Boy Erased

“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.

“FOR 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.

Over the next two weeks, LIA staff, along with my parents, would determine what kind of hiatus was necessary in my case. As its name suggested, the Source was the fountainhead of a long and difficult journey.

“TELL THEM what you did, T,” Smid said. We were in the Group Sharing portion of our afternoon session. “You need to admit what you did so it won’t happen again.”

T, an obese middle-aged man wearing several black cardigans, stood before our group to confess, stone-faced, that he had once again attempted suicide.

This was T’s seventh suicide attempt since coming to the program. He’d tried pills, knives, whatever he could find.

“Typical,” J whispered, leaning in, his warm cowboy breath tickling my neck. “The guy’s an attention hog. Got too many daddy issues to name.”

T seemed to shrink into his cardigans, the buried half of him stark black against his pale face. Whatever had first devastated him had left long ago, but LIA would try and dig it up.

“Who among us will cast the first stone?” Smid said, turning back to our group. “We have all sinned and come short of the glory of God.”

It seemed earnestness was more than half the battle in the fight for an ex-gay lifestyle. You had to want to change, and until you wanted to change so badly that you’d rather die than not change, you would never make it past Step One—admitting you were wrong. The reason pre–ex-gays like T felt powerless to change, Smid said, was that deep-seated family issues kept them separate from God. “Suicide isn’t the answer,” he said. “The answer is God. Plain and simple.”

“What I did was wrong,” T said, pocketing his pink-scarred hands inside his topmost cardigan, his words scripted. “I know that with God’s help I can learn to see the value in my life.”

J coughed a laugh into the hollow of his fist. Don’t count on it.

When T finally sat down, we all said, “I love you, T.” It was a program requirement, rule number nine in the Group Norms section: Once someone from your group stops talking, say “I love you, ________.”

All of God’s children being equal, our names were interchangeable.

“I love you, T,” Smid said.

ALTHOUGH I didn’t know it at the time, Smid had given different advice before. He was still dealing with a decade-long backlash that had arisen from alleged advice he’d given to one of the first young men to attend his program. According to Family & Friends, a Memphis newspaper, Smid had told the man that it would be better for him to kill himself than to live as a homosexual.

Various bloggers have since approximated the number of suicides resulting from LIA’s treatment as anywhere from twenty to thirty cases, though figures like these are impossible to pin down.

The controversy didn’t end there. According to a Daily Beast interview with Peterson Toscano, a former patient of Smid’s who attended LIA meetings in the late ’90s, LIA had also been responsible for staging a mock funeral for a “would-be defector,” a young man of nineteen or twenty who felt he might benefit from an openly gay lifestyle outside the facility. LIA members stood before the boy’s reposing body and spoke about “how terrible it was that he didn’t stick with God, and now look where he is, he’s dead because he left.” They read mock obituaries that described the boy’s rapid descent into HIV, then AIDS, and cried over him. This went on until the boy was fully convinced that his sinful behavior would lead him to a death without any hope of resurrection. Though the boy did finally flee LIA, it was only years later and, according to a conversation I had with Toscano, only after years of psychological damage.

It was our fear of shame, followed by our fear of Hell, that truly prevented us from committing suicide.

SMID FINISHED his speech and waited in silence for our faces to register the importance of Step One. After several long seconds, he dismissed us for a break, cupping his palms together for a single clap. The sound was jarring. I stood and stretched, then walked through the sliding glass door and kept walking across the porch, feeling like I could walk for hours, days, weeks. The others followed, their shoes scratching the concrete.

I wanted to talk more with J, who seemed like a nice-enough guy, someone who hadn’t been here long enough to forget what the first day was like. But J stayed seated inside, and I ended up standing at the far edge of the porch by myself. I could see S standing just on the other side of the glass, straightening her skirt and aiming the corner of a shy smile in my direction. T was still sitting at the end of our semicircle, his gaze fixed on a patch of concrete near my feet, where a few tawny birds pecked at crumbs left behind by one of the group members. He cupped his hands in front of him as though they were filled with birdseed, as though he might scatter a pecking trail from the door to his chair.

“NOW,” SMID SAID, walking over to a whiteboard on the opposite wall, “can anyone here tell me what a genogram is?” He clapped his hands together. “Anyone?” He picked up a black dry-erase marker from the silver tray at the bottom of the whiteboard.

