Why Is Everyone Going Back Into the Closet?

Hello, hello, and welcome back to Abit Fruity.

I'm Matt Bernstein.

Thank you so much for being here, and happy pride.

We're going to give you a little pride episode today.

It's going to be kind of a dark pride episode, but a pride episode nonetheless.

I'm a little hungover.

As of the time we're recording this, Zoron Mamdani won the New York City Democratic primary last night.

And so it's kind of a rare moment where on the Abit Fruity podcast, we are in a very, very, very good mood.

And so we have to do do something about that.

We got to ruin it.

So

there's been this weird trend that I've noticed over the last few years, and you might have too,

which is that in one way or another, a lot of people seem to be going back into the closet.

One particular instance of this that I've been paying attention to for like four years now is that of Lohanthony, the once flamboyant, out-and-proud YouTube A-lister who's now a Trump-supporting gospel musician.

Yes, more on that in a second.

But versions of this keep happening, whether it's gay influencers inexplicably becoming born-again Christians and renouncing their identities, or the seemingly never-ending stream of new D-trans Twitter personalities, many of whom seem to be struggling with their gender identity very publicly, while claiming at the same time that they've returned to the body God intended them to live in.

It's bizarre.

And, you know, the term conversion therapy gets thrown around a lot, but what does that look like in 2025?

And how do we grapple with the idea that queer adults could be making these decisions entirely on their own, supposedly?

I want to interrogate what I've pieced together from observing this bizarre and honestly very dark pattern that I've been noticing, try to make sense of it and hopefully create a path forward where this doesn't keep happening.

Because I want my girls to be out.

It's fucking pride.

Why are you in the closet?

Come back out.

To do that today, we are joined by one of my best friends.

Welcome back to the podcast, Kat Tenbard.

Thank you so much for having me back.

I am so happy that you're here.

And Kat, also on her newsletter, Spitfire News, just wrote an incredible piece on the misogyny of Ethan Klein.

And as someone who has been recently attacked by Ethan Klein on the internet, Ethan Klein has made crazy Instagram stories about how badly I apparently want to fuck Hassan Piker, and that's why I support Palestinian humanity.

I appreciated it a lot.

So, you know, I hope he's not coming after you too hard.

And I appreciate that you wrote that.

And if you want to support Kat's work, go buy a subscription to Spitfire News.

It is the best way to support some of the best independent creators online right now.

Well, thank you so much.

It has been a wild week.

People in the H3 subreddit were also saying that I wanted to fuck us on Piker.

And I'm like, I am a lesbian and he's a very

beat.

He's a very gorgeous man.

Like, he is very attractive.

So I get it, but it's just, it's funny that that's always the default response.

No matter who you are, that's the line of criticism.

Being a lesbian doesn't even stop that I want to fuck us on Piker and like, that's why I'm not a Zionist allegations.

It's wild.

How are you feeling going into this episode today?

Because I know this is something that you and I have talked a lot about.

Half of this podcast is just like when Kat and I drink together, what do we talk about?

And then, okay, let's turn on the mic and talk about it for the podcast, you know?

Exactly.

Yes.

And I'm so excited that we're covering this topic because it's something that I've thought about a lot and increasingly over the past several years as we've seen the pendulum swing back away from LGBTQ rights, away from LGBTQ LGBTQ acceptance.

And this is an underexplored consequence of that.

Like you don't see a lot of people talking about how this actually affects LGBTQ individuals and their self-perception and how they choose to live and whether they're out or whether they feel like they can be out.

Should we start with Lohanthany?

Yes.

Because I was like telling my boyfriend that I wanted to make an episode about like all of these people like receding back into the closet.

And I was like, hey, remember Lohanthany?

The like calling all basic bitches guy from 2012?

He's like a renounced homosexual, like ex-homosexual Trump supporter.

Now, and he was like, what?

So some people know this.

Some people know this, but I think a lot of people don't.

And I think it's an interesting place to start.

So Lohanthany was this force online in the early 2010s.

He had a video that went viral on YouTube where he was twirling his leg around.

Here, I'm going to try to do it.

And he was like, calling all basic bitches, calling all basic bitches.

You're basic.

Calling all the basic bitches.

Calling all the basic bitches.

There's a new announcement.

You're basic.

He was like 12 or 13 years old when this went viral and it catapulted him into like early YouTube A-list stardom.

Lohanthony as a username is a portmanteau of his name Anthony and Lindsay Lohan, his iconic favorite celebrity.

And he just became like the archetypal, like sassy gay kid online.

Lohanthany is video of Sally.

This is like such a time capsule of what YouTube used to be because it's like in the early 2010s, like through kind of like the mid to late 2010s, there was such a prominent queer culture on YouTube where you didn't have to do a lot because the platform was still so fresh.

There was like, it was not seen as a sustainable career path or aspiration the way that it is today.

It was not seen as like an outlet for the mainstream the way that it is today.

It was like this kind of niche place where a lot of creative queer people of all ages like could find this audience.

And Lohanthany was one of those people where he was at the forefront of YouTube becoming something more than just like viral videos or where you upload like your home videos to because he went from like these like memeable moments and I remember watching his content like in as a college freshman just being like it's so fun it's so like funny and enjoyable to watch and at the same time you're seeing him and like other early queer YouTube stars like Tyler Oakley and Hannah Hart like showing up at award shows and like getting like the first YouTube magazine interviews.

He's so embedded within like early YouTube history.

Lo Hanthany was very important to me personally because because we're like the same age.

I also came out very young.

I came out when I was 15.

But more so than that, Lohanthany and I both existed in what people would make fun of me in school for, but called the glass closet, which is this idea that like you're not necessarily out of the closet, but it's like you're so gay that you don't need to tell us.

And I really related to him, like I would see his posts all over Tumblr and I was just seeing this kid like own it and own who he was and not apologize for it.

And he would talk as a teenager about like wanting to kiss a boy for the first time.

And his presence just meant a lot to me.

He also, in his years at the forefront of internet stardom, he really made a lot of wild connections.

Like he was in this influencer group called the Fab Five, which included Rebecca Black

of Friday fame, who is now out and proud and queer herself.

So it was just like an entirely different time, but he got, you know, a million subscribers on YouTube.

He moved to LA, and that was all before he turned 17.

Quite the whirlwind for someone to be so young and to mean so much to so many people, and also like be at the center of this new direction of gravity, which is YouTube and influencers and the internet.

Internet's high society, I feel like, has existed in so many iterations at this point that you have these like

insane time capsule images.

And so, I'm going to send send you one and I want you to just react to it and tell me, tell me what's happening here.

I mean, I love this image.

This is crazy.

You see this image pop up again from like time to time on like Twitter.

It will go viral.

And it's so wild that Lo Hanthany was the most famous person at the time that this picture was taken.

Tell us what the photo is.

So this is a car selfie featuring four people.

And from left to right, it is Timothy Chalamet,

Lo Hanthony, Lily Reinhart from Riverdale, and then Lily Rabe from American Horror Story and other things.

