Becket Cook designed sets for Vogue covers, built a men's fashion line sold in Paris and New York, and rubbed shoulders with Katy Perry, Paris Hilton, and Oprah. Then, on September 9, 2005, he walked into a Hollywood church and gave his life to Christ. The former gay atheist now credits two women, one a model he once dismissed, the other his own sister-in-law, with planting the seeds that led him out of a life he describes as glamorous but hollow.

Cook's account, detailed by CBN News, names Joy Durham-Schafer and Kim Cook as the figures whose faithfulness changed the trajectory of his life. In a culture that treats stories like his as dangerous or even hateful, Cook's willingness to speak plainly about leaving homosexuality and embracing biblical Christianity is itself a quiet act of defiance.

The emptiness behind the velvet rope

Cook moved from Dallas, Texas, to Hollywood and built a career most people only dream about. He worked as a set designer and production designer on magazine covers for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. He launched a successful men's fashion line with clothes in L.A., New York, and Paris. He told CBN he worked with "everyone you can imagine."

But at a fashion after-party in Paris, Kanye may have been in the room, Cook recalled, something cracked.

"I was kind of looking out over the crowd, it just struck me so profoundly. I was like, is that all there is to life? Just going to parties for the rest of my life, is this what it's all about? And I really started to panic that night. I was overwhelmed with a sense of emptiness."

That moment did not convert him. It did not even make him curious about faith. But it opened a fault line in a life that, by every external measure, was working exactly as planned.

A Christian model on a Hollywood set

The first woman Cook credits entered his life in 2004, on the set of a photo shoot. Joy Durham-Schafer was a model, and a Christian. Cook's reaction was blunt. "On the set of a shoot in 2004, I heard that the model was a Christian. I thought it was gross," he said.

He called meeting her "literally the first time I had met a Christian in Los Angeles." That fact alone says something about the circles Cook moved in, and about how thoroughly secular the entertainment world can be.

Durham-Schafer was a new believer at the time. She later described her own transformation in spiritual terms.

"It was a frequency and a vibration of the Spirit moving and indwelling in me. I was so completely transformed. I didn't even know who I was anymore."

What struck Cook was not a sermon or an argument. It was a decision Joy made in her personal life. She had been dating a man identified only as Frankie. When she realized he was not a believer, she ended the relationship, painfully.

Cook recounted what Frankie later told him about the breakup:

"[Frankie] told me the story of you breaking up with him and he said you collapsed on the floor and you were weeping. And he went to hug you, and he said he could feel like the Holy Spirit on you. He sensed something supernatural was going on."

That story landed differently than any theological argument could have. Cook said it "really touched me and kind of freaked me out in a way." He described it as "maybe, the first spark of me thinking... 'There must be something real to this kind of Christianity-thing.'" He said it "definitely planted a seed."

A woman he had initially dismissed as "gross" for her faith had shown him something he could not explain away, a conviction so deep it cost her a relationship she cared about.

Ten years of prayer before a single seed

The second woman Cook credits never stood on a Hollywood set. Kim Cook, his sister-in-law, had been praying for his salvation for roughly a decade before he ever met Joy Durham-Schafer.

Kim Cook described the moment the burden hit her. She had been doing a Bible study on Revelation when a fear gripped her, not about Becket's sexuality, but about his eternity.

"I was doing a Bible study on Revelation and...that all of a sudden became my concern that if the rapture happens, you are not going to go. I just remember being so burdened that you would not be in eternity with me."

Her prayer was simple: "Lord, please just save him."

What makes Kim Cook's account striking is what she chose not to focus on. She did not lead with moral objections to her brother-in-law's lifestyle. She did not make homosexuality the issue. "I really wasn't worried about you being gay," she told him. "I just wanted you saved, and then let God deal with that when the time came."

That distinction matters. In a public square where Christians are routinely accused of bigotry for holding traditional views on sexuality, Kim Cook's approach was neither hostile nor evasive. She prayed. She waited. She trusted God's timing.

"Your battles are won by being on your knees. The most important thing that we have to do is love, and we have to have grace. You have to have truth, but I think the grace has got to be before the truth and that love."

Her counsel to others in similar situations was direct: "Embrace prayer, do not turn your back, and keep loving them."

September 9, 2005

Cook gave his life to the Lord at a Hollywood church on September 9, 2005. He described the experience in terms that leave little room for ambiguity.

"God's like, 'I'm real. Jesus is my Son. He's real. Heaven's real, hell is real. You are now adopted into my Kingdom. You are my child now.' And I was so blown away I couldn't stop crying for the rest of the time. I was crying because of two things: the joy of meeting God, and my sin. It was my most intense cry since I was an infant."

He called it "the road to Damascus moment."

Cook went on to write a book, "A Change of Affection: A Gay Man's Incredible Story of Redemption," and to host "The Becket Cook Show," which has explored LGBT issues from a biblical perspective over the past few years. Years after that 2004 shoot, Cook and Durham-Schafer reconnected. "She and I had an incredibly surprising encounter," he said, without elaborating further.

Why this story still matters

Cook's account is, at bottom, a personal testimony. It does not come with a government filing or a court ruling. But it arrives in a cultural moment when stories like his are treated as suspect, or worse, as harmful. Entire institutional frameworks now exist to discourage the very kind of transformation Cook describes. Social media platforms flag content questioning gender ideology. Professional licensing bodies in multiple states have moved to ban so-called "conversion therapy." The message from the cultural establishment is clear: people like Becket Cook are not supposed to exist.

Yet here he is, telling his story on camera, naming names, and crediting two women whose faith was quiet, persistent, and costly.

Cook himself pushed back against the idea that conversion is something one person can force on another. "You can't bludgeon or badger somebody into the kingdom of God," he said. "It's God's work. It's a supernatural act from God."

He urged patience for those praying for loved ones: "If you can rest in God's sovereignty and know that it is his timing. It's his will."

Kim Cook prayed for a decade. Joy Durham-Schafer planted a seed without knowing she had done it. Neither woman launched a campaign or organized a protest. They simply lived out convictions that the broader culture now treats as dangerous.

In a world that insists identity is fixed and faith is bigotry, the most radical thing two women did was pray and mean it.