1. The Dancefloor

00:00:00
Speaker 1: This episode includes discussion of sexual assault, including rape. There are references to suicide, drug use, strong language. I'm disordered eating.

00:00:17
Speaker 2: It was September nineteenth, two thousand and I'm at home, ironically working on my first book about X gay ministries, and I got a call from my colleague at the Human Rights Campaign, Dearrel Hershaft get down to the bar, mister Peas right now. And I was like, why, Darrel, I can't. I'm working on my book, and he said, your chapter's right here are Mike? What are you talking about? John Paul, the king of the X gay ministries, is at mister P's and I think he's hitting on me. And I said, are you sure?

00:00:50
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's yeah.

00:00:53
Speaker 2: And I have never ran so fast in my life. X kay poster boy John Paul John PAULK, former chairman of Exodus International. I got there and I'm thinking that this can't be this must be a mistake. And I slowly opened the door. I look inside and oh my god, there is John Paulk.

00:01:15
Speaker 4: He didn't even just work at Exodus internationally.

00:01:18
Speaker 3: He was the former chairman of Exodus International.

00:01:21
Speaker 2: The biggest ex gay leader in the world. Sitting there in a gay bar like you know. You know, he's never left one and.

00:01:28
Speaker 4: He wrote a book, Love One out, how God's love help two people leave and find each other.

00:01:36
Speaker 5: He deserves what he got.

00:01:38
Speaker 2: He was hurting people, destroying lives and making money from it, and he got exactly what was coming.

00:01:47
Speaker 5: To him over there.

00:01:49
Speaker 4: Initially he was gay, then he became ex gay, where he was able to pray away the gay.

00:01:56
Speaker 6: I remember it being a major blow to the evangelical cure I to see one of their brightest, hottest stars go down.

00:02:05
Speaker 4: Now he has renounced the ex gay movement and he's ended that marriage with Anne Pulk, so he is now kind of x X gay. John has never been anything but gay, but he really tried hard not to be.

00:02:18
Speaker 7: John just seemed like a different person, willing to do whatever it took.

00:02:25
Speaker 2: I was happy he finally told the truth.

00:02:28
Speaker 5: I'm John Pulk. For years, I was that poster boy of the ex gay movement. I was an ex gay who married an ex lesbian and traveled the world telling my story of how I changed my sexuality. I'm the man who took leadership positions within evangelical ministries and said, hey, you can overcome your sexuality too. For years, I wore the label of ex gay with pride. It was like a badge of honor that meant I truly renounced being gay my life, my career. It was all built around how I changed my sexuality, how I pushed my being gazed so far down inside myself that it was no longer a concern. As I told Oprah Winfrey, it diminished. That was until well, we'll get to that part, but let's just say that I am now in my mid sixties and living once again as an out and proud gay man. This is my story in all its chapters. It's time to peel back the layers and expose what happened to me in the midst of conversion therapy, to shine a light on what the X gay movement does to people and the pain it continues to cause, and for me to look too at the harm I did from within it.

00:03:58
Speaker 8: I was taken into a room with two passes, and they used holy water to anoint my head, my chest, and they even dripped it over my nether regions will say, and started speaking in tongues over me.

00:04:11
Speaker 6: I had lost one hundred fifty pounds because if I couldn't control my sexuality. I was going to control my weight. I called my nine hundred calorie a day diet a fast. Looking back, my nutritionness says that sounds like an eating disorder.

00:04:27
Speaker 2: You can never undo all of the damage that has been done. If somebody killed themselves, for example, because they couldn't change, you cannot reverse that. What you can do is make sure other people aren't harmed and save other lives.

00:04:45
Speaker 1: I'm Kate Holland, the producer of this series, and you'll be hearing from me along the way too. I've seen the devastation that conversion therapy causes firsthand. I've seen the lives of people I love destroyed by it world that exists in secret and thrives in the shadows. The more time I spent with John Polk, the more questions I had about his previous life, not just about the methods of this so called therapy, but how people end up in it, who's pulling the strings, and how is it linked to wider conversations of conservatism around sexuality and gender ideas that affect all of our lives. Welcome to Atonement the John Polk Story, Episode one, The Dance Floor.

