Page 133 →McKrae Game and the Christian Closet

In June 2021, Columbia’s city council passed an ordinance that created the first restrictions within South Carolina on conversion therapy, banning licensed therapists from using the approach on minors within the city limits. Although twenty states, the District of Columbia, and many cities and municipalities across the country have already passed legislation making conversion therapy for minors illegal, and President Biden signed an executive order in June 2022 that limits federal funding for conversion therapy, the four-to-three Columbia city council vote revealed how closely contested the practice remains in South Carolina—even in the state’s capital, which houses the flagship university. Conversion therapy, also known as reparative therapy, promises to identify and “heal” the causes of a person’s same-sex attractions, often through prayer and sometimes through the “casting out” of demons. Allegedly, through conversion therapy, a person could become “ex-gay” and pursue a heterosexual life. Many professional organizations, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, have denounced the practice as harmful and unethical, but the Williams Institute of the University of California, Los Angeles, estimates that 698,000 individuals have received conversion therapy in the United States.¹ Religious organizations and counselors remain immune from existing bans.

The long-term negative effects of this practice have begun to attract national attention through works such as the New York Times bestselling memoir by Garrard Conley, Boy Erased, which became a major motion picture, and the 2021 Netflix documentary Pray Away.² The human consequences in South Carolina are unavoidably tragic and, at the same time, an intrinsic element of the culture of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, plus other (LGBTQ+) individuals in the South. An examination of the life of McKrae Game, an “ex-ex-gay” Spartanburg native who appears as both villain and victim in the history of conversion therapy, demonstrates how complex the journey to personal acceptance can be.³

Page 134 →McKrae was born in Spartanburg in 1968 into what seemed to be a typical white Southern family. His sister, Maria, was popular and competed in dance competitions. His father sold real estate and then had several business ventures. His mother was a housewife. They all attended the First Baptist Church in downtown Spartanburg, where McKrae has happy memories of church potlucks and where he was baptized. McKrae remembers playing for hours with Legos in his parents’ basement or, whenever the weather was nice, exploring the neighborhood’s creeks. The appearance of normalcy was carefully crafted by his mother, who only left the house in perfectly styled wigs and matching pantsuits and who obsessively cleaned and managed their home. Any inclination that McKrae expressed toward anything “abnormal,” like the time he came home wearing a necklace he had borrowed from another boy at school, was quickly corrected. “You look like a goddamn fucking faggot,” his mother screamed at him.

He also remembers trying on his sister’s ballerina costume and the red-hot shame he felt when he was discovered. Easily distracted, McKrae struggled in school, eventually being held back a grade. His parents later moved Maria, and then him, to the private Spartanburg Day School. There, other students promptly dubbed him “McGay,” a slur that was both confusing and uncomfortable to the prepubescent McKrae. His parents divorced when he was in his teens, but McKrae later thrived in high school. After mowing a few neighborhood lawns, McKrae bought equipment, hired some friends, and created a sizable lawn care service. Returning to the public high school, McKrae found himself to be popular: He had plenty of pocket money from his lawn care business, his sister was a popular cheerleader at the public high school, and his father let him throw raucous parties for his friends in his home. McKrae dated girls and had sex with them. He didn’t tell anyone that he often thought about rock stars like Bon Jovi and Adam Ant, whom he had seen on MTV, when he slept with girls.

Life changed for McKrae when he turned eighteen, graduated from high school, and moved into a house across the street from his mother. A clever businessman, McKrae rented the house and then sublet a separate upstairs apartment to offset his own rent. His mother helped him show the apartment after he placed an ad, and when he met the prospective renter she had found, he laughed and told her, “Mama, that man is gay.” His mother shook her head in skeptical disbelief. “Mama,” he said, “he just asked me to have the windows cleaned. He said they are filthy. He’s gay.” Doubtfully, his mom shrugged her shoulders and brushed it off. McKrae rented out the apartment.

Page 135 →The upstairs tenant quickly picked up on McKrae’s repressed attraction, and McKrae had his first gay sexual experience with the tenant. He began traveling several times a week from Spartanburg to Greenville, where, in the late 1980s, a private nightclub called The Castle catered to an LGBTQ+ clientele.⁴ McKrae had never been around openly gay people before, and the experience was liberating. Feeling a mixture of fear and belonging, McKrae kept his membership card to The Castle in his wallet, even though he largely restricted his open displays of attraction to men to gay-friendly areas in Greenville and, eventually, Atlanta. For his family, friends, and clients, McKrae maintained a heterosexual identity, even when he began dating men and entering longer term relationships. Once, his mother walked in on him kissing his boyfriend in his living room. After hearing the news, his father asked him to go for a drive. “I understand that you like guys,” his father said, “But you like girls too, right?” McKrae shook his head no. “I really wish you would reconsider and stay open to women. I just think it will be a much more difficult life for you being gay and only being with men, rather than being with a woman and just having sex with men.” This advice was not what McKrae expected to hear from his father, and, many years later, after his father had remarried and divorced again, McKrae learned that his father had himself engaged in affairs with men. For many in the South, being gay was tolerated as long as it was not flaunted and, ideally, remained concealed within an outward-facing heterosexual marriage. McKrae found ways to prevent his mother from unexpected drop-ins, and despite what his mother had seen, he realized that maintaining the façade of traditional heterosexuality was enough to satisfy his family.

