Boy Erased (3 page)

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.

•   •   •

“T
ELL
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.

•   •   •

A
LTHOUGH
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.

•   •   •

S
MID
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.

•   •   •

“N
OW
,” S
MID
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.”

•   •   •

I
T
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
X
s. 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.