"[Busineses should] stand against any kind of program that wants to change who an LGBTQ person is."

By the time a group of former ex-gay leaders had prepared a statement condemning Google for refusing to pull a conversion therapy app, it was already too late.

On Thursday evening, March 28, the Former Ex-Gay Leaders Alliance (FELA) had prepared a statement taking the tech company to task for allowing users to download an app that refers to gays as “sexually broken” and trans people as “gender confused.” Created by Living Hope Ministries, the app claims homosexuality results from “deep-seated wounds” which can be healed after individuals abandon their “false identities.”

In the press release, former conversion therapists took particular issue with a claim on Living Hope’s website that LGBTQ people fall “short of God’s best for humanity.”

“This is little more than a 21st-century version of the outdated idea of ‘pray

away the gay,’” claim the two dozen former ex-gay leaders who make up FELA’s membership. “The members of FELA know first-hand the terrible emotional and spiritual damage that trying to change sexual orientation or gender identity can cause, especially for LGBTQ youth.”

While Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft removed the app, Google declined to take action for two months. The company claimed Living Hope had not violated its terms of service.

Silas Stein/picture alliance via Getty

Google finally announced it was pulling the app from circulation after HRC reported its intention to demote the company on its Corporate Equality Index (CEI), which rates corporations on their LGBTQ policies. Google had previously scored a perfect 100.

In a statement, Google claimed it had made its decision “after consulting with outside advocacy groups, reviewing our policies, and making sure we had a thorough understanding of the app and its relation to conversion therapy.”

Although FELA’s letter strongly condemning Google was left in the “Drafts” folder in Gmail on Thursday night, that doesn’t mean bygones will be bygones. Bill Prickett, a former conversion therapist who co-founded the organization in 2014, is still unsure why Google “needed that much time and that much pressure.”

“It’s very distressing that some kid could download this without any kind of supervision,” he tells NewNowNext. “This was available on an app by an organization that had a very strong pro-LGBTQ stance. The inconsistency bothered me.”

The Living Hope app was downloaded over 1,000 times, according to reports.

But while Google has removed the Living Hope app, one of the most glaring contradictions of the company’s history of LGBTQ advocacy is it has never formally condemned conversion therapy. While Google has opposed adoption laws discriminating against same-sex parents and anti-trans bathroom bills, it has refrained from weighing in on conversion therapy bans in states like New York and Colorado.

Al Drago/CQ Roll Call

This isn’t just true of Google. Hundreds of major corporations—like Amazon and Hewlett Packard—have signed onto letters urging Congress to support the Equality Act and denouncing Trump’s trans military ban, but public statements against “gay cure” treatments are few and far between.

Michael Bussee, a fellow member of FELA, believes the silence on “gay cure” treatments “may be just a lack of awareness.”

“Many people don’t realize that there are still organizations like this that are trying to keep the ex-gay movement alive,” he tells NewNowNext. “I sometimes talk to people, and they say, ‘I heard they used to have those ‘pray-away-the-gay’ programs, but those are all gone now, right?’ It’s under the radar, but it’s still happening.”

According to UCLA’s The Williams Institute, more than 600,000 people in the U.S. are survivors of conversion therapy. The practice remains legal in 35 states.

Bussee and Prickett have seen the harms of conversion therapy up close. Before becoming one of the co-founders of Exodus International, Bussee operated a small ex-gay ministry right across from Disneyland in Anaheim. Members would meet every week in an old theater that was converted into a church. The sign on the front still read “Melodyland” because church leaders didn’t have the money to change it.

Bussee describes the atmosphere of the Ex-Gay Intervention Team—or EXIT—as “like an AA meeting for gay people.” He left the organization around 1979, when he realized no one was changing.

“The harder they tried to suppress [their orientation], the stronger the feelings got,” he claims. “People were getting more and more and more depressed, discouraged, and guilt-ridden. They’d go and hook up with somebody on an anonymous basis and then feel terribly guilty about it. The group became more of a weekly confessional.”

Bussee hit his breaking point when a client “repeatedly slashed his genitals with a razor blade and poured Drano on the wounds” following an anonymous hookup.

Prickett, who formerly served as the pastor of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, wouldn’t reach the end of his rope for another decade. When a member of the group was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in the late 1980s, his mother wouldn’t allow Prickett to minister to the man on his deathbed. He wasn’t even allowed inside the home.

“He brought this on himself,” the man’s mother allegedly told him. “This is God’s judgment, and it’s too late for you to come pray for him.”

“It broke my heart,” Prickett says, “and with it, everything imploded.”

VICTORY: TWO is delighted that Google finally deleted a dangerous app that targeted LGBTQ youth with toxic messages of guilt and shamehttps://t.co/CKxYfS2Pgs pic.twitter.com/86lpBA0cV7 — Wayne Besen (@WayneBesen) March 29, 2019

Since leaving the ex-gay movement, Bussee and Prickett have devoted their lives to ending conversion therapy, which continues to persist decades later. Last week, Southern Poverty Law Center filed a motion for criminal contempt proceedings against Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH), a New Jersey clinic which has continued to operate in the face of a 2015 court ruling shutting it down.

Although conversion therapy is a loosely defined set of techniques, those practiced at JONAH—now known as Jewish Institute for Global Awareness (JIFGA)—are among the most extreme. Clients say they were forced to strip naked and shower together; others beat up pillow effigies of their parents as punishment for making them gay.

FELA—which was formed four years ago in SPLC’s offices—believes corporations have a role to play in shutting these centers down for good. When North Carolina passed its anti-trans bathroom bill HB 2 in 2016, the state faced a potential billion-dollar boycott. Over 200 companies either spoke out against the law or threatened to take their business elsewhere if it remained on the books. Google was one of them.

HB 2 was repealed and replaced with a compromise bill a year later. The controversy discouraged states like Texas and South Dakota from passing their own anti-trans bills in fear of inciting similar blowback.

Prickett says companies like Google face a moment of choice, just as he did 30 years ago. After he quit the ministry, Prickett started attending a gay and lesbian Christian bible study group in Southern California. One night people began sharing their stories of surviving conversion therapy, and he listened in horror at their experiences.

“I sat there and I began to cry,” he says, choking up as those memories flood back. “I thought, ‘I was part of that.’ I was just horrified and ashamed, and I decided I can’t keep silent. I had to speak out.”

Prickett hopes companies who want to support the LGBTQ community make the same decision.

“The very essence of conversion therapy is saying, ‘You are not the person you’re supposed to be, you are not a person of worth,’” he claims. “Businesses are going to have to decide not just that they are LGBTQ allies, but they also stand against any kind of program that wants to try to change who an LGBTQ person is.”