SPARTANBURG — McKrae Game is gay.

He was gay when he received counseling from a therapist who assured him he could overcome his same-sex attractions. He was gay when he married a woman and founded what would become one of the nation’s most expansive conversion therapy ministries.

He was gay when thousands of people just like him sought his organization’s counsel, all with the goal of erasing the part of themselves Game and his associates preached would send them to hell.

For two decades, he led Hope for Wholeness, a faith-based conversion therapy program in South Carolina’s Upstate. Conversion therapy is a discredited practice intended to suppress or eradicate a person’s LGBTQ identity through counseling or ministry.

But the group’s board of directors abruptly fired Game in November 2017. In June, Game publicly announced he was gay and severed his ties with the organization.

Now, the man once billed as a leading voice in the conversion therapy movement is trying to come to terms with the harm he inflicted while also learning to embrace a world and community he assailed for most of his adult life.

Game is one of many former conversion therapy leaders who have left the movement and come out as LGBTQ. In 2014, nine founders and leaders from some of the country’s most prominent programs and ministries wrote an open letter calling for a nationwide ban on the practice. The letter was published online by the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

While Game’s coming out and condemnation of conversion therapy is important, he needs to take ownership of the role he played in others’ pain and to be sensitive to their healing process and careful with how he chooses to interact with them, said Casey Pick, senior fellow for advocacy and government affairs at Trevor Project.

On a recent afternoon, Game was invited by a former Hope for Wholeness client to attend a counseling session. The young man reached out to him, Game said, and explained that he was trying to come to terms with the damage done, trying to untangle himself from the messaging he’d internalized through Hope for Wholeness.

Game, donning a rainbow T-shirt, sat and listened. He owed him at least that much, he thought. Read more via Post and Courier