Simon Kent Fung

Simon Kent Fung is the host of Dear Alana,.

So how’d this whole thing get started?
I read about Alana’s story and immediately was shocked because of how many parallels there were with mine. And I started trying to research and learn as much as I could. It takes an insider to know about this stuff, and I felt like I recognized many of the groups Alana was involved with, even though I’m like 12 years older than her. I ended up finding her mom, Joyce, on Facebook. It was kind of a shot in the dark to reach out. I told her my story about conversion therapy, religious vocation, and some of the messages that I received in that part of the Church, and I said, if you need any support, please feel free to reach out. I didn't expect any response. 

She got back to me and we connected a few months later by phone. And eventually there were more phone calls and texts. That began a relationship for the next year and a half. She certainly felt like nobody among her immediate family or friends understood, because it all seemed so odd. This was a very supportive, affirming family. Why would Alana do this? Why would she seek this kind of advice? Why would she be so involved in the Catholic Church? The kind of subculture of the Catholic Church Alana was involved with was pretty radical. People didn't get that part. Joyce felt very misunderstood and isolated and I think she just felt like, oh my goodness, somebody else understands a little bit about Alana’s experience.

I was working in tech and I got burnt out during Covid and decided to take a couple months off. I was at my parents’ house in August 2021, and one night at 2AM I couldn't stop thinking about Alana. Her story kept haunting me. I wanted to know what happened to her. And this idea came to explore it with audio. I thought it would be an interesting way to talk about some of the delicate aspects of her struggle. I had this vivid sense of wanting to capture the specific feeling of being alone in your room, writing in your journal, talking to God. That was the feeling I wanted to capture in the show. And it felt like audio was that feeling for me. So often we listen to things in the dark, it's so personal.

I mean, intimate is the word. 
Exactly. It's like you have to focus on the words because there are no distractions. 

Also, it almost feels like you're hearing from beyond or something. 
Exactly. So that week I emailed her mother and her sister and their family attorney, and I just said, Hey, I have an idea. We got on a Zoom. 

Had you listened to podcasts before? Were you a podcast listener?
Yes, yes, yes. And my first job out of college was in documentary film, so I had some understanding of media, and story structure, and production.

What podcasts did you listen to? 
I listened to a lot of chat shows. There were a lot of Christian shows that helped me in my post-conversion therapy life. I listened to a lot of people interviewing each other about their experiences deconstructing things. A lot of my conversion therapy experience was similar to other folks from different religions—Mormons and Orthodox Jews. And so hearing other podcasts from those perspectives was powerful, even though they weren't Catholic stories. 

I didn't know the Catholics were doing this.
Yeah. They're actually the intellectual brains behind it all. All the people that started these organizations and therapeutic guide books were Catholics. 

I grew up Catholic. I have conflicts with that, obviously. But I always kind of felt like the nuns and the priests I met were pretty chill. I was listening to the part where the priest told Joyce that she wasn’t Catholic enough, and I thought, that is not what I grew up with. 
Me neither. It wasn't my experience until college. So Alana got kind of brought into this when she was an early teen, and I got brought into it when I was a late teen. We left a lot of this out, we could probably create several episodes about the whole historical chain of events that happened in the late fifties, early sixties, post-WWII, when the Catholic Church realized globally that it got a lot of things wrong and really need to rethink how they were engaging with the world.

How so?
They convened at Vatican II, which is the biggest church council over the past 150 years, where they really rethought a lot of things like the relationship with Judaism and other religions. Mass switched to the vernacular, how we know it today, versus Latin. They restructured a lot of things. And in that process, it created a lot of division in the Church where some people were like, this is too much change! This is not the church that we believe is the true church. You enter the Reagan era of politics in the US and the sort of emergence of the Culture Wars around issues of abortion and guns and multiculturalism. And that created some interesting alliances between political parties and religious groups. Organizations, think tanks, and lobbying groups saw that they were preserving the true version of Catholicism that actually happened to align with a lot of these political positions.

Ah, I had no idea how new this was.
Yeah. So like a lot of the nuns that you probably grew up with were like pre- this era, or were formed in the middle of it. A lot of them likely were going along with the new Vatican II changes. That was the kind of Catholicism I grew up with, too. But in college I encountered the version of Catholicism that really saw itself as defending the “true” version of Catholicism. And it started to have a big presence on college campuses. 

 I remember going to mass in college and the priest said something like, “If you weren’t listening to every word of the sermon, it is a sin to come up for communion.” And I was like, that’s…different.
Exactly. And I think that I got wrapped up in this, and so did Alana. It's not just like we were following blindly. There is a very interesting historical and theological mental model that this brand of Catholicism teaches that makes people feel very protective about it and very bought into it. I think that's sort of the world that Alana walked into without knowing. She was 14, she didn't know there was all this history that led up to this point. And the Archdiocese of Denver in particular is one of these dioceses that’s taken up this mantle to fight these cultural battles with this kind of Catholicism. And there’s a lot of money behind it, too. And so the fact that she grew up in Denver and in that archdiocese is another factor that we were trying to hopefully allude to and explain in some way because it wasn't a coincidence that Alana fell into this. 