00:05:39
Speaker 5: To understand how I ended up in the clutches of conversion therapy movement. I need to lead you back to my early adulthood, because before any of this began, I was an openly gay man, completely immersed in the gay scene. My eighteenth birthday, my closest friends thought it would be fun to take me to a gay bar. And when you were eighteen back then, you could get into a bar. They had been telling me about this club called the Kismet, saying that it has an incredible music, that there's amazing dancing. I'd never been in a nightclub in my life, and I was scared to death. It was nineteen eighty one, but I remember the night like it was yesterday. In fact, it would later become the opening chapter of the first book I'd write. When I was promoting the X game movement. I can see myself now waiting outside the club in the back of the car. I'm wearing a brand new outfit, a gift for my grandmother. I had an Eve Saint Laurent outfit that she bought me all I'll never forget it. Off white linen pants, an off white shirt with purple piping around the lapels. I had this gorgeous lavender ysl belt with a brass buckle, and she had bought me a pair of off white sweded fry cowboy boots. Oh, I got it so eighties. I wasn't out yet. Looking back on it now, I think the trip to this gay bar was my friend's way of saying they knew I was gay, But these were my first steps towards saying it myself. The bar was in a seedier part of downtown Columbus, Ohio. There was just a light kind of overhanging the red door of this place. No signs. Gay bars didn't have signs then where I was from, it was just easier that way, but everybody where it was. And as we started to walk toward the door, I could hear the thump of the speakers, and I was so filled with nervous excitement, scared, but pulled in by this force. I remember going through the door and there was a man in a white tank top sitting on a stool, and he had a black mustache. He looked every bit of the village people back in the day. His eyes just went over me from head to toe. He said to me, can I check your coat? And I started stuttering and I said I'm not wearing a coat, and he started to giggle. He goes, can I check your shirt? I was so embarrassed. I said no, thanks, I will keep this shirt, and then he said something like, well, have a great time, stud. So this is my foray into the entrance of the gay bar. Growing up, I had always felt pretty alienated. I wasn't rough and tumble or into sports like many of the other boys. Recess was the scariest thing you could imagine for a boy like me, because the boys and girls would just separate on the playground. It was like there was this invisible line. I always went to the girl's side of the playground, which of course made me different from the boys. I remember this one day, staying in from recess, sitting at my desk looking out the window seeing the boys out there. I think they were playing kickball and just wanting to be with them and be but I knew I wasn't like them. I was different, and it seemed like nobody understood me. But that night at the Kismet, we walked inside and my two friends sandwiched me between them. It was like nowhere I'd ever been before. Mirror balls, light spinning all the colors, the walls were covered in mirrors. There was a huge dance floor in the middle. It was like reality was suspended and all that existed was this cavernous place called the Kismet, nicknamed the Kay. My friends headed to the dance floor, and I took myself to the bar. Scotch on the rocks was my teenage order. It would get you busted faster than anything else. And at the far end of the bar, I saw this man. He was gorgeous, just a year or so older than me. It was hypnotic, and after chatting for a little while, I liplocked with this man. And I can feel it as I think about this. We had this wonderful beard, scruff, and we were passionately, ferociously making out. But it was the most wonderful feeling to have that masculinity against my skin, and I was gone. It's like I finally found quote unquote my people, and I belonged there. It's a wonderful part of.

00:11:52
Speaker 9: My memory of who I am.

00:11:59
Speaker 5: Because of what to come as I look back now, was horrific.

00:12:06
Speaker 10: Conversion therapy really refers to any of several dangerous and discredited practices that are aimed at changing a person's sexual orientation or gender identity.

00:12:17
Speaker 1: This is Casey Pick. She's the senior director of Law and Policy at the Trevor Project.

00:12:23
Speaker 10: The United Nations says even described conversion therapy as a form of torture.

00:12:28
Speaker 1: The Trevor Project is the United States' largest provider of suicide prevention and crisis intervention services for LGBTQ plus young people. The nonprofit has been going for twenty seven years.

00:12:42
Speaker 10: The way you define conversion therapy is by its objective and the motivations behind it. It's not based in science, medicine, or fact, but always stems from the false and outdated notion that LGBTQ plus people are some how unnatural or struggling with something that needs to be cured. Historically, we saw this take the form of really physical forms, aversion therapies, drugs, electroshock therapy, even in some cases lobotomies decades ago. Those physical forms are much less prevalent now, but what we continue to see are really talk based forms of conversion therapy that use shame and pressure and guilt. Sometimes they can look a lot like a twelve step meeting. The modalities really do vary, especially because This isn't a legitimate psychological practice. There's no training for it in any medical school. So you continue to see these modern twists on old ideas. The idea of using an app to confess to your feelings of sexual attraction. It's still the same old shame idea, just dressed up in new and scarily modern clothing.

