What Happens When You Google “Gay Child”
Tech platforms have purged apps that promote discredited gay conversion therapy, but organic search results can still steer users to anti-LGBTQ groups
Growing up in Athens, Georgia, Jon Bozeman knew he was gay from a young age, but also knew his community would never support him. So after leaving home for college, he tried to get ahead of the problem by seeking “counseling” at Exodus International. Exodus, founded in 1973 — the same year the American Psychological Association stopped classifying homosexuality as a pathology — described itself as a “worldwide Christian organization” that worked to restore “sexual wholeness to men and women who desire to overcome their homosexuality.”
Bozeman’s counselor told him that he should do things like snap a rubber band against his skin when he thought about men in a sexual way, and also told him that his parents were to blame for his “same-sex attraction.” Bozeman finally left Exodus in 2004, after meeting another young man in conversion therapy and starting a relationship with him. Exodus itself shut down in 2013, after many of its own leaders had come out as LGBTQ.
Professional medical organizations have been denouncing conversion therapy since 1993, and a 2018 study showed that it…
