SIO140: Surviving Gay Conversion Therapy, with Tim Rymel

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is episode 140, I'm your host Thomas Smith, and before I get to today's show, just wanted to say a huge thank you to New Orleans Secular Humanist Association, Beth and Charlotte and all the people I met that were really awesome there, thank you so much for having me, if you get the chance to work with them or go to their events, if you're anywhere near, please check them out. That's nosha.info. I had a great time and I delivered what I thought was a pretty interesting talk to an audience that was not necessarily familiar with a lot of the online atheism drama kind of stuff. So it was fascinating to do and I loved it and I had great time.

0:01:14 Thomas: I, I recorded the talk and I have made the audio available for patrons, that is one of this month's bonus episodes. It's actually all told with the Q&A it's like an hour and 40 minutes so it's almost a double. So I hope you enjoy that and I'm really looking forward to what you think.

I talked about ideology and identity and sort of the downfall of online atheism and I had a lot of interesting social science I brought into it so check that out if you're a patron or a supporter. I hope, hope you enjoy it. Now for today's episode, while I am speaking with Tim Rymel, who is a survivor of gay conversion therapy, he was an evangelical minister for nearly 25 years. Cheers.

He was in what I can't believe is seriously called ex-gay ministry, but I mean it's, it's really no laughing matter, but also just the idea that there are a lot of people in the world who think you can just be ex-gay, you know, as though you could be ex-straight or ex-black or something like that, that. Tim has a very compelling story. I think you can hear just how damaging it is to grow up with this set of beliefs and fundamentally just the idea of being taught that something about you is just not, not just like kind of wrong but just fundamentally wrong is really traumatic.

0:02:44 Thomas: I Really compelling interview.

0:02:59 Thomas: Tim nice to have you with me today.

0:03:02 Tim: Thanks for having me, Tom. It's good to be here.

0:03:03 Thomas: Really interested to hear about your story. Thanks for reaching out and when you had reached out you mentioned that you were a survivor of gay conversion therapy and I was just like, oh my gosh, I don't think I've ever talked about that on the show or had anyone, you know, where I've gotten to hear their story on the shows, so I thought it would be a really good opportunity, and of course you've got a lot of other stuff going on, we're gonna talk about books and and articles and and all you do, but yeah, do you want to start with a little bit on your background leading up to this story?

0:03:32 Tim: My story is really growing up in the evangelical faith. I grew up at a time where education wasn't that big of a deal, but I kind of grew up in a time of the Jesus movement where the fire and brimstone was kind of calming down a little bit. So it really was about Jesus' love, and it still brought in that segment of the Pentecostal Church of God where I came from and my family. So it was about God's love, but you still had to live a certain way in order for Jesus to continue loving you. I mean, they didn't say that, but it was implied.

0:04:02 Thomas: Yeah. Right.

0:04:04 Tim: So growing up in that family, one of the things that we often said about my grandfather, who had no more than a second-grade education, and he was an itinerant Pentecostal preacher. Preaching wherever they would let him talk was that he didn't know much, but he sure knew Jesus. So, you know, growing up with that, there was just this emphasis on spirituality and who God was and how we love God and all that God is within us. And our religion is different. We don't have a religion. We have a relationship because we can feel God. It's very experiential.

0:04:19 Thomas: Right?

0:04:38 Thomas: Did you grow up in a very religious place? Or did you just happen to have a very Religious family?

0:04:43 Tim: I think it was my family. I didn't call it a religious family. I just thought it was normal. You know, you know, there were, there were a lot of kids that were there were 18 kids in my dad's family. But I think 12 or 16 survived. So he was towards the end of that. So they grew up very poor and they moved from Missouri to California in 1942. So just six years after the Dust Bowl, but they were following what a lot OF other people did in the South where they just came out looking for work and they, They follow the fruit along the west coast of California, you know, in the valley, and then Oregon and Washington.

So they, as a family, they lived in tents. They were very poor, and God was very important to them, as it is, as you find in those types of situations where it was they have the Savior, somebody's going to change them, deliver them. And our flavor of that just happened to be Pentecostal Christianity. So that was all I had ever known. And I didn't know there was anything different other than we had God, and those people probably didn't because they didn't speak in tongues, and they didn't do all

0:04:47 Thomas: Right? Yeah. Hmm. Oh,

0:05:38 Tim: The things that we did. And I had never even been to a church outside of my own church, had in. And so I was a teenager by the time I had seen a Baptist church. And I just remember the pastor, when he prayed, he prayed by himself. Nobody said anything. And when they led worship, it was very subdued. It wasn't the drums and the Hammond B3 organ and all the stuff that I grew up with.

0:05:39 Thomas: Hey, Hmm.

0:06:02 Tim: It was much quieter than that. That was my experience. I was kind of getting into those other religions or the other faiths. So I didn't know if they were Christian or not because they didn't speak in tongues. They didn't have the outward appearance that I grew up with. And so that was just my background. That was just MyFamily. That was all I had ever known.

0:06:18 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, no, I can definitely relate to that. I mean, I had a number of things about my family where it's like, you think that's just how everybody is. And then everybody who's different is like, oh, they're kind of weird, you know? And then, then you grow up and you're like, Oh, wait a minute. But so, but this is all in California then. So this is, you work definitely, I, from my experience in California, growing up around where you were, you know, I didn't meet anybody in my upbringing who spoke in tongues or did any of that stuff. So it seems like you were a very religious family, kind of, and not a very religious state.

0:06:28 Tim: Yeah. Right.

0:06:52 Tim: Yeah, I think it was different. We were in the Salinas Valley. I was born in Salinas. So that was where all the farms and where they still have the farms today. So it was a small town. It was a bunch of migrant workers. And we went to the Pentecostal Tabernacle in the Solinas. So I think these families just came together. And it was very religious, but many of them came from the South. Many of them moved here from my mothership, in Oklahoma. So that was our upbringing, was very Southern, Midwestern. Even our food was Southern and Midwestern, so that part of our upbringing I never really thought about, was it like that for other people, because clearly, my relatives and the people that we hung out with, that was all I had known. But our worldviews are very small when we're young, so So that really is what we understand.

