Not Broken | Michael Passons: The Christian Singer Who Refused Conversion Therapy and Found His Voice Again

Not Broken | Michael Passons
 The Christian Singer from Avalon Who Refused Conversion Therapy and Found His Voice Again

In 2003, Michael Passons was called into a meeting with the other members of Avalon, one of the biggest groups in contemporary Christian music. By the time it ended, he no longer had a job.

The public was told Michael had left to pursue a solo career. The truth was much harder: he was gay, his bandmates knew it, and he had refused to enter conversion therapy.

Michael had spent eight years helping Avalon earn gold records, Dove Awards, Grammy nominations and twenty number-one Christian radio singles. Then he seemingly disappeared. Behind the silence was a man trying to rebuild his life after losing his career, his community and nearly everything he thought made him valuable.

This episode follows Michael from his childhood in Yazoo City, Mississippi, to the height of Christian music fame—and into the Nashville living room where it all came apart. It also traces the long road back: coming out publicly, returning to music and reclaiming “Testify to Love” as the inclusive anthem its words had always promised it could be.

Michael Passons was never broken. But it took him more than twenty years to stop living as though he needed to be fixed.

Content advisory: This episode includes discussion of conversion therapy, religious rejection and  depression.

References and further reading

• Michael Passons Breaks Silence: His Truth About Avalon, Christian Music & 20-Year Return — The Patrick Custer Show

• Former Avalon Singer on Coming Out, Getting Ousted and Where He Is Today — Washington Blade

• A ’90s Christian Hit Song Is Now Blooming as a Queer Anthem — Sojourners

• Testifying to Love: An Interview with Michael Passons, Ty Herndon and Melissa Greene — Unbound

• Pushed Out of Christian Pop, Michael Passons Reclaims an Old Hit as an Affirming Anthem — WPLN News

