At 17 years old, Sami Tacher remembers standing atop a parking garage outside Seattle and staring down at the pavement.

They had been trying for five years to suppress their attraction to men. At 15, Tacher had found Strength in Weakness, a Christian ministry that purported to teach people experiencing “same-sex attraction” how to resist those desires. To Tacher, who had grown up believing that being gay would destroy their relationship with God and devastate their family, SIW felt like an answer.

Two years later, Tacher says, they could no longer imagine how they were supposed to live the rest of their life.

“I just stood up there and waited,” Tacher told Uncloseted Media. “I went there several times.” What stopped them, they say, was thinking about the burden their death would place on their family.

“So I’ll just sacrifice everything and stay in the program,” they remember deciding.

They would remain in SIW for years as a teenager and young adult, becoming friends with the organization’s founder, Guy Hammond, and helping promote the very teachings Tacher now believes were destroying them.

“I just didn’t see my way out,” Tacher says. “I was miserable and shrinking inside [and] constantly denying myself … but I was holding on. And in the eyes of Strength in Weakness, I was succeeding.”

SIW is a ministry closely embedded within the International Churches of Christ (ICOC), according to former ICOC leadership, a global network of congregations that some former members describe as a cult because of its rigid hierarchy and control over members’ lives. SIW’s founder, a 63-year-old self-described “homosexually attracted Christian” man named Guy Hammond, has been recounted within the ICOC as “the Jesus of gay people.” He teaches that people who experience so-called same-sex attraction should remain celibate or pursue heterosexual relationships while resisting desires the church considers sinful.

In a statement emailed to Uncloseted Media, the ICOC says, “We are not, and never have been, a cult. Members join and leave our fellowship at will and we make no attempt to prevent people from leaving or finding other places to worship.”

Since its founding in 2006, SIW says it has worked with thousands of people across 58 countries, and Hammond says he has taught more than 100,000 people worldwide. While the ministry insists it does not practice conversion therapy, interviews with 24 former participants and their loved ones reveal a global program built around suppressing LGBTQ identity and behavior. Former participants—who entered the program in their teens and early 20s—described years of shame, isolation, depression and suicidal ideation.

“Any effort to suppress someone’s gender or sexuality falls under the umbrella of conversion therapy,” says Lucas Wilson, a researcher who studies conversion practices within white Christian nationalist movements. “Pushing people to remain celibate or pushing people into mixed-orientation marriages are conversion practices.”

The Conversion Therapy Loophole

While Hammond doesn’t describe his practice as conversion therapy, he has said that he is extracting people from the “gay world.”

“If you want to convert somebody from the gay world, you’re going to do that not by bashing and putting down homosexuality,” Hammond said in a service at the Johannesburg Church of Christ in South Africa. “You have to do it by lifting up Christ.”

Still, SIW is firm that it is not a conversion therapy practice. In its terms of use, all members must agree to the following:

“I understand that Strength in Weakness Ministries … does not support conversion therapy and does not use conversion therapy in any manner. It is not the goal … to have any person change or alter their sexual attraction or identity.”

In an emailed statement to Uncloseted Media, Hammond says: “We strongly condemn conversion therapy. Strength in Weakness does not practice, promote, or endorse it. Neither my staff nor I have ever promised or taught that someone’s same-gender attractions would change or disappear. I am myself a same-sex attracted Christian man. I neither seek nor feel any need to change my sexual orientation. I do not believe a person’s worth before God is determined by their sexual orientation or the attractions they experience.”

Wilson says that when an organization uses this denial tactic, it relies on “mental and rhetorical gymnastics” to create “a more palatable public-facing image.”

“It’s a matter of optics,” he says. “These are folks who know that the general population, even those who are in the Christian bubbles, know or have heard of conversion therapy and know that it has been unilaterally condemned within scientific and professional communities. … They don’t want to be labeled as a conversion therapy organization because … people will discredit them, even those within controlled Christian spaces.”

Meigan Whitcomb, a 26-year-old former ICOC member from Los Angeles, says Hammond’s teachings shaped how she understood her attraction to women long before she identified as queer. Whitcomb, who now identifies as pansexual, first heard Hammond speak when she was around 13. She’d watch him speak at church events, national conferences and in videos played by the church.

“Nobody saw it as conversion therapy,” she says. “Because they’re not trying to change them from being gay. It’s OK that they’re gay. They just can’t act on it. And that’s the little loophole.”