0:06:58 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah. No, I agree. Yeah yep. That's my experience too. I had to do a lot lot of learning when I, when I left home, that's for sure. So, wow. Uh, but yeah, you were in a very, uh, very religious pocket there with, with speaking. So you spoke in tongues and did all that kind of stuff. Wow. You oh,

0:07:55 Tim: Oh, yeah. And The funny thing about that is that when you're in that environment, and I'm an introvert, so being in that environment, there is this expectation that if you're not doing those things, else if in the church is doing, then you are seen as less spiritual. So I really struggled with that, was trying to be more spiritual, trying to more connected to God, because I'm so analytical and so left-brained, I would stand in the pews and have this battle going on in my mind where the right side of my head is wanting to be, you know, letting it go and just being, just worshiping and doing all those things. And the left side of my brain is, is questioning everything. Is the, is the pastor telling the truth? Is the Bible true? You're speaking in tongues. Is that actually a language or what's going on? And you're, you know, what's, what going on here? So, so there was always this, this thing happening in my mind about what was real and what wasn't. Um, I realized that I was gay, cause I didn't have a word for that. I didn't know what it was.

0:08:44 Tim: I was much younger, and I was 14 years old, I think, when I realized that I was gay. But in context, this was 1979. So the American Psychiatric Association came out in 1973 and said, no, homosexuality is just a variant of human sexuality. But there's no way that I would have known that. There's no Way that my family had probably even heard of the American Psychiatric Organization. And the terms that we used back in those days of Anita Bryant was, you know, fag and all the terms that they had back then, which is what we would call each other as kids, because that was the thing to do. It was just, you're a weirdo.

0:08:44 Thomas: So. Right, right, right.

0:09:21 Thomas: That still existed by the, you know, I'm, I'm a little bit younger, but that was still around in the shitty town that I grew up in in California. So yeah, in the 80s and 90s.

0:09:29 Tim: Right. Yes. But you just thought you're just a weirdo, right? I mean, you didn't really put much into it. But when I realized that I was 14, I just remember feeling like I cannot tell this to anyone. I just have to pray and beg God to take this away from me. And I thought, well, maybe I'll grow out of this. Maybe this is something that everybody goes through and they just grow out of it.

So with my friends, you know, I saw that they were getting more attracted to girls and I didn't have the same thing, or if I would play along with them, but it wasn't the same for me. I just had this something inside that was just blocked. I just didn't feel that way. When I became a Christian at the age of 15, however, I knew that that there was going to be problems with this thing.

But I felt like if I just pray enough, if I read my Bible enough, if I get to know God in the right way, then according to His promises, He'll heal this thing, and again, you know, drawing on those roots of the Jesus movement in the late 60s, early 70s, in the evangelical church, we changed to the more sophisticated assemblies of God by that time, and drawing on what I understood was that whatever you ask of God, He'll give it to you. So I believe that if I just kept praying, just kept submitting to the Lord, that this would take care of itself. That didn't happen.

0:09:34 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:10:50 Thomas: You don't say.

0:10:51 Tim: So, right.

0:10:51 Thomas: Yeah. So it's like you looked at it and it makes sense. I mean, given your worldview at that time, it seems logical. That's like, okay, did you think of it as, this is maybe a challenge that I was given, that if I do the right things then I can overcome it, rather than, this is just who I am? Yeah.

0:11:09 Tim: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, but for me, I didn't talk about it. I didn't say anything to anybody. And I started having having a very severe depression and anxiety and I lost a ton of weight. So I'm 5'10 and I dropped to 115 pounds when I was 19 years old. And we just couldn't figure out why. We didn't know what was going on. And of course, back then I didn't realize how strong the brain could affect the body. So I had a girlfriend and that was a disaster.

0:11:14 Thomas: Right.

0:11:40 Tim: And I heard about Ministries on this television show. And so I didn't even know that that was a thing back in the, at this point, this is late eighties. And I contacted one that I found out was in San Rafael, California. So they're about 60 miles away. And I contacted them and I said, look, I'm not really gay because I'm a Christian. So that's incompatible.

0:12:00 Thomas: Yeah.

0:12:02 Tim: But I said I need help. So I started corresponding with this guy named Mark. And he said, why don't you come out to the ministry, check us out, see what it's about. So I drove out there one Friday night to a Bible study, and it was the first time that I had been in a room of people that were like me. And it was really kind of creepy, to be honest, because I didn't feel like we were exactly the same. I had absolutely no experience with this. I'd never acted out. I've never done anything in my life with even the thought of being gay, because I was was so opposed to it. So I'm in this room, and I met the ministry founders and leaders at that point, which is Frank and Anita Worth. And Frank was one of the founders of Love in Action back in 1973. He married Anita. He was an ex-gay, married Anita, his wife.

0:12:50 Tim: And theologically, we matched. We felt the same ways. We believed the same things. And so when I went and met with him after this Bible study, I just broke down crying because I felt like I have to be here. I have to come here. This is the Holy Spirit leading me and this is where I need to be. And they were so loving and kind to me and put their arms around me and they prayed with me. And so I decided that I would go into the to Love in Action and go through their residential program. So Love in Action had a one year residential program for men at the time where you would come from January 1st to December 31st and you would work through the issues in this program, talk about why you were were gay, talk about how God could heal you. It was about submitting and accountability and memorizing scriptures. So it was a very safe place.

0:13:35 Tim: And I decided that I would go there and try to work this thing out. So that was excruciating itself. I actually attempted suicide between the time that I met them and the time that I went, because I just, I was so humiliated the fact that I had had to deal with this issue and I needed to face it. So January 1st, 1990, I went into the residential program at Love and Action and spent one year there with a lot of other guys that I hadn't met.

So we had, there were actually two houses at Love and Action where they bring guys in from all over the country, and the funny thing is, you know, we get a lot of questions about how do you bring these guys together, these young gay guys in a single house, and say that they're there to love Jesus. You know, but we really didn't have issues with that. I think part of it is just because you're so scared. Now, I can't say that there haven't been issues. In our particular house, we didn't have any problems. It really was a lot OF guys that we were there because we wanted to serve Jesus. We wanted to be the best person we were supposed to be. Um, so that really was our motivation.

So for me going through that one year program, it felt like things were changing because about four months into the program and you're living with all these guys, you have very little alone time. There's no, there's no place to go for pornography or any of that kind of stuff. So what happens is, you know, you do kind of get where, just don't do anything. So So for me, I took that as, oh, my sexuality is changing, when what happened was my sexuality was just getting shoved down and buried.

0:14:13 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Just Repeat.

0:15:07 Tim: And so I think a lot of us went through that same thing, is that we felt like we were changing. We felt like things were happening. But there was a difference between those of us who were raised in an evangelical home and those of Us who were not. I have some good friends that did not come from the evangelical background. And a year out of it, or some by the end of it were saying, that oh didn't work and they were able to walk away from that.

