Boy Erased. Garrard Conley
the hazy whitewashed buildings in the distance. I waited for the sunlight to spill over, but the longer I watched, the longer it seemed to take. I wondered if this was how time was going to work in this place: minutes as hours, hours as days, days as weeks.
“Once you enter the group, you’ll be well on your way to recovery,” Smid said. “The important thing to remember is to keep an open mind.”
I was here by my own choice, despite my growing skepticism, despite my secret wish to run away from the shame I’d felt since my parents found out I was gay. I had too much invested in my current life to leave it behind: in my family and in the increasingly blurry God I’d known since I was a toddler.
God, I prayed, leaving the office and making my way down the narrow hallway to the main room, the fluorescents ticking in their metal grids, I don’t know who You are anymore, but please give me the wisdom to survive this.
A FEW HOURS LATER, sitting in the middle of Smid’s circle, I was waiting for God to join me.
“You’re no better and no worse than any other sinner in this world,” Smid said. He kept his arms crossed behind his back, his whole body tense, as if he were tied to an invisible plank. “God sees all sin in the same light.”
I nodded along with the others. The ex-gay lingo had by now become familiar to me, though it had come as a shock when I’d first read it on the facility’s website, when I’d first learned that the homosexuality I’d been trying to ignore for most of my life was likely “out of control,” that I could end up messing around with someone’s dog if I didn’t cure myself. As absurd as the idea seems in hindsight, I had little else to go on. I was still young enough to have had only a few fleeting experiences with other men. Before college, I’d met only one openly gay man, my mother’s hairdresser, a bearish type who spent most of his time filling out what I saw as a stereotype: complimenting my looks; gossiping about coworkers; discussing plans for his next fabulous Christmas party, his pristine white beard already sculpted for the role of Dirty Santa. The rest of my bigotry I learned from pantomime: limp wrists and exaggerated sashays from mocking church members; phrases that lifted out of natural speech into show-tune lilt—“Oh, you shouldn’t have”; church petitions that had to be signed in order to keep our country safe from “perverts.” The flash of neon spandex, the rustle of a feather boa, the tight ass shaking for the camera: What I did manage to see on TV just seemed further proof that being gay was freakish, unnatural.
“You need to understand one very important fact,” Smid said, his voice so close I could feel it in my chest. “You’re using sexual sin to fill a God-shaped void in your life.”
I was here. No one could say I wasn’t trying.
THE MAIN ROOM was small and halogen lit, with one sliding door opening onto a sun-sick concrete porch. Our group sat in padded folding chairs near the front. On the walls behind us hung the laminated Twelve Steps that promised a slow but steady cure. Aside from these posters, the walls were mostly empty. Here, there were no crucifixes, no stations of the cross. Here, such iconography was considered idolatry, along with astrology, Dungeons & Dragons, Eastern religions, Ouija boards, Satanism, and yoga.
LIA had taken a more extreme stance against the secular world than any of the churches I’d grown up in, though the counselors’ way of thinking was not unfamiliar to me. Within the fundamentalist strain of Christianity that goes by the name Baptist, my family’s denomination, Missionary Baptist, forbade anything that had the power to distract the soul from direct communication with God and the Bible. Many of the other hundred or so denominations that comprised the Baptist spectrum often quibbled about what could or could not be permitted within the flock, with some churches taking these issues more seriously than others, subjects like the ethics of dancing and the pitfalls of non-Biblical reading still up for discussion. “Harry Potter is nothing more than a seducer of children’s souls,” a visiting Baptist preacher once told our family’s church. I had no doubt that my LIA counselors would also shun any mention of Harry Potter, that my time spent in Hogwarts would have to remain a private pleasure, and that I had entered into an even more serious pact with God by coming here, one that required me to abolish most of what had come before LIA. Before entering this room, I had been told to cast aside everything but my Bible and my handbook.
Since most of LIA’s customers had grown up within this literal-minded Protestantism and were desperate for a cure, the counselors’ strict rules were met with mild applause. The unadorned white walls of the facility seemed appropriate decor for a waiting room in which we would wait to receive God’s forgiveness. Even classical music was forbidden—“Beethoven, Bach, etc. are not considered Christian”—a heavy silence blanketing the room during our morning Quiet Time, drifting into our daily activities and inspiring an atmosphere that seemed if not holy, then at least not secular.
The study area at the back of the room, home to a bookshelf filled with inspirational literature and a hefty stack of Bibles, contained dozens of testimonies from successful ex-gays.
“Slowly yet surely I began to recover,” I’d read that morning, squeaking my finger down the glossy page. “I began to recover from not having a male friend unless it involved sex. I started learning who I really was, instead of the false personality I created to make myself acceptable.”
I HAD SPENT the last several months trying to erase my “false personality.” I’d walked out of my college dorm one winter day and jumped into the campus’s half-frozen lake. Shivering, I walked back to the dorm in water-suctioned shoes, feeling rebaptized. In the hot shower that followed, I watched, dazed by the shock of icy heat on my numb skin, as a drop of water traced the edge of the showerhead. I prayed, Lord, make me as pure as that.
During my stay at Love in Action, I would repeat the prayer until it became a kind of mantra. Lord, make me as pure as that.
I REMEMBER little about the ride to the facility with my mother. I had tried to look away, to prevent my mind from recording what passed by outside the passenger’s-side window, though a few details remained: the muddy caramel-colored Mississippi passing behind the steel girders of the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge, the scale of our American Nile feeling like the perfect stimulant for my uncaffeinated mind; the glass pyramid glittering at the edge of the city, spreading its hot light across our windshield. It was early June, and by midmorning almost every surface in the city would be too hot to touch for more than a few seconds, everything sweltering by noon. The only relief came in the morning, the sun resting at the edge of the horizon, still only a suggestion of light.
“Surely they could afford something better than this,” my mother said, steering us into a parking space at the front of a rectangular strip mall. The location was more upscale than much of rest of the city, part of a wealthier suburb, though this strip mall was arguably the least attractive landmark for miles around, a place for lower-end retail stores and small clinics to find a temporary home. Whitewashed red brick and glass. Double doors that opened onto a white foyer with fake plants. A logo above the entrance: inverted red triangle with a heart-shaped hole cut out of the middle of it, a series of thin white lines spreading across the gap. We stepped out of the car and headed toward the doors, my mother always a few steps ahead.
Once we entered the foyer, a smiling receptionist asked me to sign my name in a ledger. The man looked to be in his midtwenties. He wore a polo shirt that fell loosely from his chest, and his eyes were a bright honest cobalt. I’d been expecting some wan-faced wraith who’d already erased everything interesting about himself. Instead, here was someone who looked like he’d be willing to play a few rounds of Halo with me, then use video-game analogies to tell me a little about what God had done for him. You have to fight against the enemies, the aliens trying to invade your soul. I’d met plenty of hip youth pastors with a similar look and attitude.
I can no longer remember his name. I can no longer remember if there were any signs in that foyer of what was to come, any paintings on the wall, any rules posted. The foyer exists for me now as a blindingly white waiting room, the kind you see in Hollywood depictions of heaven: a blank space.
“Can I see the place?” my mother asked. Something about the way her voice lifted into a polite