For three years, McKrae enjoyed life as a young, gay man. While he refrained from fully embracing his identity in Spartanburg, he was active in the Greenville gay community and eventually fell in love. Growing closer to his boyfriend’s family in Greenville, McKrae began to experience relationships that did not require hiding one’s sexual orientation. Around his boyfriend’s family, the young couple and their displays of affection were not merely tolerated but treated like any other healthy relationship. However, this source of stability abruptly ended when McKrae’s boyfriend was sentenced to prison for a DUI charge that had happened years prior. Tragically, while in prison, McKrae’s boyfriend learned that he was HIV positive. Although McKrae’s family had stopped attending church regularly when he was a young teen, he now feared that God was punishing him. The social structures and teachings of Evangelical Christianity remained deeply Page 136 →engrained in his thinking. McKrae started to hear what he believed were direct messages from heaven. Watching the weekly drag show at The Castle, McKrae thought he heard a voice say, “This is not where you are supposed to be.” Today, when McKrae looks back at his younger self, he sees a man conflicted: “My mind was telling me one thing. My body was telling me another.”

Another landscaper in Spartanburg invited McKrae over for dinner, then to church, and eventually to a meeting about an exciting business opportunity. Feeling lost, McKrae enjoyed the attention of this man, who was a bit older and had all of the things that signaled a traditional Southern family: a successful business, a nice home, and a pregnant wife. At this man’s invitation, McKrae attended an information session at a local hotel about selling Amway products. McKrae left the Amway meeting with a one-hundred-seventy-five-dollar startup kit and halfheartedly persuaded his mom to buy some plastic wrap and dishwashing detergent. Selling Amway products did not really matter that much to McKrae, but being accepted and encouraged by this new set of friends did. For a short period, McKrae vacillated between these two different worlds, having dinner with his new Amway friends before driving to The Castle later that evening and joining his friends for Sunday morning worship service after a late night at the club. “Don’t you want to have a family one day, McKrae?” probed the wife of his friend. When McKrae thought about it, he knew he did want kids, but in the early 1990s, gay marriage or adoption were not realistic possibilities.

The lifestyles of his Amway friends appeared to be the only way to create a loving family, something McKrae deeply wanted. A few months later, his new friends invited him to an Amway convention in Tampa, Florida. Researchers have classified Amway as a “quasi-religious organization” because of the shared spiritual beliefs of its core community.⁵ Because Amway operates under a multilevel marketing, or “direct sales,” model, the growth of the organization is predicated on the personal recruitment and mentoring efforts of its members. Existing Amway “independent business owners” identify others who might be receptive to the brand’s worldview. Thus, Amway’s conventions offered seminars and motivational speeches to its tens of thousands of attendees, but they also incorporated Christian music, testimonials, and sermons, packing football stadiums like large tent revivals. Throughout the convention, McKrae found himself more and more emotional, weeping uncontrollably at times. On the final day, McKrae had a conversion experience, going to the altar onstage at the stadium floor. This “coming to Jesus” moment went hand-in-hand with a renunciation of Page 137 →McKrae’s identity; when the speaker asked the audience to repent from their sins, McKrae only thought about life with his gay friends. When his friends from Spartanburg gathered around him in celebration, McKrae blurted out in a tearful confession, “I’ve been living as a homosexual.” His friend’s wife hugged him and patted him on the back. “We know. We’ve been praying for you,” she said.

Although McKrae had not been attending church for many years, the religious component of his internalized homophobia was strong.⁶ One of his first thoughts was, “Now I can go to heaven and not to hell.” But Christianity offered protection here on Earth, not just in the afterlife, by outwardly reinforcing compulsory heterosexuality and conventional gender roles and by providing a “Christian closet” in which to hide his sexual orientation.⁷ On returning to Spartanburg after the Amway conference, McKrae solicited the advice of a local pastor, who told him to join a large congregation with an active singles program. McKrae returned to First Baptist Church of Spartanburg, the church of his youth, and threw himself into a new circle of friends and activities. His friends from The Castle tried to contact him for a while, leaving exasperated messages on his answering machine warning that he had been brainwashed, but he ignored them. Eventually, those calls stopped. McKrae did not share with everyone at First Baptist that he had recently enjoyed life as a gay man, but he did tell church leaders. When he was eventually tapped to become a leader in their youth ministry program, church leaders gave him clear instructions. First, he had to promise to stop drinking. Second, if he ever returned to his former “lifestyle,” he had to leave the church and promise not to come back. Filled with a new sense of belonging and acceptance, McKrae readily agreed to both.