This is crazy.

And I did not know who Timothy Chalamet was at the time.

What's so wild about this picture too is like Timothy Chalamet was the last person who I would be able to recognize.

Like out of all of these people, I knew who Lily Rabe was because of American Horror Story.

I knew who Lily Reinhardt was then because of Riverdale.

And then Timothy Chalamet, who is now obviously the most famous person out of all of these people by far, comes along a few years later.

These people were just like existing in LA alongside each other.

It's so funny.

And at the time, like Lo Hanthany was the one who had like the most clout, the most fame, the most name recognition, the most everything.

The concept of Timothy Chalamet hanging out with Lo Hanthany for clout.

It's more likely than you think.

So Lo Hanthany is really riding high for quite a few years with this internet stardom.

He eventually, you know, in the later 2010s, he sort of recedes in his fame a little bit.

He's still, you know, like out and proud and gay, but the internet changes a lot.

People like me start posting.

And I just...

add that to say that Lohanthany and I followed each other on Instagram and we would like message back and forth at the time.

Like Anthony would respond to my story sometimes and like we'd, you know, queen out a little bit in the DMs.

Uh, he was always very sweet.

And if you can believe it, we still follow each other.

Uh, you know, this is about to take a pretty wild turn, but Anthony would go on to unfollow most of the people that he followed before his sort of conversion arc.

And he only follows about a hundred people now.

And it's like Ben Shapiro, Donald Trump, and me.

For whatever reason, he never unfollowed me.

And I've uh, and I've never unfollowed him either.

And I've actually gotten quite a number of messages from people over the years being like, Why are you following this person?

And my answer is this:

I still hope, and this is probably going to become a theme of this episode, but I have a lot of hope that this is a person who will come back

around

one day.

And I don't know, I just feel like even though like Lo Hanthany and I were never remotely close, like I feel like,

you know, all you can do for someone when they are going through something like this is just be there the whole time.

And for me, I, you know, that's not a particularly hard thing to do.

I just want to stick around on Instagram.

But, you know, I'm holding out hope.

I guess is the point.

Yeah.

And I mean, this happens.

Like you have gay or queer trans people who throughout their lives come out and live freely as themselves and then retract, go back into the closet, repress things, but then later in life have this like rebound period.

Like it is possible.

And I think throughout queer history, it's been, there have been times when this has been more frequent because of the complexity of existing in a society that is inherently oppressive to who you are.

So COVID lockdown happens and Anthony starts posting some, you know, content that I personally, as like someone who's not very spiritual, it just wasn't for me, but it didn't strike me as problematic, it didn't strike me as worrying.

But it was a lot of like daily affirmations, sort of spiritual stuff.

It seemed that he had moved out of LA and was living in somewhere rural.

He would film a lot of these on like the back of his pickup truck.

But he was like, you know, like, shout out to the woods gays.

You know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of gays who love the woods and who love affirmations.

I wasn't worried.

And then in late summer 2020, this is five months into COVID-ish,

he posts a 41-minute long YouTube video where he says, What, Kat?

Because I know we've both seen this.

Yeah,

he says he talks about how throughout his like career on YouTube, he struggled with substance abuse.

He's been addicted to like clout and fame and likes and all of these things.

And he describes this position of turmoil that he's been in.

And he connects it to his gay identity and being queer.

And he renounces his queer identity and basically says, like, I'm choosing Christian celibacy.

To a lot of people, it's like, what, what does this even mean?

Like, I remember when I first watched this, I was so confused because I was like, it sounds like you've gone through something akin to conversion therapy, but he's not using those words.

He's just sort of saying, like, I used to be gay, but I'm not anymore.

I'm rejecting it because of God.

Yeah, a quote from the video was, it's no coincidence that through pursuing my same-sex attraction, I was also addicted to alcohol.

I was also addicted to weed.

I was also trying hallucinogenics.

I was also addicted to money.

I was also addicted to views.

I was addicted to attention.

I was addicted to opportunity, opportunity that earthly

pleasures brought to me.

I believe in that video, he also talks about being abused as a child sexually and associating all of this with his gay identity.

Like, he needs to shed his gay identity because it's sort of wrapped up in all the other things he was doing that he perceived as sin.

And so a lot of people immediately online, first of all, were like, what the fuck?

And second of all, were like, who did this to him?

Who sent him, who sent him to conversion camp?

And I want to come back to that in a second, but you mentioned Christian celibacy.

Can you explain what that is in relation to like conversion therapy and all of this?

So when this happened, I was working at Business Insider and I actually wrote an article about it with my coworker Rachel Greenspan.

And what I learned is that Christian celibacy refers to this kind of emerging ideology where it's not saying that like being gay isn't real.

And it's not even necessarily saying that you can like flip that switch and become straight.

It's like if you experience same-sex attraction and like the buzzwords that Lo Anthony was using in this video align with this movement.

It's like if you experience same-sex attraction, that's viewed as like an addiction.

Like it's viewed as this unhealthy mental,

like physical condition that you have.

And so the right way to operate as a Christian is to basically not indulge in that same-sex attraction.

And that can mean remaining celibate and just not having sex at all.

And it can also mean like, okay, I'm a lesbian, but I'm going to marry a man.

I might even marry a gay man and we'll have a straight gay relationship.

And that's how we'll be Christians.

And this is such a through line with any sort of conversion therapy adjacent program.

And we're going to talk about different types of them and what they look like now because my God, they do a good job at disguising themselves, kind of.

But they all sort of frame sexuality as a thing that you do and not a thing that you are.

So they'll talk about, like you said, it's, it's like, you're not gay in your heart.

It's not part of your identity.

It's you're addicted to same-sex behavior in the way that you could be addicted to like doing drugs or drinking alcohol.

And so, and this is of course true outside of religion, like the way that you become sober is you stop drinking, you stop doing drugs.

But to them, it's like you can become sober from homosexuality by just not doing homosexual acts.

They don't see it as like a part of you.

They see it as sex.

And I think it's actually interesting because that idea of sexuality is also just really common on the right in general.

I mean, all the time, I just, whenever I get like hate mail from homophobes, it's all about like sucking dick and taking it up the ass because that's all they they think being gay is.

Which like in certain moments.

I'm kidding.

God, I can't.

I can't have moments of levity.

A lot of Christian ideology around sex in general is this idea that like sex and sexuality are tools.

Like I grew up Catholic and my earliest sexual education was in the Catholic Church.

And they would tell you, obviously, like you need to be celibate until marriage, but when you're having sex it's for procreation it's man and a woman having a baby within the catholic faith and this is common across a lot of different religions this is common across a lot of different denominations and when it comes to like gay sexuality it's like even if you have that urge like we all have urges we all want to watch pornography we all want to consume alcohol but you have to like it's this idea of control.

You have to control yourself.

You have to not indulge in these like sinful things, but the devil is always going to tempt you.

