There is a loose network among my LGBTQ+ friends, one that pops up when a prominent figure whose well-known stance against our community suddenly dies. Our group chats cover a wide range of reactions, from shock to relief to joy. We share memes, make jokes, reveal trauma; we make a space for ourselves, in other words, where we can dishonor the dead who once injured us without censure. The last big figure to blow up my notifications was Joseph Nicolosi, one of the clinical psychologists responsible for the creation of conversion therapy, a treatment I and many others were forced to undergo at a young age. Now it’s Billy Graham, a much-lauded evangelist whose reputation as our country’s last great moderate has eclipsed his history of homophobia.

Recently, when I made this private conversation public, many people outside the LGBTQ+ community wanted proof of Graham’s bigotry. Nicolosi was an easy villain, but Graham? Weren’t my purity politics getting in the way of recognizing this complicated man’s good deeds, which, after all, extend all the way back to the beginning of the civil rights movement?

As someone who frequently lectures on the power of empathy and honest dialogue, the accusation offended me. Of course I know Graham was complicated, like all human beings are. I know that, when compared to someone like Jerry Falwell or even his fundamentalist son Franklin Graham, Graham looks positively progressive. Yet I also know that he was responsible for an incalculable amount of psychic and physical damage to the LGBTQ+ community, and that his explicit endorsement of conversion therapy ruined not only my childhood but the lives of hundreds of thousands of others. A few good deeds does not cancel out this harm. One 2005 interview with the New York Times stating his desire to steer clear of “hot-button issues” such as homosexuality and abortion does not reverse the statements he’s made in the past against our community.

Why is it that when I bring up the harm some celebrated public figure has caused me, I’m told I’m not recognizing that person’s full humanity, that I’m not respecting the dead? Why does that sound a lot like being told to shut up? There’s a reason I don’t usually take these conversations out of private group chats. Yet as someone who has felt Graham’s legacy in nearly every aspect of my life, this is one instance I feel compelled to speak out against the veneration of this man.

I point to to his 1974 letter to a young lesbian in an advice column he once maintained, in which he blames modern society for “sexual perversions” and advocates for conversion therapy. Others who were guilty of the sin of homosexuality were “converted — were regenerated by faith in Christ,” he writes her. “Such restoration is possible for you.” Or to the time in 1993 that he told an audience of over 44,000 people that he thought AIDS was a “judgment from God,” which he later retracted, or to his 2012 endorsement of a North Carolina anti-marriage equality constitutional amendment (though some suspected that, given his advanced age, his son Franklin Graham was primarily responsible for this stance). But most significantly, like many LGBTQ+ individuals who grew up in conservative households, I point to my own backyard.

In 2003, when my Baptist parents were searching for a cure for my homosexuality, they had only a few sources they trusted to guide them in their decision-making process. One was the Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, which was heavily affiliated with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association; the other was Graham himself, who was by far the most trusted leader in the evangelical Christian community at the time. Both sources pointed to a cure for homosexuality. On the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association website, dating as far back as January 2001 and still today, the question of homosexuality is addressed multiple times, and a cure is offered: “God not only wants to protect you from homosexual behavior, but He wants to begin to meet the deep needs at the root of your same-sex desires,” it once said. The site went on to suggest contacting Exodus International, the largest conversion therapy umbrella group at the time, or Homosexuals Anonymous. In its current version, the site still recommends reading a book on the gay cure.