0:15:31 Thomas: Were they doing there in the first place if they didn't have It seems like you, you would take a strong religious background to even want to feel like you needed to do this. Or was it just because it was a different time? Oh.

0:15:42 Tim: It was a different time. It was different culture. And we're talking about the end of the 80s when the AIDS epidemic was still pretty strong. We didn't know what was happening. So I think there was a lot of fear in general and in the general public. And so when you have we add the religion on top of that, of course, that just adds this added bonus of what is this? I don't want to be like this. I want to serve God. We just didn't know as much as we know now. Plus, you know, the other piece of this, which I'll talk about in just a minute, was the religious right had really been growing. So since 1978, the religious right had been coming together and creating the moral majority. They were getting more involved with politics. They had voted in Ronald Reagan. They're doing a lot more politically and getting more politically active. And that really was the combination of spirituality and And politics, so, right,

0:15:47 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:16:32 Thomas: It's hard for me to, I, I've never experienced anything other than that, the fact that the right, you know, tied together religion and politics, but it's weird that it didn't always used to be that way.

0:16:42 Tim: It's kind of where it didn't used to be that way. But what happened in that time period, too, was that the ex-gay ministry, conversion, it wasn't called conversion therapy back then, but the ex gay ministry was being pulled into politics. We didn't really plan on doing that, but we became part of that culture war. So when you have these guys that are living these quiet lives in a little house in San Rafael, California, who wanted nothing more than to serve God and to just go about their lives and get married and have kids, and now we find that we're kind of pulled into this public debate about homosexuality, and look, there's these guys, they're changing, they'RE doing this, so the problem is that gay people just don't want to serve god, and so they're godless. And so, you know, it creates this whole divide between us and them. It was very convenient for the religious right to use us. At the end of my program here in 1990, I went on staff.

0:17:30 Tim: Actually, I talked to our new director, John Smith, at the time, and I said, I want to go on staff, I wanna go back into the ministry again. So John said, well, I just had a board meeting and we were looking for someone that can start to handle all of the engagement requests that we're getting from churches, from the media. We just need someone to manage this and to help us with our programs. So because of my involvement with church ministry, you know, I'd been a musician for a long time, put together a lot of programs and all the things that church ministers do or music ministers do, it wasn't a big stretch. So I took that and molded what we had and updated it. We had some kick-ass music. You know, we had some really good stuff. So we go to these churches with our programs, and we had testimonies and plays and music and drama and all the things that we presented, which was a very impactful message to people that wanted to believe that gay people could change.

0:18:08 Thomas: Yeah.

0:18:22 Tim: At the same time, we were getting contacted by the media. So our staff began making these appearances on Jerry Springer, Good Morning America, ABC News Tonight with Peter Jennings did a story on us. John and Ann Paul, who are ministry staff, ended up on the the Oprah Winfrey Show. So all of these things were happening around us, and it felt like we were doing God's work. It felt like people were coming to us because they wanted answers. They wanted to find out what was going on. In the Bay Area where we were, it's very liberal. It was then, it is now. And so over time, we started doing a lot more ministry engagements outside of our area, going traveling to different states, different places, but not a lot was happening in Moraine County. So we had the opportunity to take the ministry and move it to Memphis, Tennessee, and we did that at the end of 1994.

0:18:22 Thomas: Was

0:19:11 Tim: In the meantime, I had met someone, became close to her, and was told by the ministry staff, don't worry about it. If you don't feel these sexual attractions, that will happen once you find the right person, that when it's time, that God will provide that for you, and so you'll get married, and you'll know that that's the right person. So, we did just that. We got married,

0:19:29 Thomas: I just wanted to make sure to reset a second because, you did that that year. Was there anything? I mean, so you felt when you had essentially repressed your sexuality, you felt like some progress had been made to the point where, I say progress in quotes, obviously. But like to where you felt, "OK, I'm either no longer gay or I'm like along the direction of where I need to be going." It sounds like the program for you seemed like it was doing something and was effective.

0:20:01 Thomas: Wow. But what is, we didn't really get into, I'm curious and sorry to backtrack here, but I mean, what were you doing? Was it just being all, it was simple as being, you quarantined in a way, but also studying scripture. Was there anything more targeted than that? Or is it just Being Super Religious, essentially?

0:19:59 Tim: Yes and yeah Okay, so there's... there's two sides to this. One is that yes, we were being super religious in that we spent a lot of time together, my accountability team became my roommates, one of whom worked for Excess International, which was the umbrella organization for all of the ex-gay ministries in and out of the United States. We were spending a lot time in church. I was doing a lot lot of praying. I was doing a lot of worship because I was a worship leader. I was doing, you know, all of the things that I would do in my Christian experience. The other piece of that is the psychological, scientific part of that, which again, I wouldn't have learned until much later when I started to take this apart, was that our brains put stories together, and our brains, when we want to believe something, will create that story, and it gives us that dopamine push when we feel like we put the pieces of the puzzle together. For me, that meant not feeling those sexual attractions, being repressed, although I I didn't call it repressed then.

0:21:11 Tim: I felt like having no sexual attractions was better than having any sexual attractions at all, because I didn't want to be gay. I didn't want that to be a part of my life. So my brain played along with it, and it said, look, you have decreased sexual attractions. You're doing what you're supposed to be doing, so it's working for you. And I believe that it was working for me, and I think the other people in the ministry believed it was working for them as well. We didn't lie. And I say this because that's part of the response I get from the LGBT who rightfully are angry about my involvement or the ministry staff's involvement in conversion therapy, is that we were very sincere in what we did. We believed it to be true because we needed to believe it to me. We needed to be true in order to keep our religion and alive so

0:21:56 Thomas: So I guess just, I was just trying to assess the question of like, for people who don't know, and myself included, like, what is gay conversion therapy? At least in your case, I'm sure it varies, but like, at least in Your case, it wasn't, it sounds like, because I've heard some tales of some really abusive sounding stuff, but You wouldn't characterize your experience as necessarily that, other than, of course, the entire premise being abusive in,

0:21:57 Tim: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Right. Well, there's three types. So when I, when I was involved with it, it was called ex-gay ministry. We didn't really talk about conversion therapy, that came later and and That developed by, well, there was a couple of sources who say that they developed it, but it developed out of the, I guess, culmination of ex-gay ministry to um, conversion, conversion therapy, where you're still dealing with some of the psychological issues and you're pulling God into it. And then you've got reparative therapy, which really just delves into the psychology, which is based a lot on what Freud believed, was that there was a disconnection between men and their father or a disconnectation between women and their mothers. And so the idea is to repair that broken connection between the child and the parent, and then providing them proper gender role models so that they could repaired, so they could they could be what they were supposed to be. Does that make sense?

