After Conversion Therapy Left Him 'Broken,' Gay Man Finds New Way To Integrate

Find out more about Simon Kent Fung and his podcast “Dear Alana” here.

Transcript

CONTENT WARNING: A head’s up we mention suicide in this episode. The National Suicide Prevention lifeline is 988. You find out more about suicide prevention on our Resources page.

As a child growing up in Canada, Simon Kent Fung preferred his sister’s toys. He rather imagined he was a Disney princess over a hockey star.

I was really into watching cartoons and Disney movies. That's actually how I learned to draw was copying a lot of those characters. I was really into playing with dolls and Barbies and dressing up. 

But he always felt he had to keep that part of himself hidden.

That was something that I kept really secret and private. If there were kids that or family friends who were visiting our home, I would hide all of my dolls in the closet.

He says his dad didn’t understand why Simon was like this. 

He scolded me and really tried to steer me away from some of those activities. 

Simon wasn’t athletic. He didn’t like any sports, even swimming. When he was little, Simon dreaded the days he and his sister were forced to go to swimming lessons with their dad.

I hated going to class. I hated the whole environment of the swimming pool. It was smelly, it was cold. I remember going to class and it was parent, child swim lessons. The fear that I felt around getting into the water and then being forced by my father into the swimming pool and then being forced to float without him to be grabbed onto and him pushing me away as I was trying to grab on to him. It was a very scary moment for me because I thought I was going to drown and to have my father not be there to to comfort me was really extra scary.

Whether at home or at school, Simon felt like there was a part of him that was wrong or broken, that needed to be fixed. 

I remember I would take the bus in the morning and there would be these two boys, one of them was my age, one of them was his older brother. And his older brother would throw rocks at me and generally try to make me flinch by throwing things at me. And it got to a point where… I remember my fourth grade teacher, I think it was, actually kept me inside at recess where he just was like, ‘you don't have to go outside if you don't want to.’

This is a story about the price we pay to belong.

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

Simon Dives Into Catholicism

Simon didn’t really have any friends as a kid. He was often lonely on the playground so he’d chat with God.

SIMON: I really related to God in a more and a more intuitive level as a as a young child who was really lonely and isolated on the schoolyard. God was my only friend. 

LAUREL: Were you having conversations in your head with God? 

SIMON: All the time. Yeah. I was having conversations with God in my head. I was praying. When I woke up in the morning before I went to bed at night, telling him about my day, recapping all the things that I was hoping would do, asking for things, praying for things. 

LAUREL: And it sounds very comforting to have this friend. 

SIMON: Yeah, to have this friend who was all powerful, all knowing, who was always there, always accessible, always listening. 

At the head of his bed he kept a bible. At night he often read passages about God helping those who were persecuted and outcast. 

At one point in elementary school a teacher asked him to draw what he wanted to be when he grew up and he drew himself as a priest standing next to a church.

Then when Simon was in high school, he recalls Pope John Paul II visiting Toronto for World Youth Days.

It was there that I think I was exposed to this vibrant, international, youthful version of Catholicism. You had all these young people from all around the world, from Brazil and the Philippines and Poland and France and everyone was just singing in the subways and joyful. 

It wasn’t until he moved away to go to college when he discovered a brand of Catholicism that just made a lot of sense to him.

It had a lot of answers, had a lot of rationality to it. It was explaining why we did certain things in mass it was explaining what we believe and why we believe and why we're different than the Protestants, why we're different than other religions. And it gave me, yeah, like a a rational underpinning that I didn't have before that was very compelling. 

Simon finally felt like he belonged to an active social group that self identified with their faith.

That really drove me deeper into into my Catholic faith and got me very interested in studying it, learning about it, and practicing it more seriously. 

He went to mass everyday and confession every week. He felt unburdened, and free every time he sat down with a priest and told him his sins and prayed. 

It's actually kind of therapeutic too, because you're getting a listening ear. You're getting someone to give you some notes on maybe what you could be doing better or what you might want to go deeper into.

Simon Comes Out To A Priest

At the same time Simon was discovering his religion, he also realized he was attracted to other men. 

It was really scary. I didn't think I had the word ‘gay’ to describe my feelings, but I certainly knew that it was disturbing to me. And so I would say throughout my high school age, I really disassociated from a lot of those feelings. 

