Gay priest says conversion therapy after move to UK felt ‘oppressive’

Augustine Tanner-Ihm was encouraged to attend weekly meetings for people ‘struggling with their sexuality’ by a church in Liverpool a decade ago.

Augustine Tanner-Ihm has said conversion therapy should be banned (Augustine Tanner-Ihm/PA)

A gay priest said his experience of conversion therapy felt “oppressive” after he was encouraged to attend weekly meetings for people “struggling with their sexuality” by a church in Liverpool a decade ago.

Augustine Tanner-Ihm, 33, moved to the UK from Chicago in 2013 and became an intern for a Liverpool church where conversion therapy made him feel “that a part of [him] was always going to be wrong and bad”.

Mr Tanner-Ihm told the PA news agency that he now works as a priest for three churches in Manchester where he “can just be myself” and said “as a survivor and a minister, I think it’s best that [conversion therapy is] banned for all people in the UK”.

Conversion therapy is the practice of attempting to convert a non-heterosexual person to heterosexuality using methods like psychoanalysis and religious counselling, and has been condemned by LGBT+ charities like Stonewall.

A Government survey published in 2017 found 7% of UK LGBT people had been offered the therapy.

The Government has committed to banning conversion therapy but it has not yet banned the practice.

Mr Tanner-Ihm started conversion therapy when he joined a Liverpool church at 23 and told members that he was “struggling with [his] sexuality” in order to receive “help”.

He said: “They were like, ‘oh, that’s fine. We have a group for people that struggle with their sexuality’, and when I got there, I realised it was conversion therapy.”

He met with 10 to 15 other people, between “university age to about 60”, who were also “struggling with their sexuality” once a week for around seven or eight months.

He said: “They met at someone’s house and they met once a week with a range of people – people who were single, people who got married to people of the opposite sex – and very much the goal was for you to be able to marry the opposite sex.”

He described the meetings as “kind of like a support group,” adding: “People talked about different ways of dealing with things. People talked about their own struggles and talked about total deliverance that God can give. [There was] a lot of prayer. Quite intense prayer.

“They put it in my schedule, that I was going to go, but then after a while, I realised it was expected for me to go.”

Mr Tanner-Ihm described the highly emotional conversion therapy meetings as “oppressive” and said he was particularly vulnerable as he was “an intern from another country and [his] visa was in their control”.

After repeatedly questioning some of the points made during the conversion therapy sessions, Mr Tanner-Ihm said he was perceived as a “troublemaker”.

He said: “I was always the person to question everything … and I don’t think they wanted someone to do that.”

He returned to the US when his visa expired and lived there for over a year, before moving back to the UK.

Mr Tanner-Ihm said he wrestled with his sexuality “every single day” as he grew up in poverty in a predominantly black community in Chicago with “quite religious” Jehovah’s Witness parents.

He was around 14 when he first realised that he might not be straight, which coincided with him discovering Christianity at a Christian summer camp.

Soon after becoming a Christian, he told a man who was mentoring him that he was gay and was given a book “about how people can change from being homosexual to heterosexual” which he “sunk into” in an effort to change his sexuality.

He said: “I was 14 and I think I was really vulnerable, really fragile, and I just wanted help because I saw, through my black culture, through the religion that I came from and the religion I went into, and wider society, that this was bad.”

After undertaking a year-long stint as an intern in Liverpool, he later returned to the UK in 2015 and lived in several parishes before eventually settling in Manchester, where he is now a priest for three churches.

He said his attitude towards his sexuality has changed “massively”, adding as he undertakes his duties as a priest, “I can just be myself. It’s really quite lovely”.

Although Mr Tanner-Ihm’s feelings about his sexuality have transformed and societal attitudes towards homosexuality have “drastically changed”, the minister still feels the effects of conversion therapy.

He said: “It has caused a lot of pain and suffering, and I continue to deal with the ramifications of conversion therapy.”