0:22:27 Thomas: Yeah.

0:23:13 Thomas: I mean, no, but I Understand what you're saying. Right.

0:23:15 Tim: Yeah, So it's really all about the mind, in that, you know, the belief that there's something wrong with your sexual orientation and that there was a mental break somewhere along the way. So we did believe that in ex-gay ministry. We did pick up that whole Freudian idea of the broken relationships. However, our repair for that, like it was for anything else in the evangelical church, is you just have to pray enough, you have to trust God enough, you have to believe, do accountability, memorize the Bible, and and then it will fix itself because as you submit to God those things will be repaired, um Conversion therapy and reparative therapy started to kind of replace God with psychotherapy, so it it evolved over time. And And John Smith, our director, who's still a good friend of mine and wrote a book called X'd Out, talks about how with Love in Action, after I left, he said, I just kept going from one thing to the next thing. When conversion therapy came up, I started bringing in psychologists so it would show that we're, as a ministry, we're legitimate.

And he said, I knew that it wasn't working, but I was just trying to figure out how to make it work. And so I think a lot of that was happening in those ex-gay ministries, is that they do get more of the psycho, or try to bring in these psychologists to legitimize what they're doing. But it's all the same. You're still trying

0:23:51 Thomas: Right.

0:24:36 Tim: To repair something that you believe is broken that now we know, of course, was never broken in the first place.

0:24:42 Thomas: Yeah, okay, so we can go back. To You got married, now, did the person you married, was she aware of kind of everything you went through regarding this? Oh.

0:24:54 Tim: She was aware of the ministry. She actually traveled with me at the point that we got married. I was the outreach director at Love in Action and traveling all over the country. And so when she was available and we were in the state, she would go with me to these different places and she would actually talk. So, you know, when we would talk to youth groups, they would ask her questions like, what's it like to be engaged to this this ex-gay man?

And so she would answer some of those questions. She wasn't aware of the depth of what the ministry did and what I believe to be true. And in fact, I kind of tell the story is that when I wrote Going Gay, she didn't come out looking very good in that book. And I didn't realize how angry I was even at the time I wrote the book.

But later when I an article in the book for the Goodman Project and people kind of skewered me because at one point in the book, I talked about, you know, I couldn't have divorced her because I was a Christian. So the next best thing that us Christians do is that we just pray to God that he would just kill her. And

0:25:54 Tim: So, so, you know, I got kind of, you know, lambasted with that article saying how awful and what a terrible thing to say. And so I said, you Know what, I'm going to interview her. And So I did an article from her perspective. And it was very enlightening for me to sit down with her and to let her tell her side of the story. And, you know, first of all, she said, Look, I don't know of anybody who's been in a long term relationship who hasn't wanted to kill them at one point or another.

0:25:54 Thomas: My Gosh, yeah. Hmm.

0:26:17 Thomas: So.

0:26:17 Tim: So so she goes, I would just let that go. But I said when did you first realize realize I was gay. And she said, the honeymoon. And I thought, you know, even gay guys don't want to hear that. That's not what you want to hear. So it was humbling, and I got another perspective of her. But her thing after the divorce, and you know every divorce is messy, but after going through what we had been through, she said I just wanted to know the truth. She said if I had been given the truth about what it was like to be ex-gay, I could have lived with that. But she said The ministry kept me in the dark. I was never allowed to make a decision about whether I wanted to marry you in the first place. I was never allowed to make a decision about what life would look like. She said, you didn't know what was true.

0:27:04 Tim: You lived so long trying to make this thing work and trying to live with these ideologies that you lose your grip on what reality is. She

0:27:13 Thomas: Can we go? I again, sorry, we're skipping around. I'm, I'm trying to see if we can get back in chronological order, because now I'm curious about so much that has gone on between the lines here. So why did she feel like she had no choice in marrying you? It sounded like you said just there.

0:27:31 Tim: Didn't know the depth of the When you say ex-gay, and she was a new Christian at that time. She was a fairly new Christian, so she believed everything. She believed what the ministry said. She saw that our ministries were this testimony to God, what God had done, how he had changed us. And then she got to living in the reality, and she started seeing other guys in the ministry whose marriages weren't at all as they appeared. And when we traveled, the way that we presented them weren't as they actually were in our lives, because there are difficulties.

0:27:34 Thomas: Okay, I see. Hmm, right.

0:28:03 Tim: You know, when you struggle to have a sexual relationship with your spouse, that's just one of many problems that starts to happen. And I think she started to perceive that was what was going on. But nobody ever told her the truth about that. Nobody told her what she was stepping into.

0:28:15 Thomas: So you were having to present like a fairy tale version often of these marriages, because that's your job, essentially, at that point, right?

0:28:25 Tim: Yeah. You know, we didn't know how other couples worked. This was new for us. So when I got into my relationship, I thought, oh, well, you know, probably all couples have these similar situations happening. I didn't know what it was supposed to be. And I think I lived most of my life with, well I guess I'm supposed to act this way, I'm supposed to think this, or I'm supposed to feel this. By the time I got out of conversion therapy, it was years later, and a lot of therapy for me to start to figure out what I really believed and what I really felt, because I just kept pushing things down, and I just didn't talk about it and continued to struggle with anxiety and, you know, physical symptoms because of that.

0:28:28 Thomas: Hmm. Hmm.

0:29:04 Thomas: So can you talk about the process of what, I mean, obviously we're talking today and you don't believe these things and it sounds like you're, you know, it's not like you'RE married anymore to that person. What was the process, uh, of either figuring out that you didn't believe these things or how did that go?

0:29:21 Tim: It was six years after my marriage before I started to come out. When she left, she had met somebody else before she divorced me. And I conveniently used that to go to her family and say, she's cheated on me. She's having an affair. And of course, her family being the religious family that they were said, oh, my God, you poor dear. You know, so they rallied around me and And they rallied around our kids. And she kind of did go off and do her own thing for a while, which just made it that much easier for me to point fingers and say, look at what she's doing.

0:29:24 Thomas: Hmm. Hmm.

0:29:52 Tim: She's tearing our family apart.

