Boy Erased (29 page)

“Do you want to say something to him?” Smid said.

J pushed back his bangs again and sat up. He seemed to glimpse the promise of the next step, his eyes growing soft and wet. This could be his moment. Smid stood beside him with his
eyes focused on the Lie Chair. In an instant, they both seemed to glimpse the same nightmarish tyrant.

“Dad,” J began, “I've memorized each of the eight clobber passages. I've worked hard to be a good Christian man. I've accounted for my past sins, tortured myself to accomplish each of these steps.”

Smid circled the two chairs, nodding in either direction, as if he were addressing both father and son. The most important thing here was to believe the fiction, to make the father a receptacle of pain and fear rather than the living, breathing, walking complexity he'd always been when you were around him.

“The person I want most of all to kiss,” J continued. The room grew quiet. I was barely breathing. The auditorium seemed to grow hotter with each of his words. I didn't dare look at him. “The warm gut feeling I get when I am close to this other person. The constant questioning that comes from a personal reading of scripture. I understand it now. All of this is temptation sent from the Devil, meant to confuse me, meant to snare me in addiction.”

“Amen!” T yelled. “Preach it!”

I could hear S shifting in the chair behind me. The blond-haired greeter walked to the right side of the stage, his eyes fixed on the invisible drama.

“Gambling, alcoholism, cohabitation, abuse. These were all gifts from you, Dad. But not any longer. I don't accept your gifts. I throw your gifts at my feet and stomp them.”

As J finished, he collapsed into a sobbing heap on the floor.
Smid ran to him and placed one hand on his back, the other in the air, praying for God to heal this young man. After a few seconds, he led J back to the chair beside me. I still wouldn't look at him. I was afraid of what would happen if I looked at him. Here was someone willing to break in front of me while I was using everything in my power just to stay whole. In the next moment, Smid motioned for me to come to the stage.

“I think it's time you showed us what's going on inside,” he said, leading me to the metal seat, his hand on my elbow. The seat was still warm from J's heat. I tried to keep from looking at J, who was now kneeling at the foot of his chair, shaking. There was no way to know if he was experiencing something real or simply faking it—and even now, after the fuses have blown and the antiseptic light has faded, I can no more be certain of his conversion than I can of any ex-gay's.

“Do you see your father?” Smid said, standing behind me. Dust clouded the light in the air in front of me, rivulets twisting in the place where my father was supposed to be sitting. I tried fusing the rivulets into his slacks, his navy business suit, his salt-and-pepper hair combed at the part. I tried working myself up into an angry fit.

“Take your time,” Smid said.

The silence was unbearable. I sat there for several minutes, waiting for someone to end it. I thought of the numbers game my father and I used to play: Each of us would guess a number from one to one hundred, and then we would say the number aloud at the same time. I thought of how we were usually only
ever a digit or two away from each other, a feat that felt like a miracle. I wanted to tell the group that there were things I'd never understand about my father. There were things that could never be translated into words. But I loved him.

When no one ended the silence, I stood up from my seat. “I'm not angry,” I said. “I don't understand why I have to be angry.”

The blond-haired boy walked up to the stage. His face was red, and his hands were clenched into fists. “You've been hiding what you really feel all week long,” he said. “You're angry, but you're not showing it. You're keeping all of it hidden away, but we can see it.”

“I'm not angry,” I said. I was on display, standing before a jury of my peers. The sun was hot on my back. “It's more complicated than that.”

“It's not complicated,” the blond-haired boy said. His face was getting redder. “You're making it complicated. What you feel is anger because your father hasn't accepted you. You need to come to terms with that. You need to scream at him, tell him how you really feel.”

“I'm not going to scream,” I said. I was trying hard not to show how nervous I was.

“You're shaking,” the boy said. “That's how angry you are. It's obvious.”

I wasn't going to cry. I wasn't going to let them make me cry. I kept my eyes on the doorway of the auditorium, never looking back at J.

“You should let it out,” Smid said. His voice was close behind me. I felt sobs coming, but I held them down, swallowed them. I blinked a few times. The room blurred.

“I'm not even sure you want to change,” the boy continued. “I'm not even sure you've been telling us the truth
at all
.”

“You're crazy,” I said. “You're all completely crazy.”

I took one step forward then found I had enough strength to take a second one.

“I thought it was more
complicated
than that,” the boy said.

If I kept focusing on each step, I thought I might have the strength to reach the door.

“You have to want to make it past Step One,” Smid said. “That's the only way.”

