The Miseducation of Cameron Post

by Emily M. Danforth

  I looked at her. She didn’t smile. She didn’t look mean, necessarily, but serious, all business. She had one of those faces with too many sharp points, her nose, her cheekbones, severely arched eyebrows; and she wore her hair pulled back supertight to her head, like the backup faux-guitar-playing women in that Robert Palmer video, so it seemed like her forehead went on forever. She did have great hair, though. It was really white, like a perfect shade of white, Unicorn Tail or Santa’s Beard, and with it all pulled back tight like that, into a ponytail, it looked somehow futuristic, like she might have come off the Enterprise.

  “Tip of the iceberg,” she said again.

  I had just heard that expression recently but couldn’t remember where, and I didn’t have time to think about it with them both looking at me with such expectation. “You mean because so much of it is below the surface?” I asked.

  “Exactly,” Rick said, smiling even bigger. “You nailed it. We only see about an eighth of an iceberg’s total mass when we view it from above the surface of the water. This is why ships sometimes got in trouble, because the crew thought that what they were seeing on the water seemed pretty insignificant, manageable, but they weren’t prepared to handle all the ice below the surface.”

  He reached over and slid the drawing back across the table and wrote a couple of things on it, then slid it back over to me. Next to the pointed mass located above the water’s surface it read: Cameron’s Same Sex Attraction Disorder. He had also written: Family, Friends, Society above the ship.

  Now I could see where this was going.

  “Would you say that the tip of the iceberg, in this drawing, anyway, looks pretty scary to the people on the boat?” He asked.

  “I guess,” I said, still looking at the paper in front of me.

  “What does that mean, you guess?” Lydia asked. “You need to answer these questions with a bit of reflection. We can’t support you if you aren’t going to put forth any effort.”

  “Then yes,” I said, looking at her and speaking deliberately. “The iceberg’s tip, as it is drawn in this picture, features many sharp angles and pointy protrusions, and it is looming ahead of the ship in a precarious manner.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It is. That wasn’t so hard. And because it’s so big and so scary, it’s all the people on the ship want to focus on. But we know it’s not the real problem, is it?”

  “Are we still talking about the drawing?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “The real problem for the people on the ship . . .” She paused to tap-tap her finger on the drawing, right on top of the words Family, Friends, Society; then she took that same finger and pointed it at me, getting me to look at her face, before continuing. “The real problem is the massive, hidden block of ice holding up that scary tip. They might manage to steer their ship around the ice above the surface but then crash directly into even bigger problems with what’s beneath. The same is true for your loved ones when it comes to you: The sin of homosexual desire and behavior is so scary and imposing that they become fixed on it, consumed and horrified by it, when in actuality, the big problems, the problems we need to deal with, they’re hidden away below the surface.”

  “So are you gonna try to melt away my tip?”

  Reverend Rick laughed. Lydia did not. “Something like that, actually,” Rick said. “But we’re not doing anything; you’re going to do it. You need to focus on all the things in your past that have caused you to struggle with unnatural same-sex attractions. The attractions themselves shouldn’t be so much the focus, at least not right now. What’s important is all the stuff that came before you were even aware of those feelings.”

  I thought about how young I was when I first considered kissing Irene. Nine. Maybe eight? And there was my crush—you could call it a crush, I think—on our kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Fielding. What could have possibly happened to me to make me “struggle with same-sex attraction” by the age of six?

  “What are you thinking?” Rick asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Lydia sighed big. “Use your words,” she said. “Your big-person words.”

  I decided I hated her. I tried again. “I mean, it’s interesting to think of it this way. I haven’t ever really, before.”

  “To think of what?” Lydia asked.

  “Homosexuality,” I said.

  “There’s no such thing as homosexuality,” she said. “Homosexuality is a myth perpetuated by the so-called gay rights movement.” She spaced out each word of her next sentence. “There is no gay identity; it does not exist. Instead, there is only the same struggle with sinful desires and behaviors that we, as God’s children, each must contend with.”