S straightened her shoulders and raised one hand, the other hand tugging her skirt below the red knobs of her knees—what I would soon learn were rules two, four, and six of the Group Norms section of our handbooks: “(2) No slouching in chairs, sitting back on chairs’ hind legs, sitting with arms crossed, rolling eyes, or making disgusting faces; (4) Raise hands to speak; (6) Clients are to sit in such a way as to not cause another to stumble.” She’d obviously been here long enough to tame most of her False Images.

“Yes?” Smid said.

“A genogram is a family tree,” she said, “only one that shows patterns of family history as well. Kind of like an illustrated genealogy.” Or a character list, I thought, remembering the many hours I’d spent in my dorm room trying to chart the family history of Wuthering Heights in my Moleskine, annotations like “the meaner Cathy” written beside characters’ names. I wondered if I’d get my notebook back.

“Good answer,” Smid said, writing the words “Family Tree—Genealogy” in large cursive across the top of the board. He turned back to us. “Anything we can add to this?”

I shifted in the padded chair. I’d always felt this nervousness in classes, this need to put an end to the silence following a question no matter how inadequate my answer. I also wanted to impress my fellow group members. I wanted to show them how much I knew, let them see how much smarter I was, how I didn’t make obvious typos, how I didn’t belong here, not really, I was just passing through, I would find my way out of here in no time.

“That was a good guess, S,” Smid said, retrieving a stack of posters from the blond-haired boy. He handed the stack to T, who took one sheet and passed it on. “A genogram shows hereditary patterns and sinful behaviors in our families. It doesn’t trace our genealogy so much as the history behind our present sinful behavior.”

Smid walked back to the board. He pulled off the marker cap with a flourish. First he wrote an A for alcoholism. Then he wrote P for promiscuous. He filled the board with the thick black letters we would use as a key for our genograms. H for homosexuality; D for drugs; $ for gambling; M for mental illness; Ab for abortion; G for gang involvement; Po for pornography. I tried to ignore the lack of parallelism in Smid’s list, a basic style rule I’d picked up in junior high English class. The medium, I told myself, didn’t always have to be perfect. J took one of the poster sheets and passed the stack to me. I could feel his hand tremble as it passed between us. I placed my sheet on the beige Berber carpet at my feet.

Smid turned to face us, clicking the marker cap shut. “Trauma is often linked to generational sin,” he said. “We have to understand where the sin came from in the first place. How it trickled down from father to son, mother to daughter.” I recognized the sentiment from a Bible verse popular in our family’s church—Exodus 20:5.

I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and forth generation of them that hate me.

The blond-haired boy handed each of us a stack of rubber band–wrapped colored pencils. The veteran members of our group slid from their chairs to begin the daily group project, bringing their posters with them. I quickly followed, my knees already accustomed to hours of kneeling at the tung-oiled altar of our family’s church and asking God to change me. I had spent eighteen years of my life going to church three times a week, heeding the altar call along with my father and the other men, trying to believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible.

“The compulsive patterns of parents influencing children,” Smid continued. “This is the most common root of sexual sin.”

Our color-coded genograms would tell us where everything had begun to go wrong. Trace our genealogy back far enough and we would find, if not the answer to our own sexual sins, then at least the sense of which dead and degenerate limb in our family tree had been responsible.

I scooted my poster over on the carpet so I could be closer to J. S slid her eyes at me as I passed, but I pretended not to notice.

J nudged my ribs with a red pencil, leaving a small checkmark on my white button-down. The weight of my gaze slid down his long ropy arm to where his purple-veined wrist was drawing a wavy red arrow of abuse from his father to his mother.

“I bet that’s it,” he said. His voice was so monotone, it was hard to tell if he was serious or simply regurgitating LIA lingo. I wondered if irony had been a greater part of his personality pre-LIA. I wondered if I would have liked him more outside of this place. “I bet some of that abuse turned me gay. Or it could have been Dad’s D. Or maybe Mom had an Ab before I was born.”

I wondered how anyone could know so much about his family. My clan was tight-lipped; when our past slipped through, it was only in accidental bursts or in code.

“I don’t know where to start,” I said, staring at the blank poster. It was a problem I experienced each time I sat down to write, but I had slowly started getting better at it. Relaxing my thoughts, I could enter my psyche through a side door, sit down cross-legged and examine the hieroglyphs.

“Start with the worst,” J said, smiling, “unless you’re the worst.”

IT WAS HARD to conjure a family tree out of early childhood memories. My father’s life had, from the moment of his calling to be a preacher, filled a vacuum within our family mythology. His importance in our town and community seemed to override everything we knew about ourselves. I was His Son. My mother was His Wife.

