Boy Erased (2 page)

“Call me if you need anything,” my mother said, squeezing my shoulder. She was all blond hair and heavy blue mascara, blue eyes and a perennial floral-print top: a spot of Technicolor in this drab place.

“I'm sorry, ma'am,” the receptionist said, “but we have to keep his phone while he's here.”
For security reasons.
“We'll inform you if anything important pops up.”

“Do you think that's necessary?”

My mother and the receptionist finished their conversation—“It's the rules, ma'am. It's in his best interest”—and then my mother was saying good-bye, telling me she was headed off to check us into the hotel, that she would be back to pick me up at five o'clock sharp. She hugged me, and I watched her go, her head high, her shoulders square, the glass double doors swinging closed behind her with a sigh from their pneumatic hinges. I'd seen her like this once before, during the year both my grandparents died. She had carried me through that year, patted a space for me next to her on the sofa as visitors wove in and out of our living room carrying casseroles and baskets filled with glazed pastries. She had run her fingers through my hair and whispered that death was a process, that my grandparents had both lived happy lives. I wondered if this was how she felt now, if she thought that LIA was part of a necessary process—difficult, yes, but easier to accept once you knew it was part of God's plan.

“Let's get you checked in,” the receptionist said.

I followed him to another room, also white walled and empty, where a blond-haired boy stood beside a table and asked me to remove everything in my pockets. The boy was barely older than I was, perhaps twenty, and he carried an air of authority that made me think he'd been here a while. He was handsome in a svelte, twinkish way, tall and angular, though he wasn't my type. Then again, I didn't really know what my type was.

On the nights when I'd allowed myself to look up images of men in underwear on line, I'd only been able get halfway down the page, the pixels threading strand by strand in a slow-motion striptease, before I felt the need to exit the browser and try to forget what I'd seen, the laptop growing too hot in my lap. There were flashes, of course, hints of attraction emerging in my occasional fantasies—a toned bicep here, the sharp V of a pelvis there, a collage of various dimples beneath a series of aquiline noses—but the picture was never complete.

The blond-haired boy waited, tapping his index finger on the folding table between us. I dug in my pockets and removed my cell phone, a black Motorola RAZR whose small screen suddenly lit up with an image of the lake, my college campus's obligatory slice of nature: a few maple trees clustered around a glassy surface. The blond-haired boy scrunched up his nose at the sight of it, as though there were something perverse lurking under the peaceful scene.

“I'm going to have to look through all your pictures,” he said. “Messages, too.”

“Standard procedure,” the receptionist explained. “All pictures will be taken for the purpose of sobering reevaluation.” He was quoting from the False Images (FI) section of the handbook, a section I would later be asked to memorize.

We want to encourage each client, male and female, by affirming your gender identity. We also want each client to pursue integrity in all his/her actions and appearances. Therefore, any belongings, appearances, clothing, actions, or humor that might connect you to an inappropriate past are excluded from the program. These hindrances are called
False Images (FI)
. FI behavior may include hyper-masculinity, seductive clothing, mannish/boyish attire (on women), excessive jewelry (on men), and “campy” or gay/lesbian behavior and talk.

I looked down at my white button-down, at the khaki pants my mother had pressed for me earlier that morning, starched pleats running down the center of each leg. Nothing in my wardrobe or phone could be considered an FI. I'd made sure of that before coming here, checking my reflection in the mirror for any wrinkles, deleting long strings of text messages between friends, waiting for the gray delete bar to finish eating up all of the hope and anxiety and fear I'd shared with the people I trusted. I felt newly minted, as if I'd stepped out of my old skin that morning, my “inappropriate past” still rumpled on the bedroom floor with the rest of my unwashed laundry.

“Your wallet, please.”

I did as he said. My wallet looked so small sitting there, a tiny leather square containing so much of my identity: driver's license, Social Security card, bank card. The boy in the license photo looked like someone else, someone free from all problems: a smiling face in a vacuum. I couldn't remember how the DMV had gotten me to smile so goofily.

