I moved my things into the room. The beds were lined up across from one another, and we each got a separate dresser. At the far end of the room we had a much cheerier window than the one in 307. It looked out toward the church, across the front lawn.
Once I’d moved all my stuff in, I couldn’t stop talking. It made me nervous to have such an attractive guy around. I told Nicky nearly everything about myself and then some. He listened as he got ready to go to work-we all had to find nine-to-five jobs within thirty days of getting there. I eventually found an administrative job at a desktop publishing firm.
When I ran out of things about me, I asked him about himself. Nicky told me he’d just started work at a printing office a couple of days ago, so we had a little professional talk at first. Then he said he originally came from Baton Rouge, but at sixteen, his pop kicked him out of the house when he caught him having sex with another man. He said it was even a boyfriend he loved, not a cheap encounter, but that didn’t matter. His mother agreed with his father, and even his brother sided with them because they all had religion. Nicky called his dad a “fucking hypocrite.”
Nicky’s boyfriend was his age, so Nicky couldn’t live with him. They ended up running away to Chicago. They found a place but then broke up. They stayed roommates, but then they got into crack cocaine, and things really started going wrong. Eventually Nicky became a drifter. I wanted to hear more, but he kept saying he had to go. As usual, I couldn’t help myself and kept asking questions until he broke the conversation off and closed the door.
That night, I officially met the other men in the program. Bill gathered all twelve of us on the couch in the rec room, and after we shook hands, he settled us down to make an announcement. “What I see in front of me is a bunch of straight guys,” he crowed. “That’s right! From now on, you are all heterosexual men. That’s the way I want you to think of yourselves, because you’ve taken the first, biggest step toward curing your same-sex attractions. Give yourselves a big round of applause. You made it!” We all clapped.
“Great news!” Jake said, pretending to get up and leave. “Glad that’s all over with.” We laughed.
“Not so fast, Mister,” Bill said. “Changing your mind about who you are is only the first step. Changing your behavior is step two through about two million. I can’t just snap my fingers and turn you all straight. I wish I could.” A serious hush fell among the guys. “But we’re all going to work together to help you achieve your goals: leaving sin and decadence behind, and living in accordance with the truths of Jesus Christ. Because at Resurrection, we believe that if you change what you do and what you think, you are no longer the same person. Live in Christ, and He’ll show you the way out of homosexuality.” Another round of applause came on its own. Then Bill talked about his own struggle, including being molested by his great aunt for five years, followed by his mother’s death and a period of teenage alcoholism and violence. Right when he was about to slash an ex-friend’s throat with a broken bottle during a fight outside a gay bar, a medallion of Christ’s head fell out from inside his victim’s collar. When he saw that, Bill broke down.
Bill telling his story opened us all up to telling our own. Nicky told us about the rest of his life. At nine, his father had forced sex on him, and that kept on until he turned sixteen and his dad threw him out. “The bastard was jealous!” Nicky shouted, with a bitter laugh. After he got to Chicago, he had a lot of sex to raise his self-esteem and then got addicted to heroin. He had a falling-out with his ex over money and moved onto the street. For a year or two he lived in a squat and slept with men for drug money. This was less than a year ago. He told me later that he thought he might have AIDS but he didn’t want to take the test.
Other guys had similar life stories. School bullies had beaten up George every day on his way back from high school. His father tried teaching him to fight but that didn’t work. He came out of the closet and his folks shunned him. They stopped celebrating his birthday and giving him Christmas presents, and after a while they refused to even look at him, so eventually he had to move out.
Jake’s parents had split up, and his protective father died. He didn’t get along with his stepfather, and eventually the guy stabbed him in the back with an ice pick. He had to have extensive back surgery and was lucky to be alive. That explained why one of his shoulders was a little higher than the other. Keith, the other black guy in the program, came from Chicago. He had gotten fired because he stayed home and masturbated to male pornography instead of showing up at work. His fiancee found out. She broke off the engagement and told his family everything. Bernard, a Catholic priest, had been recognized in a gay bar and a scandal erupted. His church paid his way to come from Champaign, Illinois. They made a deal to take him back, but only if he graduated from Resurrection.