• Michael Passons: Official Biography

Transcript

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June 30th, 2003. Three people arrived at a house in Nashville. They weren't strangers. They were people Michael Passins had traveled with for years. People he had stood beside on stages all over the country. People whose voices he knew so well he could probably find his harmony with them before the rest of us had found the melody. Together, they were Avalon. And Avalon was huge. By then, the Christian pop group had two gold records, 20 number one radio singles, six Dove Awards, two Grammy nominations, and an American Music Award. Michael had been there almost from the beginning. But on this particular day, nobody had come to rehearse. Nobody had come to talk about the next album. According to Michael, his three bandmates came into his home and told him he was no longer a member of Avalon. Eight years ended in a living room. Michael would later describe the feeling this way. His friends, his social life, his career, his paycheck. Gone. And for the next 17 years, most of the people who had listened to Michael sing would have no idea why. The official explanation was simple. Michael Passins was leaving Avalon to, and you may want to visualize air quotes here, pursue other musical opportunities. It sounded perfectly reasonable, it also wasn't true. Because Michael had been keeping a secret. Actually, he had been keeping it for most of his life. And by 2003, that secret had become something that people around him believed was incompatible with the life he had built. Michael Passins was gay. Michael grew up about five miles outside Yazoo City, Mississippi. If you want to understand him, that matters. This was small town, Mississippi, and Michael's family fit the place pretty well. They hunted. Everybody hunted. The men hunted, the women hunted, camo, woods, deer. Duck Dynasty wouldn't arrive for another two decades, but I feel reasonably certain the town was prepared. Michael wanted to stay home and play the piano. He laughs about it now, but as a kid, he understood that he was different long before he understood exactly what the difference was. Music made sense to him. He began singing and playing when he was very young. At church, he heard the music of the little country congregation his family attended. Outside church, he discovered people like Elton John, Billy Joel, Lionel Ritchie, and Amy Grant. Michael was 12 when his family took a trip to Nashville. On the ride back to Mississippi, he made himself a promise. Someday, he was coming back. He was gonna make music. That part of Michael's features seemed surprisingly clear. Another part was beginning to get complicated. Michael remembers a hay ride in seventh grade. All around him, the other boys were suddenly interested in girls. They wanted to kiss them. They were disappearing under blankets. Michael did not understand what all the fuss was about. He wanted to ride on the hay and roast marshmallows. And honestly, at 12 or 13, marshmallows seems like a perfectly solid choice. Less complicated and much easier cleanup. It's funny when he tells it now, but there was something happening in that moment that probably wasn't funny at all to the boy experiencing it. The other boys were moving in one direction, and something inside Michael wasn't following. At first, there was denial. Then there wasn't. By college, Michael says he knew he was gay. He also knew what he had been taught about being gay. He attended a Christian college. He had grown up inside conservative Christianity. The message was not especially nuanced. This wasn't something you accepted, it was something you fixed. One weekend, when Michael was home from college, his father finally asked him directly, Was he homosexual? Michael said, No. His father told him that if he was, they could get him some help. That detail would be easy to turn into a villain story, but Michael doesn't. Even now, talking about his father can make him emotional. He says his father loved him. His dad simply believed what a great many people believed at the time. If his son was gay, there must be some way to stop him from being gay. And Michael believed it too. Because nobody would eventually have to drag Michael kicking and screaming into the idea of changing his sexuality. He would go looking for it himself. After college, Michael did exactly what that 12-year-old boy had promised. He moved to Nashville. He worked for country producer James Stroud. Michael has described those early music row days without much glamour. He was the assistant. He picked up food, he washed cars, he did whatever needed doing. He wasn't making music yet, but he was close enough to carry lunch to the people who were. And one day, while sitting in a waiting room at Masterphonics on Music Row, Michael saw an opportunity to deal with the other problem in his life. There was a phone book. Remember those? For younger listeners, a phone book was essentially Google printed on very thin paper, except it could also boost a child high enough to reach the dinner table. Michael picked it up and started calling therapists. I can relate to that more than I wish I could. In my twenties, I secretly looked for help to overcome what I thought of then as my gayness. I hid those searches the way other people hide porn. I remember finding the Exodus International website and reading the success stories of men who said they had changed. I would look at their profile pictures and think about whether or not they were cute. Which was probably not the response Exodus was hoping to inspire. But when you've been taught that the deepest truth about you is really a condition, you go