While undergoing “reversal” therapy for his homosexuality, Ryan Kendall knew it wasn’t going to work. “I knew that I was gay like I knew that I was short and half-Hispanic,” the 26 year old testified on Wednesday in the trial challenging California’s Proposition 8.

Growing up in the largely conservative city of Colorado Springs, Kendall said he knew he was different and that he “liked boys” from an early age, but it wasn’t until he looked up the word “homosexual” in the dictionary at age 11 that he realized he was gay.
“The definition they gave was someone who was sexually attracted to a person of the same sex,” Kendall said. “I knew that was what I was.”

Kendall, who grew up in a deeply religious family, said he was terrified by this discovery. Throughout his childhood, Kendall said, “homosexual was a big scary word and I felt very frightened by it. I remember my parents saying that families were threatened by homosexuals.”

Read the rest of Maria Dinzeo’s Courthouse News Service article here.