And the act of being a good Christian is to repress those parts of you.

When you published that Business Insider article about what was happening with Lo Hanthany, you mentioned in it, and we were talking about this when I was preparing for the episode, that his YouTube bookmarks were public and that he was bookmarking content from a woman named Jackie Hill Perry.

You know, the internet is so big and vast that someone can be so famous and you can also have no idea who they are.

So who is Jackie Hill Perry?

This is a woman who grew up identifying as a lesbian.

She had relationships with women and then she turned her back on what she calls same-sex attraction.

She is an author and an influencer with

one and a half million Instagram followers, very active Instagram followers.

Like currently, I was going through her content and I could not believe how popular it was.

And she wrote this book called Gay Girl, Good God,

which has,

take a guess right now, how many very, very overwhelmingly positive reviews it has on Goodreads.

I know I can't hear you guessing, but just take a guess.

25,000.

And it's just like a pretty standard ex-gay memoir.

Here's the blurb.

In Gay Girl, Good God, author Jackie Hill Perry shares her story, offering practical tools that helped her in the process of finding wholeness.

Jackie grew up fatherless, experienced gender confusion, it's my favorite kind of confusion, and embraced both masculinity and homosexuality with every fiber of her being.

She knew that Christians had a lot to say about all of the above, but was she supposed to change herself?

How was she supposed to stop loving women when homosexuality felt more natural to her than heterosexuality ever could?

At age 19, Jackie came face to face with what it meant to be made new,

and not in a church or through contact with Christians.

God broke in and turned her her heart toward him right in her own bedroom in light of his gospel.

This makes me so sad.

One of the things that makes me so sad about this is I went on to the Goodreads reviews because I was really curious, like, who is leaving five-star reviews on this book?

And the theme that I gathered from it was it's a lot of people who are at least claiming that they do not experience same-sex attraction.

Maybe some of them have a little bit of a thou doth protest too much vibe, but for the most part, this is people who are saying they're not gay.

They've never had gay thoughts, whatever.

And they like stuff like this because it provides a very convenient narrative if you ever feel guilty about your bigotry.

This serves a purpose within the broader Christian community where it's like, you don't have to feel bad about not accepting gay people because you can just reframe that as like it's actually gay people who need to do the work to repress that part of them.

There was one review in particular though that really saddened me, which was it was a five-star review and it appeared to be from someone who was very, very young because they wrote in their review that like they had stopped and started the book because they needed to finish their homework and then they finally got back to it and they were like, this book is such a great resource for me.

It's awful.

It is so depressing.

And it's like, yes, freedom of speech, but this is so harmful to people who come into contact with this ideology.

And And with the case of Lo Hanthany, you see a direct connection between how this can influence people.

100%.

I mean, Lo Hanthany was someone who ostensibly read this book, probably among other things, and was like, you know what?

Yeah, I am going to turn my back on same-sex attraction.

Can I read?

I was also reading the Goodreads reviews of this book.

There's one left by a woman named Amy Morgan.

It's a four-star review.

And this just really tickled me.

Jackie's testimony is powerful.

Also, if you replace gay in the title with whatever your personal idol is really good book about worshiping god instead of gods convincing book no matter your particular struggle i just love the idea it's like

when talking about renouncing your homosexuality if you replace homosexuality with anything else that you like it really holds true and

being gay is no different than worshiping britney spears and i'm like sure okay in my case, they are one and the same.

Like,

what the fuck are you talking about?

It's also so interesting that like, Lohanthany was such a huge fan of Lana Del Rey.

And that was how I discovered Lohanthany is like, he had a very viral video about going to a Lana Del Rey concert.

And he was like, he described it as literally like a quasi-religious experience.

And this is a video that I would like re-watch over the years because it was just so like sweet and fun and funny.

And it's like, you have these really passionate, queer people who find this sense of community and purpose and belonging in pop culture and in the community that they find through social media.

And like when you reach this point of inner turmoil, I think Christianity can be very attractive because it's like you're just replacing like the pop star you love or the genre of content that you're participating in with this like Christian faith.

I remember there was a famous TikTok of this kid who like grew up in a mega church.

And they were like, I thought that I was like an evangelical Christian.

And then I went to a One Direction concert for the first time.

And I realized I just like live music.

I was also reading this really interesting thread from someone who studies religion as an academic.

And she was like, it may surprise people, but we don't really know what religion is.

Like there are definitions of religion, but basically within scholarship around religion, it's like religion could theoretically be like being a Swifty.

And a lot of people have argued this.

A lot of people have argued this.

I have argued this.

And it's like, I know a lot of Swifties who actually grew up in the Christian faith and were like youth group leaders, church multiple times a week, who backed away from religion.

Like they were doing the opposite of what Lohanthony did, where it's like they grew up in religion, but it didn't ultimately like politically, morally, ideologically, it did not work for them anymore.

But they come into like music fandom as sort of a replacement for that kind of community.

And if you look at a lot of people's testimonies who have at some point been in any sort of conversion therapy program, a lot of what they talk about is just like feeling belonging within it.

So anyway, Loanthony has this sort of dramatic shift.

A lot of people online are like, who sent him to conversion therapy?

Like, was it his mom?

But like, that didn't really make sense because like his mom had long been featured in his content and was very supportive of him.

Yes.

So it was just kind of like this vague, like something happened to him.

I think at some point he actually denied outright going to any sort of camp.

And for all I can say, like, I believe him.

And I also don't really think that that's the point.

And

we're going to get to that.

But a few years later, people learn through his mother's Instagram account that he's gone to the military.

Do you remember when she posted that photo of him in his military garb?

Yes, I do.

It's unfortunately burned into my brain.

Yeah, it's, it's, uh, it was sad.

The whole thing is sad.

It is sad.

And now he's sort of crept back onto YouTube and he posts gospel music now.

Glory to Jesus Christ.

I believe I could find more.

His situation is revived in the internet public conscience every now and then.

For example, when when Brat came out, there was like a viral tweet that was like, rest in peace, Lo Anthony, you would have loved Brat.

And that's honestly really sad.

Like it's a little like funny.

It's a little bit of a joke, but it honestly is really, really sad.

And I think a lot of people will look at something like this and be like, well, he's not hurting anyone.

Like this is just him.

Like this is his individual journey.

He's not like hurting anyone else.

That's not really the case.

The experts who I spoke to at the time in 2020 talked about this because it's like, when you have someone with this massive following creating this, like putting out this ideology, showing this pipeline publicly, that does present a harm because it could easily be like the introduction point for other young, struggling queer people or queer people struggling of all ages could see this and like start to go down the exact same path.

Yeah, well, and that's, and that's the thing with most of these ex-gay communities, which again, we're going to talk about them, the communities themselves more more in a little bit.

But the majority of them, if not I would argue all of them, are led by people who identify as ex-gay.

So in a lot of situations, it is people who have been victimized by this ideology, basically advertising that abuse to other people, saying that, saying that, oh, it worked.