How do you feel about the Catholic church now? Are there any good feelings you have about it? 
I mean, I've gone through so many stages and, and I think some of it is captured in a raw way in the podcast. But I think for me, one of the things that was interesting is that making the project has actually been healing in the sense that it's helped me look at my own story in a new way. I wouldn't have scrutinized everything to this degree. And that was unexpected. My plan was to make this in as detached a way as possible. To tell the story, be the voice.

Who was the first person that was like, you need to be in it?
My producer, Laurie. She and others who were giving feedback along the way were like, you know, we need to know where he's coming from. What gives him the right to tell the story? I ended up really restructuring a lot of the storytelling, in terms of how prominently I ended up in it. In so many ways, it is a coming of age story. It's a family story. And I think there was a certain amount of vulnerability that I had to show in order to maybe earn the right to be trusted with such a delicate, sensitive topic.

In putting up a magnifying glass to my life, and revisiting my own journals, I realized that both Alana and I didn't start out this way. We had an innocent and simple kind of faith as children and as young people. So much of my current relationship with the faith has been returning to that original place, where that relationship with God and with the Divine was so natural. I think what we've realized in making this show is that both Alana and I, unfortunately, in the process, encountered messages and ideas and theologies that kind of distorted that. Faith is a very important part of me. It's as much a part of my identity as my sexuality. And so I think the shame and the pity of this story is that we were forced to choose. How do we find integration? That's where I'm at now.

Do you still go to mass?
Yeah. It was actually in moving to San Francisco 10 years ago that kept me going. I ended up walking into this church with this incredible history. Prior to the 80s, it was an old, graying, Irish Catholic parish smack in the middle of what was becoming the gay neighborhood. There was no trust between the church and the gays. Then the AIDS crisis happened. And these young men around them were dying. Old parishioners ended up taking a lot of these men who had been abandoned by their families and providing hospice care for them and hosting funerals for them. And that kind of forged a relationship of trust between the Catholic church locally and this community. Ever since then, it's been a predominantly LGBTQ parish in what is one of the most conservative archdioceses in the country. And I walked into this and met all these people who had so many different experiences of the Church that I didn't have. Like they didn't go to conversion therapy. They may have struggled in other ways, and had different baggage. But they still actively chose to attend. That really opened my eyes to a practice of faith and a relationship to the Church that has been really healing. It's that sort of integration that I mentioned earlier that a lot of these people have that I continue to seek. That looks like going to mass, serving the community. I was on the Pastoral council of this parish and it's still an important part of my life. 

When you're reading the journals, were you kind of like, “Aha, this is familiar language” or was it surprising to you?
So much of what Alana wrote, I have had almost identical writings. And, I pull up some of those throughout the season. Other people who have binged the show have shared similar stories. I think what's beautiful, the gift of this story, is the trust that the family has given us in disclosing this material. It's revealing a world that we rarely have access to. It's so private. I know we wrestled a lot with the ethical dilemma of how to respect Alana in this process and to be sensitive because she's not here. At the same time knowing that she had expressed in her journals a deep desire to be known and, as she writes, “found.”

It was like she was writing to you.
Exactly. Knowing that gave us some amount of permission and relief, knowing that she may have secretly wanted someone to find this. Alana had told her mother before she passed, “Everyone needs to know how bad it was,” and had even vowed to write a book. I think we were trying to be very sensitive about balancing what was essential and what was most core to her experience and not being unnecessarily salacious or scandalous about anything because that's not what this is about. It shows a window into a world that is so secret and vulnerable. Because it’s something people don't often hear about, it's hard to empathize and really understand what that conflict can feel like. And seeing how Alana captures that conflict so articulately also inspired me to be vulnerable with my own story. I feel like Alana sort of led the way there. 

Part of you is doing this because you are genuinely curious and you feel tied to this story, and then there's another part of you that’s a storyteller, too. You’re going through it yourself, but also collecting everything as a reporter. Did that go back and forth? Joyce had to think about agreeing to do this before she trusted you. Then she said, “Let’s do this.” When she said that, that was a big moment. Were there moments like that when you thought, “This is a big part of the story,” or “I’m so glad we have this on tape.” Or were you just totally in it? Where was your brain? 
All the tape that you heard was actually collected live and in real time. There was no staging of any of this. The first time I met Joyce was the first time I met Joyce on tape. I had told her, “I'm gonna have a mic with me, just so you know.” And she's like, “Absolutely, no problem.” So I was holding the mic, meeting her for the first time, giving her hugs. That was all real. And I think throughout the collecting of this story, because it was also the first time I'd ever done this, there was a little bit of beginner's luck in that I just wanted to collect everything. I wasn’t thinking, “Let's capture this moment.” I just had the mic on. 

