Davis Mallory is reacting to some of the skeptical responses he’s received since introducing his girlfriend on social media this week, one year after he announced that he is no longer gay.
The star of ‘The Challenge’ took to Instagram on Friday to ask his followers why they’re struggling to accept the idea that someone can change their sexual orientation.
(As fans know, Davis publicly came out as gay during ‘The Real World: Denver’ in 2006 and lived as an openly gay man for nearly 20 years. In 2025, however, Davis announced that God had “pulled [him] out of that lifestyle” and had begun showing up in his dreams every time he “returned to sin.”)
“In a world where everything can change, from your favorite ice cream flavor, to your hair color, to your weight, to your gender identity… the world feels what cannot be changed is your sexual orientation,” Davis wrote on Instagram Stories on Friday.
Davis made it clear that he believes he didn’t decide to change his sexual orientation and, rather, it was an act of God.
“What has been changed within me was not by my own might but by the work of the Lord working through me,” he wrote.
As The Ashley previously reported, Davis is now dating Rachel Vaughan, a woman he’s proclaimed his love for on social media.
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In the past, Davis has stated that he was always conflicted with accepting that he was gay. In 2018, he told Out magazine that he believed his religious upbringing made it hard for him to come to terms with being gay.
“At 15, I had a suspicion I was gay. Well, I wouldn’t have called myself ‘gay,’ as that word had such a strong negative connotation to me. As a boy growing up in Georgia with a very religious family and community, being gay was not at all what I wanted to be,” he said. “I came out to my peers in my junior year of college on a study abroad trip in Europe. I had finally fallen in love for the first time that summer, with a man and I felt feelings I had never felt before for a woman.”
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In October 2025, Davis appeared on The Becket Cook YouTube show and explained how he realized he was not gay around 2024, after being in a relationship with a man for three years.
“Throughout the last year of our relationship, I feel like it was the Holy Spirit or I feel like God just took my desire for having sex with him away,” Davis explained. “I literally could not and did not have any desire for sex, but I had a desire for company, companionship…and I started noticing that God was kind of putting it on me that, like, this sex does not produce life.
“And it was just saddening,” Davis continued. “I just felt so sad any time we had sex. I just felt such deep sadness. And so that was the beginning of a change in my heart…”
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During the same 2025 interview, Davis said he realized around that time that one of his “biggest life purposes” is to “save other men from the hell or fire that I had just been in.”
He also stated that he did like women romantically but had convinced himself that he was gay.
“I have found women attractive for a long time as well but I was just claiming to this [gay] label,” he said. “I’d labeled myself as gay and only gay and it felt like a sticker I couldn’t take off of me. And I just felt like I didn’t know how to get back into being heterosexual because I did feel like God had designed me to be that way but I [was] kind of, like, tattooed with ‘gay’ and I couldn’t figure out how to take it off, you know?”
RELATED STORY: ‘The Challenge’ Star Davis Mallory Debuts Relationship with Woman After Announcing He’s No Longer Gay