It's also like needless to say, but repressing part of yourself and repressing desires that are healthy and natural and good is not good.

Like creating this sense of shame around who you are and the way that you love and the way that you live your life is unhealthy.

Like it's often, I feel like within this community and even outside of it, it's framed as like, well, this is just people's choice.

And it's like, well, it's propaganda is what it is.

The most out there take yet on the Abit Fruity podcast: conversion therapy is bad.

It's actually good to be gay.

They're going to cancel me for this one.

This might be an unpopular take here, but like, ooh, like gay sex is kind of a good thing.

Well, in 2025, we do kind of have to go back to basics.

So let me just say, gay is good.

Yeah, let's start there at square one.

I want to put a pin in Loh Anthony for a little bit.

We'll come back to him and kind of what we think actually happened because it's still sort of...

not clear.

But while we're doing this sort of internet historiography, there is another person who went down a very similar thing who I want to throw in here because he's another person who gets kind of swept up in this viral conversation every few months online.

Kat, do you remember Staten Harry, aka the Lady Gaga Boy?

Hey, monsters!

What's new?

Today, I'm going to be lip-syncing to Ale Alejandro, Ale Alejandro.

You better enjoy it.

Keep those paws up.

Very high.

Super high.

Higher than before.

Of course I do.

This is this, this breaks my heart.

It is truly heartbreaking because it's like the video that he created that went viral is so sweet.

And it's like, this was a child who was 11 years old at the time that he made this video.

And he's like wearing a Lady Gaga t-shirt in a room covered in Lady Gaga merchandise, doing like these flamboyant over-the-top lip syncs as like a little monster.

And it went super viral.

It was very, very cute.

Lady Gaga herself was like, I love you.

And he was like, this is the best day of my life.

And you still see this used as like a reaction video from time to time.

What does he say?

Come on, little monsters.

Everybody better be jumping.

Everyone better be jumping.

I know the intonation with which he says, Everybody better be jumping because it's such a joyous video.

But I remember seeing this and being like, oh my gosh, like, you're the 11-year-old

who is so himself that, like, I wish that I could have been at 11.

Do you want to take a beat though on like the topic of children going viral?

Because I think a lot of people misunderstand how scary that can be when you're a child.

And the same thing happened to Lo Anthony.

I mean Lo Anthony was like 12.

Yes.

And I think that like when you look at kind of the trajectories of these stories that we're talking about, it's not just like out of nowhere you're renouncing your queerness.

It's like there is typically an element of like trauma and going viral as at any age, but particularly in the vulnerability of youth when you're 11 years old, when you're 12, 13 years old, that can be traumatic, even if at the time it feels good.

Because having this level of mass exposure is fundamentally unnatural.

And like, again, people of all ages talk about this, about how going viral is like, if there are the good parts of it, but there are also the overwhelming bad parts of it, particularly when you have a very young, queer child being pushed in this huge way in front of so many eyes, all of a sudden, they're not asking to have this massive audience.

It's like you can imagine the consequences of that, the immediate scrutiny, the overwhelming amount of bigotry that these children are going to face.

I can only imagine what like a Facebook comment section would look like on this video today.

It would be horrible.

And at the time, I'm sure it was horrible.

Like, for on the gay internet, we love stuff like this, but on like the straight internet, it's like this child is being abused.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Oh my God, totally.

I think the comments would be worse now, honestly, because

he went viral before the groomer panic started, but now it would just be like, I mean, now like his parents would have like CPS called on them probably by like some crazy right-wing psychophant.

His house would get swatted.

Unlike Lo Anthony, Staten Harry, who's this boy, he doesn't really become like a career content creator.

He just kind of has these like lady gaga lip-sync videos that go very, very viral.

And nobody really hears from him for a while, so much so that there was actually a Twitter account created called Where is Staten Harry?

And which is...

That's so funny.

It's also like, he could just disappear.

It's okay.

You know, COVID happens.

And I mentioned that only to say, I do think COVID and lockdown, specifically in 2020, was such a traumatizing time for so many people in so many different directions.

We saw so many people become, you know, anti-vax conspiracy theorists.

We saw so many people go down so many conspiratorial rabbit holes.

And I think this is in line with a lot of that, the amount of people who went under these like new religious journeys.

Yes.

And I want to like talk about this more as we go along, but it's like the fact that these things happened in like the 2020 era is no coincidence because you saw all of these things that were already starting to happen on the internet.

You saw the beginning of this like pendulum swing toward conservative culture online.

That was already happening before 2020, but 2020 accelerated everything.

All of a sudden, it went from like being very online, being extremely online, being a huge fan of YouTube, et cetera.

It was still somewhat niche.

For young people, for people who grew up online, like being in YouTube culture was already sort of a majority experience.

But what happened in 2020 was like you saw this massive acceleration in like across all demographics because of like the conditions of lockdown and quarantine.

We're spending so much more time online than before.

And because of these other like socio-political, economic, cultural factors that were happening in the wider world, you saw this intense burst of conservative content.

And YouTube in particular was primed for this because in the decade leading up to the pandemic, there were so many career influencers who were building these conservative networks online.

And this is the pipeline that was set in place that so many people fell down.

And this aspect of it, this like conversion therapy aspect of it is very unexplored compared to like the manosphere.

1,000%.

And it was something that like as I was researching and putting together notes for this episode, it was just like the fact that I came across Jackie Hill Perry, who's that ex-gay author who is currently a very popular influencer online with a husband and kids and who is still doing sort of like biblical adjacent content, but for a massive, massive audience.

And it's just like, oh, wait, broad swaths of the public currently have accepted the idea that like you can just change your sexuality through prayer.

Like that is, that's something that's actually very popular again.

Yes.

And I think you're right.

I mean, as conservative politics and homophobia and transphobia become more popular, you see a direct correlation with like the belief in rebranded conversion therapy practices, which are fundamentally always the same.

But I want to get back to Staten Harry because he reemerges in March 2022, four years after his initial videos go viral with a new video.

And he is doing like a Bible sermon on YouTube.

And it's uploaded on March 28th.

And the caption is, March 28th used to be a very demonic day for me because it's lady gaga's birthday a day i used to worship her and exalt her on so crazy much well every day really but especially this day so anyways just a little testimony of how good god is and how now on march 28th i'm glorifying him not a mere celebrity i legit had thousands of pictures of her on my phone pictures even on my wall my clothes my phone's wallpaper my entire social media accounts were even based around upon worshiping her.

Wow.

Thank you, Lord, for saving me.

Amen.

This reminds me of that one interview Trixie Mattel did where the interviewer was like, well, what do you have to say for people who say that it's not natural and it's not God's will?

And Trixie Mattel goes, well,

God's not real.

I am.

It's like, well, what are you worshiping a female pop star?

At least she's real.

Yes.

It's like, this text is so, like, you almost have to laugh reading it because it's so absurd.