looking for a treatment. Michael was in a new city. Nobody knew him, and maybe this was his chance. He wanted somebody who could make him straight. Eventually, he was referred to a counselor who worked with men like him. Michael began going. Weekly individual sessions, group meetings with other men at a local church, talking, praying, trying. He did it for about two years, and nothing changed. So Michael reached another conclusion. Maybe therapy wasn't the answer. Maybe he simply needed to pray harder. And for years, that is exactly what he did. Meanwhile, something extraordinary was happening with this music. In February 1995, Michael performed at a showcase in Nashville. Grant Cunningham, an AR executive with EMI, was there. Cunningham was helping assemble a new Christian vocal group. Michael got the opportunity, and that group became Avalon. Their first major tour was The Young Messiah in 1995, an 18-city arena run alongside some of the biggest names in Christian music. Then came the records, the radio singles, the awards, the touring. And in 1997, a song called Testify to Love. Nobody really knew what they had. When Avalon was naming its second album, the record label wanted to call it Testify to Love, and the group preferred a maze of grace. The group won that argument. Now, I say this with love, but the record company was actually right. It happened. Because Testify to Love became the song. If you didn't follow Christian music in the late 90s, it is hard to explain how big that song was. So take my word for it, it was huge. It stayed on Christian radio and it followed Avalon everywhere. It became the song people waited to hear. A song about declaring love. A song about living love openly. And one of the people standing on stage singing it night after night was hiding the most basic truth about who he could love. Michael has a phrase for what happened to him during those years. He says he developed two Michaels. There was the real Michael, the one who felt what he felt, the one who wanted what everybody else seemed to want, to fall in love, to have somebody, to stop thinking about every gesture, every answer, every person who might know too much. Then there was the other Michael, Church Michael, Stage Michael, Avalon Michael. That Michael knew the rules, and for a while, maintaining both versions worked. I went to a couple Avalon concerts back then, and of the two men in the group, Michael was not the one who registered on My Gaydar. Let me be very clear, that tells you absolutely nothing about the other man. He has never said he is gay, and I have no basis to say he is. When you're closeted in that world, you were always scanning the room for somebody, anybody who might be like you. Anyway, back to Michael. He wasn't married, but for a while he was young enough that people weren't asking too many questions. Then everybody around him started getting married. Michael stood in their weddings. He watched people celebrate them. Nobody asked the brides and grooms to apologize for falling in love, and nobody told them their relationship might cost them their career. Their lives simply moved forward, and Michael's couldn't. And he got angry. Not at one person necessarily, at the whole arrangement. He was watching other people live the life he had been told that he could never have. Eventually, he decided he wasn't willing to spend his entire youth alone. So sometime the real Michael came off the shelf. He met men. He took chances. And every time he did, there was another problem. Trust. Because when you were carrying a secret that could destroy your career, falling for somebody means handing him the weapon. Michael had to trust that whoever he let close understood what disclosure could cost him. He got very good at hiding. He had to. Then one night Michael went to a gay club. He went alone. He wore a baseball cap pulled low, which surely is the internationally recognized disguise of any famous man hoping not to be recognized. He says he was basically a wallflower. He didn't arrive with anybody, he didn't leave with anybody. He was curious. Somebody recognized him anyway. Michael still doesn't know who, but that person called his record company. Soon, Michael found himself in a meeting with the president of the label. Somebody had seen him. They even knew what he had been wearing. Michael understood what was happening. The secret wasn't entirely his anymore. And now the machinery around Avalon knew. There were discussions, there was scrutiny, and eventually there was another demand. Therapy. Again. Michael had already spent years trying to change himself. He knew where this road went, but now the stakes were different. Avalon wasn't a dream anymore. It was his life. So he agreed. For a period, Michael came off the road. A temporary replacement was brought in, and Michael went back to counseling. He remembers sitting across from somebody and talking while the person just looked sadly back at him. That was essentially it. Michael had already talked about this. He had prayed about it. He had begged God about it. He knew what he was attracted to, and sitting in another room talking about it wasn't changing anything. Eventually, he refused to keep going, and he returned to Avalon for a while. Then came 2003. Michael has described another incident that year when he does not discuss in great detail publicly. When confronted about it, he didn't tell the truth. By then, hiding had become almost instinctive. He calls it self-preservation. Michael believes one member of the group became particularly determined to remove him after that. He has said he later understood that an ultimatum was presented to the label. Either Michael