Boy Erased: A Memoir

by Garrard Conley

His idol was Billy Graham, an evangelist who used the public sphere to such an advantage that he had been able to shape our country’s political climate by whispering into the ears of no less than eleven presidents.

NEED HELP? The choice to accept help from David would come to seem oddly menacing. Later, I would spend too much time thinking about the choices I made that year. Irrational as it was, I sometimes believed he might not have raped me just a few months later—lowered my face to the keyhole fly of his cotton briefs and forced me to go down on him until I gagged on a cocktail of my own vomit and his semen, the intimacy I’d thought I wanted from him only a few minutes before now forced on me in such excess—if I’d only chosen to carry my own boxes into the dorm.

Rape

EVEN IF you know the person—especially if you know the person—rape, and the memory of it, becomes a blinding flash. A brush against something bigger than yourself. Sometimes the experience takes the form of a divine visitation, such is our need to displace the reality of it.

Rape

I would never get close enough to the memory to see what was really there. For the longest time, I wouldn’t allow myself to admit that it was rape at all. Like many victims, I was embarrassed. How could I have let this happen?

If life was ever going to make sense again, I would have to search harder for clear answers.

Certainly not cured, but no longer filled with the sins I’d kept secret for so long. Yet rather than feeling relieved, I felt—what, exactly? My guilt and fear had all but disappeared in only a matter of days, replaced by what I could only describe as Nothing.

Nothing

turned me into a skeptic, a heretic, someone who second-guessed everything he felt or saw.

For the time being, it seemed like God had abandoned me. Like the Underground Man, I was trapped in stasis, in Nothing.

The only moments when the ache became a sharp pain were when I allowed myself to imagine a happy life with these crushes, a rarity to be sure.

Perhaps, had I known how close I truly was to suicide, I would have kept away from the jail and its dank cells, its display of lives broken by bad choices and bad luck, of people who had been unable to change themselves when it most counted—yet

Both sides seemed to suggest the same efficient solution: cut ties. Either abandon what you’ve known your entire life and your family, or abandon what you’re learning about life and new ideas.

Rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose. The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who have used them, to disguise themselves so as to perfect them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them. —MICHEL FOUCAULT, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice

Rules

The truth is, being heartless came so easy for post-LIA me that I didn’t even have to think about it. The trick was to believe that cutting people out of your life was a necessary step in your development.

Often, it felt like a small victory to realize that another point of contact had lost its hold on me. I was in control of how quickly I lost the weight, and it felt good not only to feel the past leaving my body—all that fat like rings of a trunk now narrowing, disappearing—but also to see the shock on people’s faces, the lack of recognition at first glance, the double take. I was a different boy.

Weight loss

“We learn to manipulate,” Smid added. “We learn to be seductive, purposely unclear about our motivations in relationships as self-protection.” I looked up from the workbook. The words didn’t seem so naked, so vapid, when he said them. It was easier to lie when you believed the lie.

Lies

Nails mark the places where I’ve just removed photos of me and my last boyfriend: a reminder of the many casualties suffered in a long string of withering intimacies, advances made and accepted but rebuffed once things got too serious. No one is going to get close enough to hurt me.

I really lost touch with myself all those years, because I was so busy trying to be someone else. I am now confused about nearly everything—God, faith, where I belong, where I should go from here. I have lost friends. I often feel hopeless. I am trying to get my life back on track.

And God. I will not call on God at any point during this decade-long struggle. Not because I want to keep God out of my life, but because His voice is no longer there. What happened to me has made it impossible to speak with God, to believe in a version of Him that isn’t charged with self-loathing.

I will feel the pang of a deep love now absent from my life. I will continue to experiment with different denominations, different religions. I will continue to search. And even if I no longer believe in Hell, I will continue to struggle with the fear of it. Perhaps one day I will hear His voice again. Perhaps not. It’s a sadness I deal with on a daily basis.