But it's also like, it's still so depressing because it's like, yeah, you can be too extreme and you can be too obsessive.

We see this in Stan culture.

Like, it can become unhealthy for you and for the person you're obsessing over.

But having pictures of Lady Gaga on your wall is not demonic.

That's called growing up in the 2010s.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

So Staten continues to make like Bible sermon content to this day.

The Lord is at hand.

Now the amplified Bible.

Let your gentle spirit, your graciousness, unselfishness, mercy, tolerance, and patience be known to all people.

The Lord.

But, you know, people were like, kind of.

what the hell happened?

Like, and he did write at one point on another sort of Bible-related video, coming from someone who used to be completely part of that community and supported it 100%, this is amazing.

God is so good.

So we have another case of, okay, he renounced sexuality.

He was out as gay and

now he's not.

Again, like people, because his like Lady Gaga videos still go viral, like people bring up that he is this, you know, basically like Bible thumper YouTuber now.

And it's the same comments that Lohanthany got.

It's actually sometimes people will be like, oh, he was like Lohanthanied.

But people will say, you know, I feel horribly like someone sent sent him to a camp.

I can only imagine what must have happened.

And people

harass these figures too, which I don't think is productive.

Like when Mayhem came out, Lady Gaga's newest album, like people were like commenting all over his stuff.

Like there's this one, please react to Abrakadabra.

And he said, no, thank you.

He wrote this thing on TikTok that was like, yes, I am the Lady Gaga monster child, but I no longer associate myself with Lady Gaga and believe that her fans are demonic and I do not condone that behavior.

Thank you.

And I think, regardless of how you feel about like the implications of these people publicly advertising any sort of like conversion mindset, harassing them is not gonna help anyone involved.

And people do the same thing to Lo Hanthany because there's like a semi-recent video of him where someone asked him, and some of this is innocent, like some of this is people just like genuinely curious.

Someone asked him if he still listens to Lana Del Rey, and he actually said he sometimes does.

Like he was like, I don't listen to any of her new stuff, but occasionally I'll listen to like the Born to Die album.

I mean, no matter what religious transformation you go through, Born to Die still hits.

He's like, he's like, I'll put on a little without you.

And I'm like, me too.

And also, it's kind of ironic because I'm like, maybe you should listen to newer Lana Del Rey albums because she's kind of gone on this conservative trajectory.

Yeah, the newer stuff might hit too.

But like, people have this idea, I think, with Lo Anthony and Staten Harry and sort of all of these internet figures that they were like forcibly strapped to a table and like given electroshock therapy or something, right?

Because I feel like that is people's understanding of conversion therapy is like you're taken to a like a place with an evil pastor who like shows you images of gay porn and then shocks you so you are conditioned to fear it or something.

And chiefly, I think people don't understand why someone would do this without someone forcing them to.

Yes.

And it doesn't help that like, this is still a really common media portrayal of what conversion therapy is.

Like, you saw this in, ironically, American Horror Story.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In like season two, Asylum, this was a portrayal.

And you see this, like, there are still to this day movies that come out about conversion therapy where it's like the evil man like straps them to a chair in the woods.

And it's like, I understand

this is very common and consistent like horror imagery, but it doesn't reflect the reality, which is frankly even more sinister than that in a lot of ways.

A thousand percent, because a lot of people can't imagine like anti-gay violence that is through talk therapy.

Yes.

And that is theoretically opted for by the person going to it.

Yes.

So I want to talk a little bit about sort of the modern history of ex-gay Christian ministries in the United States, because I think something that you realize pretty quickly when you you look at the history of this from like the 70s until right now in like Loanthany State and Harry era is that it's actually just the same thing the entire time.

And it's not electroshock therapy and it's not, you know, like we're going to whip this out of you.

And for those reasons, it's way easier for it to fly under the radar of anti-conversion therapy laws.

So this group called Exodus International is founded in 1976, which is basically, it's a coalition of ministries devoted to ex-gay identifying Christians and hopefuls.

By the way, a number of former leaders from within Exodus International, who all at one point identified as ex-gay, were the subjects of a Netflix documentary called Pray Away, which I really recommend watching.

But notable to this is that the primary form of therapy being offered by these ex-gay Christian ministries wasn't electroshocks.

It was talking.

It was group therapy.

It was prayer.

It was like things that from the outside could look fun and like a community and a club and games and trips and camps of a bunch of gay people.

Sounds like a good time.

Yeah, honestly.

It actually reminds me, SNL did an amazing skit about this once, and it was like, it was like an ex-gay camp, but the premise of the sketch was that they all really just wanted to fuck each other.

And they were all pretending to not want to.

Yes, yes.

But the thing about these ministries is the adults who were participating in it opted to go themselves.

And you see from the inception of these sort of ex-gay ministries that the core language and identity of the programs were the same things that we hear from ex-gay influencers now, which was this manipulative illusion of choice.

You know, if you want to change, there's a way to do it.

And they're all about like empowering you to make a better choice.

Yes.

And it's like, we, we don't, we're not telling anyone.

This is another way that they get around conversion therapy laws.

We're not telling anyone that they need to be straight.

We're just saying that you have options.

And it's like, well, wait, do I really have options if you're putting me in an environment, in a religious environment that's telling me that only one of the options is correct?

Yes.

And it's also so insidious because it preys on vulnerable people.

It preys on people's vulnerabilities.

And you see this in the way Lohanthany framed his journey because he talks about things like childhood sexual abuse and substance abuse and like parts of his life that were traumatic and bad.

And what these types of programs do is they take the real trauma in people's lives and they reframe it as a side effect of being gay or being queer or being trans.

And that is so dangerous and so harmful.

And it's like particularly around issues like childhood sexual abuse.

This idea that if you're abused as a child, it like makes you gay and renouncing that is your pathway to healing.

That is so sinister.

It also creates like a convenient excuse to not have to confront how widespread childhood sexual abuse actually is and the fact that most people who experience it are not later gay.

It's like minimizing the issue, shifting the blame, shifting the fact that within religious communities, oftentimes a lot of this abuse is enabled and perpetrated and covered up.

And it's like the same thing with like substance abuse issues.

A lot of programs programs for treating substance abuse kind of trick you because you come in the door thinking that you're coming into a community space that is very welcoming, that's going to help you.

And you're so vulnerable and primed to be convinced that what will ultimately help you is like renouncing your sexuality.

These sorts of like tricky, are they, aren't they conversion therapy programs, like a lot of people do stuff like this.

But I feel like the reason we see a lot of celebrities in particular get involved in shit like this is because like being famous, especially especially being famous when you're young, especially being famous when you're queer, is traumatizing.

Yes, a hundred percent.

Because it's such a, it's such a pattern with these people.

I mean, you've noticed like a number of like influencers, because I mean, a lot of your career has been spent reporting on them.

Yeah.

I mean, like, there are constantly cults popping up that specifically cater to people who are in the public eye.