I didn't look behind me. I didn't look back at the others. I kept my eyes on the red exit sign.

“If you walk out,” Smid said, “you won't ever be cured.”

Each step gave me more and more strength until somehow I was sprinting through the hallway, until somehow I was standing before the reception desk. “I need my phone back,” I said.

“Can't do that,” the receptionist said, smiling. “You know the rules.”

“It's an emergency,” I said.

“What kind of emergency?”

“It doesn't matter.”

The auditorium doors were still closed behind me. No one was coming after me yet. The receptionist dug my phone out
from a pile of phones and handed it to me. He was no longer smiling.

I dialed my mother's number. She answered on the first ring.

“Mom,” I said, “I need your help.”

•   •   •

M
Y
MOTHER
and I were quiet for most of the ride home. We still hadn't called my father to tell him what had happened, afraid of what he might say. We didn't know how to start explaining things because we hadn't yet explained them to each other. But as the Ozarks folded around us once again, I began to feel the familiar straightjacket cinch across my chest and along my back. I knew I had to do something or we would continue to live the same way we'd always lived: a life full of secrets, full of unsaid words.

“I never want to go back there,” I said.

“They said you needed a few more months,” my mother said. “Maybe even a year.”

I had heard their conversation from the passenger seat, as Cosby leaned in through the cracked car window to warn her of my erratic behavior. “I'm not even sure he
wants
help,” he'd said. “He needs at least three more months. He probably needs a break from college.”

My mother steered us into the slow lane. I watched the grassy shoulder glide by us, brown from heat and drought.

“Did you know that man's only college degree is in marriage
counseling?” my mother said. “Why is a marriage counselor telling my son how to be straight?”

The grassy shoulder opened up to reveal a bald patch of dry red clay. The red was glaring, a bleeding wound. “Screw it,” I said.

“What did you just say?” my mother said.

I grappled for the plastic airbag cover in front of me, digging my fingernails into the cracks, tugging. I wanted the bag to inflate, to knock me back as far as it could. I pictured the cover as my father's chest: his heart billowing out, exploding, deflating. I wanted T's pain, S's shame, J's anger. I wanted the obliteration of every nerve connected to my skin.

My mother pulled onto the highway shoulder, kicking up a trail of dust behind us. Cars flew by, honking, overcorrecting their trajectories, swerving across the thick double yellow lines.

“What's going on?”

I dug my fingers deeper into the cracks. I was blinking tears, but I wasn't going to cry. Outside the window, the red clay was mocking me. The mountains wanted to hurl themselves on the roof of our car. After several minutes of trying, I finally gave up. I sat back in the seat and closed my eyes.

My mother was quiet beside me, her breathing shallow. “Oh my God,” she said. “Are you going to kill yourself?”

The question was simple enough, but what came out of my mouth was a sharp animal cry. I tucked my knees into my chest and pressed my side against the passenger door, my cheek hard against the glass.

“Oh my God,” she repeated. “We're stopping all of this now.”

She took this as a yes, the only evidence she needed to convince herself to end my therapy sessions with Love in Action. She heard yes, but I had already been given a gift that no one could ever take from me. I was alive, and I now had the benefit of knowing it. I was alive, and this was all I needed.

•   •   •

W
HEN
I
THINK
about everything that has happened to me, I sometimes wonder if any of it was real. I sometimes wonder if the facility might have managed to turn me crazy in the end, that perhaps I have spiraled off into some abandoned corridor like my great aunt Ellen, talking only to myself. If it weren't for the handbook and the many ex-gay counselors I've contacted since leaving, I might still be second-guessing my sanity about what really happened during those few weeks. And if my father could have had it his way, none of us would have ever spoken about my ex-gay experience again. Though he didn't ask any questions the day I came home from LIA, though our conversations since have been filled with awkward silences, it seems he has quietly accepted the fact that ex-gay therapy was never going to change me. In the years following my enrollment in LIA, he continued to fund my college education, never asking too many questions about what I was learning in my English concentration. “A writer,” he said once, after I'd told him what I wanted to be. “Wouldn't that be interesting?”

On some days, it's hard to believe that I ever lived in a world
that operated on such extreme notions of self-annihilation. But then I turn on the news, read a few articles, and realize that what I have experienced may have been unique, but in no way was it disconnected from history. Minorities continue to be abused and manipulated by both nefarious and well-intentioned groups of people, and harmful ideas continue to develop new political strains all over the world. What I can't quite understand—and what I may never be capable of understanding—is how we all came to be mixed up in the ex-gay movement, what drew each of us to Love in Action's double doors. There are no pictures to help me search for clues, so I develop them myself.

