy. Individuals may seek spiritual guidance about their relationships, sexual behavior, celibacy, or religious commitments without being subjected to an effort to change their orientation. The important distinction concerns whether the intervention begins with a predetermined conclusion that same-sex attraction itself is unacceptable and must be eliminated, diminished, or replaced.
A young man may be told that his attraction is the result of an emotionally distant father, an overinvolved mother, childhood trauma, insufficient masculine identification, or a failure to develop appropriately. These explanations can be especially compelling when offered by someone whose authority he trusts. They provide a story about why he feels the way he does and, more importantly, imply that something can be repaired.
If his sexuality is the consequence of a wound, perhaps healing the wound will make him heterosexual. If it reflects insufficient masculinity, perhaps becoming more masculine will remove the attraction. If it represents spiritual weakness, perhaps deeper devotion will finally bring relief.
There is something understandably seductive about a promise of change when the alternative appears to involve losing one's family, community, or understanding of God.
For an adolescent who fears abandonment, conversion efforts may not initially feel coercive. They may feel like the only available route to preserving everything he loves.
And that is part of what makes the experience so psychologically complicated.
What the Research Actually Shows
The scientific literature does not support conversion therapy as an effective treatment for changing sexual orientation. In 2009, the American Psychological Association's Task Force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation reviewed decades of research and concluded that sexual orientation change efforts were unlikely to succeed and carried risks of harm. Many earlier studies claiming success suffered from serious methodological limitations, including inadequate comparison groups, biased samples, inconsistent definitions of change, and reliance upon participants' retrospective reports.
More recent research has reinforced these concerns. A systematic review by Pachankis and colleagues (2026) examined 130 empirical articles addressing sexual orientation and gender identity or expression change efforts. Among 86 prospective studies, at least one form of harm was identified in approximately 78%. Most retrospective studies also documented significant associations between exposure to conversion efforts and adverse outcomes. The authors emphasized the methodological limitations of the evidence while concluding that the literature consistently associates these practices with harm.
In a study published in the American Journal of Public Health, Green and colleagues (2020) found that LGBTQ young people who reported exposure to conversion efforts also reported significantly elevated levels of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts. Blosnich and colleagues (2020), examining sexual minority adults, similarly found associations between sexual orientation change efforts and suicidal ideation and attempts, including when accounting for adverse childhood experiences.
These findings do not mean that everyone who undergoes conversion therapy develops severe psychological difficulties. Experiences differ, and individuals may interpret those experiences in complicated ways. But the evidence offers no credible basis for promising that these interventions will produce heterosexual attraction, while documenting meaningful risks of depression, anxiety, shame, and suicidality.
The American Psychological Association and American Psychiatric Association oppose conversion practices and recommend approaches that support identity exploration without imposing a predetermined outcome.
For the young man sitting across from a pastor or counselor, however, the consequences of these practices may be felt less through diagnostic categories than through the everyday experience of repeatedly failing to become someone else.
The Psychological Cost of Trying to Be Changed
Imagine a young man who has spent months participating in a religious program intended to help him overcome same-sex attraction.
He attends meetings, completes exercises, and speaks with a counselor about his childhood. He is encouraged to examine his relationship with his father, develop stronger connections with heterosexual men, and avoid situations that might awaken sexual desire. He may be asked to identify moments when he experiences attraction and reinterpret them as longing for male affirmation, unmet emotional needs, or a desire for the masculinity he believes he lacks.
For a time, he may feel encouraged. The program offers structure, a community of people who appear to understand his struggle, and a vocabulary that makes his experience seem explainable. He may even report feeling changed. Perhaps he has reduced his sexual behavior, learned to suppress particular fantasies, or become less willing to acknowledge his attractions. He may feel temporarily reassured by the intensity of his religious commitment.
But the attraction will remain. Perhaps it returns while he is sitting beside another young man at lunch, walking across a college campus, or remembering someone he met years earlier. The feeling appears with an ordinary spontaneity that makes his efforts seem futile.
What happens psychologically when a person has been promised that sufficient effort will make a fundamental aspect of his experience disappear, and the promised change never arrives? He may conclude that he has not tried hard enough. Perhaps his faith is inadequate. Perhaps he has concealed something important from his counselor. Perhaps he secretly enjoys his attractions too much or has not surrendered himself fully to God.
The failure of the intervention becomes experienced as a failure of character.