00:14:15
Speaker 1: Conversion therapy is a bit of a nebulous title. You might have heard the phrase pray away the gay, and over the years it's been known as reparative therapy, sexual orientation or gender identity change efforts, and gender exploratory therapy. It's currently banned for minors in twenty seven American states, and there's somewhere between half a million and eight hundred thousand survivors living in the US today, yet it continues.

00:14:47
Speaker 10: It's really hard to know how many people are still practicing conversion therapy because of its shadowy, secretive nature. But in twenty twenty three, the Travel Project released report entitled It's Still Happening, in which we were able to document more than one thousand, three hundred active practitioners who were still engaging in conversion therapy. And it's really important to know we were quite conservative.

00:15:15
Speaker 1: Those thirteen hundred conversion therapists are just in the United States. The Trevor Project only included those who were explicitly and publicly stating that their objective was to change someone's sexuality or gender identity, and they only included licensed professionals.

00:15:33
Speaker 10: So we know that this is still happening, and unfortunately there may even be a resurgence happening today.

00:15:41
Speaker 1: And why is that?

00:15:42
Speaker 10: Honestly, because we are experiencing a backlash in this moment regarding the progress that LGBTQ people have made in recent decades.

00:15:54
Speaker 2: I would consider it a blood liable against the LGBTQ community.

00:15:58
Speaker 1: This is Wayne Bessen.

00:16:00
Speaker 5: I've known Wayne for years, but we've not always been on the same side.

00:16:04
Speaker 2: My work is to debunk the X gay myth. It's one of the most harmful lies because the way it's been used to say, well, you don't need equal rights because you can change. You don't need to be able to marry the same sex, marry the opposite sex, just go to these ministries or this therapy and you can change. So that has been central to my work because I believe that the entire LGBTQ movement, we must overcome that lie. Are we face punitive legislation against us.

00:16:36
Speaker 5: Conversion therapy does not work. I'm proof of that.

00:16:42
Speaker 2: It causes families to reject their own children. They say, oh, you're gay because you're not trying to change, You're not working hard enough, you want to be this way. It's a lifestyle. It trivializes a very intrinsic part of who we are into something very frivolous, and that divides families. It tears them apart. It ruins these relationships, and that is incredibly hard on both the families and the gay person or the transgender person who was rejected. A lot of people are left on the street. It leads to depression, anxiety, a self destructive behavior, including hardcore drug use because the pain is so immense.

00:17:25
Speaker 10: At the Trumvor Project, we have published a pere reviewed article that showed, based on surveys of tens of thousands of LGBTQ plus young people, that more than ten percent of the youth that we surveyed reported that they experienced conversion therapy or were seriously threatened with it. And for those young people, they are at double, sometimes more than double the rate of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts.

00:17:57
Speaker 2: This is nothing to laugh at. The the impact on individuals and families cannot be understated, neither.

00:18:05
Speaker 1: Can the impact on society as a whole.

00:18:08
Speaker 10: A few years ago, the Trevor Project worked with a team of health economists and what we found, based on a comprehensive literature review based on the prices advertised by those thirteen hundred active practitioners. That we found was that the direct cost of conversion therapy annually was six hundred and fifty million dollars in terms of payments made from families and patients to the practitioners, But the indirect cost, the cost associated with those suicide attempts with depression and anxiety, was more than eight billion dollars. So the total cost of conversion therapy to the United States economy we found to be more than nine billion dollars a year.

00:19:06
Speaker 2: This is an issue that touches every LGBTQ person. You don't have to go into an X game ministry or have a conversion therapist to be impacted by it, because it impacts the way the world sees you. They say, oh, it's just a lifestyle and you can change it. You're just in a phase.

00:19:24
Speaker 5: For example, you.

00:19:25
Speaker 2: Can pray the gay away, or you can examine the roots of how you became gay and wish it away. And it doesn't work like that.

00:19:36
Speaker 5: And when it came to me and my work promoting the X game movement.

00:19:41
Speaker 2: Yes, we absolutely wanted to expose it as a fraud. That was very high on our agenda.

00:19:48
Speaker 5: For me, like many others, my entry into conversion therapy was faith based. It was all wrapped up within the most conservative end of evangelical Christianity, Christianity where it exists, though there are stories of conversion therapy and pretty much all faiths Judaism, Mormonism, Islam and more. Yet, I was a gay man telling the whole world that being homosexual was wrong, and I spread the message that if you want to change your sexuality, you can and we can show you the way I spread that harm.

