Surviving the ”Cure” of Conversion Therapy (with Lucas Wilson)

He was told he was broken. He was promised a cure. It was all a lie. 

Lucas Wilson, author of Shame-Sex Attraction: Survivors' Stories of Conversion Therapy, takes us inside the real experiences of queer people forced to try and change their so-called "same-sex attraction."

Lucas shares both his own story and those of survivors, revealing the psychological, moral, and spiritual harms of conversion therapy. He also explains why stories, not just statistics, are the most powerful way to confront the discredited practice.

As the U.S. Supreme Court gears up to overturn conversion therapy bans, these stories matter now more than ever. 

See the complete transcript at relationscapes.org. 

Show Notes

• Boy Erased

• Chris Walker, "Supreme Court Appears Poised to Strike Down State Bans on Conversion Therapy," truthout.org.

• "Practices of so-called 'conversion therapy," report to the UN.

About the Author

Dr. Lucas Wilson is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Toronto Mississauga. As a former evangelical and a survivor of conversion therapy, he is the editor of Shame-Sex Attraction: Survivors’ Stories of Conversion Therapy (JKP Books, 2025). He is also the author of At Home with the Holocaust: Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives (Rutgers University Press, 2025), which received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award. He is also the co-editor of Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Literature (Lexington Books, 2023), a collection of academic essays about the writings of grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, which has been named an “essential” title by Choice Reviews. His public-facing writing has appeared in The Advocate, Queerty, LGBTQ Nation, and Religion Dispatches, among other venues, and his academic work has appeared in Modern Language Studies, Canadian Jewish Studies, Flannery O’Connor Review, Journal of Jewish Identities, and Studies in American Jewish Literature and in edited collections published by The MLA, SUNY Press, The University of Alabama Press, and DIO Press. He is currently working on two interrelated monograph projects that examine evangelical homophobia and transphobia in the U.S.