0:29:53 Thomas: Ask, So this all happened before you, you necessarily realized you didn't believe these things, you were still religious and still think? Yeah, okay, just check.

0:29:53 Tim: Yes.

0:30:02 Tim: Yeah, after she left, I was in church. I was, you know, doing all kinds of stuff with the ministry. I stayed involved. But that messed me up. When she left. That was the wake up call. That's when I started to, you know, I would get so depressed and think, divorced, I'm gay, or not gay, but I'm struggling with same-sex attractions, and I'm a Christian, and none of this is making sense to me. None of this, I've done everything that I can do to make this work, and it's not making any sense to Me. So I said, God, what's wrong with Me? What's wrong With Me that this isn't working? It was in that six-year time period where I'd gotten involved with spiritual warfare. Her mom had brought me, my ex-wife's mom brought me a couple of books. And so we were reading these books together and we were praying together. And at some point I went, this doesn't make any sense. Why am I praying for her when God supposedly loves her more than I do?

0:30:04 Thomas: Okay. Hmm. So,

0:30:59 Tim: God loves my marriage more than I do. God loves my kids more than I do. And yet it's clear to me that she's not coming back. That this isn't going to end in the spiritual manner in which I perceived it. So what's going on here? So it was at that point that I started to think, maybe I am gay. Maybe this isn't what I thought it was. So I had a boss. I was working as a corporate trainer at the time, and he gave me a form to fill out. And he said, you know, training his classes, he said what are you going going to do to improve yourself? And the only thing I knew to write in that form was I'd go back to school. So I had gone to Bible school. I had my associate's degree already, but I didn't have my bachelor's degree.

0:31:46 Tim: And so I said, I'll finish my education. So he said, great, what school? And so we ended up, I ended up back in school. And I remember sitting at the computer one night in the hotel.

So when I was traveling to these different places, doing these classes, and so I'm in the hotel on the computer and I'm working on an assignment, and I was so depressed and so despondent, I just, you know, life had ended for me, my entire life had been spent in the ministry, and I remember just sitting there getting ready to, you know, do a research paper, and I just thought, that's not the question, I have the question I have is, where the hell is God, what happened.

And that was the beginning for me, is that I started to research history, I went back to archaeology, I started looking up other theological perspectives other than the evangelical one that I grew up with, um, and by the time I finished my undergraduate degree, I went on to work on my master's program, and I started studying cognition, I started to learn how the brain works, I started learn how we think, how we learn, how our, how, you know, we evolve over time, and my question was, how does somebody get from this perspective to this perspective, and they call that transformative learning, and when I've heard about transformative learning and cognition, that's where I studied my research paper and time, was just trying to figure out how we evolve, how do we learn things, and how do we grow.

So at this point, even by the time I had gone into grad school, I believed that gay people were created. I didn't think they were born that way. So that really was the beginning of change for me, and I went through a very long period of being very angry with God.

0:33:22 Tim: And then I went through a period of just absolute research, just throwing myself out. I became very left-brained to the point where I just cut off my emotions. I stopped feeling, and I just needed to know the truth. I just wanted to know the truth, and that's what changed for me.

0:33:39 Thomas: Had you still been trying to like date women, or had you just kind of not really even bothered putting energy into that kind of thing, you

0:33:48 Tim: No, I did. I did try to date. I tried to date a couple of women. I went out with one a couple of times, and she was very sweet. I really liked her. But there was something inside of me that was saying, I can't do this anymore. I can lie. I can't try to be somebody that I'm not to another person.

0:34:05 Thomas: Yeah.

0:34:05 Tim: And I just, I just don't think I can do it again. So I decided I just wouldn't date anybody at all.

0:34:06 Thomas: Wow. So you went on a real intellectual journey of just trying to learn all of this stuff. And eventually, what did you come to? Did you come to like a different version of religion, or did you just go, ah, this is all crap?

0:34:25 Tim: I said, it's all crap is what happened is it was, I met this lady in grad school who she was a television writer and she was in Presbyterian and lived in Hollywood. And so her and I started having these really really deep conversations. And she said to me, you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So we would spend, you know, hours just talking on the phone about our lives. And she was saying things to me that those quote unquote non-Christian churches have, where she would say, talk about love is love. And then she would talk about her sex life. She was unmarried and sleeping with these guys. And I'm like, that doesn't make any sense to me either.

0:34:58 Thomas: Yeah.

0:34:59 Tim: You can't do You can't have both, you know. So my response to that was, it's all just bullshit. I'm just going to walk away from it. None of it's true. And I was very, very angry. So I stayed there for a really long time. And the change happened when I learned that Lisa Ling was doing a special called Gays in America. And she was going to be interviewing some people that I knew.

0:35:22 Tim: And so I heard about the show. And I was sitting there with my then boyfriend this show, and something clicked. Something just clicked inside of me. And I would pause the show because I was about to break down. And so I would explain to him, and I'd never talked about my experience with X Gay. I mean, he knew that I was X Gay, he didn't know the depth of involvement with it, but he knew the people that were on the TV were, you know, people that I had worked with. And I would pause the show and I would start to explain, you knows, somebody, oh, this person is this, and that happens, and it was, I was just catching my breath. I just needed, oh man, sorry, this choked me up.

0:35:22 Thomas: Oh, I'm sorry.

0:35:59 Tim: I was catching my breathe because I said, I just, I need to breathe for a minute. And we watched this show, and the things that they were saying were just spot on. They were my story. It was these guys who had been excommunicated from their churches, that had come out, that had lost their children, that their wives had divorced them, their families had been destroyed, their ministries had been lost. And at the end of the show, stopped the recording. And I remember I remember sitting there thinking, I have a choice to make. I can shove all of this back down and keep going or I can face this and try to put my life back together.

0:36:41 Tim: And I Remember just making that choice to say, I got to do this. I got I got a fix this thing. I leaned over and so my boyfriend, Abel, who's now my husband, just looked at me and he held me and I just I just sobbed. I just cried and cried and just thinking, I don't even know where to begin. I don't know where to begin to put these pieces together. And so I found a therapist. And I got this therapist. I didn't know if he was gay or not. I didn't really want a gay therapist because I needed somebody who was a dad. And at that point, I said, look, here's the story. And he said, well, I'm not gay.

0:37:24 Tim: And now I said, we probably have more differences in our political views than than that whole thing, so I just need to talk this through. And so I just happened to find an amazing therapist who has been my therapist to this day, um, and we took it apart.

