Boy Erased (21 page)

The projector screen rose, the white dove revealed its fractured Bernini light, and it really was as beautiful as I remembered it. The pastor asked a series of questions about my father's life, about his devotion to the Lord, about what led him to this day. Finally, the pastor spoke a simple question into the microphone—“Will you do everything you can to fight against the sin of homosexuality in the church?”—and my father's clear unequivocal answer swept through the congregation. As it happened, I felt something snap inside of me, a warm glow that spread through my limbs—a feeling of love surrounding me, coursing through me, the same feeling I'd experienced when I lay in bed and called on Jesus to enter my body—and I suddenly realized that I never had to take Mark up on his offer. I had already been called. I didn't know if this feeling was from God or my parents or some hidden inner reservoir, but it didn't seem to matter. I knew I still had a long struggle ahead, but I also knew at least one other thing: I wasn't going to erase Mark's number. Let the counselors do what they wished.

“Yes,” my father said. “I'll do my best.”

My parents never had any reason to worry about the nurses. In the end, it had been them, not the hospital staff, who had switched my identity.

T
he movie theater was packed, sold out, as everyone had said it would be. A hush settled over the crowd as the white-haired man made his way up the aisle. The man cleared his throat, stood with his back to the screen, and waited for the hush to settle into silence. For the next two hours, this would be the quietest our audience would get, a relentless succession of choked sobbing, coughing, sniffling, and moaning running like an alternate soundtrack behind the torture sequences that were so vital to the success of 2004's
The Passion of the Christ
.

I sat in the back, between Charles, my new roommate, and Dominique. The twins usually came as a pair, as they had to our college—a singing pair, singing almost everywhere they went—though here, in this room full of evangelicals, they kept it to a minimum. Just one week earlier, the last week of February, I had attended one of their recitals, watched Dominique march up
and down the theater aisle in her floral-print muumuu and scarf ensemble and belt out “Summertime” in a tone that struck me as both garish and beautiful. I had delighted in her exaggerated minstrel expressions, her imitation of how white people thought a black person should look, only because she seemed so self-aware, so politically charged, in a way I could hardly imagine for myself. On scholarship for singing, Charles and Dominique were ostracized, if not intentionally, then at least by default, and it was often hard to tell where one of their performances ended and another began, so uncomfortable were they with the whole setup. They were also struggling along with me in my Comp II class, a fact that, given their near-total refusal to open their ranks for anyone else, made it possible for us to become friends, to spend all-nighters in the cramped dorm lounge writing papers, knitting together our growing impressions of the world.

“Do you think it'll snow while we're in here?” Charles said. We'd been arguing about it for the past week, ever since the meteorologist first mentioned the possibility. This was around the time when I'd first suggested that we watch
The Passion
together. “You know,” I'd said, my voice a practiced monotone, “just to see what it's all about.” Though Charles and Dominique weren't very religious, they had also grown up in a Baptist church and were interested in seeing what all the fuss was about. I knew it would be impossible to ignore this movie, that my parents would soon be calling to ask if I'd seen it, and I thought seeing it with Charles and Dominique might give me some perspective, allow me to mock it in some way, decrease the power
Christ seemed to hold over my life. If all went according to plan and LIA accepted my application, I would be attending ex-gay therapy at the beginning of June, only three months away. My intro therapy sessions at LIA's neighboring office had suggested to my parents that LIA would be the best path forward. I had visited the therapist a few more times over Christmas break, and he'd told my mother that I was making progress, that I would be a good fit for the program, though I couldn't really see what had been so positive about our conversations. Most of the time I'd simply listened to his lectures on sobriety and self-restraint, trying to hide my trembling hands. A few times I had parroted back the therapist's jargon in order to move past any long uncomfortable silences. He must have interpreted this as humbleness, as a form of repentance. Though my parents hardly ever mentioned LIA these days, they certainly weren't making any of our family's usual summer plans to visit Florida, and their silence on the subject only made my enrollment feel more inevitable. Watching
The Passion
with Charles and Dominique would either strengthen my ability to cope with whatever I'd soon face in ex-gay therapy or it would teach me just how much stronger I needed to become in the next few months.

