Coming out after being married to a woman and having kids takes a certain bravery and strength. In this Season Finale we bring you two fascinating and new stories of men who tried to force themselves to live a straight life and eventually came to terms with who they really are.  

Kade Bartlett comes from a small, extremely religious town in north Oregon, and for years suffered from homophobia, both self-homophobia and from his community.  He tried for years to ‘pray the gay away’ for years before finally coming out of the closet. “I had somebody who was very close to me, almost like a mother, she was very religious,” he recalls. “I came to talk to her with things like ‘my marriage is on the rocks’ and she said ‘you gotta lean into God more,’ ‘you gotta pray more’.”

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“When it finally came down to it and she said it was a choice, I kinda lost it,” Kade said. “I said, ‘who in the hell in their right mind  would choose this shit?! With all the baggage and the crap and the threats, even the murders that happens, who would choose this? Why would anybody want to choose that?!’”

For Josh, who lives in Canada, the religious environment and various conversion therapies he went through (including medication to decrease his libido) caused serious trauma.

“I volunteered myself for different therapies that were focused on dealing with what I labeled at the time ‘dealing with unwanted homosexual attraction’,” Josh says. “Conversion Therapy is kind of an umbrella term for a bunch of different therapies that proport to modify your sexuality, and I started in my very early 20s, maybe when I was 20 years old, and that was also a fucked up community because the first therapist I ever saw, he actually came on to me in session, and he was the one saying that these are bad feelings. I had to put a stop to that therapist.

“And then I found an online group called Setting Captives Free, and I was engaging with a different online therapists, or so they call themselves, I highly doubt that they’re actually therapists. They would tell me basically, if you ever act on these feelings you’re on the road to becoming a pedophile. And so that’s what I was convinced would happen, I never had any attraction towards that population whatsoever, but I was terrified that that would eventually happen, so further came the need to suppress who I am.”

The Wife's Reaction

The difference between Kade’s and Josh’s stories is the reaction of their ex-wives. Even though Josh’s wife was extremely supportive and they have became friends, the scars from living life in the closet are not going away easily.

“I’m debating going into trauma therapy,” he says, “because I felt immense shame over who I was, that really defined a large part of my relationship with my ex-spouse, because every decision that had major consequence in our lives, from my perspective, I was always going to relent because who I was, was a bad person and who I was, was illegitimate.”

Not only are these men’s stories dramatic and in...