Pray Away, begins with a man asking passersby if they’d like prayer. He think begins to tell them “I lived transgender, but I left it all to follow Jesus.” What follows is a documentary by Kristine Stolakis, looking at the conversion therapy movement in the United States and I have a great deal of feelings about this film.
In the 1970’s the Evangelical church in the United States began to go from what some saw as an eccentric offshoot of Christianity to becoming mainstream Christianity. While there is not necessarily anything wrong with Evangelicalism (I was an Evangelical before converting to Lutheranism at 16), like any major religious movement there are people who will misconstrue the message for power. Alongside this rise in popularity was a group called Exodus International. This group started with five men struggling with their homosexuality and wanting to start a Bible study to work to “pray away” their gay. You’ll hear that slogan a great deal around Pride Month. What followed was the receipt of over 25,000 letters from people who had been cast out from their family or villainized by their community, stating that were willing to do anything to be what they saw as “normal.”
Pray Away follows former leaders in the conversion movement who have left Exodus International, which closed down after leaders saw the extremely negative affect the program had on the mental health of participants. Many participants found themselves in self harm behaviors or completing suicide. One of the women interviewed in this film is Julie, who underwent a decade of conversion therapy. She said being gay wasn’t her whole identity, it was trying to not be gay. We also hear from many members of the initial Exodus Road program who married the opposite sex and became major public figures in the movement. These figures were well known for their appearances on television and in political press conferences stating that being gay was a choice. The majority of these people are now in relationships with same sex partners. The effects of these appearances and these statements has lead to lingering falsities floating around the subject of homosexuality.
The documentary does also focus on Jeremy, a man who claims to have lived as a transgender woman before leaving behind the life and forming what is called The Freedom March. The Freedom March is like the opposite side of the story here. They are a group of men and women who claim to have left homosexuality and are now straight. There is a great deal of pain in their eyes.
Pray Away is hard to watch, especially as someone whose sexuality places her in what we lovingly call the Alphabet Mafia (LGBTQIA+). There are so many moments where people come forward and talk about how they were hated in their own homes, how they struggled for someone to just accept who they were instead of trying to change them to something easier. We see people who have suffered extreme mental and sometimes physical trauma at the hand of charismatic leaders, not unlike that of victims of cults. What I did really appreciate about the documentary is that the survivors still had a close relationship with their spirituality, but not the leaders who tormented them. They did not trash Christianity or a relationship with Jesus, but rather highlighted the dangers of following other people blindly.
Pray Away just premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and will come to Netflix this August.
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