“Please empty the contents of your wallet and place them on the table.”

My face grew hot. I removed each card. I removed a small wad of twenties, followed by a torn piece of wide-ruled paper with the telephone number of the college admissions office I'd written down at a time when I'd been nervous about my chances of college acceptance.

“What's the number for?” the boy asked.

“College admissions,” I said.

“If I called this number, would I find out you're telling the truth?”

“Yes.”

“You don't have any phone numbers or photos of ex-boyfriends anywhere on you?”

I hated the way he spoke so openly of past “boyfriends,” a word I had so carefully avoided because I felt that just saying it might reveal my shameful desire to have one. “No, I don't have any inappropriate material.” I counted to ten, breathing out through my nose, and looked up once again at the boy. I wasn't going to let this get to me, not this early on the first day.

“Do you have anything else in your pockets?”

His questions made me feel paranoid. Could I have unwittingly carried in some kind of inappropriate object? At the moment, it seemed as if everything about me was inappropriate, as if I might be banned from the premises simply because I was already too dirty. His tone suggested that I was desperately trying to hide an extensive sinful past, but the truth was that, although I did feel the weight of this expected sin, I had very little physical evidence, and even less physical experience, to account for it.

“Are you sure you don't have anything else?”

I did have one other thing, though I hoped I wouldn't have to give it up: my Moleskine journal, the one in which I wrote all of my short stories. Though I knew these stories were amateurish, that I was just playing around with serious writing, I looked forward to returning to them the minute the day's activities ended. I suspected that the long descriptive paragraphs on nature, innocuous as they had seemed when I wrote them, could be construed as too florid, too feminine, another sign of my moral weakness. One of my latest stories even featured a young female narrator, a choice I knew was hardly gender affirming.

“There's this,” I said, holding the Moleskine in front of me, not willing to put it on the table with the other belongings. “It's just a notebook.”

“No journaling allowed,” the receptionist said, quoting from the handbook. “All else is distraction.”

I watched as the blond-haired boy took the Moleskine in his
hands, as he laid it on the table and began flipping the pages back and forth with disinterest, frowning. I can no longer remember which story he found, but I can remember the way he ripped the pages out of my notebook, wadded them into a dense ball, and said, in a voice free of emotion, “False Image,” as if that was all they were.

“Well, that should be it,” the receptionist said. “Now I just have to do a quick pat down, and you'll be ready.”

He patted my legs, ran his fingers beneath the cuffs of my khakis, worked his way to my arms, the cuffs of my shirt, and then, as if to comfort me, patted my shoulders—one-two-three—looking in my eyes the whole time.

“It'll be fine,” he said, his too-blue eyes fixed on mine, hands still weighing down my shoulders. “We all have to go through this. It's a little strange at first, but you'll come to love it here. We're all one big family.”

I watched as the blond-haired boy tossed my story in the trash.
Lord, make me pure
. If God was ever going to answer my prayer, He wouldn't do so unless I became as transparent as a drop of water. Crumple the first half of the story and toss it in the trash. All else is distraction.

•   •   •

“F
OR
THE
WAGES
of sin is death,” Smid continued. Afternoon sunlight slanted through the sliding door behind him. Each time he walked past us, the shadow of the door's central rail passed over him like the sluggish pendulum of a metronome,
marking the slow tempo of his pacing. Our therapy group sat quiet and still, our breathing calibrated to the slow pulse of his legs, the casserole from our lunch break sitting heavy in our stomachs. There were seventeen or eighteen of us in the group. Some had been here long enough to know to abstain politely from the meat and processed cheese, while others had brought their own lunches, opening neon Tupperware lids that sent off a whiff of tuna and mayo. Watching the older members eat their lunches, the ones who'd been at LIA for two or three years, I'd been able to see how the receptionist was at least partially right, that this was a family, however dysfunctional. Crustless bread and ultramarine Jell-O: This was a group that knew how to tolerate the idiosyncrasies of one another's food habits. People settled into their routines with little of the self-conscious buzz, of the surreptitious glancing that usually accompanies large groups who find themselves suddenly thrust into more intimate circumstances. I was the only one who seemed to be playing the outsider, scraping my fork through the Hamburger Helper as if I'd forgotten how to feed myself, hardly looking up from my plate.

