Transcript for Gay teen describes experience in so-called gay conversion camp

The first leads in our investigation came months earlier. The sixteen year old boy who arrived in New York on a late night. Lucas Griese telling us he had just escaped from one of the camps in the south I am beyond. He was uprooted from Naples Florida which became his home after he was adopted at the age of three. Lucas was raised in what he calls a Christian home but he says he increasingly came to know he was gay and his mother's great distress. Because she wanted me to change. Intend Mora but wishing lion community which was very Christian. They're religious and almost like. A perfect. Lucas' mother would not agree to appear in Africa that told us on the phone she was only trying to help her side. See that's it was like you know about the program. The first program where Lucas was sent located outside Mobile, Alabama in the town of Pritchard. Since close it called itself restoration youth academy. But other teams and here's say it was a place of torture and abuse. Galen Wheeler one of the non game troubled teens says he remembers well how Lucas and other boys who word game were treated. They would try to. Pre show her how homosexuality was a sinners he and affecting deterioration than they would. Resort to alternative methods. As they called. Isolation. BD it's getting whipped with a belt. Lucas was thirteen years old when he says his mother left him here in the hands of the pastor. Whose brutality woody merge once she left. A year after we first met him. And lost teens sent away and punished for being gay Lucas was now seventy a young man with an edgy new look. But still struggling to get over a white he had been through. Who robbed me mind their childhood. Most we'll come back and stuff like that having that China become better. But mostly impossible. But what kept Lucas going he says was a determination to do something about the so called Christian pastors he says abused. The full story of the escapes by Lucas and other teams from gay conversion therapy. On ABC news 20/20 at abcnews.com. Friday night.

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.