00:20:26
Speaker 1: In getting to know John, spending time with him and those who know him, it's clear that he was one of the most tootemic figures in the history of the conversion therapy movement. His story is extraordinary, but it also reveals some deeper reasons about why and how so many gets tangled up in the ex gay world.

00:20:49
Speaker 5: It wasn't long after my first night at the Kismet that I met a man who would be far more important in my life than a kiss in a nightclub. I was in my senior year at the performing arts high school I attended. It was closing night of our final performance, and I was peeping through the curtains just before the show began, and lo and behold, there was this absolutely beautiful man with freckles around his nose. He had soft blonde hair and beautiful blue eyes. And I was just transfixed looking at this guy sitting by himself in the audience. And there was a cast party that night, and that beautiful blonde man showed up there and he and I started talking and just chatted and chatted and chatted and chatted. That same night, when I went home, we called each other and we spent three hours on the phone together, and very quickly we filmed madly in love with each other, madly in love with each other, and we were absolutely inseparable. He was a year older, so he was a freshman at Ohio State when I was graduating, so he would have been nineteen. I was eighteen. And we drank a lot together and just fell in love.

00:22:27
Speaker 7: My name's Curtis Thompson. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and that's where John and I met.

00:22:33
Speaker 5: Curtis, or Kurt as I've always called him, lives in San Diego now. He's easing into retirement after a career as a registered nurse and has been married to his husband, Jack for many, many years. But back when I met him, Kurt was your typical student.

00:22:49
Speaker 7: Life was messy back then because you know, none of us. I wasn't out, and it wasn't something that he really talked about or let people know. So, yeah, I met John. I can't quite remember how we got together, but I kind of let it known that, you know, I had a crush on him.

00:23:12
Speaker 5: The feeling was certainly mutual.

00:23:14
Speaker 7: What attracted me to him was just that he was nice, sweet, cute for sure. I just knew that I was attracted to him, and that was fun.

00:23:27
Speaker 5: So back in that time, the terms to identify a male couple was this is my boyfriend or this is my lover. The word partner did not exist, and there was no marriage that was decades away, so the word lover was the common phrase for people. It was akin to a partner, you had established relationship with them. So we were boyfriends in every sense of the word, and we're literally in separable. I just fell in love with him, Sure.

00:24:04
Speaker 7: I loved him. Yeah, it was It was very intimate. It was a special time.

00:24:11
Speaker 5: In the months that followed, Kurt and I spent all of our time together. It was the summer break, and the days were long spread out in front of us.

00:24:20
Speaker 7: John was very special to me too, and is still Kurt meant so much to me.

00:24:25
Speaker 5: He was my first relationship, my first everything in the area of sexuality. I was extremely insecure and fairly naive, and then one night we were at his parents' house, they were gone for the night, and it happened. It was the most wonderful, magical experience. It felt very natural to use that word natural. That word would become so pre eminent in the years that followed.

00:25:09
Speaker 7: During the summer I was I would have been going into my second year of college, and there was a discussion about what I was going to do, where I was going to live. I know John was going to go to OSU Ohio State University, and he was planning on living in the dorms. And somehow we finangled it with both our families that we'd live in the dorm together.

00:25:32
Speaker 5: I lived with my mom growing up, and I hadn't come out to her as gay when I left for.

00:25:36
Speaker 7: College, so we lived in one of the big towers, you know, with a million students, with no privacy whatsoever. It was a huge deal for me, and I know it was for him too to just be able to do that and then be together all the time, even though we were going to school. That was kind of secondary.

00:25:58
Speaker 5: We were roommates together and we were in bunk beds. We shared a room with two other guys who were best friends, and then we were on the right side.

00:26:06
Speaker 7: It was really tight.

00:26:09
Speaker 5: It was the nineteen eighties, so we were trying to convince everyone that we weren't a couple. But one of the cute things that we did is the bunk beds were scootered up against a wall and I would reach my I was on the top, and I would reach my hand down and he would hold my hand. And we had hand signals for things because we couldn't talk out loud, and so like one tap meant I love you, two taps was I'm thinking about you, Three taps I want to fuck you, I mean, just whatever.

00:26:50
Speaker 7: So John had a little car that was parked kind of on campus off campus. I mean, it was quite a walk too, and we'd hook up in the pinto.

00:27:04
Speaker 5: Even in the cold of winter, when you could see your breath we were out there.

