Please make me pure

So, while I haven't as of yet seen the movie version, I did finish Boy Erased: A Memoir by Garrard Conley this morning.

Which is at once rough reading and also irritating at the same time.

Since the tale is told in a non-linear fashion, the gist is our narrator grows up Missionary Baptist with a Car Salesman father striving to become a minister. He dates a girl throughout high school, but remains chaste beyond a few kisses. When he goes to college, he meets a guy who rapes him. Said guy calls Garrard's parents and tells them Garrard is gay. Garrard winds up in Love In Action trying to become an Ex-Gay. End result, Garrard figures out the whole program is essentially a sham and his mother pulls him out. It takes years, but he eventually patches things up with his parents, sort of.

On one hand, one is happy he he got out before the more extreme methods of conversion happen. His rape could have been a lot worse. His parents still love him. That doesn't make any of this narrative any more justifiable by any of the participants. What happened shouldn't happen to anyone. I realize that it can and does happen, but...

I guess I've just been lucky, not growing up believing that that who I am somehow makes me less in God's eyes, that whom I love somehow makes me just as bad as a murderer.

Again, this blog isn't space for me to moralize, to point out that I have huge issues with beliefs that make parents disown their children, that wind up with programs that essentially preach that what's "wrong" with me is somehow a reflection of my parents' sins. I was lucky, even if my own path to where I am now was rocky. To my knowledge, mom's never faced consequences affecting her livelihood and calling based on my actions. On the other hand, I also vaguely remember what it was like to build a giant box to contain myself and shove things I thought would cause shunning into that box. It's been over 20 years or more, but yeah, some of that is still here.

So, yeah.

While I may not be a person who is directly targeted by this memoir, that would be more people who've been through the Ex-gay process and people who need to know the horror of it, but I could feel more than I wanted to of it echoing in my own soul.