But by the end of 2005, Michael told me, everything about his life was starting to feel wrong — his unconventional relationship, his gay friendships, even his magazine devoted to lifting up gay youth. “For a year I struggled to think of every other reason except for the obvious one,” he said. “Then it just came up, clear as day. The problem was my sexual identity. But that was really scary. I thought to myself, Seriously? That’s ridiculous. I’m a homosexual. I struggled trying to understand what was happening to me. I’d always been told that if you had doubts about the rightness of your homosexuality, which I had been having for a while but was trying to silence, that it was because you just hadn’t worked through all your internalized homophobia. But that didn’t feel true now.”

Sitting in his Y.G.A. office toward the end of that year, Michael wrote three words on his computer screen: I am straight. They felt true, so he typed a few more: Homosexuality = Death. I choose Life.

Then he stood up and left the building.

Michael soon moved out of the Halifax house he shared with his boyfriends and sequestered himself in an apartment across town. He said he then briefly joined the Mormon Church, heartened by promises from several Mormon men he befriended that they would help him “find a wife.” (Michael left the church a short time later after deciding that Mormons “didn’t agree with the Bible.”)

Alone and needing a job, Michael made a counterintuitive choice for a newly minted ex-gay: He took an editing job in San Francisco. His sister lived there, and he hoped to find and immerse himself in a Christian church community. But soon after arriving, Michael decided to visit the Castro — San Francisco’s gay neighborhood, where XY had been headquartered — to see “what I would feel.” Would he experience desire? Revulsion? Anger? “I ended up not feeling any of those things,” Michael told me, “but I did feel the humanity of the people in the Castro. I started to doubt what I’d written in those articles. I thought, Well, maybe none of this is true. Maybe I’m wrong.”

Unsure of what to do, a tearful Michael called Ben. “He said that he was sorry, and that he wanted to take it all back,” Ben recalls. “I said, ‘O.K., I’ll help you draft a statement.’ He said he would call me back the next day, but I never heard from him.”

Michael chalked up that call to a moment of weakness. “I wasn’t reading my Bible, and I was in a very lonely place, but it’s not like my same-sex attractions had returned,” he explained on the morning of my second day in Wyoming, as we sat in a padded wooden pew in a small church near the Bible School. There were about two dozen of his fellow Bible-school students in attendance, and before and after the service I watched Michael’s friendly, easygoing rapport with them.

As we drove back to his apartment, Michael told me that his desire for men had lessened in frequency and intensity almost immediately after writing the words “I Am Straight” on his computer screen at Y.G.A. When he did feel an erotic pull toward another man, he said he tried to “sit with it and unpack it,” a technique he learned during a stint at a Buddhist retreat, where he went after leaving San Francisco. (Michael, who meditated regularly for a couple of years, said he was asked to leave the community for “talking too much about the Bible.”) “I observed it instead of just acting on it, and I began to see it as an aspect of my own brokenness, not as my identity,” he said. “The more I did that, the less I felt the desire,” he went on, adding that he has never undergone reparative therapy or attended an ex-gay ministry.