Garrard Conley - Boy Erased

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 question made me feel uneasy, as if she were asking to look at real estate.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the receptionist said. “Only clients allowed in the back. Security reasons.”

“Security?”

“Yes, ma’am. Many of our clients deal with repressed family issues. Seeing a parent, no matter whose parent, no matter if it’s someone nice like you”—a winning, deep-dimpled smile—“can be a little unsettling. That’s why we call this a safe zone.” He stretched out both his arms at his sides, sweeping them wide—slowly and a little rigidly, I thought, as though his movements had once been much grander and he had since learned to rein them in. “Since you’re only in the two-week program, you’ll have access to your son at all hours except program time.”

Program time would be from nine to five. Evenings, nights, and early mornings I would spend with my mother in a Hampton Inn & Suites nearby, leaving the room only for necessities. I was supposed to spend the majority of my free time in the room doing homework for the next day’s session. The schedule sheet the receptionist handed me was fairly straightforward, with each hour accounted for in a black-bordered square, words like “quiet time” and “activity time” and “counseling” written in all caps.

The receptionist handed me a thick LIA handbook and a folder. I opened the handbook, its plastic spine crackling, and was greeted by a black-and-white welcome note with my name printed in large type. Beneath my name, a few Bible verses, Psalms 32:5–6, written in a casual modern English different from the formal King James Version I’d grown up with.

I finally admitted all my sins to you and stopped trying to hide them. I said to myself, I will confess them to the Lord; and you forgave me! All my guilt is gone.

I flipped through the pages at random as my mother peered over my shoulder. I wanted to close the book the minute I saw the obvious typos and clip-art graphics. I wanted my mother to think the best of the place before she left, not because I felt like defending the poorly designed handbook, but because I wanted the moment to pass as quickly as possible without any more of her overly polite interrogations. If she started asking questions about design and casual Bible language, she might start asking questions about qualifications, about why we were even here in the first place, and I knew this would only make things worse. Questions only prolonged the pain of these moments, and they almost always went unanswered. I was done with asking questions about how I had ended up in this situation, with searching for other answers, other realities, other families or bodies I could have been born into. Every time I realized that there weren’t any other alternatives, I felt worse for asking. I was ready to take things as they came now.

“Call me if you need anything.” my mother said, squeezing my shoulder. She was all blond hair and heavy blue mascara, blue eyes and a perennial floral-print top: a spot of Technicolor in this drab place.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the receptionist said, “but we have to keep his phone while he’s here.” For security reasons. “We’ll inform you if anything important pops up.”

“Do you think that’s necessary?”

My mother and the receptionist finished their conversation—“It’s the rules, ma’am. It’s in his best interest”—and then my mother was saying good-bye, telling me she was headed off to check us into the hotel, that she would be back to pick me up at five o’clock sharp. She hugged me, and I watched her go, her head high, her shoulders square, the glass double doors swinging closed behind her with a sigh from their pneumatic hinges. I’d seen her like this once before, during the year both my grandparents died. She had carried me through that year, patted a space for me next to her on the sofa as visitors wove in and out of our living room carrying casseroles and baskets filled with glazed pastries. She had run her fingers through my hair and whispered that death was a process, that my grandparents had both lived happy lives. I wondered if this was how she felt now, if she thought that LIA was part of a necessary process—difficult, yes, but easier to accept once you knew it was part of God’s plan.

“Let’s get you checked in,” the receptionist said.

I followed him to another room, also white walled and empty, where a blond-haired boy stood beside a table and asked me to remove everything in my pockets. The boy was barely older than I was, perhaps twenty, and he carried an air of authority that made me think he’d been here a while. He was handsome in a svelte, twinkish way, tall and angular, though he wasn’t my type. Then again, I didn’t really know what my type was.

On the nights when I’d allowed myself to look up images of men in underwear on line, I’d only been able get halfway down the page, the pixels threading strand by strand in a slow-motion striptease, before I felt the need to exit the browser and try to forget what I’d seen, the laptop growing too hot in my lap. There were flashes, of course, hints of attraction emerging in my occasional fantasies—a toned bicep here, the sharp V of a pelvis there, a collage of various dimples beneath a series of aquiline noses—but the picture was never complete.

The blond-haired boy waited, tapping his index finger on the folding table between us. I dug in my pockets and removed my cell phone, a black Motorola RAZR whose small screen suddenly lit up with an image of the lake, my college campus’s obligatory slice of nature: a few maple trees clustered around a glassy surface. The blond-haired boy scrunched up his nose at the sight of it, as though there were something perverse lurking under the peaceful scene.

“I’m going to have to look through all your pictures,” he said. “Messages, too.”

“Standard procedure,” the receptionist explained. “All pictures will be taken for the purpose of sobering reevaluation.” He was quoting from the False Images (FI) section of the handbook, a section I would later be asked to memorize.

We want to encourage each client, male and female, by affirming your gender identity. We also want each client to pursue integrity in all his/her actions and appearances. Therefore, any belongings, appearances, clothing, actions, or humor that might connect you to an inappropriate past are excluded from the program. These hindrances are called False Images (FI) . FI behavior may include hyper-masculinity, seductive clothing, mannish/boyish attire (on women), excessive jewelry (on men), and “campy” or gay/lesbian behavior and talk.

I looked down at my white button-down, at the khaki pants my mother had pressed for me earlier that morning, starched pleats running down the center of each leg. Nothing in my wardrobe or phone could be considered an FI. I’d made sure of that before coming here, checking my reflection in the mirror for any wrinkles, deleting long strings of text messages between friends, waiting for the gray delete bar to finish eating up all of the hope and anxiety and fear I’d shared with the people I trusted. I felt newly minted, as if I’d stepped out of my old skin that morning, my “inappropriate past” still rumpled on the bedroom floor with the rest of my unwashed laundry.