  I was looking at her, and she at me, but I didn’t have anything to say, so I dropped my eyes to my iceberg.

  She kept going, getting increasingly louder. “Do we say that someone who commits the sin of murder is part of some group of people who have that identity feature in common? Do we let murderers throw themselves parades and meet up in murderers’ clubs to get high and dance the night away and then go out and commit murder together? Call it just another aspect of their identity?”

  Reverend Rick cleared his throat. I kept looking at my iceberg.

  “Sin is sin.” She seemed pleased with that, so she said it again. “Sin is sin. It just so happens that your struggle is with the sin of same-sex attraction.”

  I could hear Lindsey in my head telling me to say Really? Well, if homosexuality is just like the sin of murder, then who dies, exactly, when homosexuals get together to sin? But Lindsey wasn’t sitting there with the two of them. And Lindsey wasn’t exiled to Promise for at least a year. So I kept the Lindsey part of me quiet.

  “How are you feeling about all this?” Rick asked. “We’re throwing a lot at you, I know.”

  “I’m good,” I said, too quickly, without thinking about his question at all. I added, “Well, maybe I’m fine.” I had a headache. The room we were in, this little meeting space off Rick’s office, was just big enough for the table and three chairs we now occupied, and the small space smelled too thickly, too sweetly, of the potted gardenia sitting on a shelf beneath the window, all shiny leaves and maybe half a dozen blooms, some of them already brown and decaying on the stem. Being there made me almost wish for Nancy the counselor’s office: the couch, the celebriteen posters, the bites of food from the office staff, the lack of sin indicated by my presence.

  “So what do I do with this?” I asked, holding up my iceberg.

  Rick pressed both his palms to the table in front of him. “We’re going to spend your one-on-ones, as many as it takes, attempting to fill in the stuff below the surface.”

  I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure what he meant by that.

  “It will be hard work,” Lydia said. “You’ll have to confront things I’m sure that you’d rather not face. One of the most important first steps is for you to stop thinking of yourself as a homosexual. There’s no such thing. Don’t make your sin special.”

  Lindsey in my head said, Funny—my sin seems pretty fucking special considering that you’ve built an entire treatment facility to deal with it. What I said out loud, though, was “I don’t think of myself as a homosexual. I don’t think of myself as anything other than me.”

  “That’s a start,” Lydia said. “It’s uncovering just who the ‘me’ is, and why she has these tendencies, that will be the challenge.”

  “You’ll do just fine,” Rick added, smiling at me his genuine Rick smile. “We’ll be here to support you and guide you through all of it.” I must have still looked doubtful, because he tacked on “Just remember that I’ve been right where you are too.”

  I was still holding my iceberg. I shook the paper back and forth a few times, fast, and it made that cool, sail-flapping noise paper makes when you shake it like that. “So I should take this with me?”

  “We’d like you to hang it in your room,” he said. “You’ll write on it after
each one-on-one.”

  That iceberg was my first, and only, decoration privilege for the following three months. I hung it directly in the center of the bare wall on my side of the room. I started looking for everyone else’s icebergs, now that I knew what to look for. Sometimes disciples (we were supposed to call ourselves disciples and to think of ourselves as disciples of the Lord and not just fucked-up students) who were further along in their programs would have partially buried their icebergs beneath the typical kinds of ephemera that show up on teenagers’ walls—though the posters and flyers and pictures belonging to Promise teens had more to do with Christian activities and bands and less to do with, say, naked cowboys or Baywatch girls. But adolescent collages are all sort of the same, regardless, and the iceberg photocopies were distinctive enough that I could eventually spot them.

  Written in the ice below the surface on each disciple’s picture were phrases and terms that didn’t make much sense to me until my own one-on-ones progressed and I started writing similar kinds of things.

  I studied everyone else’s below-the-surface troubles with such regularity that I can remember some of them pretty much word for word:

  Viking Erin (my roommate):

  Too much masculine bonding with dad over Minnesota Vikings football. Jennifer’s extreme beauty = feelings of feminine inadequacy (inability to measure up), resulting in increased devotion to Girl Scouts, attempting to prove my worth (as a woman) in inappropriate ways. Unresolved (sexual) trauma from seventh-grade dance when Oren Burstock grabbed my breast by the water fountain.