Scientology is always the most prominent example, but it's like another great documentary on Netflix was like the 7M TikTok cult, where it's like you had this religious figure who was, it's so messed up.

It's like he was finding these like young people on TikTok who were really good dancers and like bringing them into this like religious group.

It all feeds into each other.

He like takes their money.

He benefits from their, how popular they are online.

And he also creates this controlling authoritative environment where people are not free to be themselves.

What's so interesting to me is that from the beginning, like I said, I mean, these programs that don't call themselves conversion therapy,

they actively reject the label of conversion therapy.

All of the language is always empowering, like empowering you to make a better choice, empowering you to overcome sin.

It's not punishment.

It's not your bad slap you on the wrist with a ruler, you know, strap you up to an electroshock machine.

It's always like, let's empower you to live a better life.

That I think is a crucial part of like conversion programs, especially modern conversion programs that people, it doesn't align with the way that they think about conversion therapy.

But the thing is, the part that makes all forms of conversion therapy bad and the same, I mean, yes, electroshocks are bad on their own.

Like nobody wants to be electroshock.

But the fundamental belief is that if you try hard enough, you can change.

And the abuse will ultimately feel the same, you know, whether shocks are part of that process or it's just having to exercise self-control over on your own accord over something that cannot be changed in this way.

Yeah.

I also think that people shy away from having more like nuanced conversations about like how we express our sexuality and how we know what our sexuality is.

You know, within liberal rhetoric around like issues like gay marriage, this idea that you are born this way, lady gaga,

this idea that you're just like, you're born gay or you're born straight and you just innately know and you're very secure in that throughout your whole life this can be helpful messaging in terms of just explaining to people like why they shouldn't be homophobic but it also fails to acknowledge the fact that the societal conditions and the conditions of the community that you are in at any given point in your life can have an effect on how safe you are to not only come out to your community but to come out to yourself and people don't like to grapple with this because then they have to grapple with their own sexuality and like ask themselves harder questions.

But it's like you are, we are socialized in a society that is heteronormative, that assumes everyone is straight until proven otherwise.

And this contributes, even outside the context of conversion therapy, this contributes to like why it can take people 30 years to accept the fact that they're gay.

or to accept the fact that they're trans.

And if we did live in a more accepting society, then perhaps, and we see this reflected in the data, when society becomes more tolerant, people discover their identities earlier.

They become more comfortable and accepting in their identities earlier.

And when you have these repressive systems, then it actually changes how people feel about themselves and it becomes murkier and more difficult to like inhabit that perspective.

A thousand percent.

Just back to the historical timeline a little bit.

Like I said, these ex-gay programs have basically always been run by people who identify as ex-gay themselves.

And so as you can imagine, the inner workings of these movements have kind of always been a total mess in

ways that are like, it's just, it's the whole thing is built on a house of cards, you know?

And there have been some really incredible examples of that house of cards collapsing underneath itself.

And so, one of the examples I want to give you is of a guy named John Polk, who was one of the subjects of that Prayo A documentary.

But he joined Exodus International, identifying as a gay man in the 80s, very early on in the movement.

And he began identifying as ex-gay.

He married Ann Polk, who was also in the program and was an ex-lesbian.

What could go wrong?

The two of them were on the cover of Newsweek.

And I want to send you this cover and

I want you to describe it for people.

First thing you need to know about this cover is that if you were walking down the street street today and you saw this cover, it would not even be that out of place.

Because

so it's this issue of Newsweek, and it's the couple and they're next to each other.

Like he's got his arm around her, they look very normal.

It says gay for life, question mark.

Going straight, the uproar over sexual conversion.

And then I'll also note there's this big yellow like banner over the Newsweek logo that's like terror bombings, like the U.S.

Embassy.

And I'm just like, God, it's time is a flat circle time is a flat circle we're always like fear-mongering about gay people and like terror

we're back to conversion therapy and bombings yeah can you describe how they look on this cover yes they

they look so uncomfortable like palpably uncomfortable.

Like the face that the woman is making is like, she's like, I love men and my husband who loves women has his arm around me because he loves women and I love men.

That's right.

It's very funny.

It's like a 60s nuclear family cartoon, but like bought off of Temu.

Yes.

You know, like, we're not convinced.

This is not the real stuff.

Exactly.

You even get the sense that like the Newsweek editorial team was not convinced.

Everybody in the room was like, I guess.

Like, all right.

It's like, it's like actually playing house, literally.

Yes.

I also just noted underneath this,

this could be me and Kat.

Kat, Kat,

if it gets real bad in this country under Trump and like we are forced into heterosexual marriages, could we do this together?

Absolutely.

We can even do the Newsweek cover.

Let's recreate it.

I'll dye my hair back.

You'll take the nails off.

If you guys see Kat and I getting married on the cover of Newsweek as heterosexuals, keep your goddamn mouth shut.

I don't want to hear it.

But so John and Anne Polk, they rise through the ranks of Exodus International together.

And in 1995, John is made the chairman of the North American arm of this movement.

Five years later, in September of 2000, amidst a crisis of identity that John would later say would have led him to suicide if he didn't come forward as his true self.

He goes to a gay bar in DC.

And this is like, this is like telling a melodrama.

A patron at that bar recognizes him as like a leader in the ex-gay movement, calls his friend who works at the human rights campaign.

The human rights campaign guy comes to the bar and photographs John, like kind of scurrying out of the bar.

When John is later confronted with the photographs, he first lies and says, he goes, I didn't know it was a gay bar.

I was just stopping in to pee,

which is awesome.

He eventually confesses to knowing it was a gay bar before going.

Obviously, he's fired from Exodus International, you know, in a movement that he's at this point devoted decades of his life to.

And Anne Polk divorces him.

John Polk would eventually renounce the whole movement and apologize and admit that his sexuality never changed the entire time that he was inside the movement.

Exodus International collapses in 2013 with many of its former leaders apologizing for their involvement.

But because there's still homophobia in 2013, it just morphs into another group called Restored Hope Network, which, first of all, still exists.

These groups just constantly rebrand themselves to evade accountability and criticism.

But guess who runs Restored Hope Network today?

Tell me.

Anne Polk.

She's still in it.

So classic.

And like the real takeaway, I feel like, is that as long as there's homophobia and transphobia in a society with gay and trans people, which is every society, like this stuff will always exist.

This stuff will always exploit the bigotry and the hatred that queer people have towards themselves.

There's a quote from Prayaway that I noted here.

As long as homophobia exists in this world, some version of Exodus International will emerge.

It's not the organization or the methods that were used.

It's about the underlying belief that there is something wrong and changeworthy about being gay.

One thing that this really reminds me of is like a conversation that I encounter a lot, which is this idea of like people get really confused why a lot of women are misogynistic and why like women and also people of any marginalized community will like vote against their best interests or like behave in a way that is counter to like their freedom.

And And one of the reasons why this happens is because it's rewarded in a society that is ultimately conservative.

Like these people were able to build careers and livelihoods and get on the cover of national magazines by renouncing their queerness.