As part of his new Christian identity, McKrae stopped listening to rock music and started listening to contemporary Christian radio. His landscaping business in Spartanburg continued to grow, and he was driving his truck between job sites when he heard a radio advertisement for “people who are homosexual but don’t want to be.” The advertisement announced a one-day conference in Greenville. McKrae did not want anyone to know that he was still attracted to men, and, once again, Greenville promised some degree of anonymity. This conference was small, with thirty or forty men and women in a small church on the outskirts of town. After praise and worship, the organizer, Dan, explained that there was hope for change and that therapy could get at the sources of same-sex attraction, which stemmed, according to Dan, from childhood family dynamics or abuse. At the end of the day, McKrae met Dan and bought the book You Don’t Have to Be Gay, by Jeff Page 138 →Konrad. He told his parents about the conference, and his mother offered to pay for weekly individual and group counseling sessions with Dan.

Group therapy was refreshing for McKrae because, now that he was no longer going to The Castle, he no longer had a community of gay friends. Even though the individuals in group therapy were, like McKrae, trying to stop being gay, McKrae felt connected by their shared experiences. Each week, group members would share their personal triumphs and setbacks, and McKrae could see that he was not the only person who was trying—and failing—to repress his sexual attractions. Individual therapy began with confessions. McKrae confided in Dan his childhood fascination with his sister’s clothes, his former relationships, and his fears of being alone. Dan told McKrae to keep a prayer journal, which McKrae dutifully did, highlighting the parts each week that he wanted to discuss with Dan. Part of Dan’s approach involved repairing failures in parenting from McKrae’s childhood by recreating aspects of the parent–child relationship, so during some weeks they would spend the session playing with Legos on the floor. Dan encouraged McKrae to think about the small things that made him attracted to men. Was it the clothing? Was it the man’s hair? Dan suggested that pinpointing and resolving whatever was triggering could dismantle the same-sex attraction. Dan’s approach was not purely psychological. As months progressed, sessions also incorporated Dan’s prayerful laying of hands on McKrae, speaking in tongues, and the casting out of evil spirits.

On many levels, the conversion seemed to be working. Pushing through great anxiety, McKrae arranged through his family doctor to be privately screened for HIV. McKrae tested negative, which he took as a sign that God was pleased with his renunciation of his sexual orientation. He signed up for a dating service and was paired with a young Evangelical woman whose father was a pastor. Within six months, they were engaged to be married. McKrae’s parents were thrilled and openly expressed their relief: “McKrae, please put this behind you and live your life. No one has to know.” But McKrae felt compelled to openness. Traveling by bus with a men’s group from First Baptist Church to a Promise Keepers convention in Boulder, Colorado, McKrae stood up in the aisle of the bus on the long drive home and testified to the men on the bus.⁸ He confessed to living a former sinful life and thanked God for delivering him from temptation. Although McKrae was fearful before the testimonial, which he felt God called him to do, he was immediately rewarded. Many men on the bus were in tears by the end of his story, and they praised him for his honesty and bravery. Buoyed up by their approval, McKrae began to feel more comfortable with Page 139 →identifying as “ex-gay.” He told his fiancée about his past, and they worked together to plan a large wedding. He continued to go to individual and group therapy. Another young man from church approached him and admited that he “used to be gay too.” Together, they began attending an additional conversion therapy group in Charlotte.

In some ways, group therapy normalized the “falls” that ex-gays experienced. Each week, members confessed to lapses into same-sex fantasies or even real-life hookups. McKrae often masturbated to Men’s Exercise magazine, the closest thing he could find to male pornography at the grocery store. McKrae alternated between feelings of guilt and pride. For all outward appearances, he was succeeding in his goals to be ex-gay. He was engaged to be married. He had stopped drinking and going to gay clubs. He was leading a Christian life. Momentary “falls” were evidence of the Devil’s continued temptation to sin. They were to be expected, experienced, and then confessed. For many months, McKrae felt in control of this cycle and his desires. His wedding announcements went out. His fiancée had her bridal shower. Then, without any premeditation, he began having sex with his new friend from church, sometimes before they drove to Charlotte for group therapy. Riddled with shame, he told his fiancée not long before their wedding date. Despite his promises that it would never happen again, she ended the relationship. The wedding was cancelled.