This creates a particularly painful arrangement. The treatment begins from the assumption that something within the person is defective. When the effort to correct it fails, the person may experience himself as defective twice over: first for having the attraction and then for being unable to eliminate it.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, we might understand this as an intensification of an already punitive internal moral world. The young man may have internalized the expectation that he must control his desires to remain worthy of love. Conversion practices can give that expectation the apparent authority of treatment, reinforcing the idea that acceptance must be earned through the removal of something unacceptable.
Even his efforts to understand himself may become organized around self-correction. Instead of asking what he feels, he asks why he feels something he should not. Instead of becoming curious about desire, he searches for the childhood injury supposedly responsible for it. Instead of developing a more integrated sense of himself, he may learn to regard his emotional and sexual life as a collection of symptoms requiring surveillance.
The therapeutic relationship itself can become part of this struggle. The counselor may be experienced as a loving, authoritative figure whose approval depends upon evidence of progress. The young man may minimize continuing attractions, exaggerate improvement, or conceal experiences that seem inconsistent with treatment goals.
A setting intended to encourage honesty can reproduce the very conditions of secrecy that brought him there. He has come seeking relief from the closet, only to discover another place where telling the truth feels dangerous.
Psychoanalysis Has Its Own History to Confront
It would be misleading to discuss conversion therapy as though it emerged entirely from conservative Christianity.
Psychiatry and psychoanalysis also contributed to the historical pathologization of homosexuality. Although Freud's views were more complicated than some of the theories developed by his successors, twentieth-century psychoanalytic writers frequently interpreted homosexuality through ideas about developmental arrest, disturbed parental relationships, defensive identifications, or failures of psychosexual development. Some clinicians believed that uncovering or resolving these presumed conflicts could facilitate heterosexuality. Such theories helped provide an appearance of psychological legitimacy to interventions that treated same-sex attraction as a disturbance requiring correction.
This history deserves acknowledgment, particularly from those of us who continue to find psychoanalytic thinking valuable. The problem was not simply that these clinicians misunderstood the origins of sexual orientation. They often began with an assumption about what healthy development should produce and then interpreted patients' experiences in ways that confirmed it.
A young gay man's relationship with his father became evidence of inadequate masculine identification. His attachment to his mother became evidence of developmental disturbance. His fears about heterosexual relationships could be interpreted as the cause of his homosexuality, while his same-sex desire was understood as something to overcome. The theory could become difficult to challenge because nearly any psychological material could fit its explanatory framework.
Contemporary psychoanalysis has the opportunity, and the responsibility, to approach sexuality differently. Unconscious fantasy, attachment history, identification, shame, and defense remain meaningful subjects of inquiry. But they should not be used to presume that homosexuality is the symptom of an underlying pathology.
A gay man may have complicated feelings about his father. He may struggle with masculinity, dependency, intimacy, or unresolved childhood experiences. These deserve the same thoughtful attention they would receive in the treatment of a heterosexual man, without treating sexual orientation itself as the problem to be solved.
The task of psychoanalytic treatment is to understand the individual's psychological life, not to guide it toward a predetermined identity.
When the Wish to Change Is Also a Wish to Belong
There is a final complication worth considering.
Some young men voluntarily seek conversion efforts, sometimes with considerable determination. They may insist that they want to become heterosexual and describe that wish as an expression of deeply held religious values. Their stated wishes should be taken seriously.
Yet psychoanalysis also asks us to consider how wishes develop within relationships and what they may be protecting. A young man may sincerely want his attractions to change. He may also want his parents to remain proud of him, his pastor to regard him as faithful, his friends to continue including him, and God to see him as good.
These desires can become so intertwined that he has difficulty separating the wish to be heterosexual from the wish to remain loved.
If he could be certain that his family would accept him, would he still want to change? If he believed that God did not condemn his attractions, would the wish have the same urgency? If he could imagine a future in which he remained connected to his faith and loved another man, what might become possible?
These are not questions designed to produce a particular answer. They are invitations to understand the emotional circumstances surrounding a wish that may initially appear straightforward.
The distinction is clinically important. Respecting a person's religious beliefs does not require offering an intervention that promises an unsupported change in sexual orientation. Equally, affirming someone's sexual orientation does not require dismissing the importance of their faith.
A thoughtful therapeutic approach can make room for grief, uncertainty, celibacy chosen for personally meaningful reasons, changes in religious affiliation, and the exploration of sexual identity without prescribing what the person must become.
For some survivors of conversion practices, recovery involves more than recognizing that the intervention was ineffective. They may need to mourn the years spent trying to change, the relationships damaged by secrecy, and the ways they learned to distrust their own feelings. There may be anger toward counselors, pastors, or parents who believed they were helping. There may also be affection and gratitude toward some of those same people.
