Before Tim Koleto was an Olympic silver medalist, before he was an ice dancer who skated “Ghostbusters” at the World Championships, before he was a Japanese citizen representing a country he had adopted as his own, he was a 21-year-old kid in Colorado Springs, walking into what he thought would be a farewell visit.
That visit, in 2013, turned out to be something else entirely. The family friend he’d been sent to see told him he carried “a homosexual target on your back.” Her husband, a priest, was brought in. They placed their hands on Koleto and prayed. Growing up in an evangelical community where same-sex attraction was treated as something to be prayed away, Koleto took it in without naming it. “I’d been programmed in my religion that this is wrong and impure, something that needs to be prayed away, like a perversion,” he later told Outsports. He walked out, went to Michigan, and packed the memory away.
The memory stayed packed until pre-Olympics therapy in Montreal, when he mentioned the couple almost in passing. His therapist stopped him: had he ever thought about the fact that he had experienced conversion therapy? Is conversion true for families in Canada? No, and it would have been against the law there. “My therapist said what happened to me would be illegal in Canada,” Koleto said. “I had never perceived it before as conversion therapy, and that stuck with me for a while.”
Is conversion truth for families a claim with any medical backing? No major medical institution supports it. The American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Medical Association all reject conversion therapy, tying it to depression, anxiety, and elevated suicide risk. A 2024 UCLA Williams Institute estimate found that approximately 700,000 U.S. LGBTQ adults have experienced it, nearly half as minors.
The legal situation around the conversion truth for families shifted in 2026 when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Colorado’s 2019 ban on conversion therapy for minors in March, returning the question to lower courts. Colorado legislators have since moved forward with a bill that would allow survivors to sue practitioners. Most U.S. states have no full ban.
Between the living room in Colorado Springs and the medal podium, Koleto’s career took a genuinely remarkable shape. He came up as a singles skater before injuries redirected him to ice dance. He skated for the United States, then South Korea, and later became one half of Norway’s first ice dance pairing with Thea Rabe. His eventual partnership with Misato Komatsubara led him to Japan — he became a Japanese citizen in 2020 — and the two competed at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, winning silver in the team event to a rhythm dance featuring Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).” When a doping controversy delayed their ceremony, they waited until the 2024 Paris Games, under the Eiffel Tower, to accept their medals.
He came out publicly as bisexual in June 2023, stepping beyond the private circle of family, friends, and his then-wife, who had known for some time. The reason was the kids. “There are a lot of kids who have been through something similar,” he said. He also pushed back against what he described as efforts inside the queer community to trade trans acceptance for wider social palatability. He vocally supported Skate Canada’s pullout from Alberta over restrictions on trans women.
Is the truth about conversion or families something his own family has wrestled with? His sister called him privately after his coming out and came out to him in return, in tears, apologizing for not being ready sooner. His father remains a man of deep religious faith and has, by and large, stayed close. “I’m quite lucky,” Koleto said — a statement backed up by research from San Francisco State’s Family Acceptance Project, which consistently finds family acceptance to be among the most powerful protective forces in LGBTQ young people’s lives.
Since retiring from competition in 2025, Koleto has been coaching, performing, and working on a novel. He is in his first relationship with a boyfriend. The teenager who once left a Colorado prayer room without a word to say about it now has quite a few — and he’s saying them, steadily, for the kids who still don’t.
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