The fallout from this experience was painful, although it could have had even more serious consequences. When McKrae told his friend that he was ending their sexual relationship, his friend was devastated and attempted suicide. After seeing that his friend got additional support, McKrae left First Baptist for another large Baptist church in Spartanburg, First North. McKrae was able to transition quickly from one religious social circle to another. Wanting to limit her own exposure to negative gossip, McKrae’s ex-fiancée did not publicly expose the reason for calling off the wedding. As he turned twenty-seven, McKrae began to feel some relief that the wedding did not happen. Although he still wanted to get married, he questioned whether his former fiancée was the right person for him. McKrae did not question the conversion therapy message. He believed that he had simply been tempted by the Devil and had made a mistake—one he would not make again.

McKrae made friends quickly at First North. Within months, he was asked to teach Sunday School. Unlike at First Baptist, McKrae did not share that he was ex-gay. He joined the adult singles group and became roommates with another man from church. Through these connections, he met soon met Julie, a beautiful blonde woman in her early thirties. Within a year of Page 140 →breaking off his first engagement, McKrae and Julie were dating. He told Julie about his prior engagement but not the reason the wedding was called off. Before he proposed marriage, however, he told Julie that he needed to tell her something about his past. “It’s not really bad,” he said in preparation, “but it’s not really good.” Without going into many details, he told Julie that he used to be gay. She let out a sigh of relief and laughed. “Gosh, McKrae, I thought you were going to tell me that you used to be addicted to drugs or something.”

Despite knowing the reasons for the failure of the first engagement, McKrae’s therapist, Dan, now viewed McKrae as a success story. In Spartanburg and Greenville, the Evangelical fight against equality of LGBTQ+ people was escalating, and the ex-gay movement participated openly in efforts to shut down “the gay agenda.” In Greenville, there were efforts to prevent a group home for people with AIDS, and plans were blocked for a gay-affirming church to remodel and occupy a former school. In the summer of 1996, both Spartanburg and Greenville County Councils introduced resolutions that claimed “gay lifestyles” were in opposition to community standards. The International Olympic Committee threatened to refuse the Olympic torch to be carried through any county that adopted such a position, as it had done with Cobb County in Georgia three years prior.⁹ Evangelical churches took issue with this punishment, claiming that they were forced to accept an immoral and anti-Christian lifestyle. Pastors, including the pastor at First North, spoke from the pulpits in favor of the resolutions. McKrae was asked to speak before Greenville County Council, where hundreds of citizens gathered, mostly in favor of the resolution. McKrae pleaded, “I used to be gay. That lifestyle almost destroyed my life. It almost destroyed me. Thankfully, I was saved by our Lord Jesus Christ. I’m here to tell you that no one has to be gay. Our county has to take up a stance against this lifestyle. We should never condone it. For the good of the children. For the good of us all.” McKrae received thunderous applause and cheers and was later quoted in local news stories. Ultimately, the Spartanburg resolution was passed but then rescinded, but the Greenville resolution passed and held. The Olympic torch did not go through Greenville County.

This time, the wedding went off as planned, and McKrae and Julie were married. McKrae describes the early years of their relationship as ideal. They were best friends, and, although McKrae was not sexually attracted to her, he felt sincerely in love with her. Although he had had sex with other women in high school, he would have to fantasize about men to be aroused. With Julie, this was not the case, at least not in the beginning, and their emotional Page 141 →bond supported a sexual relationship. In the early years of their marriage, they went to the movies. They went out to dinner. They moved from the singles group at church into the married groups for men and women. Only when they began trying to conceive a child did sex become formulaic and, as McKrae describes, like “work.” As the couple struggled with fertility issues, McKrae became more and more tempted by gay fantasies. He found a convenience store that sold gay porn magazines, and he would impulsively buy one, only to burn it a few days later. Late at night after Julie had fallen asleep, he began calling the phone sex numbers advertised in the magazines. When Julie caught him, first with the magazines, and then with the phone bill, he apologized and prepared himself for her to leave him. Each time she did not react angrily but said that, when he was tempted, he needed to call her and that she would pray with him. McKrae was grateful for Julie’s response and would control his behaviors temporarily, but as the stress of infertility grew, McKrae would return to gay outlets. It was during this period of stress that McKrae engaged in his first extramarital affair, a spontaneous encounter with a repairman. He hid this one-time slip from Julie for months, but he was riddled with guilt. When he did confess what had happened, Julie again forgave him.

