Ex-Disney star opens up about traumatizing experiences with conversion & electroshock therapy
So Random!, and also appeared on Shake It Up, Austin & Ally, and Jessie in the early 2010s—recently guested on former Disney star Christy Carlson Romano’s podcast, Vulnerable, where he opened up about his struggles with his sexuality and the intensive therapies he went through to “treat” it.Now 34, the actor first reflects on his “very, very conservative” upbringing in North Carolina, a time he says instilled in him these ideas of super rigid heteronormative standards for young men—and that “gay people are the most evil thing that could possibly exist.”“How I grew up is: you find what sport you’re good at, you get a scholarship for that,” he tells Romano on the podcast. “If that doesn’t work, you get a scholarship for grades, go to college, find a woman to get married [to] and then get a house.
That was the only option that I was told or saw. Which sounds like my first nightmare. No offense to anybody.”A post shared by ray vazquez (@tiorayray)But Montgomery did discover one other option: Move out to Los Angeles to follow his Hollywood dreams—and he did just that, while still a teenager.
He says his role in a play, in which he starred as a physically abused gay teen, is what finally inspired him to come out to his parents, though neither of them took it well.In his early 20s, around when Montgomery began regularly working on Disney Channel shows, he enrolled himself in conversion therapy in an attempt to convince himself he could be straight.
He stresses that the network had nothing to do with the therapy—the decision was of his “own free will”“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 shares on the podcast. “At the time, the career stuff was going so well that I was still in this broken prison brain of thinking, ‘I’m on red carpets.