In practice, Whitcomb says, people labeled as same-sex attracted, or “SSA,” were expected to either marry someone of the opposite sex or remain single. “It felt like they would just walk around with a scarlet letter on their chest,” she says.

In SIW’s programming, members read Hammond’s books, attend conferences and gender-separated support groups, complete worksheets and participate in forums through the website. If deemed necessary, they will receive individual counsel from Hammond.

One SIW counseling article, for example, encourages men to “confidently pursue” their “heterosexual goals.” In another SIW guide called “HELP! My Roommate is Gay!” Hammond instructs roommates of gay congregants to question them about when they were last “involved in homosexuality,” identify people in the home who might cause them to “struggle,” avoid walking around “naked or half dressed,” and involve church leadership if the person is “just not repenting.”

“I believe every person is created in the image of God and deserves dignity, kindness, and respect, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity,” Hammond wrote in his email to Uncloseted Media. “Many LGBTQ+ people do not share our ministry’s biblical convictions regarding sexuality, and we respect their freedom to live according to their own beliefs.”

A former participant of SIW sent Uncloseted a May 2023 recorded conversation with a person who contacted SIW seeking information about the ministry in which an SIW volunteer staff member describes how its support groups monitor members’ sexual behavior, relationships and “purity,” including masturbation, pornography, hookups and emotional attachments to other men.

During the same conversation, the volunteer describes SIW helping a man who had decided to dissolve his marriage to another man and return to the church. “We supported him in that,” the volunteer says. “We walked through it with him, Bibled with him, navigated with him through this [dissolution] of his marriage.”

“It has this appearance of liberation,” says Wilson. “But over time, people realize that this is not a free space. There are a lot of conditions on these people’s love for them. They have to follow the program … and then you realize that it’s conversion therapy under a different name.”

Behind SIW’s Denial

While SIW rejects the conversion therapy label, Tacher says the effects of SIW’s programming were damaging to their mental health.

“It developed into a deep anxiety for me,” they say. “My whole universe was making sure same-sex attraction doesn’t happen. I will ruin my life and my family’s lives and there’s no coming back.”

Behind those teachings is a network of influences that stretches well beyond SIW. Hammond has longstanding ties to some of the movement’s most prominent practitioners and organizations.

He wrote a glowing review for a book by Michael Rosebush, who practiced conversion therapy over the phone and was previously affiliated with Focus on the Family, a prominent anti-gay group. Hammond wrote that he was Rosebush’s “former client” and that the book was full of “sensible guidance” that he received while “under his care.” Hammond also wrote in a blog post, “I acknowledge that I am not a Reparative Therapist, but that does not mean I do not have tremendous respect of that theory and therapy.”

In 2010, Rosebush was listed on SIW’s website as a member of its counseling staff.

Additionally, SIW’s former associate director, pastor Kris Boyer, has been involved with Outpost Ministries. In an article from SIW obtained from a survivor, Boyer described Outpost as a “non-denominational ex-gay ministry.” And the ministry was among the original members of Exodus International, the former umbrella organization of the ex-gay movement, which was shut down in 2013 after its leader issued a public apology to the LGBTQ community “for the pain and hurt many of [them] have experienced” as a result of the ministry’s conversion efforts.

In 2010, Boyer addressed the Presbyterian Church General Assembly in opposition to the ordination of noncelibate gay clergy, presenting his own life as evidence of the “possibility of change.”

Boyer did not respond to a request for comment.

The Adolescents Hammond Called Peers

Beyond the relations to past conversion therapy organizations, Hammond’s teachings were especially personal for some of the young men who came under his influence.

“How do you repent of attraction? I don’t know,” Hammond says of his sexuality. “But I can repent of what I do with my attractions in my mind and with my body.”

Hammond, who grew up in Windsor, Canada, had a rough childhood: His parents’ relationship was tumultuous; his father, a pastor, had multiple suicide attempts; and he was molested by an older man—all of which he presents as context for him developing “same-sex attraction.”

“Being attracted to people of the same gender was not something I woke up one day and decided,” he says in “Finding Guy,” a documentary about his life. “I remember lying in bed at night, looking up at the ceiling, considering how little the world seemed to think of me.”

In an article on the SIW website, Hammond writes that his male clients experiencing same-sex attraction begin by completing “an extremely thorough questionnaire about their sexuality” that asks them to reflect on their development between ages 11 and 17, including whether they had less body hair, smaller muscles or a “smaller penis size” than other boys their age. Hammond then claims that “an astounding 69% of the SSA male clients responded ‘yes’!”