We started taking this break by break, we just started taking things apart, we sort of dealing with these feelings and, um, you know, the anxiety that I felt even towards my boyfriend at the time, we took all of that apart. And so it was actually from that experience of starting to walk through these things that I wrote the book Going Gay.

So Going Gay tells the story of my journey, you know, into and out of a conversion therapy, but it also talks about my experiences at the time. And what I wanted to capture was that even as I was coming out of conversion therapy, I was still a very hardcore conservative Republican. You know, I voted Republican through 2012 because it was so ingrained in who I was as an individual. And it's ingrained, you know, conservative theology and conservative politics are kind of one in the same these days. So it became a long journey, and I wanted to write Going Gay that a Christian or somebody could pick up that book and identify with what it felt like to face something that you felt so strongly against, and yet that was your reality. So it was just, it was facing your own reality and walking through those step by step.

You know, one of the things I talk about in the book is when I went and got tested for AIDS. And I remember sitting in the chair and the guy said, I have your results. I need you to sign this form if it's OK to turn this into the CDC with your test results so they can track this thing.

0:38:17 Thomas: Yeah.

0:39:07 Tim: And I went through this mental battle because the Republican inside of me said, yes, of course, I need to track those things because it's a safety hazard and we should know. And then the personal side of me said, but this is me. Those are my results. And it became so personal to address this person that I didn't want to be at the time. I didn't know how to grasp the reality of all that I was because it went so much against my own beliefs, my own faith.

0:39:42 Thomas: So, had you admitted fully to yourself that you were gay, but you still just had so much guilt about it? Is that what it was? It's, it's an apologies, you know, it's hard for me to grasp, of course, because I haven't gone through that kind of thing.

0:39:54 Tim: Don't know if I had guilt about being gay as much as—I didn't want to be gay. I didn't—I don't want that—the only thing I ever wanted to be was, you know, quote-unquote, normal. It was have a wife and a family and live in a suburban neighborhood and be in the ministry. That was all I had ever envisioned growing up in my life. And that was taken away, or—I mean, I hate to say it that way, but it felt like that was taken away from me. I didn't—I didn't get to do that. And—but the thing was, when I was doing that, it was a lie. It wasn't, it wasn't who I was. So yeah,

0:39:59 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I See, so It's a matter of having to really fully change this fundamental picture in your head of what was the right thing to be doing, I guess. Is that right?

0:40:37 Tim: I think it was capturing who I really was and capturing all of who I wasn't being okay with that. Um, when I did the, uh, the book tour for Going Gay, I was interviewed at NPR, your local station in Sacramento. And one of the questions she asked me was, did you ever at any point, when I was talking about traveling with the ministry and all the things we were doing, she said, did you ever at any point say to yourself, no, I really am gay? And that was such a powerful question for me because I just remember sitting in that room and something inside of me just was like a wall that went up. And all I could think to say was no, no, because that couldn't be true, because the Bible was right. The Bible had to be right.

0:41:18 Thomas: Right. Yeah.

0:41:20 Tim: There was no place for me to say, yes, I am gay because the bible had to to be right. And that was really kind of, I think one of the, really one of the catalysts for the second book of Rethinking Everything was because I started to, you know, go through this mindset again of, is the Bible right? Or why is it not right? Or what do we know? What don't we know, you know? But even from that point, just kept questioning, you know, all the articles that I've written since Going Gay came out have all had to do with religion and politics and sexuality. And it was just Just me going back and looking at history and getting more information and realizing that, and again, I didn't know this until I started studying this, but we knew that conversion therapy didn't work back in the 1960s. There's data on this. And yet we continue to this day to push that. So those are the things where, you know, you go back and you think, if I had known, if I just knew the truth, things would have been different.

0:42:04 Thomas: Wow.

0:42:16 Thomas: When we come up with things that fundamentally contradict our worldviews, we're not able to just take on that new data, you know? It's a long, painful process. But at what point were you finally comfortable of saying that, yes, I am gay. Was it when you wrote the book around that time?

0:42:34 Tim: You know, I think it was around that time. And the funny thing is, you Know, my husband and I have been together for going on nine years now. So we've been married for a little over one. When we got together, I hadn't come back out to my parents. My ex-wife knew. I hadn't even told my children at that point. And my kids, you know, had gone through private Christian school. So when I was teaching at that school, I had to lie on the forum and say, no, I'm not gay. You know, I don't view pornography. So, you put all this stuff out there. So there still was keeping up this persona that I wanted to put out there. And I have struggled, and I'll be honest about this, because I know in this PC correct world, don't like to hear this, but I really have struggled with gender definitions. And I've got two daughters who are, you know, very pro-feminism, and I'm right there with them.

0:43:22 Tim: But the programming in my own head about gender is very strong about what men do, what women do, what the roles are, who we are, how we present ourselves, how they walk, how to talk. All of that stuff has been deeply programmed into my brain. And so even my transgender friends, you know, it's funny when my husband and I will talk about that, is that he'll hear me call them by their birth gender, and it just happens automatically.

It's not something I'm trying to do or mean to do. It just happens dramatically. So a lot of that programming has stayed in there. And for me, just coming to terms with the fact that I am gay, and I'm, you know, I'm okay with this. I've got an amazing life right now.

But it took a really long time to get here, and it took a long time to walk through much of what any ex-evangelical would walk through, which is the shame, the guilt, the fear of hell, all of those things that we have to deal with when we're facing our faith, our religion, and find out that that's not true. It's taken a long time to put the pieces in order.

0:44:20 Tim: So I think the conversion therapy piece of that was just another layer there, trying to figure things out.

0:44:27 Thomas: So yeah, I'm trying to make sure I understand. So when you talk about trans people, you're just saying that that's something that was still ingrained into you, even when you might have thought you've dealt with all this stuff that was inculcated into you. And then you find, oh, wait, there's more that I haven't yet addressed. Is that what you're saying?

0:44:50 Tim: Yeah, I'm just saying it's deeply ingrained in me that my upbringing is deeply ingrained in me. And even though intellectually, I know better. I've written articles on gender expression and the scientific reasons that there are transgender people. So I know better, but the training in my brain will sometimes say things that are so far right. My husband calls me an evangelical sleeper cell. He says that someday there's going to be this wake word. He goes, I just think you're going to come back up and you're gonna go work for Pat Robertson or something. So I think it's just, it's something that is so ingrained. So it's constantly learning. And, you know, as I raised my kids, I had to ask myself the questions. Why are you opposed to what they're wearing? Is it because they're women? Is this what society thinks? Is your background says women shouldn't dress like that? You know, what are the things that drive you? So it was a constant question of why do I think this? Why do I feel this?

