Strength In Weakness: Guy Hammond’s Program That Devastates LGBTQ Survivors
>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.”