Love + Radio · Love and Radio | Daylight Media

Journey Into Manhood

March 1, 2023·43 min·3 clips

David Matheson explodes after being buried with his 'dead' father and sons in a conversion therapy retreat.

A taped rectangle sits at the center of the floor. The speaker remembers volunteering for a half-hour process where staff asked what was happening inside him and why he had come. They called it guts work, which tells you plenty. What comes up is his father's imagined death, even though the relationship between them had already been painful for a long time. Another speaker lays out the pattern more plainly. He describes himself as a poster child for a theory, someone whose own therapy seemed to shift his sexuality enough that heterosexual feeling could take priority. At the time, that felt workable. He says he could turn closeness with men into nonsexual connection while pushing down a deeper need for intimacy with them. He wanted more than what he was living with. That want became his career, tied to his stated wish to relieve suffering and defend people he believed were marginalized. He became a counselor. The word he settled on was wholeness, first for gender, then for a therapy and a clinic. David Matheson appears directly. A promotional voice calls him a pioneer in overcoming same-sex attraction, with all the training language wrapped around that. Then Journey into Manhood comes into view: part summer camp bonding, part therapeutic peer counseling, a 48-hour retreat at YMCA camps or Christian camps somewhere in the woods. Someone tells the listener to take a deep breath. It sounds comforting, rehearsed, and a little hard to sit with. The beautiful locations only make the scene stranger, because the beauty and the emotional exposure are happening in the same place.

As heard by us

A retreat story where healing talk keeps colliding with grief and contradiction.

Journey Into Manhood follows a men's retreat where self-help language keeps sliding into grief, sexuality, and the need to be forgiven. The episode's sharpest moment comes from a participant's "guts work" and the taped rectangle where he talks through his father relationship…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

A retreat where "guts work" and private grief keep colliding.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Love + Radio