00:27:09
Speaker 7: I mean when I think now, my god, my body would ache and all of this if I was doing something like that now, But it didn't matter at the time, you know, that was just what we did. Remembering some of this stuff is like memories I haven't thought about and a long time.

00:27:33
Speaker 5: Like the vast majority of first relationships, first loves, even it didn't last, but Kurt and her time together has always remained special to me. Cracks started to develop in our relationship. I don't think Kurt and my goals were one and the same at this point. I think Kurt wanted to maybe explore relations with other people. Of course I didn't want that at all. I was so hurt. So after our first semester at Ohio State in the dorm, I was so devastated. I actually quit school and I moved back home.

00:28:19
Speaker 1: But Kat remembers it slightly differently.

00:28:22
Speaker 7: I think we met other people, and I think we just kind of were still trying to find ourselves. I know that we you know, we drank a lot. We partied a lot. That that was a big factor too. You know, we'd get really drunk and then we'd say things that were painful, you know, I mean, it's just the way it was. There was a lot of drama. We were both very dramatic. John was still finding himself, dating a lot of people. Well, surprisingly we maintained a friendship. He was just always trying something new. And when I say that specifically, there was just you know, he had a lot of friends. He partied a lot.

00:29:16
Speaker 5: I was a barhor. I was always at gay bars. Back then, gay life was centered around gay clubs. I felt very very comfortable in a bar. I love the easy, careless camaraderie of talking to strangers at a bar. And I was a very common face in the gay club scene.

00:29:48
Speaker 7: When he would get drunk, he'd change, and you know, he'd either be the life of the party or not. And when he wasn't, you know, it was painful.

00:30:05
Speaker 5: And that lack of a barometer would lead me further into trouble.

00:30:22
Speaker 9: Why Dad, how you I am John Norman Polk? I am John's father.

00:30:33
Speaker 5: These days, I'm really close to my dad, both emotionally and physically. I live in Portland, Oregon, and he's just across the river. But it's taken us a while to get to this point. My mom and dad got divorced when I was young, so he was, in his words, a weekend dad.

00:30:51
Speaker 9: We would get together on weekend. We'd go bay a miniat or golf, or we'd go down to the river and have a lunch. We'd always eat the same kind of things. It was a thing that he and his sister Vicky really enjoyed when we got together. There were never any problems or difficulties. It was just a joy being together.

00:31:13
Speaker 3: I first met John when he came out for our wedding.

00:31:16
Speaker 5: This is my stepmother, Vicki. I was in my early twenties when I first met her. I flew across the country to see her and my dad in the lead up to their wedding.

00:31:26
Speaker 3: The first memory I have of John was when we went to the airport to pick him up because he had flown out from Ohio and we, of course lived on the West coast, so I saw him coming out of the area where the plane had landed, and I was astonished. I don't know that my mouth dropped open because I couldn't see that, but I could not believe how much John looked like his father and how very handsome he was, and then getting to know him was just delightful. I remember he and his sister both I think, stayed with us for a few days, and I remember they one morning fixed breakfast for us and they were fixing pancakes or something like that, and I thought, how fun is this? It was just family time, and it just felt wonderful.

00:32:18
Speaker 9: When Vicki and I, Vicky, my third wife, and I got married, she was curious about what her relationship was going to be like with my four children, and she wanted a roadmap, and she asked, you know what's going to be like? And I said, you'll develop it as you go along. And that's always been my approach to life, no roadmap, see what comes along. I've always been supportive of John and all my children, regardless where they're going in life. There wasn't my my role to give them a direction. It was to enjoy their direction. If I could give any thoughts I might have along the way that might be of interest or help.

00:33:12
Speaker 5: I would do that, but never.

00:33:14
Speaker 9: Meaning to change their thought processes or life processes.

00:33:20
Speaker 1: Whilst I was asking Norman and Vicki about John and their relationship with him, Norman interrupted the flow of conversation to say something that had obviously been on his mind.

00:33:30
Speaker 9: I want to say something that Vicky might ask to strike from this conversation. She's never been happy about John going forward with this podcast because she's thought he's at a point where he can get on with his life and to dredge up the past might not be healthy for him. Those are my thoughts. I let Vicky respond.

00:34:05
Speaker 3: I know, I remember, and I know how painful this was for John to go through what he went through, and I just didn't want him to be in a situation where he was going to have to relive that over and over. I didn't want that for him. I appreciated and valued what he had done with his life, but I didn't want him to have to do it again because it was so painful. And that was why I said this to Norm. But I would never have said it to John because it's his life, his decision, and I only was looking at it from my perspective.