went or that member would. Michael is careful about this part because he wasn't in those conversations. He can tell us what he came to believe happened. He knows exactly what happened next. June 30th, 2003. His bandmates came to his house and told him he was out. Michael says he could have responded differently that day. He knew things. There were things he could have said. People, he could have pulled down with him, but he didn't. He asked them to leave, and they did. Imagine the silence after the door closed. For eight years, Michael's life had been airplanes and tour buses and hotel rooms, sound checks, and stages. And then suddenly there was nowhere to go. This wasn't simply losing a job. Avalon was his community. His friends were there, his income, his identity. Even his relationship with God had become tangled up in that world. Michael later said it felt like being thrown from a tour bus that never bothered to stop. In his recent interview with Nashville Public Radio, he put the industry's calculation plainly. Christian music was a business. And in that culture, being gay was considered bad for business. If Michael became a liability, other people believed they could lose money too. That doesn't make what happened less religious. It makes it religious and commercial. Which may be worse. Avalon continued, and Michael disappeared. The public got a much cleaner story. Michael Passens had decided to pursue other musical opportunities. There was talk of a solo career, but nothing really came of it. Inside Nashville, Michael says people knew something was wrong. You don't walk away from a group at the height of its success without people asking questions. He tried talking with managers and industry people he knew. People were sympathetic, but nobody could really help him. Michael felt like damaged goods, and he now describes what followed as being effectively blacklisted from the Christian music industry. Eventually, he had to sell his house. At points, he slept on friends' couches. The man who had stood on stages in front of thousands of people became almost invisible. For a while, he couldn't bear to listen to music, much less make it. Think about that. Music had been the clearest part of him since childhood, and now even that hurt too much to touch. But he didn't leave it completely. For years, Michael traveled as a keyboard player with the Christian group Point of Grace. That arrangement feels almost painfully perfect. He could still make music, he could still be nearer the world he loved, he just didn't have to stand in front of it. He didn't have to be Michael Passins from Avalon. The spotlight had become a dangerous place. So he stayed behind the singers and he stayed quiet. For a long time, Michael blamed himself. Maybe all of this had happened because of him. Maybe if he had been stronger, more disciplined, more faithful, maybe if he had prayed correctly, maybe if therapy had worked, there was always another maybe. It took years to start pulling those ideas apart. He began examining what he had actually been taught, not simply what somebody told him the Bible said. What did he believe? Why were certain ancient passages treated one way and others another? Why had Christian interpretation changed on some things but remained supposedly immovable on this one? Michael started doing something that could be terrifying when your whole life has been built inside a religious system. Seventeen years passed. Then in 2020, Michael was invited onto a podcast called Jonah and the Whale, hosted by Josh Skinner. Michael didn't go in planning some dramatic revelation. He figured they would talk about Avalon, the 90s, music, old stories. He sat down, put on the headphones, and the microphones came on. And something happened. Michael decided he didn't care anymore. Not that he didn't care about people, he didn't care about protecting the old story. For 17 years, other people had been allowed to explain what happened to Michael Passins. And now Michael was sitting in front of a microphone. He could explain it himself. So he did. He said publicly that he was gay. He said Avalon had removed him. He talked about the repertoire therapy. He talked about the meeting at his house and the secret. For the first time, the public Michael and real Michael were speaking with the same voice. Michael figured some people would hear the podcast and then everybody would move on. Apparently, he'd forgotten how the internet works. Someone at Billboard heard it. The phone rang. Then people picked up the story. Other outlets followed. 17 years after Michael Passens disappeared from Avalon, people finally learned why. The secret was out. But here's the part of Michael's story I love. Coming out wasn't the ending. It would be easy to stop there. Michael finally told the truth, roll credits. Life is rarely that cooperative. Michael had spent years learning how to disappear, learning how to make himself smaller. Even when he was in Avalon, he now believes he was shrinking. His bandmates were extraordinary singers, and Michael says he sometimes held himself back. Then, more than 20 years after he left Avalon, his friend Ty Herndon called. Ty had an idea. What if they recorded Testify to Love Again? Michael hadn't released a vocal recording in more than two decades. He wasn't even sure what his voice would do, but he said yes. They brought in producer Wayne Hahn. Then they decided the song needed something else. So they called Melissa Green. Melissa had been a member of Avalon when Michael left. Today, Michael calls her one of his closest friends and fiercest allies. Think about that for a minute. A story that could have remained frozen in 2003 