“It might be too warm outside,” Dominique said. “But I bet there'll be at least a little snow.”

“Of course it'll snow,” I said. I wanted to put an end to the debate. I was tired of the argument, and I half believed that the late-season snow had a greater chance of falling if we closed ourselves off to it, as we had in this auditorium, like the times
in my childhood when my mother would drive us to the city to watch one of her romantic comedies and, directly after leaving the auditorium, we'd find a thin blanket of snow waiting for us under the streetlamps, the ground newly soft under our soles. The roads snow-chapped and treacherous and unsalted, my mother would drive us back up the hill to our house after our weekend movie, laughing the whole time. “Isn't this
wild
?” she'd say. And it truly had been wild, my father off somewhere in his shop building cars or in the house reading scripture, blissfully unaware that his tiny family was making its journey through snow. We could do it without him, at least for a few miles.

“I think it has to snow,” Dominique said, eyeing all of the white-haired people who passed by our aisle. Their heads swooped past like tiny unthawed islands of snowdrift. “Preacher hair,” my mother used to say, long before my father had accepted God's calling, before his salt-and-pepper hair began turning to that soft cotton that so reminded us of angels' wings.

“It won't stick any,” Charles said. “It's too warm.”

“Negative Nancy,” Dominique said.

“Don't give me a white girl's name.”

“There's no such thing as a white girl's name,” Dominique said.

If I closed my eyes, I didn't seem to be in a church crowd at all. I was about to watch a movie with good friends. It was just a normal Friday night. This was exactly what I wanted, what I'd planned for: a secular miracle, my father and his entire
mission defrocked before my eyes, openly mocked by these new nonbelieving friends who didn't give a shit, these friends who could sing their way through any tragedy. None of this awful school year had to matter: not the extensive therapy sessions I'd attended over Christmas break, not the slow but steady march into treatment, not the slice of suburbia I'd recently suspected might hold the key to my future as an ex-gay. Here, I didn't have to think about being gay
or
straight. I didn't have to worry about upsetting Christ anymore. Instead, I could laugh alongside Charles and Dominique at the spectacle of His death. A catharsis, I'd recently learned in my Western Lit class. The snow would arrive and blanket everything, and we would step out of the theater as new people, made clean and carefree, just as the transcendent church hymns had also promised long ago,
washed
in the blood of the Lamb
.

•   •   •

M
Y
EX
-
GAY
THERAPY
SESSI
ONS
at LIA's neighboring office, begun just after my trip to the jail, felt like part of a different life. Since my mother kept putting off scheduling my doctor's appointment, I hadn't yet visited Dr. Julie to check my testosterone levels for deficiencies, but I already knew, after my first session, that I was diseased, possibly incurable. I never told Charles and Dominique any of this, worried they would think the same about me. All they knew about my background was that I had grown up Missionary Baptist and that my father was
becoming a preacher. I wanted to keep these two parts of my life separate, a choice that leant a sense of timelessness to my secret life, a sense that I could pretend to be one person—a complex, evolving, educated person—while at the same time I would always remain a hell-bound diseased sinner. This secret life pressed against my student life at all times, always there in the back of my mind, and the moment my student life began to make any progress (better grades, more friends), I would be reminded, once again, that there was a world of sinfulness awaiting me, that perhaps it would always be there.

In my secret life, I was always at Love in Action. There, the air grew colder, and holly wreaths decked every front door of every suburban house I passed on my way to the facility. In my secret life, I found myself thinking of snow as I sat before the thick-browed counselor and watched his lips move with no clear sound attached. Then, gradually, his phonemes merged into real words until there was no way to keep from hearing them.

I looked away, searched the window for the tiniest flake, the smallest fraction of hope. My parents and I had opened ourselves up to this hope just when I seemed most lost, accustomed as we were to the habits of faith, and this hope shot us through the tight circuitry of the ex-gay industry to the heart of things, to this place.

“Do you think you're masking a deeper problem here?” the counselor asked, leaning forward in his chair. He was sitting across from me, staring, waiting. “Do you think all of this gay
business is really connected to your relationship with your parents? Wouldn't you say you and your mother are extremely close?”