00:34:46
Speaker 9: Would you want these comments on a podcast.

00:34:49
Speaker 3: I don't. I don't feel like they are particularly pertinent. But John, I would defer to you, Okay, okay if John wants is very parental.

00:35:08
Speaker 5: After breaking up with Kurt, I dropped in and out of college. We remained friends, seeing each other all the time, but I was heartbroken. So I'd sign up for school. I'd go six or seven weeks, then I'd start missing classes. During one summer, I realized I needed to find some work, one that would fund my new bar hopping lifestyle. I was looking for a job and I ran across an ad that was looking for a male escort. I needed the cash, and I thought it would be just like American Jiglow. I'd be the Richard gear leading man. I even wore a suit to the interview. They hired me, and I became the only male escort on the illicit company's books. Back then, they charged the client eighty dollars an hour. They got forty and I got forty. And so what happened was the driver would take you, and it was mostly in hotel rooms, into a hotel room, walk you to the door, and knock on the door. The door opened, the client would hand the money right up front to the driver and he would say, I will be back in one hour to pick you up. Got so many people don't know this about my life. I hate having to put this in, but there you have it. Fuck it, this was a part of my life. Sorry. Remember the very first time I went in, there was a man. He looked very straight and much older than me, and I asked him if he wanted a massage. He said yes he did. All the lights were out, and I took my clothes off and I sat on the edge of the bed with one knee propped on the bed and the other leg on the ground, and I started to give him a back massage. It went no further than that. Time was up. I got dressed, the guy picked me up, and I thought, good lord, I just made forty dollars and where could a nineteen year old get a job for forty dollars an hour? I thought this as easy as can be. It wouldn't stay so easy, and clients would expect much more than a massage. Being around the girls and being in the office night after night was fun and exciting and scary because you never knew what was going to happen. In very short order. My uniform to go into work was short shorts and a tank top. You could get out of it fast and get back in it. I started becoming busier and busier, and of course my eyes were opening up to the real world. This summer that I spent I was introduced to drugs LSD, acid and cocaine. It got to the place where I had to be about three sheets to the wind before I could go into these men's hotel rooms. I got very good at talking my way through an hour, and the goal was, and this is what the girls taught me, try to get them to take sex off of the table till your time was like fifteen minutes before you were going to be picked up, so that they would purchase you for another hour. And so you got eighty dollars in one place. You start asking about their job, their family, Could I have a drink? And it became this conveyor belt of nameless, faceless men, and I started to harden in the inside.

00:39:24
Speaker 7: I remember we would talk in the morning where he had been up all.

00:39:27
Speaker 1: Night John's ex boyfriend Kat. Again, I don't really know.

00:39:31
Speaker 7: What was going through my head at the time that he was doing that, but he was making good money, and he seemed okay with it. Whatever he did he dove into, and it was you know, I'm laughing now, but I mean he it's funny as it sounds. It seemed like he just wanted to do the best he could at whatever he dove into, whether it was good or bad.

00:40:00
Speaker 5: Felt like a vampire. I was a creature of the night, and I would sleep all day just feeling wanted and unwanted. So I was wanted for an hour. I was wanted for a night, but I wasn't really wanted because nobody knew who I really was. I had a false persona. And when you start living like this, it's almost seemingly nothing can go but down. Late that summer, a man booked me for four hours. I was driven to the outskirts of Columbus to a sort of cabin like building. This guy opened the door who had no teeth. He was this old, wretched, dried up gay guy, and I was dropped off. We went through the same routine with the driver, the money was exchanged. I went in within about ten minutes. None of my normal tricks worked. He said, I want you naked, and I want you naked right now, and I just felt like something is wrong. My heart was pounding, my throat was dry, my mind was racing. I was in the middle literally of nowhere. He made it very clear we were gonna have sex imminently like then, and so I asked if I could go in the kitchen and pour myself another scotch. He said yes. He was very angry, he was agitated, he was demanding. I went in to get the drink and I turned my head back, and all of a sudden, his back was to me and he was holding a knife in his hand behind his back. Words can't even describe the terror that went through me. And I thought, this man is going to cut me up and kill me. And because I was younger and faster, as I came into the room, I shoved him into his wall of his living room and I began running, and I ran as fast as I possibly could. That was the last night I was ever an escort. Performing has been a part of my life the very beginning, not just at performing arts school or at college where I majored in it. And before I took on the role of professional ex gay, there was another persona I would.

