“You have to understand that the environment I grew up in taught you that you deserve to be punished all the time,” Montgomery said of seeking conversion therapy after coming out as gay.
Matthew Scott Montgomery shares the truth about his troubled past.
The So random! alum opened up about his painful experience discovering his parents, and then attending conversion therapy, on Tuesday’s episode of Christy Carlson Romano’s PodCo podcast, Vulnerable.
Having grown up mostly in North Carolina, Montgomery, 34, described his parents as “very, very conservative” and said his upbringing encouraged heteronormative standards for men.
“The way I grew up was: you find a sport you’re good at, you get a scholarship for that,” he recalled. “If that doesn’t work out, you get a scholarship for your grades, you go to college, you find a woman to marry [to] and then get a house. That was the only option I was told or saw. Which sounds like my first nightmare. No offense to anyone.”
After moving to Los Angeles, the actor appeared in a play Yellow, in which he played a teenager physically and emotionally abused for being gay. The experience of the production, however, prompted him to come out to his parents, which he says happened after his 18th birthday and went terribly.
“Mom collapsed sobbing when she found out,” he explained. “My parents were very upset and left town. My father hit me the next day and said, we feel like we don’t know you. We’re going back to town and we want him to introduce himself to us.”
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On days off from work as a Disney Channel star, Montgomery enrolled in conversion therapy, a dangerous practice that attempts to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of LGBTQ+ youth through a combination of harmful physical and psychological therapies.
He stressed that Disney “had nothing to do” with the decision, but felt it was necessary after his parents’ reaction to his coming out.
“You have to understand that in the environment I grew up in, you were taught that you deserved to be punished all the time,” he explained. “At the time, things were going so well with my career that I was still in a broken prison brain thinking, ‘I’m on red carpets. I’m on TV every week. This is too good, I should be punished on my days off.'”
Eventually, he began attending a center he believes was for “homosexual men who wanted to become heterosexual and become a heterosexual movie star.” For three hours each week, he engaged in activities such as filling out worksheets about his feelings for other men and apologizing to his father for being a “sensitive, artistic boy.”
Later, Montgomery said, he underwent electroshock therapy and a type of hypnosis.
“I’d have these silver bars that I’d have to hold in my hands and they’re really kind of sneaky and sneaky about how they got you to do it, because they were like, ‘We’re going to try something a little bit different,'” Montgomery said, adding that his practitioners will tell him to ‘just try to hold this’.
Matthew Scott Montgomery in the episode ‘So Random!’
Eric McCandless/Disney Channel via Getty
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“So you hold the metal rods, and then the next week they would buzz slightly when you held them when we talked about certain things, and then you’d try to build up a tolerance to the shocks until it was like painful,” he explained.
Montgomery described one specific example of electroshock therapy, which combined the procedure with psychological conditioning.
“They would do a kind of hypnosis where you would imagine scenarios,” he recalled. “You imagine the world is post-apocalypse and it’s like a decimated Earth and the only person left on Earth is a straight man… you go and you go and hug a straight man. And when you’ve hugged a straight man in my Mind you, they’d cut my hands off . Like an electric shock.”
The actor finally came to the realization that “there is nothing wrong with me” after working on a play that closely resembled his life. That’s when he decided to leave conversion therapy for good.
“I think it was the therapy I really needed because I got to experience what it’s like to have a family that not only loves me, but celebrates me and really accepts me,” he explained.
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Matthew Scott Montgomery at the premiere of ‘Bully’ in Los Angeles in March 2012.
John Shearer/WireImage
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In the years since, Montgomery has developed close friendships with stars including Hayley Kiyoko and Demi Lovato. The actor said that Lovato’s family especially accepted him as their own.
“Dema’s family, that’s my family,” he said. “It’s my soulmate, it’s like the person who loves me most deeply and in that moment I was able to carefully nurture a life that was filled with love and art and expression that satisfied me making me so happy in a way I’ve never been before.”
Montgomery said today that he is still dealing with some “side effects” related to his time in conversion therapy, but hopes that by sharing his story, it will help someone else going through a similar situation.
“If you’re listening to this and you’ve either gone through conversion therapy or you’re thinking about it, there’s nothing wrong with you,” he said. “Nothing in the world is wrong with you. You are loved. You deserve to have a perfect and beautiful life.”
This is not the first time that Montgomery has spoken about his traumatic past.
In an Instagram post in January 2022, the actor revealed that he once went to conversion therapy and said of the experience, “It’s really hurtful and it’s really horrible when you’re in it.”
Alongside the video, which featured footage of him appearing happy and playful on Disney Channel shows while undergoing conversion therapy, Montgomery stressed, “You have no idea what people go through behind the scenes.”
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He said he hoped the videos would “increase empathy” before reminding anyone who has undergone conversion therapy “that there is nothing wrong with you”.
“Nothing needs to be fixed, nothing needs to be changed. God loves you. God purposely made you the way you are. And you know what? I love you too,” he concluded.
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Source: HIS Education