Newsweek interviewed actor Chad Allen about Save Me, his movie about one gay man’s experience with an ex-gay ministry.
Your character in “Save Me” struggles to reconcile his Christian beliefs with his homosexual desires. Which parts of that struggle ring true to you?
Pretty much all of it. It wasn’t like I set out to tell my story, but where the script ended up is a struggle that I relate to almost in its entirety. My character starts out finding himself loveless and godless. I went through that. There was a time in life when I was absolutely desperate and addicted and void of love. My character’s entire process of finding God and finding love, while truncated, is truthful for me. That’s what it looked like, except mine was over the course of six and a half years, not two hours.
Did you ever enter a gay reparative-therapy program, as your character does?
No, thankfully. I say thankfully because I think for me it would have been a very damaging experience, as I think it often is for people. We presented a very loving, very middle-of-the-road ex-gay ministry. But there are many that we’ve looked at that are much more extreme, and potentially much more damaging to the psyche.
Considering the favorable press this movie has received, some of it from conservative Christian sources, I expect that it will find a distributor soon.