00:43:12
Speaker 1: Take on in John's apartment building. In early twenty twenty five, we rifled through boxes of memories, photos, letters, family videos, and press clippings, including those from when John was the poster boy of the ex gay movement. He showed me a full page ad that was in the Oregonian on October eleventh, nineteen ninety six. There's a huge black and white photo of John and then a quote to that.

00:43:37
Speaker 5: Reads, ironically, my homosexual orientation didn't change until I met an incredible man, and that man was Jesus. For many years, I searched for intimacy and belonging through homosexual relationships. When I came out as a gay man, I felt a new acceptance from others that after six years, I found myself empty and lonely, always wanting more. Then I asked Jesus Christ to come into my life. In him, I found out what true acceptance really is. He gave me an unconditional love I had craved all my life, and yet even though he accepted me as I was, I came to understand that the Bible was clear that homosexuality was never God's intention. Slowly, over time, he began changing my orientation, not just my behavior, and showed me my true identity. If it hadn't happened to me, I probably never would have believed it, but it did. There is another way out.

00:44:45
Speaker 1: I'm really taken with the description of you.

00:44:47
Speaker 5: That John, Oh, the description John Paulk former homosexual, male prostitute and female impersonator. Quite a zends there, female impersonator. That's how the evangelical ad for conversion therapy referred to it. But at the time I called it what it was, drag. I discovered drag during my college years, around the same time I was escorting. I loved the theatrical nature of it instantly. The first person to ever put me in drag was my friend Larry also known as Lauren Stevens. He was a makeup artist during the day and he had brought extra clothes. He brought his dark black wig and what he put in on me, Oh my god. I looked incredible. And he said, let's take you out. We've got to go out. So they put high heel on me. I couldn't walk in him. I was tripping all over the place and Larry is trying to give me this quick education. You need to keep your knees together, put your shoulders back, and down, drag your arms behind you a little bit, turn your wrist up. After a little while, I started to get the hang of it, and so we made our way to a local bar called Imaginations. Nobody knew it was John underneath all of this. Well, all I can say is this was very intoxicating to me, and I became very addicted to this kind of fun. Candy was extremely elegant and upscale, dressed formally all the time, pillbox hat with a veil, suits with three quarter length sleeves, skirts just below the knee, close toed pumps. Always very very elegant, understated, but incredibly sophisticated. My persona of Candy was patterned after my mother.

00:47:30
Speaker 7: I mean, he was stunning.

00:47:31
Speaker 1: Kurtz remembers them both.

00:47:33
Speaker 5: We would go.

00:47:34
Speaker 7: Out to the bars and he looked like a movie star. You know, his mom was beautiful. She actually had movie star looks, and he reminded me so much of her. And you know, here he was like doing drag and he had this confidence, just did it profoundly.

00:47:58
Speaker 5: In the eyes of many. I was the most beautiful drag queen that people had ever seen at the time, and it was just life was wonderful. For about four years, I was completely immersed in drag and the bar scene. To the outside viewer, I was living it up. At one stage, Kurt and I moved back in with each other.

00:48:18
Speaker 7: Those were good times and not so good times. The good times were, you know, we had a shared history. You know, we could we could talk about guys together. You know, I could say, oh, what do you think of this guy or that guy. We were like still young kids that, you know, talked about stupid stuff and the not so good times. One of the reasons why I ended up moving out of that apartment was John and his friends on the weekends during the week whatever they would they would dress and drag, they would get inebriated, and they would walk the streets and find guys to mess around with. And so, you know, John was away one weekend doing a drag show and I remember there was a knock at the door and there were these three guys and they knocked on the door and they said, where's Candy, And I said, Candy's not here, and they're looking at me, and I don't know if they thought I was Candy. I don't know what they thought. They looked like they wanted to like take me out, like kill me or something, I don't know what, and I just said, Candy's not here, and they said, well, when's he going to be back. I just knew if I wanted to stay safe, I needed to end this conversation.

