JOEY
O'DONNELL
IDENTITY
episode
no.07
I Was Going to Love Them Even If They Couldn’t Love Me
Joey O’Donnell on growing up in a Pentecostal family, conversion therapy at 13, the uncle they lobotomized and 30 years of building a life on his own terms
Joey O’Donnell was raised by his grandparents in central Phoenix. They were cotton pickers from the South who hitchhiked to Arizona on a train, met in the fields outside Florence, and built a life around faith. His grandfather went to Bible school in Miracle Valley, became a licensed minister, started buying time on local radio, and eventually built over 30 churches across the valley. His grandmother stayed home, fed every kid in the neighborhood, and ran food bank boxes out of the church.
It was a house of love, Joey says. Not just for him and his brother, but for everyone. He didn’t understand until his grandmother’s funeral, when the kids he’d grown up playing video games with started telling him that without her, they wouldn’t have eaten.
“You tell you’re like the kid that you played video games with starts telling you how if it wasn’t for them feeding them, they would have starved,” he says. “It touches me. I get emotional even thinking about it.”
The Preacher’s Kid
Joey’s mother was the middle child. She got scarlet fever around seven or eight and lost her hearing entirely. Nobody realized it for years. The family thought she was developmentally delayed until a school nurse tested her hearing in her teens. She had been reading lips the whole time.
Growing up in a Pentecostal minister’s house meant church Sundays, church Wednesdays, and revival every night when it came around. It meant being the example, always. “Both quiet and loud in church at the right times,” Joey says. “Both shining and humble when you’re not in church.”
The Woman Who Walked Down the Aisle
When Joey was 13, something happened at church that cracked the foundation. A woman walked down the aisle in the middle of a service, crying, and confronted the minister in front of everyone. He had had an affair with her and abused his position of counseling to do it. The men in the church stood up. Joey had never seen anything like it.
That Sunday, he told his grandparents he wasn’t going back. The arguments lasted weeks. And in the middle of one of them, he said it: if you’re so worried about my soul, you should probably be worried that I’m gay.
“It was like the world crashing down,” he says. “Complete and utter silence. And everyone just walked away.”
Uncle George and the Lobotomy
What Joey didn’t know at 13 was the story of his grandfather’s brother, George. Uncle George was a doctor who shuffled when he walked, stuttered severely, and yet somehow spoke his way through English, Russian, Mandarin and Spanish. The family said he’d been hit in the head by a patient during his medical residency.
At George’s funeral, Joey learned the truth. George’s mother had caught him in bed with another man in the 1940s in Florence, Arizona. She had him lobotomized. Joey’s grandfather had grown up knowing this, and now here was his grandson telling him the same thing.
Conversion Therapy
Joey’s grandparents told him they were sending him to Texas to visit cousins. It was a conversion therapy center. He was 13, placed alongside people being treated for addiction and sexual disorders. The premise was that same-sex attraction was caused by either an overbearing mother or an absent father.
According to the Williams Institute, approximately 698,000 LGBT adults in the United States have received conversion therapy, roughly half of them as adolescents.
“This place was like a McDonald’s for therapy,” Joey says. “We’re just running through there. They put a little olive oil on their head and bless them and send them out.”
He figured out what to say. He told them the devil had tricked him. He got re-baptized. He went home, got a girlfriend, and performed for three years.
The Circle K
At 16, Joey ran into a kid from church camp named Justin at a Circle K. Justin had come out, been sent away by his parents, and was living on his own. Joey told him he was gay. Justin asked if he wanted to move in. They drove a Chrysler LeBaron convertible to his grandparents’ house, Joey grabbed a bag, said he was gay, said he understood he couldn’t stay, and left.
He didn’t talk to his grandparents again until he was 20. But they kept his gas card active.
“I was always big and bold and loud,” he says. “And so I was like, I’m going to love you even if you can’t really love me.”
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Making Space in Their Faith for Love
When Joey reconnected with his grandparents at 20, the conversation was simple. “I was ready to be loved and they were ready to love,” he says. They never talked about it directly. But his grandfather watched Joey meet Fredrik, build a career, and become the most successful person in the family. That was enough.
“They figured out a way to somehow make space in their faith for love,” Joey says.
When asked what he would say to the 13-year-old version of himself, Joey’s answer came without hesitation.
“Hey, I forgive you,” he says. “I hope you forgive me.”
To parents whose children come out to them, he offers something equally direct. Your sibling didn’t have dreams for you. That’s why siblings usually handle it first. Parents have planned the next 50 years and the grandkids. When someone says the life you dreamed for me is going to be different, the best response is the simplest one. I hear you. I see you. And I still love you.