Glenn, a shy, nervous boy from Houston, came from oil money, and his parents had said they would disinherit him if he didn’t change. Randolph, who’d escorted me to the john, was a sixty-seven-year-old retired dentist from Seattle. A widower, he had gone behind his wife’s back with men since before they got married. He’d even had a twenty-year relationship on the side. After he’d broken up with the fellow and his wife had died, Randy started to go to gay bars and host late-night leather sex parties in his basement. He didn’t like the person he was becoming, and he didn’t want his folks to find out.
Derek, a big linebacker-sized guy with very feminine ways, cried when he talked about how living in the gay community had worsened his troubles, and didn’t think he could change, but everybody begged him not to give up hope. A Cuban guy, Enrique, had a history of mental illness. His family had some money, and when he told them about his SSAs, his father told him to get married and have a kid anyway. Nobody in his family would talk to him, so he couldn’t tell them that he was HIV-positive. Later in the program, he got attacked in the street by some anti-gay people even though he hadn’t been doing anything gay.
When I told my story, I mentioned to Enrique that marrying a woman and having a child won’t fix homosexual urges. Bill agreed. “Only committing yourself to Christ can do that,” he said. By the end we’d all had ourselves a good cry. It felt great to be among people who understood, who could relate to my same difficulties. We hugged one another and Bill told us he loved us and had faith that we would all succeed. Judging from our stories, we all needed that.
Now that I’d come out of Safekeeping, I gained phone privileges. Annie had called several times, so I returned the call. We sighed and couldn’t think of anything to say a lot of the time. I tried to fill the dead air with stories about my day. I told her about Nicky.
“What does he look like?” she asked.
“He’s just some hick with a busted-up nose,” I said. “He used to be a junkie.”
“Is that ... attractive to you? Does it seem tough?”
“No, no, no. I don’t like tough.”
“But you picked up a cop.”
“Darn it, Annie, it isn’t like that.” It had gotten stuffy in the phone booth.
“Please just stop lying to me, Gary.”
“Please just start trusting me. I’m not lying.” Another long silence came, one that felt as long as the hundreds of miles between Memphis and Orlando.
“This is a lot of trouble for us,” she said. “I’m counting on you to work hard.” She meant to remind me that she’d paid off the debt I left when I died, and that I owed her something for all that.
“I told you I would use my job money to pay the fees,” I protested. “It’s not fair for you to put extra pressure on me.”
“Now you’re going to tell me about pressure? You want to rarse a daughter on your own?” This time the silence took on a chilly, aggressive nature, like a draft forcing its way through a broken window.
“Put Cheryl on the phone,” I said, to change the subject. From then on, Annie always brought her to the phone during our nightly calls, but she never asked to speak to me. I had one-sided conversations with her, and the
n Annie came back on and we’d argue until the cows came home-more like until the cows woke up the next morning.
I also gave my mother a call. She sounded very weak and far away, even though I could tell she was excited to hear from me after all this time. “I was like to die of grief,” she said. “I lost my whole family,” she kept saying. You didn’t lose]oe, I wanted to tell her, you disowned him. But reminding her of that wouldn’t have accomplished anything. Dakota and Lisette had been softening things when they talked about my father. It turned out he had died because he refused to go to the doctor for the disease that made his skin hard-scleroderma, Mama said-and it spread to his internal organs. Mama took him once he got too weak to protest, but it was too late-Daddy’s stubborn nature killed him.
With the possibility of saying all I needed to say to him gone, I felt numb. Minister Mike’s sermon came back to me, about how there was only time when somebody was alive to say you loved them, or that they’d hurt you. I wondered if the minister had ever found out about Chester, and what he’d done. I became angry with Daddy for everything he’d done to me, and even more with myself for never speaking up. I got afraid that if I couldn’t confront my father, I’d never cure my gayness. Like he’d died on purpose, to fix me in time.
