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When a 14-year-old girl in Boulder, Colorado, named Alana Chen started keeping secrets from her family, it was under the advice of her Catholic priest. Chen, a devoutly religious teenager, had always felt different from other girls: She had, from a young age, felt a calling to be a nun.
There was a problem with this. Chen also had realized that she was attracted to other girls. She sought advice from her priest, a controversial and firebrand traditionalist, and he gave her disastrous advice: She should not tell her family, who might encourage her toward sin by affirming her sexual orientation. Instead, for the next seven years, with the encouragement of the priest, this well-rounded teenager—an athlete, artist, and A-plus student—secrety underwent conversion therapy, trying to ”cure” her of her sexual orientation. In 2019, at age 24, Chen died by suicide.
Chen’s story and those like hers have helped many religious families come to understand the dangers of conversion therapy, which uses various nonscientific psychological interventions to try to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. There’s little question of what led to Chen’s death: She left behind journals that spoke to the shame and despair she felt over her failure to make herself straight. Conversion therapy has, for years, been considered cruel and medieval in the mental health community, and its practice has been outlawed in more than 20 states.
But now, the practice may make a return. Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Chiles v. Salazar, which dealt with Colorado’s conversion therapy ban. In the arguments, the justices appeared sympathetic to the free speech argument made by the Christian mental health practitioner Kaley Chiles, a counselor in Colorado Springs. Chiles has not actually faced any kind of censure or other practical limits stemming from Colorado’s 2019 ban; instead, she was selected by the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom as a representative for the fear of being limited in what she can say in therapy. The justices look poised to rule in her favor.
But for those who oppose the ban, Colorado’s loss might mean more cases like Chen’s. To get a sense of the human stakes of this case, Slate spoke with Simon Kent Fung, the creator of the podcast Dear Alana, which chronicled Chen’s struggle and rose to the top of the Apple podcast charts, making Chen’s case a famous one in the state of Colorado. Slate spoke with Fung, who spent several years chronicling Chen’s story and diving into the world of conversion therapy, over the phone the day after oral arguments. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Slate: How did you find out about Alana’s story?
Simon Kent Fung: I had never met Alana, but I read about her [death] in the news when I was living in California. I was really shocked hearing her story because it had a lot of similar elements to my own. I had dreams of becoming a Catholic priest and spent most of my 20s in various forms of conversion therapy in an attempt to prepare for the seminary and to be eligible for application. I went to individual and group therapy, I did a “three-day journey into manhood” masculinity retreat, and I attended ex-gay ministry programs run by Exodus International. Alana was over a decade younger than me, and she was encountering the same ideas and offered the same kind of therapeutic approaches to addressing her sexual orientation that I was.
I ended up reaching out to her mother to share my condolences; we talked on the phone, and that began a two-year relationship of supporting each other. Alana’s story had been haunting me, and in 2021 I [decided] I wanted to learn more. Her family was very supportive and opened up their home to me. Alana captured a lot of her struggles in her journals, which her family discovered during her hospitalization. They became the basis of the podcast Dear Alana, which was released in the summer of 2023.
What did conversion therapy look like for Alana?
It looked like two years of talk therapy with a licensed therapist in Colorado. It also looked like pastoral counseling. She was encouraged to attend an ex-gay ministry-slash-training program that promised to heal “sexual and relational issues.”
As she was processing her sexual orientation, Alana journaled about how she was told that she was gay because of a broken relationship with her mother. It’s hard to explain, sometimes, when you’re not inside these communities, but the theories behind conversion therapy—of homosexuality being caused by trauma or by a faulty relationship with a parent—are very much in the water of conservative religious communities. I was told that I was gay because of a faulty relationship with my father. The theory seemed so compelling: If I could fix that, it would change my orientation. And the reality is that I didn’t have a really good relationship with my father growing up, so at some level, I was finding some benefit from talking to someone for the first time about my childhood and my parents. For a subset of the population, you might never otherwise get to go to therapy, because there’s distrust in these communities towards therapy. One of the reasons conversion therapy is so compelling is it does provide an avenue to explore one’s childhood and relationship with your parents.
If that’s the case, what, then, do you say to the people who don’t understand why you’re opposed to the legalization of conversion therapy?
I empathize with those who don’t understand how therapy can cause harm. I think that the people who are offering conversion therapy are well intentioned. But in 2009, the American Psychology Association organized a task force to do a literature review of all of the research on conversion therapy, and it was able to show that there was no evidence that conversion therapy was effective, and that there was some amount of evidence of harm. Some studies show upwards of two times the increase in later suicide for people that have undergone conversion therapy. There’s some research that shows an increase of people being alienated from their families and leaving their faith communities, as well. What I found is that the stacking of shame ultimately leads a lot of young people to despair.