He came of age in the nineties when being gay was seen as transgressive. Culturally and religiously, he felt it was off limits.

I didn't know anybody who was gay. And so it felt very isolating. There was no universe in which I would ever entertain the possibility of being in a same sex relationship or exploring my sexuality in that way. I was much too ashamed of it, and I felt that I had gotten to a point religiously and from a faith perspective where I was convinced that that was something that was wrong. So I just couldn't do it.

Try as he might to stuff down these feelings, he knew he wasn’t being completely honest with himself. As a young man in college when many of his peers decided their vocations in the church – married, priest, or single – Simon felt he had to come clean. 

Father William, who’d taken a keen interest in Simon’s future, saw in him the potential to be a priest. So, one day he asked Simon if he was ready to drop out of school and join the seminary.

Everything in me wanted to say yes. I felt very much called to this way of life, and I really desperately wanted to serve God and to be with Him every day and to do his work. But I had to be honest. And there was, to a fault, always a part of me that could never tell lies and I said, ‘Father William, there's something you should know. I struggle with same sex attraction.’ Father William immediately changed his face became like a stone. And he he said he wrote it. He took out his notepad, wrote something on it, and said, take this. Come back to me when you're fixed. And then he never spoke to me again. PAUSE By the way what he wrote on that piece of paper was the website to at the time was the largest and only clincal network of conversion therapists.

Simon says he wasn’t surprised. In fact, he had been expecting this response.

I felt like yes, like, okay, like I'm going to do this and I'm going to make you proud and I'm going to get better. And I understood where he was coming from, and I empathized with that. People hearing it, they might have been outraged on my behalf or potentially disappointed or saddened on my behalf. But I don't I don't think at the time I felt sad or disappointed. I think I was so convinced that I needed to do this even before him telling me that, it felt like a confirmation of something already believed. PAUSE It's almost like the ways people would describe being in an abusive relationship after a long period of time where they don't necessarily see I almost felt like I wasn't worthy of feeling sad about it. Like I wasn't worthy of feeling disappointed because it felt like, yes, I am damaged and broken in this way. Like, of course I need to be fixed and healed like him not talking to me like, ever again. Like, of course he wouldn't like. I am so damaged and broken that I need to address and fix this. So I don't fault him for that. It was at that point where the disappointment or the feeling of sadness wasn't even there because I was so convinced that I was in the wrong.

Simon Seeks Conversion Therapy

Simon had already been researching conversion therapy online. While many people think of children being forced into electroshock treatment, or exorcisms where they’re told same sex attraction is something of the devil, what Simon found looked a lot more like talk therapy. 

I bought secretly bought books on Amazon without my parents knowing. And I was reading websites. I was reading all these success stories and testimonials really felt like, oh my goodness, this seems like something that was addressable, especially since I was 19, 20.

That he was still young enough to rewire his brain. So he came out to his parents but assured them he had a plan.

And I think my parents just didn't know enough about any of this to know what to believe. And they sort of believed me for many years. They went along with it because they're like, oh, Simon, Simon's read about this. He's researched, he's responsible. He knows what he's talking about. So, yeah, like, let's support him in this.

Simon’s parents agreed to go to a meeting where they learned the neo Freudian theory that explained why Simon was attracted to men. The conversion therapy theorists say that a young man is attracted to other men because his relationship with his father was damaged by some sort of trauma. So in a subconscious effort to repair that relationship they seek out connections with other men. 

They were like, ‘wow, we didn't realize we could have played a role in this or how integral we were to this developing in Simon.’

After Simon graduated from college he moved to New York, where he had found a conversion therapist.

He was giving me books to read and workbooks to do that really drilled into my relationship with my father and my connection to male peers, which is another aspect of this conversion therapy theory, which is that the trauma doesn't necessarily have to be with your father. It can also be with your male peers growing up. And you can see how much that really lined up with my experience of being bullied. 

His therapist had Simon pick a sport as a way to develop physical contact with other men. Simon chose Judo martial arts.

SIMON: He wanted to sort of desensitize me to that sort of male contact.

LAUREL: And then you arrive at judo class and everyone's hot.

SIMON: Yeah, so I arrive at judo class and I am overwhelmed by how attractive all of these men are, like everyone is fit.

