Yvette Cantu Schneider Spent Years Advocating For Anti-Gay Policy. Here’s Where She Is Now. – Esquire
Yvette Cantu Schneider spent fourteen years working for the “ex-gay” movement—not only as the director of Women’s Ministries at Exodus International, but also through public policy work for the “pro-family” organization Family Research Council. A self-identified ex-practicing lesbian at the time, she made many television, conference, and church speaking appearances over the years in favor of conversion therapy and against gay marriage. Then, around 2010, she began to experience panic attacks before appearances at these events, she explains in Netflix’s new documentary Pray Away, which documents the rise and fall of Christian ministry Exodus International. Today, she’s an outspoken advocate against the “ex-gay” movement and a supporter of LGBTQ+ rights and equality.
Yvette Cantu came out in 1987 when she was 21 years old. But as she got older, she became increasingly involved in the church, and specifically ministries that advocated for the conversion of their gay constituents. Her speaking abilities on gay conversion landed her a job as a policy analyst at the Family Research Council in 1998, where she worked to advocate against homosexuality in culture and public policy. She worked there until 2001, when she moved on to run a ministry called Grace Christian Fellowship while consulting for other Christian groups. From 2008 to 2010, she served as the director of Women’s Ministries at Exodus International, which was at the time the largest network of ministries that offered conversion therapy to gay constituents. She was brought on after her work on Prop 8, a California ballot proposition intended to ban same-sex marriage. In her arguments against gay marriage at the time, she compared the marriage between two men or two women with marriage that could theoretically take place between a man and a horse or a pedophile and an underage victim. “There are very few statements I’ve made that felt as gut-twisting as this one,” she told GLAAD in 2014. “I’d have to say that moments like this, delivering lines like this, felt wrong.”
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It was in 2010 that she began suffering panic attacks before “ex-gay” events, and resigned from Exodus. In 2014, she formally came out as an “ex-ex-gay,” explaining to GLAAD that “many people I knew suspected all along that change—true change where all same-sex attractions disappear or become rare and incidental, and heterosexual attractions take their place—never happened.” She authored a book in 2014 about her experience called Never Not Broken: A Journey of Unbridled Transformation, which also deals with her young daughter’s leukemia diagnosis.
Today, Cantu Schneider is a spokesperson for GLAAD on the “ex-gay” movement, and has been sharing Pray Away promotional material on her Instagram since the film’s Tribeca Film Festival premiere. She identifies as bisexual, and is happily married to her husband, with whom she shares two daughters. “Fifteen years ago when I met the man I would eventually marry, we had an instant connection. Anyone who knows us can see we’re soul mates. Could I have had an equally strong bond with a woman? Of course,” she explained in 2014.
While Cantu Schneider spent years advocating against LGBTQ+ rights in Washington, she now believes in legislation banning the very therapy she once preached in favor of. “These types of bans need to progress throughout the nation as quickly as possible,” she told GLAAD. “It’s damaging to take a child who is questioning his or her sexuality, or who may display qualities that are not in line with what our society considers normative for their gender, and communicate to the child (and parents) that there is something wrong with him, that in some way he or she is deficient. When their feelings fail to change, they’re left holding a big bag of shame instead of feeling empowered because they have embraced their authentic and multi-faceted self.”
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