I picture Smid walking away from his first wife, leaving everything behind. I picture J, forging a new identity in the face of an angry father. I picture my mother, her former life disappearing as she stands beside her new preacher husband on the stage, perhaps remembering the child she once lost in the hospital, perhaps thinking about me.

Again and again, I picture the Lie Chair. I see my father and the chair. I see him as a child, watching his father tie his mother to the dining-room chair and beat her. I see how he must have cowered, crouching, from his own father. Then, decades later, there he is, sitting in a padded hospital chair beside my grandfather's bed after alcoholism has taken everything from this man's body, the only one of his siblings to visit the dying old man.

Always I circle back to my father. I picture him clutching the
invalid hand. I picture him crying silently, waiting to say good-bye. There is a mystery in this, a minor apocalypse somewhere between what these two men once knew of themselves—a holding on to something that, in turn, refused to let them go—and I long to know it, like the old
prophets.

S
mid's voice emerges from the darkness, enclosing me in its soft, lilting syllables. I'm lying in my bed in a tiny apartment in Auburn, Alabama, two years into a master's degree in creative writing, winding down from a night of researching Restoration drama by listening to a podcast of
This American Life
, Ira Glass's voice a haven of liberal thinking in a deeply conservative state, when suddenly—as if some cold hand has reached out of the past to clench my throat—Smid's voice draws me back to Love in Action.

“John, you don't have to live like this anymore,” the voice says. It's a recording from one of Smid's many appearances on an evangelical television show. In the interview, Smid quotes God, whose voice once told him that he needed to become straight, that this would only be possible if Smid followed God's orders.

I grope in the darkness beside my bed for the lamp and switch it on. The light burns my eyes. This can't be happening. This private shame made public. I feel strangely protective of the information, as if no one but me has the right to hear this kind of talk. The tone of the
This American Life
interview is winking, with knowing phrases that betray a liberal audience accustomed to joking about “one of those Christian places that claims they can cure homosexuality.” It's the tone of so many of my professors, people so far removed from the conservative Christian perspective that they can't help but sound flippant, many of their lives padded by families who've supported them since they were toddlers.

I stand up beside the bed, dots swimming in my eyes, orange and yellow streaks swirling across the mostly bare white walls. Nails mark the places where I've just removed photos of me and my last boyfriend: a reminder of the many casualties suffered in a long string of withering intimacies, advances made and accepted but rebuffed once things got too serious. No one is going to get close enough to hurt me.

But now here it is: This voice I've tried hard to forget reaching through the barriers I've erected to declare a truth that arrives a decade too late to make better what at one point in my life felt as though it could never be made better. “The transformation for the vast majority of homosexuals will not include a change of sexual orientation.” As if this is all it takes—Smid's admitting to the obvious lie he'd sold me and my family—to repair the damages inflicted on all of us. As if this could make
up for the near decade of confusion and self-doubt that followed the collapse of my faith.

This is the first of many public apologies. Over the next few years, ex-gay counselors will continue to admit their wrongs, pose for magazine photos, readily accept opportunities for interviews. Exodus International, the umbrella company Love in Action worked under, will disband, and in its wake only a few ex-gay facilities will continue their operations, none of them ever as big or prevalent as Love in Action, though a few dogged evangelicals will export ex-gay thinking to places like Uganda. The popular story arc will be one of redemption: the tyrant turned reformer. These ex-gay counselors will even write books. Smid will write a memoir,
Ex'd Out
; publish it at a vanity press; and pitch it in many of his interviews. In his biography at the back of the book, he'll include words that, though partially true by the time he writes them, will cause my entire body to shake from anger.

Whether he is dealing one-on-one with an individual, a family, or speaking in churches or seminars worldwide, John's message of openness and honesty resonates with everyone who longs to be accepted, loved, and understood.

It will take years before I find the strength to finish the pages of my own story, before I can even approach my memories. I will return to my parents' house from time to time, acting like a stranger. In these moments, my mother will drag me down to
the hell my parents had been living in all those years since I left them to insecurity and doubt and the fear that they've committed an unforgivable act from which they can never recover.

“You two have to deal with this directly,” my mother will say, pointing first to my father then to me. “I refuse to be in the middle anymore.”