Oh
, I thought, looking into his dark eyes,
so all along love has been on loan. This man has come to collect.
So I sat straight up in the padded chair, trembling, nodding, smiling, and I said something like “Yes, my mother and I
were
too close, so I craved that close bond in every one of my friendships.” And with that first ex-gay utterance, with that strange tongue still vibrating in the air around me, my mother became something less to me. The bond between us grew less magical, less mysterious, bound to the assigned descriptors, to the role she must have been playing in my narrow little production of sin.

In my secret life, when I left the office for the second time, glossy brochure in hand and a next appointment already scheduled a week before Christmas, there was no snow waiting outside to soften my steps. Over the next few months, the snow still didn't arrive. I was told that these things took time. I was told that I needed to be patient. Sitting with my friends in a movie theater several months later, spring well on its way, I felt as though it was long past due.

“It
has
to snow,” I said. Charles and Dominique turned to me and smiled. In that moment, I thought of saying something like “Yes, you
are
the family I've never had. Yes, you
are
surrogates.” But this was not my secret life. The counselor wasn't here, not in this place, though he had already patterned his thoughts into the white mass my mind had become.

•   •   •

“W
HERE
HAVE
you taken me?” Charles said, digging into the popcorn bag between us. It was a good question. Here sat white-haired, pale-faced elderly people. Here sat intermittent sprinklings of local church youth groups huddled together in brightly colored bunches, their matching T-shirts lit up beneath the canned lighting like unstrung Christmas lights. A few more white-haired men, most likely deacons, stood with their backs to the burgundy-curtained walls, their pale hands crossed before their flies, the curtains behind them trembling with their slight stirrings.

The white-haired man at the front of the theater cleared his throat again, and the crowd grew quiet. “Some of you will have questions after watching this powerful film,” he said. “Some of you will feel moved by its message.”

Charles tossed a piece of popcorn at Dominique. It traveled in an arc in front of my chest, landed on her shoulder. Dominique picked it off as if it were a cockroach, raised one finger to her lips, and shushed us.
This is serious
, her eyes said, though the glimmer in them suggested the opposite.

In only a few months,
The Passion
had become one of the most popular movies of all time, largely thanks to evangelicals. I hadn't told Charles and Dominique that my father was just like these white-haired men, standing in front of audiences in my hometown and asking people to be saved, that my mother had called to tell me of the large number of people my father was
leading to the Lord at every screening. “You wouldn't believe it,” my mother had said breathlessly, as she sometimes was, in awe that my father could inspire others, believing, perhaps for the next few weeks, that there might be something truly miraculous about his ministry. “It's a sight. All those people crying, down on their knees.”

When I left each weekend for home, I didn't tell Charles and Dominique where I was going. We didn't discuss my rapid weight loss or my sudden dip in GPA. The thing that passed between us for concern—the “You're too damn skinny”—said all we needed to say. The world outside our tiny circle was a scary place, and it always would be, but the arrogance of youth made these problems seem like a skin you could shed. We were here now, with one another, and everything else was just so much white noise.

As winter settled on our campus, frosting the triangular patches of grass between our academic buildings, the three of us spent most of our time together, watching movies in the dorm, one lazy pile of warmth held up against the cold that whistled through our poorly insulated windows. Our limbs splayed everywhere; we became inseparable. Mutual friends used the word “creepy” to describe the way we folded around one another, finished each other's sentences, walked to the cafeteria only when all three of us were hungry, our appetites surprisingly in sync. We hardly ever spoke of our families, who nevertheless would have been suspicious of one another, my parents never having set foot anywhere even remotely similar
to their side of town. But we didn't feel the need for such things in order to be close. We were here, together, sheltering under the slats of the bunk, the glow of the screen.

“We'll be available for counseling after the showing,” the white-haired man continued, pointing to the men along either aisle, his fingers tracing invisible lines, a kind of flight attendant preparing for our ascension. “Jesus can wash away all of your sins, make your garments spotless. He'll help you walk away tonight with a clean heart.” I lowered my gaze to where my feet plugged into a darkness I wanted to slink down inside until the movie was over.