In May 2005 a 16 year old’s MySpace entry got world wide attention.

Zach’s friends knew he came from a conservative evangelical home, they knew he was gay. He knew he was gay, and what would happen when he told his parents. He  wrote about their response on his blog.

Somewhat recently, “I told my parents I was gay. This didn’t go over very well. They tell me that there is something psychologically wrong with me, and they ‘raised me wrong.’

This blog entry began to get the attention of people around the world, especially as events in Zach’s life unfolded quite quickly.

Today, my mother, father and I had a very long ‘talk’ in my room, where they let me know I am to apply for a fundamentalist Christian program for gays.”
It’s like boot camp. If I do come out straight, I’ll be so mentally unstable and depressed it won’t matter.

Just before Zach’s parents shipped him off to the Tennessee reparative therapy program called “Love in Action” (Refuge was the teen program) he posted the group rules on his blog.  People were shocked.(These rules still chill me to my core 3 years after Zach spoke up. I cannot believe this is accepted as Christian)
He was shipped off to “Refuge” for weeks, oblivious at the time to the world wide outcry. All he saw were protesters at the gates of the Love In Action headquarters. He didn’t know how many people had reacted to his situation, nor that the state of Tennessee launched an investigation (later dropped) or that the pressure put on Love in Action  led them to shut down the teen program.*

After being isolated in the Refuge program he made one more entry on his blog when he got out. The dark side of  Christianity was evident.

Currently I feel annoyed towards a lot of things. Love In Action has been misrepresented and what I have posted in my blogs has been taken out of perspective and context. I don’t take back the things I’ve said, nor am I going to pretend like it never happened. It did. I refuse to deal with people who are only focused on their one-sided (biased) agendas. It isn’t fair to anyone. I’m very frustrated with the things going on in my life now, but everyone has their issues. Homosexuality is still a factor in my life— it’s not who I am, it never has been. Those of you who really know me, know that homosexuality was always there but it didn’t run my life, and it will not now.

…But, I’m still alive. I don’t believe I’ve been brainwashed. It’s almost insulting, thinking about it, to be brainwashed. I think that I’m going to be ok. I could write forever on how content I felt when I signed on, because of all of the messages, comments, etc.

Zach is fine, now in college, not interested in being an advocate or activist.  He is comfortable with his sexuality. He appears in an upcoming documentary “This is what Love In Action Looks Like”.  Zach just wants to get on with his education and his life.
He appears in the trailer for the documentary at the 7 minute mark, the documentary is being released later this summer. Bruce Garrett was there when Zach’s interview was filmed:

What you have to understand about that first blog post of his after he got out of LIA, is that he’d been very effectively isolated from what was going on outside LIA’s walls. All he knew of the protests was what he saw on the drive in and out of LIA, and what he was told. When all you have is the LIA point of view for eight long weeks…and if you’ve ever read that rule book Zach posted you get an idea of how thorough the control is…it’s going to be hard, even if you’ve got a smart mind and can think for yourself, not to sound a bit like LIA when you first walk out the door. And the immensity of the response to his plea for help really seems to have stunned him. The poor kid didn’t want to be the center of an international media storm…he just wanted to live his life.

Picture a teenager being tossed into a situation where their deepest feelings, their most hidden emotions are being dragged out of them and put on a table for everyone to see and criticize…right at the time in their lives when they’re just starting to cope with their own budding sexuality. Picture being locked into that for almost an entire summer. Then suddenly you’re out, and now it seems like the whole entire world wants to pry into your head and heart too. That’s kinda what happened to him.

It’s heartening, and says a lot about him, that he managed the aftermath as well as he did. He’s a good kid, with a good heart, and he’s in college now and doing well. But I don’t think he’ll ever be as public about what happened to him as Lance Carroll became. I’m glad he’s had a chance to get some of this off his chest, and put his own words out there. But I don’t think you’ll be seeing him making any big public pronouncements. The sense I have always had from him is he never wanted to be in the spotlight. That may seem a bit surprising considering what he put on his MySpace blog, until you realize that when he posted his plea for help he only thought he was calling to his friends on MySpace. People even now have trouble realizing that anything you post online, even if it’s just in the comments of a blog post like this one, can usually be seen by the whole internet.

While Love in Action shut down it’s teen program, the organization is still active, still unaccountable,  still draconian. Reparative therapy remains a thriving business in fundamentalist circles in the US.  Many more Love in Action clients have come forward with their stories since Zach shone a spotlight in 2005.

*Refuge was shut down in 2007 and has been replaced with a four day Family Freedom Intensive course at $600.00/US per person, and a comprehensive release of liability statement.