You were like, let's go through this authentically and capture everything and look for the best stuff.
Yeah. So for example, in the first episode there's a little, light moment of Joyce wanting to make me a sandwich.

That’s such a mom thing. 
We just had the mic on and it was very real. Most of the show was made in that way. It certainly was more time consuming to have to find those elements in the tape later on. It was like a documentary in that we collected as much tape as we could and then tried to structure a story around that. 

I had a lot of tape of Joyce reading journal entries to me and me reading them with her in her kitchen before I asked her to let me read all of them. That moment of me asking her was actually happening in real time. It took that trust to be built. I don't think she would've said yes if I asked her at the very beginning.

The amazing thing about the creative partnership that I developed with Laurie is that I knew early on that whoever was gonna make this with me, I wanted it to be someone who had a complete outsider's perspective. I wanted the show to reach both insider and outsider audiences—for insiders to trust that I was speaking from a place of genuine love and care for my community, and for outsiders to catch a glimpse of what it's like to be an insider. So finding Laurie [my producer and composer] was amazing because she was able to catch me and be like, “That doesn't make sense,” or “I don't understand that,” where I take that for granted. 

There were things that you had no idea would cause her to react in certain ways.
Simon: Exactly. Providing that balance enabled everyone to be able to enjoy and listen. That was really top of mind. 

Laurie: Some of the stuff that Simon experienced in some of the therapies, trying to basically cure the urges he had—things like having massages by men and retraining your brain, being told, “This is actually an okay sensation. It's not a sexual sensation”— we left a lot of it out of the show. But it’s crazy, and it's still happening.

Simon: Most people don't know this happens at all, let alone in the Catholic church. Most people don't know that Catholic psychologists and theorists are the leading thinkers behind the modern conversion therapy movement. And most people don't know the theology behind why people are motivated to develop these theories to begin with. So I think connecting those dots was really important so that people could understand and spot it, you know, as they encounter it in its contemporary form, which can often be masked by psychological and theological language around healing ministries. It's very much disguised intentionally.

Most people who have experienced conversion therapy or are still in the middle of it have so much shame around this experience. For a lot of people there’s the shame of being gay. Then there's the shame of what conversion therapy teaches young people: that the reason they're gay is because of some trauma they experienced, usually with their same-sex parent. Then there's this third level of shame, which is what happens when you fail to change when it doesn't work, which is what happens. And so all of that results in people not talking about it. It’s a triple-dose of shame.

I'm confused. The Catholic church relies on the New Testament more than other branches of Christianity, is that right? I feel like Jesus didn't say anything about this! What was their argument about that? How were they baking this up? 
Well post-Vatican II, there really became a strong divide in the Church between those who really felt like there was a work to be done, to continue to develop the Church's theology and relationship with modernity. And those that felt like it was actually essential to take a more traditional conservative approach to all of these things. So in that context there became a faction within the Catholic church that really doubled down on sexual ethics, ideas around sexual morality, what should be permitted inside marriage, outside of marriage, contraception, you know, things related to sexuality. Out of that thinking emerged a fairly robust system of thought around the theology of sexuality that was very much connected to what a lot of Evangelicals would call purity culture. The message that I received in college and the message Alana received as an early teen was that the way to be a good Catholic was to be pure in these ways, particularly as it pertains to sexuality. Whereas a lot of other people's experience of Catholicism had less emphasis on the sexual dimensions of morality and more emphasis on the social dimensions of morality, like the death penalty and war.

“Cast the first stone” stuff.
Yeah. Those things aren't in contradiction. I think there's a role for morality as it pertains to all aspects of life. But I think the sort of brand that we fell into really hyper fixated on those sexual dimensions. That's really the cultural place where this came out of. There was a resurgence of interest in that area especially as the Culture Wars co-opted that internal debate that was happening in the Church.

Before you go…When you got confirmed, did you choose a Saint name? Who's your saint?
I went with Simon.There's a few Saint Simons. The one that is most known is Simon of Cyrene, who's not technically a canonized saint, but is the last person that Jesus asked to carry his cross on his way to the crucifixion. 

What is he the saint of? 
I don’t know…let me check.

I feel like we should look this up. I picked Lucy because I had bad vision, they thought I was going blind, and she's the saint of eyesight. And her statue is her holding her eyeballs on a platter. She’s supposed to be protecting me. They told her she had to marry a man, but she wanted to be married to God, so she gouged her own eyes out. She was martyred. 
(looking up) So there are a few Simons, there's Simon the apostle who's the patron saint of saw workers and tanners.

Saw workers and tanners. Alright.
Because he was sawed in half. He was a martyr, too. 

That’s dark. Aren’t you glad we looked that up! On that note, I’ll let you go. Thanks, Simon!