Julie’s unconditional love inspired McKrae to try harder to repress his desires. He learned, through Dan, that there was a larger organization for ex-gay individuals called Exodus International. With Julie, he attended his first Exodus conference in Massanetta Springs, Virginia. Although he had attended the Amway conference in Florida and the Promise Keepers conference in Colorado, this trip was his first exposure to the size and scope of the ex-gay world. The conference days were organized around thematic workshops on topics like “Sex Addiction” and “Pornography” and were divided for men and women. Praise and worship gatherings were for everyone, and meals were served family style. Julie attended some of the workshops but often went back to their room to rest. “This is your thing,” she told McKrae, “not mine. You like talking about your feelings and everything. I don’t.” But she was also encouraging. “I think this is good for you,” she said. McKrae had never been around so many ex-gay people, and this was just a regional conference. When he heard others talking about the national conference that was coming up in Seattle, he knew he wanted to go. The conference in Virginia also gave McKrae a new sense of calling. After he heard one participant give testimony, he felt like he had another direct message from God. The man explained the need for more ex-gay individuals to go public with their stories: “So many people walk away from homosexuality and never tell Page 142 →anyone. That’s why so many people take this journey alone.” Similar to his experience at The Castle, McKrae believed that he heard a voice in his head saying, “This is what I’ve called you to do.”

At this point, McKrae had been attending conversion therapy for over six years with Dan. Within group sessions, he became something of a leader, and, when someone would miss several weeks or disappear from group, McKrae would call them to encourage them to come back. Eventually, some group members began calling McKrae to express frustrations or to receive encouragement. At times, Dan seemed to support McKrae as a leader within the group; at other times, he seemed to resent it. That summer, McKrae and Julie flew to Seattle to attend the Exodus International national conference, and McKrae became more familiar with the structure of the organization. Back in South Carolina, Dan invited McKrae to assist him in a six-week workshop, at a church, for heterosexual people who wanted to understand LGBTQ+ people. This church was not what would be called gay affirming, but it did embrace a “love the sinner, hate the sin” view of sexuality. As Dan led each workshop with the premise that people did not choose to be gay, he explained to the participants, many who had friends, children, or relatives who were gay, that same-sex attraction stemmed from childhood trauma and failed parent–child relationships. After Dan’s lecture and a short break, McKrae would provide a firsthand narrative from an ex-gay perspective. He would talk about his parents’ divorce and the lack of attention he received as a child. He detailed his years living as a young gay man and then his religious conversion that led to a new ex-gay life. When he proudly declared that he was happily married and that they were hoping to have a baby, he fulfilled the ex-gay narrative, and participants praised him for renouncing his former lifestyle and doing the right thing. As with the Greenville County Council, McKrae found himself as a poster boy for what could be. He was proof that no one had to remain gay.

McKrae’s position in the ex-gay world began to rise. At Dan’s suggestion, he traveled to Promise Keepers conventions and set up booths for Exodus International. Some attendees of this Evangelical men’s group were resistant to the display, because they found even the recognition of gay people offensive, but McKrae experienced a lot of positive feedback as well. Through this work, McKrae also met others involved with Exodus International, some of whom were surprised and curious about this new rising star in ex-gay ministry. Back at home, another significant development happened. Dan let him read a letter, handwritten in blue ink on white copier paper, from a sixteen-year-old boy. The teenager lived in Spartanburg and had no way of getting Page 143 →to Greenville or money to pay for therapy, but he was asking Dan for help to stop being gay. McKrae knew what Dan was going to say before he said it. “Why don’t you see if you can help him?” Dan asked. Later that week, McKrae picked up the teenager from his mother’s trailer and took him out to eat. At the end of the meal, the boy asked in earnest, “So, do you think you can fix me?” McKrae smiled reassuringly back, “Well, you know, I used to be gay.”

Life began to change quickly for McKrae. His landscape business was thriving, and Julie became pregnant. They bought their first home. With Julie’s support, McKrae formed a board of directors and organized a nonprofit organization to create his first conversion therapy ministry: Truth Ministry. Because McKrae had never gone to college, his father gave him the money that he had set aside for his tuition to fund the ministry’s initial startup. He purchased radio ads on the local Christian station, His Love Radio, and they featured a story about him. Driving around Spartanburg, McKrae grew fond of hearing himself on the radio, “Hi, I’m McKrae Game, and I used to be gay. For those of you out there who are struggling with homosexuality or have someone close to them, perhaps a friend or a family member, who is struggling, I want you to know that God has a plan. No one has to give in to homosexuality. There is another path, made possible by faith in Jesus Christ our Savior. To find out more about freedom from sexual sin, visit www.truthministry.org.” McKrae started the process of becoming an affiliate member of Exodus International, and he stopped seeing Dan, who now expressed regret for encouraging McKrae into leadership and counseling positions. Never someone who could be considered a shy person, McKrae nevertheless signed up for a Dale Carnegie course to improve his skills in public speaking. He read and reread books like Joseph Nicolosi’s Restorative Therapy for Male Homosexuality, highlighting and taking notes as he went.¹⁰ Meanwhile, his client base grew. Clients signed a form acknowledging that he was not a professional counselor, and they paid by voluntary donation. McKrae’s church, First North, sponsored him and gave him a monthly stipend to speak at churches and conferences in the area. He attended the annual Southern Baptist Convention, which officially endorsed Truth Ministry and recommended it to their members. Soon, McKrae sold his landscaping business so that he could focus on the ministry full time, and he was promoted to be director of the South Atlantic region for Exodus International. Julie became pregnant with their second child, and they both felt like God was rewarding them for the way they were living their lives.