“Are you coming to see me?” Mama wanted to know.
“I’m not sure. I’m in this place, Mama.”
“What do you mean you’re not sure? Why can’t you get down here? You in jail?”
“No, Mama, it’s not jail, but I can’t leave right now.”
“Oh, I know, it’s like a rehab. Are you on the drugs, Gary? There’s nothing so bad you can’t tell your mama.”
Since she had come up with her own explanation, I decided not to complicate her life any more. “Yes, this place does help people who have had substance abuse problems,” I managed to say. There was something too bad to tell my mama. The shadow of my father’s ornery nature lived on in her, almost as powerful as when he was around. Maybe more, because the memory of somebody dead is always of a nicer person, one you ought to obey. Life never answers anybody’s questions, but it seems like death makes you an authority on plumb near everything.
“It’s good that you’re getting help, Sugar. Just trust in the Lord, He’ll see you through. You come soon, though, ‘cause I ain’t long for this world, you know. Without your daddy it ain’t the same.”
“I’ll call again when I get the time.” Mama proceeded to describe the fates of every family member and neighbor she thought I would remember, except for Joe. She talked so long that Dwayne, who was waiting for the phone, had to take the phone out of my hand, say good-bye to her, and hang up because my phone time had expired. I protested, but not a whole lot.
The typical day at Resurrection didn’t include much free time. It reminded me of the snack food conferences I had gone to in the past, except that here the seminars and group discussions were mandatory. Breakfast took place from 7:30 to 8:30. Then we’d go to our jobs. Once we got back, we had a family-style supper at 6:30. From 7:45 to 10 on Mondays and Thursdays, we took a class on the steps out of homosexuality. The class focused on a bunch of things: it helped us identify and work through the root causes of our unwanted attractions, to center on the Lord and healing, to bond with one another and give one another strength, and to build strong masculine identities. We followed the principles laid down by Charlie-Dr. Charles Soffione, the founder of Resurrection Ministries, who had written a wellknown book called Stand Up Straight. In the book, Dr. Soffione explains that SSAs aren’t caused just by gender confusion, but also by the failure to bond properly with our same-sex parents. From the kinds of things people said about their parents in our sessions, it didn’t seem like you could argue with that theory.
After 10 p.m. was Open Activity or Quiet Time. That meant phone calls and writing letters home for people who had family and friends, and playing ping-pong or pool or board games for everybody else. Tuesdays we studied the Bible from 7:30 to 10 p.m. Fridays we had Group Share at that same time. Group Share was like a confessional time, when we checked in and told the group about our daily struggles against homosexual attractions, usually for people we worked with at our nine-to-five jobs, or people from our pasts. If somebody had an attraction problem with another guy in the group, he had to report it to leadership, not confess it in Group Share. I decided to wait and see if my feelings for Nicky would go away on their own. Fat chance.
On the far wall in the rec room, we had a big whiteboard where Bill had drawn a grid. We wrote our names in rectangles that ran down the left side, and up top we numbered the boxes with every upcoming day for about a month. During our first Group, Bill opened a puzzle box of the United States. We each chose a state and wrote our names on it above the real name of the state. I chose first, so I took South Carolina. Then we glued magnets to the backs of the puzzle pieces and put them into the rectangles. The hope was that we could race each other to rack up the most consecutive days without giving in to any homosexual thoughts or urges. Sometimes you could get an extra day for performing a good deed, or get put back for bad behavior.
“We’re at day four,” Bill said. “Is there anyone who hasn’t let any samesex thoughts or urges affect them in the last four days?”
Everybody stayed silent and peeked at each other with embarrassment. There was a little bit of nervous chuckling. “How about in the last three days? No? We’ve got our work cut out for us, huh?” he joked. “How about one? Can I see one day without SSAs?” Randolph shuffled up to the board and pushed Delaware one square forward. Everybody applauded.
