Patrick McAlvey was 11 years old, sitting by the fireplace in his parents’ house in Lansing, Michigan, flipping through the Sunday newspaper, when he found himself lingering on the advertisements featuring male underwear models.

At that moment, a terrible realization clicked into place. He was one of those boys, the ones a man from his church had warned the Sunday School children about. Some boys, the man had explained, are attracted to other boys. It was a sin, he’d told them, but there was hope: he could help change that.

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Today, McAlvey is 40 and lives in Amsterdam. Dressed in a hoodie and speaking from his modern apartment in one of Europe’s most gay-friendly metropoles, he seems a world away from the conservative Christian household where he grew up. But the distance he’s traveled isn’t just geographic, it’s the span between self-destruction and self-acceptance, between a faith community that told him he was broken and a life he’s built on his own terms.

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From childhood through his early twenties, McAlvey endured periods of conversion therapy that combined talk sessions with disturbing physical exercises and invasive questioning about his body and desires. When a church family later threw him out, he was hospitalized on suicide watch at a Christian hospital. “My roommate was schizophrenic, speaking to the walls in the middle of the night, and I was just gay. I didn’t belong there.” That moment became his turning point.

McAlvey didn’t just walk away from the church to live his life quietly. He became an activist, speaking to the media and at political events in the mid-2000s, when almost no one was talking publicly about the dangers of conversion therapy. It would take until 2023 for Michigan to ban the practice for minors, but McAlvey would be one of the pioneers in that fight. 

In 2009, he filmed a video for Truth Wins Out, a national advocacy organization that had been fighting conversion therapy since 2006, publicly naming his abuser and describing his experience in detail. “It was only covered in national LGBT media and the independent weekly paper in my hometown,” he recalled. 

He did speaking engagements, mostly out of state, to help build momentum for a national ban. In 2014, when a Michigan state representative introduced the first bill in the Michigan House to ban reparative therapy for minors, McAlvey was asked to speak to the press in support of the legislation. 

But the bill didn’t gain significant traction until 2023, when it was passed and signed into law by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. By then, the movement had grown large enough that McAlvey wasn’t needed. “There were enough advocates and allies that they didn’t need me to rehash my trauma yet again,” he said. “For much of the time it took for this idea to gain mainstream awareness, I was trying to heal and move on with my life.”

When we spoke about what happens after stepping into the role of activist, McAlvey was candid. The activism had been empowering, but at some point, he realized it wasn’t enough to build a life on. “I felt like the most lovable thing about me was that something bad had happened to me,” he said. “The next natural evolution for me was to step back and build a more holistic sense of self, not lovable because I was harmed, but lovable because I exist and because of all the positive and endearing traits I possess.”

That shift came after years of public testimony that had taken its own toll. Speaking out had been healing and powerful, but it was also costly. “It can be heavy and sad to relive all the details and to again mourn all the lost innocence and happiness,” McAlvey said. “It can be scary to hear or read nasty things about yourself. It can alienate former friends and family members.” He notes that “for every person who speaks out publicly, there are many more who never will, still navigating complicated relationships with church, religion, family, and themselves.” He heard from many of those people each time he went public.

Unfortunately, McAlvey’s harrowing experience has become urgently relevant again. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in October in Chiles v. Salazar, a case in which a Christian Colorado therapist argues that her state’s ban on conversion therapy for minors violates her First Amendment right to free speech, since she claims her practice consists only of talk therapy. A ruling is expected by June 2026, and the outcome could affect conversion therapy bans in more than 20 states.

McAlvey isn’t fooled by the free speech framing. He experienced both talk-based and physical methods and believes that the talk therapy was at least as damaging.

“A lot of the first years of contact was just talking and writing, and it was the most damaging because it was false and it was presented as fact. I was so vulnerable and it really armed me with all the tools to build this deep, profound self-hatred over the next ten years.”

He also points out that therapists, like any health professionals, should be held to standards rooted in scientific evidence. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry states that conversion therapies “lack scientific credibility and clinical utility” and that “there is evidence that such interventions are harmful.” A study cited in an American Medical Association issue brief found that 77% of participants in conversion therapy “reported significant long-term harm, including […] depression, anxiety, lowered self-esteem, internalized homophobia, intrusive imagery, and sexual dysfunction.”

McAlvey also drew attention to a point often lost in the legal debate: the power imbalance between a minor and an adult therapist presented as an expert. “It is child abuse to convince a sweet, innocent child that something natural and beautiful about them is bad,” he said. It can be argued that freedom of speech is a meaningful concept when the person on the receiving end has the critical capacity to evaluate what they’re hearing. For a child, and especially a child raised in an insular environment without access to other perspectives, that capacity simply isn’t there. 

McAlvey also underscored another important asymmetry when he observes that “those of us who have been harmed by reparative therapy have so much less power and influence than the religious institutions that continue to fight for the right to try to make us disappear. There are more of us than people realize, but most will never feel comfortable speaking out publicly. And many of us will spend our lives trying to heal from this harm, with little resources left to wage a fight on behalf of the next generation.”

“I won’t be surprised if the Supreme Court overturns the law, but I will be deeply disappointed,” McAlvey said. “For some of us, this isn’t an interesting theoretical debate about the limits of religious rights and free speech. It has been our lives altered forever, our childhood innocence stolen. It is so disheartening to see religious zealots cling to their homophobia in the face of so much evidence of the harm it causes.” 

He worries that a ruling against the bans would normalize conversion therapy, leading well-meaning but ill-informed parents and churches to treat it as a credible practice. 

“Any normalization of this bizarre, unscientific, harmful practice will result in more innocent families and children falling for the lie that change is either necessary or possible,” he said. “I wish the harm could finally stop.”

Given the current political landscape, McAlvey says he isn’t surprised to see these challenges reaching the Supreme Court, or that the legislation he helped bring about could be rolled back. But he sees a silver lining. When he first started sharing his story in the mid-2000s, many people had never heard of conversion therapy, and no politicians were discussing it. 

“I wish the laws would move in the direction of protecting queer kids,” he said, “but at least it’s an ongoing debate now, and people who are considering or experiencing it can more easily seek information debunking the practice and find a support system once they escape.”

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