And sometimes there is a quieter grief for the younger self who entered treatment believing that being loved depended upon becoming someone else. That young man may have worked extraordinarily hard. He prayed, confessed, studied, restrained himself, and tried to understand his desires through explanations that were offered as truth. He may have done everything he was asked to do.
The tragedy is that the destination he was promised was never a realistic therapeutic goal.
Perhaps the work that follows is not another effort to change his sexuality, but the more difficult process of discovering what his life might become when change is no longer demanded as the price of acceptance.
What Therapy Can Offer
A clinician working with a gay man raised in a conservative Christian environment may encounter an unusually complicated relationship among shame, loyalty, desire, and grief.
The person may describe intense guilt about sexual experiences, fear of disappointing his family, or difficulty sustaining romantic intimacy. He may feel anger toward religion while continuing to long for spiritual belonging. Sometimes he expresses these conflicts directly. At other times, they emerge through patterns that initially seem unrelated to faith.
He may be exceptionally accommodating, uncomfortable with anger, or preoccupied with being good. He may struggle to recognize his own preferences after years of measuring them against the expectations of others. He may experience sexual desire with pleasure and immediately afterward feel compelled to punish himself psychologically.
There may also be ambivalence toward therapy itself.
If he has learned that acknowledging same-sex desire constitutes moral failure, speaking openly about sexuality may feel like participating in that failure. He may worry that a therapist will encourage him to abandon his faith or dismiss the significance of his religious commitments.
An affirming psychoanalytic approach should not require either outcome. The therapist's task is not to tell the person what he must believe about God. Nor is it to interpret every religious commitment as a defense against sexuality. It is to create enough psychological room for the person to explore what his beliefs, desires, attachments, and fears mean to him.
Perhaps he begins to recognize that his relationship with God has become inseparable from the expectation of punishment. Perhaps he discovers anger toward parents whose love he has never doubted but whose acceptance he has always questioned.
He may grieve an adolescence spent in secrecy. He may begin distinguishing the values he genuinely holds from the moral demands he internalized because he feared abandonment.
Sometimes this work involves recognizing reaction formation, self-punitive defenses, or the pressure to maintain an acceptable self. At other times, it involves confronting actual relational losses, present-day discrimination, or the practical difficulties of living openly.
No single interpretation can contain the experience. The goal is not to produce a particular religious identity or sexual lifestyle. It is to help someone become more capable of understanding and inhabiting his own emotional life.
And perhaps, eventually, to recognize that his desires do not have to be treated as evidence of personal failure.
The Boy Who Keeps Praying
I find myself returning to the boy sitting in the middle of the church. The congregation is singing a hymn he has known since childhood. His parents are beside him. Sunlight enters through the stained-glass windows, casting faint colors across the pews. He has spent years learning the language of forgiveness. He knows how to confess, how to repent, and how to ask for mercy.
What he may not know is how to regard himself with tenderness.
Perhaps the tragedy is not that he believed in God. Faith may have offered him warmth, purpose, community, and a relationship with something he experienced as sacred. The tragedy is that he may have come to believe that the love he most wanted required the rejection of something fundamental within himself.
He wanted to be a good son. He wanted to be a good Christian. He wanted to be loved by his family, respected by his community, and accepted by God. And he wanted another boy to look at him the way he had secretly looked at other boys.
For years, these wishes may have seemed impossible to hold together. Some men eventually leave the church. Others return after a long absence. Some find new congregations, reinterpret their faith, or build spiritual lives that bear little resemblance to the ones they inherited. Others remain uncertain.
There is no single ending to this story.
Perhaps what matters is that the young man eventually becomes able to ask questions that once frightened him. What do I believe? What have I been taught to fear? Whose disappointment am I trying to prevent? Can I love my family without becoming the person they imagined? Can I remain faithful to what is sacred to me without treating my own longing as something shameful?
These questions may be painful because they involve more than sexuality. They concern the meaning of love, belonging, obedience, and the complicated work of becoming a separate person.
For a boy who once prayed to be changed, there may be something deeply moving about the possibility of a different prayer. Not a request to have his desire taken away. Perhaps simply the hope that he might learn to live with it, understand it, and no longer feel compelled to hide from the people he loves.
And perhaps, one day, he walks into a place where he experiences belonging and discovers that he no longer has to leave part of himself outside the door.
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Illustrative scenes throughout this essay are fictional and are not accounts of patients. Christian beliefs and experiences vary widely across denominations, families, and individuals. The psychoanalytic formulations offered here are possibilities for understanding particular experiences, not explanations that should be applied to religious or gay people generally.