That is a really powerful incentive structure.

And I also think about how like a lot of times people make fun of bisexual women because within like the bisexual community, a lot of people end up in heterosexual relationships.

But I'm like, listen, it's not because they're not, they're secretly not bisexual or because they're just pretending.

It's because it's easier to be straight than it is to be gay.

You will have more options for people to date.

If you are like a bisexual woman in the dating pool, there are going to be more men than women.

You're going to have an easier time.

Those relationships are going to be, they're more encouraged by society.

And so people make choices not just because of who they innately are, but because of the way our like political culture is structured.

Yeah.

Wow.

I just did a real Aubrey Gordon.

Yeah.

I want to get people up to speed on what the current state of conversion therapy laws is in the United States.

So for what I found, 27 states have bans on conversion therapy.

But the vast majority of the bans are only for minors in conversion therapy.

So adults can still, you know, willingly participate.

There's also a number of states that banned governments from banning conversion therapy.

So, in Indiana, they banned banning conversion therapy.

In Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, they ruled that bans on conversion therapy are unconstitutional.

And then basically, the other 20 odd states in the U.S.

have no bans.

In 2023, the Trevor Project released a five-year-long report that basically said conversion therapy is still happening in every state, regardless of bans, that there are over 1,300 practitioners and half of them are not licensed therapists.

They are working in churches, ministries, you know, their pastors and priests, and they will advertise their services as like therapy for issues on sexuality and addiction and quote spiritual ailments.

Almost all of these are Christian ministries, heavily concentrated in the South and the Midwest.

Can't imagine why.

Hint, hint, there is a direct correlation between the availability and desire for this stuff and homophobia in an environment.

Interestingly, the number one state with the most practitioners, over 250 of them, was Pennsylvania.

But this is happening everywhere.

It's happening in New York City.

The Trevor Project noted that their own numbers were definitely deflated because so much of this is just underground.

And like, I think conversion therapy laws are important, but all of these programs are so good at disguising themselves and rebranding themselves and just simply saying that they're not conversion therapy and saying that no one's forced into our programs.

Everyone opts,

everyone opts in.

And it's like, I don't know, my take on this stuff is like, yes, we should, we should, oh, my camera got too hot.

I'm going to put my camera in the freezer.

This is what I do now.

Next episode, climate change.

And so my feeling about these conversion therapy laws is like, yes, it's important, but also ultimately it's like, it's like putting a band-aid on a on a broken pipe, right?

Because like the actual thing that would stop conversion therapy is like no more transphobia and homophobia, because these people would have no one to exploit if people didn't hate themselves in this way.

Yes.

It's also like taking the pinback out of the 2020 like acceleration of people being online.

A really big factor here is like when you have like a YouTube series containing this conversion therapy ideology, you can transmit that into any person's home anywhere.

It doesn't matter if the state has banned conversion therapy or not.

It doesn't even matter where the person is.

And I feel like that is likely a really big conduit for sort of not only people like Lohanthany, but also people who don't have big platforms, like people who we aren't seeing this happen in a very public-facing way.

If I had to guess, guess, I would guess that over the past several years, there's likely been a large number of people who are in this online environment that we have all seen become dramatically more conservative, dramatically more anti-LGBTQ, and then they get in their YouTube recommended feed something like this, and it takes them down that pipeline.

And you actually see this like broader weaponization of these social media platforms where Lo Hanthany is the perfect example because YouTube went from a platform where gay people were able to reach larger audiences to a platform where gay people are being propagandized into renouncing their gay identity and then selling that version of gay life to other people at scale.

And I think you segued me perfectly because I think, you know, I pulled an example.

And you segued me perfectly.

Don't you love how you can just like go on this like perfectly articulate tangent?

And then I'm like, well, but

it's all beautiful.

You're so kind.

You segued me perfectly into, I pulled an example of a very 2025 branded social media savvy conversion therapy program, movement, group with a solid online presence called Changed Movement, which is something that I have actually been like quietly monitoring for like the better part of the last five years because I've been really interested in the way that conversion therapy looks now, which is this.

So changed movement is a modern ex-gay ministry started by two ex-gay working pastors at the Bethel megachurch.

They actually don't use the term ex-gay at change.

They use the term once gay.

Again, it's this like distinctions without differences thing, you know?

They also obviously, they don't use the term conversion therapy, but also its leaders advocate against laws that would ban conversion therapy and legislation for LGBTQ equality.

So it's like

it's all the same thing.

It's like it doesn't matter if we call it conversion therapy.

But I want you to take a look at the homepage on the changed movement website.

So

you've got this picture of all of these like happy, smiling people wearing these like black t-shirts that say changed in all caps in white lettering.

And then the description is we engage LGBTQ with biblical compassion and action.

We are a community of friends who once identified as LGBTQ plus.

Today we celebrate the love of Jesus and his freedom and comfort in our lives.

Read our stories and learn more.

And looking at these people, I can tell that some of these people were

once identified as LGBTQ.

Yep, we know.

Yeah.

Don't worry.

We can definitely tell.

Well, I mean,

the one thing that is really interesting about a lot of people who renounce their queerness, I think it's funny that you bring this up, because a lot of times, like, they still choose to present as very visually queer.

I mean, I did an episode about the D-trans influencer, Maya Poet, who still looks extremely androgynous.

And so do a lot of these people, especially I noticed, like, a lot of like ex-lesbians keep like these sort of stereotypically lesbian haircuts.

A lot of the ex-gay people still wear like, I don't know, tight clothes.

What do you make of that?

That's a really good question.

I feel like it lends to the idea that like being gay is not just in like your sex life.

Like, I think that there is some nuance.

It's also in your haircut.

It's also in your haircut.

I mean, it's like, like, you can't stamp this out completely because there is clearly like palpable discomfort in adhering to like the the binary gender presentation.

These people have joined this community, which mind you, it's it's like it's a gay community.

Like they are just rebranding like having a bunch of gay friends.

It's a pride parade.

Clearly, like it's just a pride parade.

Like it, but it's it's fascinating to me because just it takes me back to the conversion therapy movements that we just talked about in like the 70s in the same way that they were still secretly going to gay bars in the same way that they probably were like secretly still being gay it's like you can't actually like stamp it out you can't actually like reverse who you are yeah and i was looking at the changed movements instagram and one of their most recent posts which mind you has 1800 likes i mean this is a this this is a community that seems to be doing quite well um really stood out to me it is a poster of

a person with rainbow tape over their mouth.

And it says, speak out, freedom can't be silenced.

And the caption is, in today's culture, if you're questioning your identity, there are countless voices ready to affirm you.

Well, yes, I'm right here.

My name's Matt Brinson.

But what if your convictions lead you in a different direction?

What if your faith leads you to seek transformation, but the door to counseling is slammed shut?

And then it's just like, we're running workshops to pray the gay way, you know, it's whatever.