You know and just instant judgments about somebody's life or something they would say would happen. And I would have to think, calm myself down and think, you know, why do you feel that way about this particular subject? Why do you fill that fill that way?

About somebody who's a porn star or a stripper, where, again, because of the programming in me has very defined roles, and I had to go back and rethink and remove the judgments and just accept people and love people just where they are.

0:44:55 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Right.

0:46:13 Tim: So that was not part of how my Christianity taught me to believe.

0:46:20 Thomas: Yeah, and obviously it's such a strong, it's a hard thing, a difficult wall to overcome, you know, and it's something that's so deeply ingrained in your upbringing. Yeah so where does that leave you today? Talk about your new book, Rethinking Everything. Talk about kind of where you are today and what the book is about. Hmm.

0:46:30 Tim: Right.

0:46:40 Tim: Rethinking everything actually came because when I wrote wrote Going Gay, I started getting a lot of email and a lot of people were contacting me who were families. They were pastors, they were wives, they Were kids, they were, you know, all of these people from all over the world that were saying this, that story is my story. And here's what happened to me. And I realized that it wasn't just about the gay issue. But there were others that were affected when life didn't turn out the way they thought it would. So when you have people that had gone through a divorce that, you know, were taught that that doesn't happen to Christians or people that dealt with drug issues or alcoholism, there were were a number of reasons that people were reconsidering what they believed to be true. And as I saw that, I thought, you know, we are so programmed to believe what we're taught, and we almost never go back and question that unless we have a reason to do so.

0:47:28 Tim: So in my studies with cognition and how we believe, I wanted to talk about how we build these cognitive schemas, that we create the life that suits us, and when it doesn't suit us, we will stay there anyway until there's a reason not to. So, you know, and that's all of us. I mean, we all do that. We all don't want to challenge what we believe. And that's why we get so angry when somebody says something that goes against what we believed to be true is because it conflicts with the schemas that we've built, that our minds say, you know, this is how reality is. This is what life is about. And so when somebody comes along who has a different worldview, view, then that challenges us, and we have a visceral reaction towards that worldview. So when I wrote Rethinking Everything, I started from the beginning, and I said, first of all, what we believe about evangelicalism, for those of us that grew up in that faith, we were taught this.

0:48:23 Tim: And when you go back even further, I mentioned that my parents came from the South and the Midwest when they moved to California. They were one of many, many families that moved over here, and with that of people that came from the South and the Midwest and moved to California during that time period, there were actually more Southerners living in the state of Southern California than there were in Arkansas by 1969.

0:48:44 Thomas: Wow.

0:48:45 Tim: What they brought with them was this very specific brand of Christianity that was based on experience, and it was based on theology and had very little to do with science. And there had been a split in 1925 between the modernists and the fundamentalists, and this is when you start to see drastic change in what people believe in Christianity. So even though modernism is really what America predominantly believes in, this idea of fundamentalism, of literalism in the scriptures really came out of that movement, and it came to California during that time. So for those of us who came from that background, we grew up in this era of literalism and belief and experiential Christianity that does not go down, does not go all the way back to the origination of Jesus' time on Earth, right?

0:49:31 Tim: But we believe it did. We were taught that it was. We believe that this Christianity, evangelicalism, is indeed, you know, it is tied to Jesus. It was what Jesus taught and believed. But once you start to go back and see that, that's not true. What happened was Catholicism is what came first. So when I wrote the book, I went back to the beginning, and I said, look, first of all, we have to ask questions. Questions are the things that get us out of our boxes, and as difficult as it is, let's continue to ask those questions and question the very box that you're in. We can't really think outside the box because our brains don't do that. We only use what we know, but you can question the box.

Why do I feel this way, why do I believe this, what drives me, what, what would I be doing if, if I wasn't, you know, didn't come from that faith or that background.

Um, and then I went through talking about where our religion originated, so I went all the way back, I wanted to know, where do we foresee religion develop, um, in different cultures, and then it brought it to current day, this is where Christianity came from, this is, you know, evangelicalism in particular came, this, you can see the progression. You can see how it worked.

0:49:45 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah,

0:50:35 Tim: And throughout history, religion and politics have always gone hand in hand, always. So where we are today is what has always happened throughout the time in history. And if you're struggling to figure out why does my faith not look like I think it should, it's because you have a faith that has been changed and morphed and rewritten and developed and now has been culturalized by the area where you live and the time that you live, and the people who are preaching this to you. So faith has continued to change. And so I wanted to talk about that. I wanted to go back and give them permission to say, I can walk away from this or at least re-examine what this faith is because it's not at all how I was taught to believe it.

0:51:17 Thomas: Do you think you most had in mind, like, a sort of an evangelical audience, or people who are questioning, and giving them some of the reasons and the explanations of why their faith is what it is, or isn't compatible with what they're living?

0:51:31 Tim: I did. I specifically targeted evangelicals because that's my background. That's what I know. But I do talk about, you know, the funny thing is a few years ago, I met this Muslim guy, and I know nothing about Islam, but I met this Muslim guy who was also gay and kind of struggling where he was in his faith. And so we talked, and the similarities between Islam and Christianity were astounding. The things that he said, he could have been a Pentecostal preacher. So the book really does kind of target those areas of faith that are more literal, that deal with fundamentalism. Anybody who's going through that. But it does specifically target the Judeo-Christian background and ethic because, again, that's where I came from. But I think it works well for anybody who's just questioning their Christianity or their faith and wanting to know, how did we get here? And when you're here, and when you're enveloped in this, and when your entire family and social structure is around this faith or these beliefs, how do you get out of that?

0:51:35 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah

0:52:26 Tim: What do you do? How do you deal with these people? How do YOU deal with the depression and the fears of hell? How do You deal with The Shame? And how do You find Your passion again when Your whole life has been wrapped around those beliefs?

0:52:40 Thomas: That's really interesting. You know, We were talking before recording, you mentioned that gay conversion therapy is unfortunately possibly making a little bit of a comeback here. Do you want to talk about that?

