Matthew Scott Montgomery, well known for his role as Matthew Bailey in the Sonny With a Chance spin-off So Random, talked out about his journey as a gay man. Growing up with “very, very conservative” parents, Matthew stated he spent much of his childhood hiding his true nature, even going so far as to attend conversion therapy on his days off from work as a Disney Channel star.
“No one knew,” he said on Christy Carlson Romano’s podcast Vulnerable on September 19. “My castmates did not know at the time, so it was kind of a secret.”
Matthew also said that Disney “had nothing to do” with his choice to seek conversion therapy and that he agreed to it in response to his parents’ “nightmare” reaction to his coming out following his 18th birthday.
“You have to understand that in the environment that I grew up in, you’re taught that you deserve to be punished all the time,” he said to Christy, who’s a Disney Channel alum herself. “At the time, the career stuff was going so well that I was like still in this broken prison brain of thinking, ‘I’m on red carpets. I’m on TV every week. This is too good, I should be punished on my days off.'”
Matthew stated he began visiting a center advertised “for gay men who wanted to be turned from gay to straight and make it as a straight movie star” for three hours every week. Some of the so-called “homework” assigned as part of the program included filling out worksheets detailing his feelings for other men, playing football and apologizing to his dad for being “a sensitive, artistic little boy.”
The sessions eventually turned into electric shock therapy, with Matthew getting a small zap every time he would think of showing affection for another man. “I would have these silver rods that I would have to hold in my hands,” he recalled. “They would try to build up your tolerance for the electric shock until it was painful.”
The Smosh actor stated he left everything because he could see the parallels between his life and a play he had worked on in which the lead character suffered homophobic abuse from his family before being adopted by the neighbours. “I think that was the therapy I actually needed,” Matthew said, “because I got the experience of what it was like to have a family not only love me, but celebrate me and really accept me.”
Matthew claims he’s “never been happier” since coming out, despite dealing with some “side effects” of conversion therapy.
“If you’re listening to this and you either have been through conversion therapy or thinking about it,” he added, “there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s not a thing in the world wrong with you. You are loved. You deserve to have a perfect beautiful life.”