But his therapist explained the difference between erotic and exotic.

We are naturally drawn to opposites or things that we don't have. And this is why. You know, according to the theory heterosexual people are drawn to each other, right? So a man is drawn to a woman and vice versa because of how different and perceive how there's a perceived difference between them and the other person. According to the same theory, I perceived men as other and as different. And that's why this way I relate to them as exotic turned erotic, right in the same way that it would for a straight person ... And so the idea would be that by demystifying and breaking down and deconstructing and disassociating from this exotic feeling that I had towards this man and the attributes that he had, the eroticism would also diminish.

As Simon was able to make platonic friendships with men, his conversion therapist encouraged Simon to take the next step – to date women.

I feel really bad for these women. I would always hit a point where after maybe the second or third day, I would feel like. They were more interested in me than I was, and that felt really dishonest and be felt. Kind of scary. Like I was like, Oh, my God. Like, I don't I don't know where this is going. I don't feel like I can handle this.

Hit A Wall

His conversion therapist told him it would take one to three years before he saw a change in his sexual orientation. But Simon persisted in one on one therapy then weekly group therapy meetings for years. Finally in his late 20s Simon stopped going. He felt he knew the theories and tried to apply them on his own, but he found the whole process exhausting.

The emotional energy needed to continue to try to change my sexual orientation day in, day out. Like we're talking every time I noticed somebody attractive on the street, on the subway, on the bus, like I had to go through this mental process of deconstructing, analyzing and disassociating. And that was something that. I think just just took an energetic and emotional toll on me… Part of that part of the hitting. Hitting a point of hitting that wall, hitting that rock bottom was just actual mental exhaustion. But the other part of it was…I felt like I had no future for myself. PAUSE

The American Psychiatrist Association says it has been opposed to any psychiatric treatment such as reparative or conversion therapy, which is based on the assumption that homosexuality is a mental disorder or that a person should change his or her homosexual orientation since 1998.

Like I really hit a wall emotionally and mentally. And I was severely depressed. And there were many factors that went into that. But what I felt vividly was this feeling that I was a failure, that. I was not feeling the change that I wanted to see, that maybe I would never recover from these father or peer wounds, that I was so damaged and that because of that, I would never be able to live out my vocation and I would never be able to live a full life. And this was happening in the context when everyone else around me for what seemed like everyone else around me was getting married, having children, moving on with their life. And I felt so stuck and I felt like there was no future for me. And that led me into a deep, deep depression where. The tears would come from this place that I didn't even know existed and would just flow with flow for hours. And I. And I felt like I just was so beyond saving. 

“This Can’t Be The Only Way”

But in this dark pool of despair, Simon found a flicker of light.

 If I continued like this, I would. I would live a life that was. That was. Yeah. That was just no different than than if I were to die and, and, and it was in that moment that I just felt like this can't be what my life is is about. Like a this can't be the only way. And it was really then that I had just kind of the small inkling of like, well, what if there's part of me that I've been rejecting for so long and then trying to to root out and to destroy? What if it was. A part of me that was inviting me to. Engage with it and engage with it to embrace it like it was. It was a very frightening given given my background and where I was coming from and how I have how much shame I carried about this, about this part of me. Like, I think it was scandalous. It felt like a little rebellious, transgressive, scary. 

He began to come up with a new way to move on.

I began to a, relinquish my grip on my commitment to trying to change my sexual orientation. And then b, start to ask myself and give myself the prompt around. Like how? How can I? How can you find a way to live my life, like actually living my life? And up until that point, it felt like my life was on pause until this part of me was resolved. 

He sought out other therapists.

This was also scary, right? Like the thought of seeing someone who was from outside of this this epistemological bubble that I was in felt very scary. And it was through the help of outside counseling that I began to just have like different ways of looking at myself and different ways of of questioning what I was believing and that took time.

But he found it too difficult to completely detach from a religion that was so much a part of his identity and daily life.

It's never a clean break from your past. I was hearing outside perspectives that were providing alternative ways for me to relate to my sexuality, to potentially give a perspective on the counsel that I was given. Given that that was a little bit more critical about some of that advice and I wrestled with that because it's like, wait, I, I chose this. Like, this was like something that I believe believed wholeheartedly. And it was something that I trusted. And. And I generally think of myself as a pretty smart and discerning person. 