To my left sat S, a teenage girl awkward in her mandatory skirt, who would later admit to having been caught smearing peanut butter on her vagina as a treat for her dog. “Pleased to meet you,” she'd said that morning, before I had the chance to introduce myself. She seemed always poised for a curtsey, thumb and forefinger twitching beside the folds of her cotton skirt. She looked down at my feet after the introduction, her
gaze locking on the tile behind my loafers, and for a moment I felt as though I must have tracked in some kind of sinful residue from the outside world. “You'll like it here.”

To my right sat a boy of seventeen or eighteen, J, wearing Wrangler jeans, a cowboy smirk, and a frat-boy part in his hair that tossed his dangerously long bangs over warm hazel eyes. J continually bragged that he had memorized all eight of the Bible's “clobber passages,” so named because of their power to doctrinally condemn homosexuality and champion traditional straight relationships.

“I read them every night,” J had said, his voice serious but also a little playful. He gripped my hand in a practiced ironclad shake. There seemed to be a thousand handshakes behind this one, each of them gradually fortifying J's grip until he was strong enough to pass this basic test of manhood. “I've memorized whole chapters, too.”

When our hands parted, I could feel his sweat cooling my palm in the downdraft.
No hugging or physical touch between clients
, I remembered from the handbook. Only the briefest of handshakes allowed.

“My favorite?” he said, smiling. “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.”

Later he would go on to tell me more about his interpretation of this “clobber” verse. “Abomination,” he would say, pushing back his bangs with the slow arc of his fingers, the white half-moons of his cuticles glowing large and bright. “Crazy word. In Hebrew,
to'e'va
. It can refer to shrimp as easily as it can to gay
sex. All those little legs swimming through saltwater, it creeped the Israelites out, you know? They thought it was unnatural.”

The other members of our group included unfaithful married men and women, former high school teachers or educators of some kind shamed by rumors of their sexuality, and teenagers kept here against their will as part of the Refuge program, a controversial branch that targeted parents who felt that sending their children to the facility was the only option.

Most of us were from the South, most of us from some part of the Bible Belt. Most of our stories sounded remarkably similar. We had all met with ultimatums that didn't exist for many other people, conditions often absent from the love between parents and children. At some point, a “change this or
else
” had come to each of us: Otherwise we would be homeless, penniless, excommunicated, exiled. We had all been too afraid to fall through the cracks; all of us had been told cautionary tales of drug addicts, of sex addicts, of people who ended up dying in the throes of AIDS in some urban West Coast gutter. The story always went this way. And we believed the story. For the most part, the media we consumed corroborated it. You could hardly find a movie in small-town theaters that spoke openly of homosexuality, and when you did, it almost always ended with someone dying of AIDS.

I was here as part of the Source, a two-week trial program meant to determine the length of therapy I would need. Most patients needed at least three months' residency, usually longer. In many cases, college students like me dropped out of school
for at least a year in order to create distance from unhealthy influences. Many stayed even longer. In fact, most of the staff members were former patients who'd been with LIA at least two years, choosing to remain inside the facility rather than reintegrate into their old lives. To be allowed to work at the facility, former patients were expected to find preapproved jobs, support themselves financially, talk only to those whose character and status had been cleared by the staff, and keep clear of the Internet or any other “secular spaces”—including “malls of any kind” or any “non-Christian bookstores.” Because patients weren't allowed to stray too far from LIA's offices, the support group became the central focus of patients' lives, the way and the truth and the light Jesus spoke of in the New Testament, the one true path to God's love.