It sounds like your problem with it is partially that Christians aren’t making this choice with accurate and full information.
Yeah. Like Alana, I was putting my hope in the success of this therapy because of the exposure to a lot of ex-gay testimonials. Now that I’ve had some distance from it and can look at it more objectively, I’m finding that people in these testimonials change their behavior, enter into mixed-orientation marriages, or choose celibacy. They will define “healing” or “change” in ways that imply orientation change, but what they actually mean are shifts in labeling of their orientation. But when you’re a young person exposed to these testimonials from your priest or pastor, it’s not easy to have the awareness to parse through what you’re being told.
If there was evidence of it working, I would have been the first to promote it. I would have been the first to endorse it. I would have been the first to continue to share it. It would have been the perfect solution for me.
You started conversion therapy in 2008—a very different time. Some of these state bans, I’ll note, have been passed with bipartisan support. Have you tracked the evolution of the debate around conversion therapy?
Conversion therapy has been around for over a hundred years in various forms. The creation of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality in the ’80s [marked] the psychological institutionalization of therapists interested in conversion efforts. It spread and increased influence throughout the ’90s.
The idea of conversion therapy being something that was ineffective and socially stigmatized really came into fruition … with the [2013] closing of Exodus International, which was the largest ex-gay referral network in this country. The bans came around shortly after this social stigma began. Bipartisan legislatures endorsed these conversion therapy bans. Even Utah, with a large Latter-day Saints population, has one. And I think that that, for a long time, was the general consensus on conversion therapy.
[But] the proponents of conversion therapy never went away. They just went underground and rebranded. They focused on talking about patient choice, talking about how their approaches are noncoercive and therefore not conversion therapy. Ex-gay ministries talked about how they offer ministry and not therapy, so they are not actually doing conversion therapy. Some groups promised orientation changes as a secondary outcome and not a primary one, and so therefore were not doing conversion therapy.
I do think of conversion therapy as a kind of stale, reheated controversy. It seems like some groups are trying to bring back old battles. But why this issue, and why now?
Because a lot of these bans include gender identity as well as sexual orientation, proponents of conversion therapy are portraying these laws as pushing young people towards gender transition. That has been a really effective way of mobilizing support for their position because of how emotional the combination of transgender and teenager can be when you put them in the same sentence. Groups like Alliance Defending Freedom have found ways of tying these laws to a politically mobilizing issue in order to challenge these laws.
I think what’s challenging about the issue is that it is being portrayed as the typical culture war narrative of “state versus religion,” “regulation versus religion.” There are plenty of religious people, including those former leaders of Exodus International, who have come out to talk about the ways this therapy is ineffective and actually causes harm. I’m very much connected to a lot of these communities still. There are plenty of conservative Christian therapists like Kaley Chiles who disagree with her characterization of the law and find her willful misreading of it to be misrepresentative of not only good counseling but what it means to be a Christian. But because of the litmus test nature of our politics, they’re immediately disregarded as being unfaithful. The willful misreading of the law in order to play into these culture war narratives is what’s really frustrating.
How is the law being misrepresented?
Colorado’s law permits the exploration of gender and orientation. All it is asking providers is to be neutral and not to push a child in either direction. There are conservative Christian voices and therapists practicing in Colorado who have not found the law to hinder their ability to offer faith approaches; these are not progressive people on LGBT issues. Those conservative Christian counselors feel they’re being misrepresented by the claims of Kaley Chiles; a group of them submitted an amicus brief [saying] the law not only doesn’t violate free speech or religious liberty, but actually protects kids and families and communities of faith from unproven and experimental practices.
But that nuance is lost because it’s being subsumed by this larger culture war narrative of “religion versus state.” I think because of the emotion around these issues, people have been scared into feeling they must support conversion therapy in order to protect patients’ rights.
What do you think will happen if the ban is overturned?
It will have a cascading effect across the country with similar laws. It will embolden the conversion therapy industry, and a lot more people like myself and Alana will fall victim to it. And the work of educating Christian families will need to continue, to raise awareness about the existence of alternatives to conversion therapy. What I’m trying to tell people is that as a still-religious person, there are alternatives.
The irony of these practices is that it alienates kids from their faith and from their families and pits them against their parents, who they blame for making them gay. It creates a lot of shame and despair when people aren’t able to change, which ultimately causes them to leave their churches. The defense of conversion therapy in the name of faith and family is driving kids away from faith and family.