Page 144 →As momentum grew in the early 2000s for the South Carolina legislature to amend the state constitution and define marriage as between one man and one woman, the Southern Baptist Convention donated five thousand dollars to Truth Ministry for McKrae to travel to churches and community organizations across the state and speak in favor of the amendment. The ministry grew and hired more employees. McKrae purchased billboards along the highways and interstates of the Upstate, some with his face on them. The billboards declared, “I Questioned Homosexuality. Change is Possible. Discover How.” Truth Ministry opened satellite offices around the region in Greenville, Charleston, Savannah, and Asheville, and a team of twenty leaders moderated online support groups. After Barack Obama was elected, McKrae was part of a larger effort to push back against legislation supporting LGBTQ+ equality, flying to Washington, DC, to speak against the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Act.¹¹ Eventually, Truth Ministry became the largest member organization within Exodus International. McKrae became a featured speaker at the national Exodus conferences, and he developed a workshop based upon his own experiences. Without irony, he called the workshop “The Transparent Life.”

Despite all of these successes, a loving wife and two beautiful children, McKrae continued to struggle. Gay pornography and masturbation were constant temptations, but, at least for some conversion therapy leaders, this was an expected part of the daily struggle against sin. A message that is consistent throughout “The Transparent Life” is a recognition and acceptance of the endless fight. McKrae had not had an extramarital affair since their struggles with infertility, but he thought incessantly about men. As a group leader himself, he knew that his desires were, even in the ex-gay world, normal. Unlike some conversion therapy leaders, McKrae did not promise that same-sex attractions would stop but that they could be redirected so that people could maintain a Christian lifestyle. Same-sex attraction and its theoretical opposite, heterosexuality, became more a question of choices and actions rather than feelings and longings. Proponents of conversion therapy were not united on this position, however, and as years passed, rifts began to form within ex-gay ministry about their stance and messaging regarding same-sex desire and the LGBTQ+ community at large. Alan Chambers, the president of Exodus International, began advocating for Christianity to be more welcoming to gays and lesbians. At this point, Chambers still held that same-sex relationships were sinful but began to suggest that it was no greater a sin than behaviors such as drinking or gambling. Chambers eventually met with the leader of the Gay Christian Network, and rumblings grew from Page 145 →within Exodus International that the organization was becoming too “gay friendly.”

McKrae felt torn. Exodus International was the largest conversion therapy network in the country, and he was one of its most prominent leaders. When some members proposed breaking off into a new organization that focused more intently on the idea that same-sex relationships were sinful, they invited McKrae to join them. Yet McKrae also understood the evolution of Chambers’s views and was not entirely opposed to the more tolerant vision that he had for Exodus International. Although McKrae had aggressively lobbied against the 2009 Hate Crimes Prevention Act, now that it had passed, he could see that it was positive, and he questioned why he had been so vehemently opposed to it. Most important, McKrae realized that he sided with Chambers on the issue of same-sex desire. Both Chambers and McKrae were becoming clearer in their statements that they could not change sexual attractions—that conversion therapy really centered on changing behaviors. In 2013, sensing growing resistance to a more inclusive message from within Exodus International, Chambers emailed the board of directors, copying McKrae, and informed them of his decision to close the ministry. The next month, Chambers appeared on Our America with Lisa Ling and publicly apologized for his role in conversion therapy. Exodus International was over.¹²

Chambers’s decision to copy McKrae on the email gave him advance notice of the folding of Exodus; the official announcement came at the annual Exodus national conference, which was held during the same week when the episode featuring Lisa Ling’s interview with Chambers aired. To McKrae, it seemed as if Chambers was passing the baton to him intentionally. Although Chambers had disavowed the practice of conversion therapy, he seemed to be suggesting that, if it was going to continue, he wanted to encourage the more lenient factions within the ministry. Seeing the collapse of Exodus as an opportunity, McKrae was poised and ready to elevate Truth Ministry as the new Exodus International. McKrae used the month between the private email announcing the closing of Exodus and the national conference to rebrand Truth Ministry as Hope for Wholeness, a new national exgay ministry. Many former Exodus affiliate ministries transitioned directly from the old organization into Hope for Wholeness. A rival organization, Restored Hope Network, formed to represent the members who wanted to return to a less tolerant message.¹³ But McKrae was now in charge of the nation’s largest conversion therapy ministry.