00:49:46
Speaker 5: This persona of me being Candy became my hiding place. I realized that I wasn't really known, but I was non and as this thing, this party, favor of the bar, and that when I would go home at night, similar to when I was an escort, the makeup would come off and the wig would be thrown on the floor and I was out of the corsets and the girdles, all the padding, at everything. It was me staring at myself in the mirror, and I did not like who was staring me back. I was spending a little less time in drag, but no less time in bars. Even without realizing it, I was in the full throes of alcoholism. By this time, I was unraveling. I was very lonely and alone, and drag was starting to not be fun. I started hanging out more and more at a place known as the Wall, a cruising spot in a time way before apps, where you could be picked up by a stranger. Night, a guy stopped for me and we went back to my apartment, just a couple of blocks away, and I had drunk so much alcohol that I apparently was in a blackout. And a blackout phase is when your memory goes dormant and your systems shut down. Your subconscious is acting at this point, but the part of you that's you is gone. It's like you have fallen asleep. Blackouts were coming increasingly prevalent in my life, and we used to laugh about it because my drag queen friends would tell me, girl, you should have seen yourself last night. I'm like, phil, what did I do? What did I do? I don't have any memory. Well, some guy laid you down on the pool table and threw your hoop skirt up around your head. Just it was all fun and well and good, and I thought it was so much fun to be reminded of what happened to me in blackouts. This particular night, I was with this person, and the next thing I could remember, it was twelve o'clock in the afternoon of the following day, and I woke up extremely groggy. The worst possible hangover you could ever have, and I remembered feeling this tremendous pain in my backside, and I stood up and I was surrounded in a pool of blood. And I had been raped and had no memory of it. And this person went through my apartment and stole every valuable treasure that I had, including a ring that had belonged to my grandfather. It was the most precious belonging I had, and he stole it. I don't know what he did to me, but I was in a blackout and there was no one to tell me. What fun thing did Candy do the night before? So to speak. Not long after that night, I had one of the most defining moments of my life. I was inching my way towards alcoholics anonymous, but this night I was out at the bar's candy dress, heels and a purse, and I'd take an acid or LSD as you might know it. These moments in Dragon High on the dance floor of a gay bar would spark my journey into the X gay movement. If a movie was creating this scene, it's like all of the sudden time stopped as I was on this dance floor and everything went into slow motion. Everybody was in blur, and the spotlight was on me. All of a sudden, my head lifted up towards the ceiling where the mirror ball was spinning in all the lights. And this is going to sound so cliche, but I heard this voice that said to me, give your life back to me, and I'll take you away from all of this. Give your life back to me, and I'll take you away from all this. Well, I knew exactly who that was, who was speaking to me. I felt it was God, and I said, in my mind, back to him? How how? I don't know how? And then everything returned to normal. The vision was gone. I didn't grow up in a religious family. I didn't call myself a Christian until later in life. I'd had a few brief interactions with Christianity and childhood, but it wasn't something that had stuck.

00:55:33
Speaker 1: There will be people listening to that story.

00:55:36
Speaker 5: Who oh, I know what you're going to say.

00:55:39
Speaker 11: But there will be people listening who hear that story. And here you had dropped acid that night. How would you respond to that train of thought?

00:55:53
Speaker 5: That very scene I have thought about not sharing because it could be perceived as very confusing. It could also be perceived as changing one sexuality really was the issue. All I can say is it's a real thing that happened to me. I don't know how to answer. It's been a dilemma my whole life as I've emerged in my authenticity because was that real? Was that drug induced? I'll tell you what. I had sobered up in that moment, and I was very present with this voice I was hearing that I was communicating back and forth with and I think what happened is during that moment kind of came flooding back to me being gay as a sin, being gay as a sin. That's, of course what we were told and what my experience with Christianity was, being gay as a sin. Now, even though I heard that voice in no way, shape or for him. After I said, I don't know how and the voice was gone, I was still a gay man, pursued gay life. I just kept going on. And now as I look back on it, I perhaps would interpret that as God taking me away from alcoholism. I think that life is what God was possibly referring to when he said I can take He didn't say take you away from being gay. Take it was undefined. I could take you away from all this and change your life. And my life was about to change. Not long after that, I got rid of Candy. I threw everything drag related into a dumpster. I started AA and tried to get sober for the first time. Everyone said I'd be back, that Candy would be back. But what they didn't know was that I was staring down the path of conversion therapy, soon to take my first steps. In a matter of months, I meet a couple who were determined to save me. I thought I was leaving hell behind. I didn't know I was entering another.

00:58:35
Speaker 3: It sounded like, and this is the word I used, a cult, And I said, I'm concerned for him. I don't want him to get caught in something that is going to be a bad situation for it.

00:58:51
Speaker 1: That's next time on Atonement, The John Polk Story. Atonement is a production of iHeart Podcasts and gold Hawk Productions in association with Marx Media Co. For more podcasts from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.