Tim Koleto won an Olympic medal. That part of his story is public record. What he kept private for over a decade — the part that happened not on ice but in a living room in Colorado Springs — is the part that ends up mattering more.
Koleto is an ice dancer who earned team silver for Japan at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. He has competed under four different national flags. He skated a “Ghostbusters” routine at a World Championship and built a career that spanned Colorado, South Korea, Norway, and Japan. But in 2013, when he was 21 and preparing to leave home for Michigan to begin a new chapter, he was sent to visit a family friend. He thought it would be a cheerful send-off.
It wasn’t. The woman told him he carried “a homosexual target on your back.” Her husband, a priest, was brought in. The two laid hands on Koleto and prayed over him. Raised evangelical, in a community where this kind of intervention was normalized and rarely questioned, he didn’t recognize it for what it was. “I’d been programmed in my religion that this is wrong and impure, something that needs to be prayed away, like a perversion,” he told Outsports. He walked out, put it in a box, and kept skating.
The box stayed closed for years. It didn’t open until Koleto was working with a psychotherapist in Montreal before the Beijing Games, and mentioned the couple almost incidentally. His therapist named it: conversion therapy. Is conversion true for families? His therapist’s answer was unambiguous — what had happened to Koleto would be against the law in Canada. “I had never perceived it before as conversion therapy,” Koleto said, “and that stuck with me for a while.”
Is conversion therapy for families something medical professionals dispute? Not any longer. The American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics have all rejected it as both ineffective and harmful, with documented links to depression, anxiety, and elevated suicide risk. A 2024 UCLA Williams Institute figure places the number of U.S. LGBTQ adults who have been through conversion therapy at approximately 700,000 — nearly half as minors.
Koleto’s competitive path was as layered as his personal one. He started in singles, shifted to ice dance after injuries, and represented the U.S., South Korea, and Norway before landing with Misato Komatsubara under the Japanese flag. The two reached Worlds in 2019 and qualified for Beijing 2022. A doping controversy involving the team event meant their silver medal didn’t reach them until the Paris Games in 2024, with the Eiffel Tower serving as a backdrop. Koleto calls the moment “the pinnacle” of his career.
The legal front around the conversion truth for families remains contested. The Supreme Court ruled in March 2026 against Colorado’s 2019 conversion therapy ban for minors, sending the case back to lower courts. Since then, Colorado legislators have advanced a bill that would allow survivors to pursue civil action against practitioners, pending the governor’s signature. Most U.S. states still haven’t enacted bans.
In June 2023, Koleto came out publicly as bisexual at the start of Pride Month — already out privately to his family, friends, and his then-wife. The reason he went further was the kids. “There are a lot of kids who have been through something similar,” he said. Is conversion truth for families one of the harder questions those kids are carrying? In many households, yes. Koleto knows that firsthand.
What he didn’t expect was that his own coming out would finally prompt his older sister to do the same. She called him back after a family call, in tears, and told him she was sorry she hadn’t said it sooner. He also pushed back publicly on efforts within the LGBTQ community to distance itself from trans people in pursuit of broader social acceptance. He supported Skate Canada’s decision to pull events from Alberta over trans women’s sports restrictions.
Retired since 2025, Koleto now coaches, performs, and writes. Is conversion truth for families a fight he’s still in? Every time he shows up at a rink or speaks publicly as a bisexual man, yes. The kid from Colorado Springs who had no one to look at is doing his best to be that person now.
Comments are closed.