0:52:50 Tim: Yeah, I think under the current administration, especially with Mike Pence, who has made very public statements about conversion therapy, think it's unleashed a lot of people doing a lot things, whether it's racism, they feel that now that they can talk about somebody's race, they can discriminate, we can get rid of the Muslims, we tell people not to speak Spanish in public. And it's the same for the LGBT community. There were over 200 anti-LGBT bills, the religious freedom bills in 2016, there were another 129 in 2017. So we're seeing this play out across the states where we're having a lot more people say, OK, you can pass this law. Yeah, they can get married, but I reserve my right to discriminate based on my religious beliefs. So I think we're seeing a lot more of this happened just in general, where people are feeling more open and more free to say the things that they've been thinking anyway. Way.

0:52:54 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, geez,

0:53:44 Tim: And so there's just some alarming statistics that are coming out. And I just read an article in Huffington Post that said that they estimate some 698,000 people have gone through conversion therapy between the ages of 18 and 59. And they're projecting out that there are others that are right behind them. And some of the conversion therapy ministries or camps or whatever you want to call them are spread out across the United States, and it's still continuing, renewing. I did work with the National Center of Lesbian Rights, and they have a campaign called Born Perfect, where they're going in and they're addressing this. So we do have 11 states and the District of Columbia that have outlawed conversion therapy, but there is a lot more education that needs to be done and a lot of work that needs to done.

0:53:57 Thomas: Right. Yeah, I was going to ask about that. Yeah, that's interesting. And I could imagine, on what grounds are they able to outlaw it? Is it the harm? Because it seems to me that, obviously, while I would love for it to be outlawed, um, it seems to me like legally, is that a tough battle, you know, cause of like, you know, freedom of speech and everything. What, you Know, how do you, how Do you go and just stop people from doing their religion that way? You

0:54:44 Tim: Part of it, I think, is they're going in with the statistics. They're showing what's actually happening. But in one case in New Jersey, there was a lawsuit, and I don't want to get all the details wrong, but the The ministry was called Jonah. It was Jews, against homosexuality. I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was a friend of mine who was the lawyer in that case, and they got it for lying. They were selling a product that didn't work. It's what it was.

0:55:13 Thomas: Oh, it's false advertising, essentially that

0:55:15 Tim: It was like a false advertising thing.

0:55:15 Thomas: Kind of thing. Right.

0:55:17 Tim: So I think that that opened the doors for more of these.

0:55:20 Thomas: Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, it doesn't work, so it's pretty, a good solid case to make like you're by definition selling a product, or I don't know if selling is the right word, but you're pushing something that can't work, so yeah, okay.

0:55:34 Tim: And it's changed. When we were doing the ministry, it really was based on the Bible and all the things that we believed. We were not licensed counselors. So there's no excuse for a licensed counselor to be doing any of this anywhere. And so that's really what they're targeting right now. I believe California is one of the first to outlaw it for youth.

0:55:45 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah.

0:55:54 Tim: So they're not letting anybody do it anymore. But more work to be done. I think we've got to attack this, and it is very interesting to me how we are okay with letting religious freedom laws be what they are. If you look at the statistics, there are about 25 percent of the United States who identify as evangelical Christians, which is a small minority of the 70% of Christians, but we've got 90.1% in our Congress who identify as Christians, which is out of proportion for those who believe differently. And the question is not whether or not God exists. The question is, how do we believe He exists? So if you're going to make those religious freedom laws, when you're making one law to help one group, then you're discriminating against another group who believes differently. So where does that end, and why are we as a nation allowing allowing this? How come we're okay with that?

0:56:41 Thomas: Right. Yeah, we've allowed the equivalent of young earth creationists in uh jurisprudence into the Supreme Court because the right has been very good at seizing that power, uh, and disproportionately putting people the really awful uh jurisprudence views on jurisprudence into the Supreme Court. And it really has set us back. And I've talked about it. I mean, it's a reason why I think all of the, if you're an atheist, there should have been no debate in 2016. I mean nothing, there's so many ways that that election has allowed theocrats to really take hold. And I think there's such a lot of people out there that are like, oh, well, I don't think there was so much distraction on other issues that we really, really shouldn't have been focusing on, unfortunately, in retrospect. And so, yeah, that's a whole can of worms. But wow, what a powerful story. And thank you so much for sharing. And understand it must have difficult been to relive some of that, but I really appreciate you coming on and retelling that story.

0:57:07 Tim: Yes. Right.

0:57:43 Tim: Thank you, Thomas. I appreciate the opportunity.

0:57:45 Thomas: So is there anything we want to leave people with? I mean, your book, again, is Rethinking Everything When Faith and Reality Don't Make Sense. That's out soon, right? Or is it already out?

0:57:54 Tim: So the book is coming out this fall, and they can go to RethinkingEverythingBook.com and get some more information. And then I have a newsletter that I'm sending out, so kind of giving updates, talking about different things. I have, not a support group, I have a conversation group on Facebook that I would love to invite people to, to talk about kind of where they are in their faith journey, how they've come to the places that they have. And it's a group of people that are atheists, people that are questioning, people who still see themselves as Christians but are seeing things differently. So I would love for people to sign up and join that conversation with us. But again, there's the RethinkingEverythingBook.com, GoingGayBook. Com, which is out. They came out in 2014, so it's available on Amazon. And yeah, I mean, let's talk. My whole perspective here is let's keep a conversation going. Let's talk about religion in America. Let's take a look at the Bible. Let's look at what it does individually. Let's talk about what it does collectively as a nation.

0:58:10 Thomas: Oh, neat.

0:58:45 Thomas: Yeah, so interesting. Did you have a place to point people on that Facebook group, like a URL or anything?

0:58:50 Tim: I do. Yes, I can get that to you.

0:58:51 Thomas: Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. I'll, I'll pop that in the show notes. That sounds really interesting. Okay. Thanks again, Tim Rymel. Sorry for that. You had to go through so much awful, you know, confronting of these, these, this powerful inculcation that you had to overcome. That sounds really difficult. I cannot imagine, you Know, I, I again, it's another privilege thing. I'd never really, I never really had to Go through the feeling of something about me is not not right according to my religion, you know, cause I was pretty loosely religious. I wasn't that dedicated and I can only imagine. Thanks for, thanks for telling that story and, helping someone like me understand what that's like to go through.

0:58:55 Tim: Excellent.

0:59:29 Tim: Absolutely. Thank you.

0:59:56 Thomas: Huge thanks to Tim, it cannot be easy to tell the story like that, and I really appreciate him taking I hope you'll check out his books and plugs. I've got them in the show notes as always. Thanks, well, thank you so much for listening week in week out, and again, SeriousPod.com support or patreon.com/seriouspod will get you access to those bonus episodes, which I think are really good, and I hope people are enjoying them, and but thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next week.