People had always seen my father as a devout believer, but at the age of fifty he had taken the next step, stumbling down our church aisle, shaking and crying, kneeling with the entire congregation until our preacher declared that God had called my father to the service. “I was aimless before I found my calling,” my father repeated weekly, standing before pulpits across the state of Arkansas, until my mother and I started to believe him, to clap along with his audience. “I was nothing. But God healed me. He made me whole. Gave me purpose.”

In less than a week, in the middle of the Source program, my mother and I planned to drive from the LIA facility to my father’s ordination as a Missionary Baptist preacher, where we would be asked to stand with him on a brightly lit stage before a church audience of more than two hundred people. The trip was already preapproved by staff and considered integral to my development, a real opportunity to test my devotion to the cause. At the church, my mother and I would be expected to hold hands, smile, to burst into tears at the appropriate moment. Important Baptist Missionary Association of America members would be traveling from every corner of Arkansas to publicly interview the man who many were hinting might be their next Peter, their next Paul, the man whose moral compass might set things to rights for the Baptists, usher in a stronger belief in the Bible’s inerrancy, distill many of the complex issues that had recently begun to plague their association. Issues like divorce, cohabitation, and—most pressing—homosexuality.

“Just think about who you are,” J said, adding the finishing touches to his poster. He was so accustomed to these exercises he could have drawn the symbols with his eyes closed. “Then trace it back to your family history.”

I began by writing the names of my great-grandparents at the top of the poster, followed by my grandparents, then my parents. Next to my parents I added aunts and uncles and all of my cousins. At the very bottom, in slightly smaller print, I added my own name. I followed the genogram key as best I could, placing only one or two sin symbols next to each relative’s name. The grandfather with the alcohol problem: A. The grandmother who divorced him because of the alcohol problem: a line with two diagonal slashes. The two grandparents who’d died one after the other: twin Xs. The aunt whose first and second husbands both died in airplane crashes on the way to Saigon, who’d later remarried and divorced: a line with two diagonal slashes. The uncle with the drug and alcohol and gambling problems: D and A and $, respectively.

As I diagrammed my family tree, coloring in the boxes and arrows and textual symbols, the genogram started to make sense. It provided a sense of security to blame others before me, to assign everyone his or her proper symbol and erase all other characteristics. I could place an H beside my own name, and everything else about me would cease to matter. If I wondered why I was sitting on this carpeted floor with a group of strangers, I could count up the list of familial sins, shrug, and move on to the next activity without asking further questions. All of this confusion about who I was and why my life had led me to this moment could be folded up with my finished genogram, slipped inside a folder, and tucked away in one of LIA’s many filing cabinets.

“It looks like you’ve got a lot of A on both sides of the family,” J said, admiring my poster, his voice a steady monotone. “That must’ve done a real number on your mom and dad. You know, they say sometimes the biggest sins skip a generation. You must be really gay.”

“That sucks,” I said, looking up to make sure no one had heard me. Even mild profanity was strictly prohibited. “I guess it’ll take a long time to get cured.”

Smid stepped between us, eyeing our posters. “Good work,” he said, patting me on the back. Light and cool, the pads of his fingers barely registered. Later I would feel this touch again, on my elbow, as he corrected my flamboyant akimbo stance to something more straight appropriate, a flagging Cro-Magnon pose popular in small Southern towns like the one where I grew up.

“I don’t want to hear that language again,” he added, his voice lower, a filed-down baritone worn by strain. “Only God’s language is tolerated here.”

I could hear S laughing quietly behind me.

“Newbie,” she whispered.

“No shit,” I said. The curse registered as a slap, but she quickly composed herself and laughed again, loud enough to draw Smid’s attention back to us.

Looking back, I think she must have been glad, for once, not to be the object of the room’s derision, to be rid of the attention of people who considered themselves lucky to know someone like her who hid an even more shameful secret. She must have been glad that people for one second had stopped picturing her lying on her back in the cramped living room of her trailer, the half-empty jar of peanut butter like a dark stain on the kitchen counter as her parents entered through the front door to find their daughter changed beyond recognition.

“Take your time,” Smid said, circling back to me. “You’ll want to get this right.”

I slid the pencil behind my ear and surveyed the half-finished genogram, trying to recall the sins of my fathers. I sat like this until the activity time ended, afraid to write something I couldn’t erase.