According to Doug Haldeman, a psychotherapist and clinical psychologist who has worked with hundreds of conversion therapy survivors, these disclosures can be “traumatizing” for youth.

“For adolescents, it can just be humiliating, especially in the context of some kind of a homophobic treatment program that they don’t feel like they’ve got any choice to participate in,” Haldeman told Uncloseted Media.

Daniel Aste, a 33-year-old philanthropic adviser, says he felt uncomfortable with the details he was pressured to reveal to Hammond when he was in the program in his early 20s.

While studying in Geneva, Switzerland, Aste helped the local ICOC congregation build its campus ministry. At the time, he was struggling with his gay identity. So he began weekly Skype meetings with Hammond.

“It was pretty similar to any sort of talk therapy, except I don’t know if the guy has credentials to do that,” Aste says. “[Hammond] would also share about his dark past. … He really pushed me to be very explicit in the details of my purity mess-ups.”

Aste felt pressure to describe his lust, attractions and any actions he took in great detail, like the types of acts he did or the exact thoughts or fantasies he was having. “I always had this lingering question of, is it a normal Christian confession or is there some sort of gratification that [Hammond] is getting from me going into such detail? … I always had a kind of icky feeling.”

Aste says Hammond taught him to build his life around avoiding sexual sin. Hammond would warn him against sharing a hotel room with another man at church conferences, even though members commonly did this to save money.

It left him feeling isolated, deeply ashamed, self-loathing and constantly self-surveilling.

“I became almost frantic in searching for the tool that would help me suppress my homosexuality.”

Tacher, now 31, had a similar experience. They were raised in a prominent ICOC family near Seattle and began recognizing their attraction to men at 12. After a church camp counselor introduced them to SIW, Tacher spent nearly seven years trying to suppress their sexuality. They paid roughly $35 on Jan. 17, 2011, as an annual fee to access SIW’s website, and began completing their daily Bible exercises.

“I would stay on the [SIW] chat forum for hours and hours each night,” Tacher says. “I was waiting for a friend, someone who understood and felt the way I did, and believed what I did. But no one came.”

At 15 years old, Tacher caught Hammond’s attention, they say, especially because they were the son of ICOC elders—a high position in the church hierarchy—and had never “kissed a boy.” It wasn’t long before Hammond recruited Tacher to make content tailored for SIW’s younger audiences.

“I would talk about my struggles, confess sin and talk about the relationships I was building with other men in the church,” says Tacher, adding that they spoke roughly monthly for an hour or more about their sexuality, relationships with other men, “purity” and what boundaries they should set in their life.

Looking back, Tacher describes their relationship with Hammond as “inappropriate.”

“I don’t think adults you don’t know well should be having these conversations with you about your sexuality,” Tacher says. “He tried to treat it like some kind of peer-to-peer relationship with a 17-year-old.”

Tacher says some of the details that Hammond shared during their talks were from his own youth.

As a young adult in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Hammond says he lived a “double life” where he’d attend church and try to appear happy while secretly returning to his boyfriend and seeking sex with men he met in gym locker rooms, parked cars and other cruising spots. Hammond recalls spending “hundreds of hours” searching for “love … connection and … significance,” while feeling that a “gaping hole” inside him could not be filled. 

But in 1986, Hammond says he was convinced by a minister in Toronto to confess his so-called sins and repent. He says the minister told him, “If you refuse to be transparent with your life and you are not willing to repent of whatever sinful activity [that] you are involved in, then there is nothing I can do to help you.” From that day on, Hammond says he never again engaged sexually with men. He’d go on to marry a woman who became deeply involved with the ministry before she passed away in 2018.

“His advice was always to run away,” Tacher says. “Stay as far away from attractive people as you possibly can.”

Tacher says that Hammond told them that even thinking another man was attractive was sinful—and, like every other sin, equivalent to driving another nail through Jesus’ hands.

When the Only Options Are Sin or Death

While Tacher remembers speaking to participants who were as young as 12 years old, Hammond describes the decision to participate in SIW as one made freely by the individual.

In his emailed statement to Uncloseted Media, Hammond emphasizes that SIW serves only adults who voluntarily seek its support. “Strength in Weakness exists solely for adults who, with that same freedom of choice, voluntarily seek support in living according to their Christian convictions surrounding their sexuality and faith.”