Hope for Wholeness held its first national conference in 2013 at the First Presbyterian Church in downtown Greenville. Stephen Baldwin was the Page 146 →keynote speaker. Realizing that many people did not live near an affiliate ministry, Hope for Wholeness launched a DVD conversion therapy curriculum that could be purchased by individuals or checked out from church libraries. Production of the curriculum was fraught with difficulties, as sessions with instructors would have to be pulled when, one by one, the instructors themselves came out as gay or lesbian. When finally published, the curriculum was successful, further cementing Hope for Wholeness as the leader in the world of ex-gay ministry. McKrae transformed his former workshop into a book, The Transparent Life.¹⁴ Momentum for the ministry continued to grow, but so did McKrae’s doubts. He texted Alan Chambers, “Do you think homosexuals will go to hell?” This question had been an important part of McKrae’s own conversion: When he had promised to leave behind his life as a young gay man at that Amway conference, his first thought had been, “Now I can go to heaven.” Eventually, Chambers responded to McKrae’s question, “I don’t know.” Finally, after decades of working in conversion therapy, McKrae felt relief. “I don’t know” opened the door to a possibility other than damnation. “I don’t know” was liberating.

Additionally, with the elevated national profile, McKrae began to experience increased scrutiny from his board of directors. What may have been considered within ex-gay circles as one’s private struggles with extramarital or same-sex desire became normalized as topics for discussion at monthly board meetings. The board questioned McKrae about his consumption of pornography, his sex life with Julie, and his masturbation. The board sent McKrae and Julie to marriage counseling; they ordered McKrae to private counseling; and, by majority vote, they made him attend Sex Addicts Anonymous. Since the birth of their children, McKrae and Julie had long enjoyed a companionate, mostly sexless marriage. McKrae still considered Julie his best friend, and although she agreed to go to counseling, they both shook their heads in confusion. McKrae was forced to explain to his board, “My wife doesn’t want to have sex. She doesn’t care if I masturbate,” but the board held firm in its decision. Hope for Wholeness may have been more open than the rivaling conversion therapy groups, but the central premise of the organization remained the ongoing scrutiny of personal sexual matters, and McKrae was not immune to this fact. When McKrae found a therapist who would accept his insurance, he was dismayed to find that the therapist was gay affirming. He immediately told the board of directors, but they dismissed his concerns, stating that they saw sex addiction as more of his problem than sexual orientation. When he told the therapist that he led an ex-gay Page 147 →ministry, the therapist told him it would be fine: “Don’t worry, McKrae. I won’t make you gay.”

McKrae started to experience severe physical symptoms. Some days, he could not get out of bed. Migraine headaches became debilitating. While walking across a parking lot to his car one day, he had to call Julie crying. He could see his car, it was only a couple of spaces away, but he could not walk to it. He went to the doctor for tests, but there did not appear to be anything medically wrong. “Stress,” the doctor suggested, “Get some rest.” That Christmas, the board of directors gave him a gift certificate to Cataloochee, a ski resort in Western North Carolina. McKrae had not been skiing in years, but the experience was liberating, so far removed from the world in which he was typically immersed. McKrae slowly transitioned away from group and individual therapy into a more detached role within the ministry, writing the weekly newsletter and overseeing operations. There was nothing in his contract with Hope for Wholeness that dictated his schedule, and he gradually decreased his hours there from sixty- and seventy-hour workweeks to a more moderate schedule. He began spending less time in the office, and his health slowly improved. Then, while skiing with his teenage son at another resort, Sugar Mountain in Banner Elk, North Carolina, he was invited to try out for ski patrol. McKrae gleefully accepted a part-time position with the resort, working there on weekends, and traveling back to Spartanburg for the week. Julie was supportive. “I think it’ll be good for you,” she said.

Although Banner Elk, or even the nearby college town of Boone, is hardly an area known for its progressive spirit, the culture of ski patrol was a new world for McKrae, who had not had close friends outside of the Evangelical Christian community in over twenty years. No one there knew him as a leader in ex-gay ministry, and, although none of the other patrollers identified as gay, the general sentiment among both male and female patrollers was LGBTQ+ friendly. McKrae started working ten- and twelve-hour days on the slopes on Saturdays and Sundays, crashing on friends’ couches in exchange for buying dinner. When ski season ended, he stayed in touch with his new friends, and the group even met up over the summer at the beach for a get together. McKrae’s world was expanding.

Back in Spartanburg, however, tensions within Hope for Wholeness were growing. McKrae’s book made clear his ongoing struggles with pornography, and the board of directors was not pleased with this public confession from the organization’s president. Some of McKrae’s positions in the weekly newsletter also drew ire from the board. In one essay, McKrae compared masturbation to eating Snickers bars. Having one every now and then is not Page 148 →that bad for you, he argued. When McKrae left for an annual retreat with ministry leaders, the organization’s secretary asked him to leave his laptop, saying that she needed it to print postage. After he returned from the trip, things began to unravel. His business credit cards were declined. One of his insurance claims for therapy failed to go through. He asked several people what was going on, but he received only noncommittal answers. Within weeks, two members of the board flew in and, without notice, announced that they had found gay pornography on McKrae’s laptop and fired him from the organization that he built and escorted him from the building. McKrae drove directly to the school where Julie worked as a receptionist, bawling hysterically. Julie listened to him until his breathing calmed and his tears subsided. “I know you don’t see this right now, but this is a blessing,” she said. “They did you a favor.”