But it's just so interesting because these people are

very smartly tapping into this like right-wing grievance culture around like, you can't say anything anymore because the rainbow mafia is going to duct tape your mouth shut.

Yes.

You can't even practice, you know, abusive pseudoscience anymore without the woke mob attempting to shut you down.

And it's like,

God.

Yeah.

It's this idea that it's actually revolutionary to to like be anti-gay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it's always predicated, like you see this with B2.

You see this with Black Lives Matter.

It's always predicated on the idea that we are a more equal and just society than we actually are.

And I see this with like specifically being gay a lot because there is a huge misconception that once gay marriage was legalized, homosexuality ceased to exist.

And it's like I grew up up in Ohio.

So

that homosexuality ceased to exist.

Homophobia.

Let me start over.

There's this misconception that as soon as gay marriage was legalized, homophobia ceased to exist.

And that is not true.

And it's like, it's very obviously not true, but there's still this sense, and I see it all the time, even from liberals and leftists, that like homophobia really isn't an issue anymore because it's so popularly accepted.

But that is not the case.

Like I grew up in Ohio and so I know firsthand that like communities, even in progressive leaning spaces, are not completely eradicated of homophobia.

It is still the dominant ideology.

Heteronormativity is still the dominant ideology.

Even if someone isn't homophobic, like our society is still one that's designed around being in heterosexual partnerships.

And like you can't escape that.

And so this idea that it's very revolutionary and very going against the grain to like be pro-conversion therapy is just not true.

I want to wrap this up with a really recent example, something that just happened like in the last month or so online with yet another influencer and their online relationship to a certain transphobic billionaire.

So someone named Hendrix who goes by, did you see this?

Yes, I did.

Someone named Hendrix who goes by the Twitter handle legal tweets, is a 43-year-old longtime Twitter creator and activist for LGBT people who identified until very recently as a transgender man.

They have had a number of gender-affirming medical procedures, and they recently, very recently, announced that they were detransitioning and now identify as a lesbian.

Now, this went very viral for a number of reasons.

Notably, that this person is claiming to detransition,

but is not changing their name back or stopping taking hormones.

I don't really want to get too deep into any sort of interrogation about their identity because it seems like none of my business.

And it seems like yet another example, many such cases of people who claim to be converting back, detransitioning, going back into the closet, renouncing their identity, but who are also simultaneously, very clearly still struggling with that identity in front of people.

So I don't really want to like pile on.

But what really struck me was a singular interaction this person had with J.K.

Rowling.

Now, this Twitter creator, Hendrix, has sparred with J.K.

Rowling, as have many LGBTQ people online for the last couple years.

And I want to show you this Twitter interaction that they had with JK Rowling when they announced that they were detransitioning.

Kat, would you like for me to read Hendrix and you read J.K.

Rowling?

Let's do it.

So Hendrix tweeted that they were detransitioning, and J.K.

Rowling said, I know we've had our differences, but this is one of the bravest posts I've ever read on here.

Welcome home.

Thank you at J.K.

Rowling.

It feels hard, but it's the right thing for me.

I'm glad to be home.

And then she says, can you follow me?

I'd like to DM you.

And then Hendrix says, yes.

This was so sad to me.

Yeah.

Because this is a, you know, a queer person.

who has identified J.K.

Rowling's abuse towards trans people for such a long time.

I mean, they have, they tweeted calling out J.K.

Rowling's bigotry for so long before this.

And then they said, I'm not trans anymore.

And again, regardless of whether or not this person is trans, it's really none of my business.

But the point is, as soon as they said that they weren't, J.K.

Rowling says, Welcome home.

And I feel like it really just goes to show that these sorts of shifts around identity will occur as long as there is an incentive to not be queer, to not be gay, to not be trans.

How nice is it for an extremely popular billionaire to tweet at you and say, welcome home?

That feels good.

That feels good.

And being queer a lot of times doesn't.

I mean, it feels good in the most

profound sense of your being your true self, but being up against bigotry all the time sucks.

How nice does it feel to be welcomed home?

You know?

It's such a microcosm of everything that we've been talking about because it's like J.K.

Rowling bankrolled and pushed so hard for trans rights to be rolled back in the UK, which they were.

And so now we have this political, social, cultural environment where people are discouraged from being trans.

And so then you have individuals.

And again, not speculating on this person specifically, but of course, in an environment that is regressive, that incentivizes you to go back in the closet or undo your transition, your sexuality, people are going to do it because that incentive structure has been provided for them.

Yeah.

And I want to note here, I've said in other episodes, of course, there are people who detransition because they learn that their identity, their understanding of their own identity has changed, it's not right for them.

But also data shows that a lot of people who do detransition detransition because being trans and out is hard.

And it's not because they're not trans, it's because transitioning is hard.

And so, considering everything we've talked about over the last hour and a half, it's like, I feel like the lines between like, did this person go to conversion therapy?

Did this person detransition?

Did this person go back into the closet by choice?

It's all so blurry because it's like, again, it's like the illusion of choice in a world that is so homophobic, in a world that is so transphobic, in a world that's telling you what they think the right choice is.

You know what I mean?

100%.

And it's like, what we do know for a fact is that bigots explicitly want this to happen.

Transphobes want trans people to either detransition or die.

And the very act of like being trans, of being gay, just accepting that and admitting it to yourself is incredibly radical in a world that wants you to either conform or no longer exist.

And so where do we end this?

I feel like, yes, you know, anti-conversion therapy laws are so important, but like, what can each of us as individuals do?

Like create create an environment for yourself and for other people where like we just have to push acceptance and we have to push love.

Like the best possible thing we can do in a state where so many people seem to be like regressing back into the closet inexplicably.

Well, it is explicable.

It's because everyone's homophobic and being out is hard.

So we just have to be louder than ever, not to be like, rah, rah, I'm Harvey Milk and I want you to come out.

But like that is kind of how we have to be.

Like we have to remind each other and everyone around us that, like, being queer is great, that we love queer people.

There's such a danger to like bigotry in being proudly yourself and being publicly yourself.

And so many of these movements against trans people, against queer people, against women, against people of color, the end goal is to hide yourself from society and be ashamed.

So when you do the opposite of that, when you exist loudly and proudly and queer or trans,

then you are directly fighting back against these structures.

And Lohanthani, and I don't even say this as a joke, my DMs are always open.

Kat, thank you so much, as always, for joining me on this podcast.

I know you've had a long week.

No thanks to Ethan Klein, but

I really appreciate you taking the time.

You're so singular in your insights, and I really hope that everyone goes and subscribes to your work at Spitfire News.

It's fantastic, and it'll be linked in the episode description.

Thank you so much.

I'm so glad that we're talking about this.

I love you all.

If you made it this far, thank you so much.

I'm so incredibly grateful.

Happy pride.

Let's just throw as much proud, gay shit at the wall as we can because we all need it.

We all deserve it.

I love you, and until next time, stay fruity.

Yippee!

That ended at a very hopeful place.

I'm happy with that.