hadn't. People changed, relationships changed, theology changed. Michael and Melissa both changed. And in 2026, they walked back into a studio together. There was a moment during the recording when Michael announced that. He needed to go to the bathroom. He didn't. He went in there to cry. Sometimes you just need a little privacy. He washed his face, came back out, and sang. Michael says he believes he sang better than he ever had before. Not because his voice was younger, it wasn't. Not because 23 years away had somehow made singing easier, because for the first time he wasn't shrinking. There weren't two Michaels standing at that microphone anymore. There was one. The new recording did something Michael hadn't expected. It charted in Christian music. Michael told Nashville Public Radio that the algorithms heard a song mentioning God and apparently knew only one place to put it. Algorithms, like fundamentalists, are not always gifted at nuance. The recording debuted at number three on Billboard's Christian Digital Song Sales Chart and climbed to the top of the iTunes Christian chart. Then Michael, Ty, and Melissa performed it at the Grand Old Opera. Michael hadn't set out to re-enter Christian music. He was reclaiming something he believed had been taken from him and opening the song beyond the small box where others had kept it. There's an almost ridiculous bit of poetry buried in all of this. The first words of Testify to Love mention the colors of the rainbow. That line was recorded in 1997 long before Michael Passins could sit comfortably in an interview and say without flinching, I'm gay. Back then, he sang about a love that reached everywhere while privately believing there might be one place that love couldn't reach. Him. Nearly 30 years later, he sang it again. This time beside an openly gay country singer with the support of a former Avalon bandmate. Then a dance remix arrived for pride because apparently the song had one more transformation left in it. And gay people do appreciate a remix. The song started finding people who had grown up listening to Christian music just as Michael had. Not little messages, paragraphs, stories. Some told him they were standing in their kitchens crying while the song played. Michael reads them. He says he tries to read every one. There is one more thing. Michael is writing music again. His new original song is called Not Broken. The first line of the chorus says it plainly. Subtle? No. After what Michael had lived through, I think he has earned the right to be direct. Because not broken isn't simply the title of a song, it is Michael's answer to the counselor in Nashville. To the group meetings in the church, to the second round of therapy, to the people who believed his sexuality could cost them record sales. To the 17 years when somebody else got to tell the story. You cannot fix something that was never broken. Michael searched the yellow pages for somebody to fix him. He spent two years in therapy trying. He prayed, he hid, he divided himself in two. Then he was told by the people around him to try therapy again. And when none of it worked, he lost almost everything. Except Michael. Michael survived. And now there is another piece of this return. Michael is featured in a documentary called Safe for the Whole Family: How to Make a Christian Superstar, premiering at the Nashville Film Festival in September 2026. The film examines what happened when Christian Music's mission, its business interests, and its strict image-making machinery became impossible to separate. Michael spent years trying to remain safe for the whole family. Safe enough for Christian radio, the record label, the people buying tickets and CDs. The cost was that he couldn't be safe for himself. And now for the first time, he is putting music into the world with his own name on it. Not Avalon. Not the blonde guy in that group. Michael. He couldn't have imagined Nashville or Avalon or the awards or number one songs. And he certainly couldn't have imagined three people arriving at his house one afternoon and taking all of it away. And I doubt he could have imagined this either. Standing at a microphone at 60 years old, the song begins. A song he first sang while he was hiding. A song about love. And this time, Michael Passing doesn't have to decide which Michael is going to sing it. There is only one left. Maybe that is what coming out really is. Not becoming somebody else, not even becoming brave. Sometimes it is simply getting tired of dividing yourself into pieces so everybody else can be comfortable. Michael spent years trying to become the person he thought God, his church, and his career required him to be. After all that work, all those prayers, and the therapy sessions, and all those years of hiding, he eventually arrived at the back of the person who had been there from the very beginning. The kid who loved music. The man who wanted to love and be loved. Michael. And this time, when he sings about love, he gets to include himself. I'm Stan Stating. And now, The Secret is Out. If you're enjoying The Secret Is Out, take a second to follow the show. Leave a review or share the episode with someone you think would connect with it. Those little things really do help more people find us. And next time, we're talking about Sally Gary. She grew up believing deeply in a faith that had very clear answers about sexuality. Then she had to confront a question those answers hadn't prepared her for. What happens when the person you've been taught you cannot be turns out to be you? Sally's story would eventually put her on a path she could have never imagined. That's next time on The Secret Is Out. See you next time.