After the first month, we were allowed to sleep in on Saturdays. Later in the day we could leave the dorms and go to approved locations like the mall or the movies, or on day trips to the mountains or downtown. But for the first seven months, we had to be in phase if we went anywhere. “In phase” meant that you kept two other people with you at all times so that you’d all stay accountable. And for the first month, Saturday meant we had short one-on-one meetings with leadership in the morning. In the afternoon we had Masculinity Repair, a monthlong workshop where we played football and learned how to build additions to houses and fix domestic cars.
On Sundays, we crossed the sloping lawn and filed into the creamcolored church on the hill to attend services until about 1 p.m. The rest of Sunday was Family Day. Not meaning our biological families-they had to wait three months before visiting. Family Day meant all the guys hung out together, played board games, and made supper. Nothing too complicated. Sometimes we molded our own burgers with ground beef and onion dip mix, or baked a mess of chicken wings. Keith made a stir-fry once, but he said he was worried that making fancy meals was a feminine thing to do. Jake shook him by the shoulders and said, “Don’t be stupid, dude! Most chefs are guys!”
I loved life at Resurrection. The regimen probably seems tough to most people, but I found it comforting. I knew that I needed to be watched constantly or I would fall back into homosexual behavior. In my life, I had almost never had erotic thoughts about women, but I wanted to touch or kiss practically every man I saw, just to test him out. The tight schedule also brought back the good memories of my childhood. In fact, following it wasn’t nearly as difficult as all the chores my father had set me and my brother to as kids. I liked waking up and knowing exactly what was expected of me every day, and when I would eat and play and sleep. It did away with the chaos of life and replaced it with a plan that would lead somewhere positive-to my being fixed.
Gay turned out to be my personal counselor. She was the first to notice that I was taking things in stride, and pretty fast, on the one-month anniversary of my stay.
“Wow, Gary,” she said. “It’s like you’ve been here for a year already.” I had volunteered to lead a group in prayer the night before, and had joined the custodial and kitchen committees. She’d heard from Bill that I spoke up a lot during Group Share. Mostly I asked stupid questions, but participating mattered more than what you said. Gay praised my
progress when I told her about any breakthroughs during my counseling sessions. The more praise I got from her, though, the harder it became to mention my problem with Nicky. If I caught myself admiring him powerful hard, I had a trick where I would replace his face with Christ’s, so the Palmetto State stayed neck-in-neck with Delaware on the big chart. I avoided tense situations by staying out of our room most of the time, like I’d done with Russ. Soon I gained a reputation among my peers for helping others who had difficulty coping.
Bill also took notice. During Masculinity Repair, he realized that I had some knowledge about sports, so he encouraged me to show some of the other men how to hold the bat, how to catch with a glove, and how to throw a curve ball.
My new brothers were so grateful that my belief in Dr. Soffione’s theories rose up fast as a row of bean plants. For the first time ever, I spoke about an experience I had with molestation during a tear-filled Group Share, and Bill added it to my personal list of root causes.
Before I got there, I thought that touching men would be a no-no in the program. But Dr. Soffione’s method didn’t mean no physical affection between men. He believed that closeness with other men was exactly what we SSA-sufferers needed. But we had to regulate the contact and neutralize it. Lots of good masculine physical contact would test the sufferer’s will power. Bill touched us affectionately and encouraged us to be playful with one another. But he warned us not to let Satan’s lust spoil the experience. If we found ourselves attracted to another man in the program, we had to follow through and allow ourselves to experience the attraction, but turn it into something loving so that we’d stop far short of sin.
My first reaction to that policy was to get turned on in the secret part of my head about the possibility of touching Nicky. Any fool could tell you that making homosexual behavior more forbidden won’t make it less attractive. I had never felt free to touch other men, not even when I went to gay bars. Now I could do it all I wanted. Of course, I wasn’t fixing to disobey the rules, and I didn’t intend to abuse the privilege of touching other men. I convinced myself not to admit my arousal, and thought that making male touch normal would help heal me, until one afternoon out on the lawn during Masculinity Repair.
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