It’s taken many years to wrap his head around it. 

Coming to some of those realizations was really a process and a journey that's taken many, many years because it's like sorting through the complicated soup of faith and of a community that and of a worldview that was both comforting and potentially you know, damaging and harmful in that it perpetuated a deep shame at the same time.

Learns About Alana

As he entered his 30s Simon got a job working in the tech industry in San Francisco. On a cool morning in December of 2019 Simon was sitting in a coffee shop reading the news, when he saw an article about a young woman in Colorado whose life seemed to have paralleled Simon’s. 

So I felt like when I read it, I was in a coffee shop and remember just bursting into tears and feeling like I was struck by lightning. Like, how is it that someone had such a similar experience to me? I was just shaking in the corner and I was really upset. 

Her name was Alana Chen. She too had been a fervent Catholic. She wanted to become a nun but didn’t feel she could until she kicked her attraction to women. She went through conversion therapy and suffered the price to belong. She ultimately died by suicide.

She was able to just after some of these what we often call like this, the sense of the double bind, right, where you're kind of damned if you do or damned if you don't, no matter what option you choose. She was able to really capture so eloquently in her own writings that struggle that I was now able to have some language for my own experience and was able to revisit my past in a way that I was certainly not prepared to do, … look at the ways in which some of these ideas and the education that we were receiving was really informing how we were seeing ourselves. To what degree there were mixed messages and to what degree that what I felt was a free choice in my own life to to approach my sexuality in this way and trying to to change and quote unquote ‘cure’ it may not have been that free of a choice. And so. In seeing her articulate her struggles and in seeing how wonderful beautiful and whole she was as a person in spite of the way she thought of herself, helped to give me a little bit more compassion and to see myself more similarly. 

Simon wound up moving to Colorado to create a podcast about Alana Chen that launched this fall. 

SHORT EXCERPT FROM “DEAR ALANA” PROMO

“I don’t need to eradicate this part of myself”

LAUREL: How accepting are you now of your queer identity? 

SIMON:  I think I've come to a place of deeper integration where I no longer feel like I need to, you know, change this part of me… I don't think there's a part of me that needs to be eradicated in the way that in the way that I felt before. And at the same time, I am finding my way in this church … and trying to find a way to have this conversation and share and share some of my experiences from this place of real, of deep love for the church and. Yeah. And I think like that reconciliation is an ongoing process. But I do want my hope is that anyone who hears Dear Alana will be able to be open to the possibility that it is possible to be a person of serious and deep faith and also live a full integrated life. 

LAUREL: Do you still go to church? 

SIMON: I do still go to church and. It's something that I. Struggle with because. I think so much of my relationship to faith has been in the last ten years has been really sorting through what is. Truly of God and what is truly coming from that place of pure connection and and intimacy and communing with the divine. 

Up until this year, I was on the pastoral council of my parish in San Francisco. And so it's something that's still a big part of my life and is a big part of my identity as just as much as my sexuality is. 

LAUREL: I think a lot of people will listen to Dear Alana and will listen to this episode of 2 Lives and wonder why. …How do you reconcile your queer identity with these Church beliefs about the act of homosexuality?

SIMON: When we think of both those outside and inside of the church, think of Catholicism as this monolith that has a very impermeable set of beliefs that are kind of fixed and and permanent. But I think what I've begun to learn is that the church, the history of the Catholic Church is the history of humanity in that it's a. It has It's it's mixture of certainty and uncertainty of of belief and of evolution. PAUSE

There's been a historical impulse for people who feel generally marginalized to leave those spaces. But what happens is that there ends up being a sort of a self-selecting group and a selection bias of who remains right, where those who actually remain to inform and to share their experiences are not don't actually have those experiences. And so you end up having doctrine and teaching that reflects that selection bias … Realizing is that I am just as much a part of the church as anyone else who has been baptized and that it's really important to be able to yeah, share my experience and… speak for those who have either left, who have not been able to make it in order to share the real impact that it has on people. And I think the other reason I remain is because God, the church, religion was and is such an important part of my life still is. … There is a richness there that I think drives a lot of us. 

So for now Simon has chosen to stay a member of the church and try to integrate all parts of himself. 

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

Stay tuned for a preview of “Dear Alana” after our show credits.