But I will refuse her request. I will refuse to even look at my father, the man with whom, post-LIA, I've primarily communicated through brief e-mails and one-sentence answers. I will rush out of the room, enter my old bedroom, and slam the door. I will fall against the soft mattress and stare up at the popcorn ceiling and run my hands over the high thread count, bury my face in the coolness of a freshly laundered bed, my parents still talking in hushed voices on the other side of the door, this call and response of blame that must have settled so gradually into their years of talking that they no longer find it as shocking as it is to me. In order to escape the sound, I will stand up and begin rifling through my closet for the Great Books collection I'd bought in my overzealous classics phase.

Touching the gold-fringed pages, it will just begin to dawn on me how close I came to losing my passion, to losing my life. In the years since LIA, I've had to spend so much time catching up with other people, learning how to believe in a world that no longer teems with angels and demons. Every time I've read a book or ingested a new historical fact that my Baptist upbringing taught me to reject, I've had to fight against the sneaking suspicion that I am being lead astray by Satan. In the message
boards and hidden ex–ex-gay Facebook groups I will join, I'll see others talking about their own attempted suicides, and I'll glimpse in these confessions elements so remarkably similar to my own that they will seem, for a moment, to issue directly from my mind. I will see people talk about losing their families, about the yearly trials they've faced as winter holidays approached and the loneliness threatened to overwhelm them once again.

“Sometimes I just want to die,” one member of the ex–ex-gay group will tell me, “when I think about how difficult it is just to get through a day, trying to act normal.”

“I've forgotten how to be myself,” another man will write. “How did I even act before ex-gay therapy? When I try to remember, I keep thinking maybe I'm wrong. They did that to me. They made me question my sanity.”

“I don't even talk to my family anymore,” one woman will write. “They still think I need more therapy. I think they'd rather see me dead.”

The chorus of voices will grow each year, revealing decades of pain, decades lost, families torn apart, relationships ruined because people outside the ex-gay world can never understand what we patients went through. On Beyond Ex-Gay, a website dedicated to surveying ex-gay survivors, users will describe in painstaking detail the lasting effects of reparative therapy.

It elevated sexuality from being part of my life to being the central fact of my life; everything revolved around it and my fear of it and being discovered.

Multiple suicide attempts, two psychiatric hospitalizations. Diagnosed severe type-2 bipolar disorder and moderate PTSD by multiple doctors in two different states. Ex-gay therapist told me the symptoms from these illnesses were caused by my “sexual confusion.”

Eleven years later, I still sometimes get nauseous when touching another man. It is difficult (possibly impossible?) to maintain a long-term sexual relationship.

I really lost touch with myself all those years, because I was so busy trying to be someone else. I am now confused about nearly everything—God, faith, where I belong, where I should go from here. I have lost friends. I often feel hopeless. I am trying to get my life back on track.

I will open the LIA handbook, read a few sentences, and feel the old shame wash over me until I can no longer focus. Once again, Smid's voice will swallow my own before I have a chance to say anything. I'll face doubt, distrust my memories, spend hours trying to reconstruct scenes so charged with emotion they'll seem impossible to pin down. I'll call my mother to ask for details, sit with her at a table and record her words, and nearly every time one of us will end up in tears. My mother will apologize again and again. I will try to comfort her, but I'll fail, because all of it truly was as horrible as we remember it, and because it will never really go away, we will never be completely
okay. Our family will never be what it otherwise might have been.

And God. I will not call on God at any point during this decade-long struggle. Not because I want to keep God out of my life, but because His voice is no longer there. What happened to me has made it impossible to speak with God, to believe in a version of Him that isn't charged with self-loathing. My ex-gay therapists took Him away from me, and no matter how many different churches I attend, I will feel the same dead weight in my chest. I will feel the pang of a deep love now absent from my life. I will continue to experiment with different denominations, different religions. I will continue to search. And even if I no longer believe in Hell, I will continue to struggle with the fear of it. Perhaps one day I will hear His voice again. Perhaps not. It's a sadness I deal with on a daily basis.

One day, when we think most of the pain is over, my mother will phone to inform me that a deacon from our old church refused to invite my father to preach at a revival service because a man stood up in protest during the middle of a church meeting, claiming that my father's “openly homosexual” son signified a spiritual lapse in my father's ministry. My parents will tell me that if I write this book, my father will risk losing his job as a pastor. The sins of the father. Every step in my success will become a reminder of ex-gay ideology. Every step in my success will become an immediate threat to my father's.

Years later, I will call my father one afternoon to let him know that this book is the book I have to write, that I might not
be okay if I don't finally write it, that I won't know who I am until I finish it.

“I just want you to be happy,” my father will say, his voice tight with everything he refuses. “I really do.”

And I will believe him.