“You’re free to live however you want, but you are not free to choose your own consequences,” Hammond says in one sermon. “The cost of following Jesus is high, but the cost of not following Jesus—that’s higher.”

But Haldeman says, “[In] the many religious communities and homophobic communities that conversion therapy survivors come from—there is no such thing as no coercion. … Almost all of the survivors I ever dealt with really felt like they didn’t have much of a choice. They could either give up everything that they had ever known, or they could give up themselves.”

Whitcomb says that, as a teenager, rejecting Hammond’s framework did not feel like an option. “Acceptance in the church was everything,” she says. Being labeled distant, weak or outside the group could mean losing the attention and relationships she had grown up depending on.

“I wanted to kill myself,” Tacher says. They recall one time sitting in their car in the parking lot holding a shattered glass bottle to their wrist, trembling. “It was only a primal urge keeping me alive. Nothing else mattered. … I was filled with such disgust and shame.”

A majority of the survivors interviewed by Uncloseted Media say they experienced suicidal thoughts either while participating in SIW or while trying to process the effects of the program. And not everyone lived long enough to heal.

Less than two years after Dezi Redler, a nonbinary 31-year-old, left SIW, their partner Nathan Udall woke up to a gunshot.

“I ran downstairs, I didn’t see them anywhere, and then I found them in the bathroom,” Udall told Uncloseted Media. “I called 911 and tried to do CPR on them, but it was too late.”

Dezi was dealing with severe mental health challenges after being in SIW for six years as a “poster child” for detransition, according to former members of Hammond’s program.

Upon joining the Orlando Church of Christ in 2009, Dezi believed they needed to detransition to follow the Bible. They cut their “beautiful red hair” and resumed presenting as a man, according to their mother, Leslie Redler. The Orlando Church of Christ did not respond to a request for comment.

Not long after, Hammond visited the church and met Dezi. In 2014, according to Leslie, he approached them about joining SIW’s volunteer staff and asked if they’d publicly share their detransition story.

“We were extremely worried,” Leslie, who was not religious herself and didn’t raise Dezi in the church, told Uncloseted Media. “They had worked so hard to become Dezi. … I was very worried that severe depression would arise. … I knew how they struggled [as a teenager before transitioning] and was very much concerned that if they abandoned their self-beliefs, things were not going to go well.”

Dezi became a prominent speaker in SIW’s transgender ministry—even while publicly acknowledging that their transgender feelings had not disappeared, they wrote in an article for Douglas Jacoby, a bible teaching website, that “it is with daily self-denial that I choose to live as God intended: in a male gender role and not romantically involved with other men.” Former SIW members remember Redler speaking about how painful it was to live in a detransitioned body while asserting that closeness to God made that pain worthwhile.

But after six years of practicing self-denial through SIW, Dezi’s depression worsened and severe OCD symptoms began surfacing, to the point where they wore gloves wherever they went. According to Leslie, they sought professional help from a psychologist who ultimately identified that living as a man—and continually denying their gender identity—was a major contributing factor to the deterioration of Dezi’s mental health.

Leslie says Dezi searched for other explanations, including a consult with a neurologist, but “there were no answers other than stop denying yourself.”

According to Udall, Dezi left the ministry in 2020 when they realized that “this is even worse [than before]. This is not what I want.”

After leaving SIW, Dezi began living openly as nonbinary. During the pandemic, Leslie says they spent hours playing Yahtzee over Zoom with her and their dad, went hiking in the California mountains, and shared years of scuba-diving trips with her. Leslie remembers Dezi as her “best dive buddy.”

“Everyone loved [Dezi]. … They were loving and kind and sweet and giving,” Udall, who was living with Dezi when they died, told Uncloseted Media. “I was completely in love with them. … I was ready to spend the rest of my life with them.”

Research suggests the danger of self-harm can remain acute even after someone leaves conversion therapy. A 2026 Trevor Project analysis found that 35% of LGBTQ young people whose most recent exposure to conversion therapy occurred within the previous year reported attempting suicide and 61% experienced suicidal ideation. While that number decreases over time, it is still disproportionately high in the following years after leaving conversion therapy programs.

“The things that they went through to finally get to be Dezi … to then try to erase all that when the feelings are still there, yes, I absolutely believe that that was the entirety of it,” Leslie says, referring to how much more depressed Dezi was while in the SIW program.

Leslie says that while members and leaders of the Orlando church reached out after Dezi’s death, Hammond never contacted the family.