For a couple of months, McKrae drifted. He picked up work as a caterer, and he asked the director of ski patrol if he could work full time during the ski season. That winter, his schedule was reversed, and instead of working weekends and returning to Spartanburg for the week, he did ski patrol for most of the week, visiting Julie and the kids on weekends. McKrae gravitated toward the female ski patrollers, and they coaxed him toward a new understanding of himself. Without challenging him or asking him if he was gay, they would say things like, “I just want you to be happy,” and “You need to stop living for everybody else.” As McKrae drove the two-and-a-half hours back and forth from Sugar Mountain to Spartanburg, he had time to reflect on his life. Slowly, he realized that he wasn’t ex-gay, he was gay. For over twenty-six years, he had been living in a fantasy world that he had helped to construct.

Coming out still took McKrae several more months. McKrae eventually created an account on the gay dating app Grindr and, with the encouragement of some male patroller friends, had his first gay sexual experience in decades. McKrae told Julie, who was more concerned about preserving the structure of the marriage, their house, and lifestyle than the details of the affair. McKrae had a large social media following, and he began to make more LGBTQ+-affirming statements online. He did not yet intend to make a public statement, but when one follower questioned, “McKrae, are you now pro-gay?” he responded, “I don’t know. I know I’m not anti-gay. I am gay.”

McKrae tried to stay off social media, off Grindr, and out of the public eye, but several media outlets picked up on the story. The Post and Courier ran a story in August 2019 about McKrae, who, by this time, had developed serious misgivings about the practices of the ex-gay ministry that he had Page 149 →himself founded.¹⁵ Subsequent news outlets followed suit. People, CBS News, Time, The Guardian, The Washington Post, BBC News, the New York Post, and multiple other outlets spread the word. In multiple sources, McKrae has acknowledged the harm he has caused others through his work in ex-gay ministry.¹⁶ In a Facebook post from August 25, 2019, McKrae declared, “I’ll take advantage of any opportunity I get to share my experiences, and my belief that exgay ministry and conversion therapy IS HARMFUL.” He apologized, “I WAS WRONG! Please forgive me!” For some, the narrative of an ex-gay minister coming out as gay elicited eyerolls and knowing chuckles. For others, McKrae was a bitter reminder of the hypocrisy and pain that conversion therapy caused for hundreds of thousands of people. He received death threats. Others told him he should kill himself. And there were still others who welcomed McKrae with open arms into the LGBTQ+ community. Deb Foreman, the president of the local chapter of PFLAG, messaged McKrae and invited him to lunch.¹⁷

McKrae’s status as villain or victim in the larger history of LGBTQ+ individuals in South Carolina has yet to be determined. In an interview with McKrae in 2020 for Logo TV, Garrard Conley, the author of Boy Erased, expressed mixed feelings about McKrae’s new position in the gay community.¹⁸ When McKrae described that he was enjoying the opportunity to be “authentic,” Conley responded, “That’s kind of hard to hear, a little bit, just because it’s not as if I’m not happy that you’ve reached a place of authenticity. It’s that I wished when I walked away, I had that kind of self-assurance. You can see how those words can trigger people and upset them, right?” Conley’s response is fairly typical. Many commenters found McKrae “disgusting,” “insufferable,” and “shameless.” Some viewers acknowledged that McKrae also experienced the effects of conversion therapy, but most were reluctant to forgive his contributions to a practice that wrecked so many lives.

The past two years have brought a lot of change to McKrae’s life. Exploring his sexuality as a fifty-year-old man in a pandemic was not easy. Several of McKrae’s friends have noted the difference in his real age and his “gay age,” pointing to the fact that he seems to have regressed to his mid-twenties, to the period when he stopped living as his true self. McKrae’s social media posts are full of seductive selfies with him sporting rainbow tank tops, earrings, painted nails, and even Speedos. He now talks openly about his attraction to men, and he has had a series of short-lived relationships. McKrae and Julie are still on good terms and technically married, although he has moved out of their family home and into a rental. Since coming out, McKrae has spoken out publicly against the practice of conversion therapy, lobbied for Page 150 →efforts to ban the practice, and has advocated for LBGTQ+ advocacy groups like The Trevor Project. In the winters, McKrae continues to work on ski patrol at Sugar Mountain.

Esther Liu Godfrey is professor of nineteenth-century British literature at the University of South Carolina Upstate. She has published on issues of gender, race, and critical aging studies. Her current project examines various forms of problematic marriages in the nineteenth century.