  Jennifer was Erin’s sister, and there were some pictures of her on the bulletin board. I didn’t blame Erin for feeling in-adequate: Jennifer was a stunner. I asked Erin about why they let her decorate with Minnesota Vikings colors and memorabilia if it was such a problem area for her.

  She had her answer all worked out. She’d obviously spent some time on it, because she said it just like I’m sure Lydia had said it to her oh so many times. “I have to learn to appreciate football in a healthy way. There’s nothing wrong with being a woman who is a fan of football. I just don’t want to look to my football bond with my father to confirm my sense of self, because the confirmation confuses my gender identity, since the activity we’re bonding over is so masculine.”

  Jane Fonda:

  Extreme, unhealthy living situation at commune—Godlessness, pagan belief systems. Lack of (stable and singular) masculine role model in upbringing until adolescence. Inappropriate gender modeling and “accepted” sinful relationship: Pat and Candace. Early exposure to illegal drugs and alcohol.

  Adam Red Eagle:

  Dad’s extreme modesty and lack of physical affection caused me to look for physical affection from other men in sinful ways. Too close with mom—wrong gender modeling. Yanktonais’ beliefs (winkte) conflict with Bible. Broken home.

  Adam was the most physically beautiful guy I’d ever met. He had skin the color of coppered jute and eyelashes that looked like a glossy magazine ad for mascara, though you couldn’t often see them because of his black, shiny hair, which he let hang over his face until Lydia March would inevitably come at him with a rubber band stretched out between her thumb and pointer finger, saying, “Let’s get it pulled back, Adam. There’s no hiding from God.”

  Adam was tall and he had long muscles and he held himself like a principal dancer with the Joffrey, all grace, all refined power and strength. Sometimes we ran the trails together on the weekends, before the snow came, and I found myself checking him out in ways that surprised me. His father, who had only recently converted to Christianity “for political reasons,” Adam said, was the one who’d sent him to Promise. His mother opposed the whole thing, but they were divorced, and she lived in North Dakota, and his dad had custody and that was that. His father was from the Canoe Peddler band of the Assiniboine, a voting member in the consolidated Fort Peck Tribal Council, and also a much-respected Wolf Point real estate developer with mayoral ambitions, ambitions that he felt were threatened by having a fairy for a son.

  Helen Showalter:

  Emphasis on me as athlete: maleness reinforced with softball obsession (bad). Uncle Tommy. Body image (bad). Absent father.

  Mark Turner:

  Too close with mother—inappropriate bonding (with her) over my role in church choir. Infatuation with the senior (male) counselors at Son Light’s Summer Camp. Lack of appropriate physical contact (hugging, touch) from father. Weakness of character.

  It wasn’t difficult to tell Reverend Rick the things I knew he was looking for me to say. He would shut the door to his office and ask about my week and my courses, and then we would start up wherever we had left off and I would tell him some story about me competing with Irene, or about how I hung out more with Jamie and the guys than with girls my age, or something about Lindsey’s influence over me. We talked about Lindsey a lot—her big-city powers of suggestion, the enticement of that which is exotic.

  It wasn’t that I was lying to Rick, because I wasn’t. It was just that he so believed in what he was doing, what we were doing, whatever it was. And I didn’t. Ruth was right: I hadn’t come to Promise with a “teachable heart,” and I had no idea how to go about making the heart I did have into the other version.

  I liked Rick. He was kind and calm, and I could tell that when I told him yet another story about my being rewarded and encouraged for masculine behaviors or endeavors, he thought we were really getting somewhere, that this “work” was benefiting me, and that I would eventually come to embrace my worth as a feminine woman and, in doing so, open myself up for Godly, heterosexual relationships.

  Lydia, on the other hand, was sort of scary, and I was glad that, at least for now, I had one-on-ones with Rick. I’d heard people describe someone as “prim and proper” before, but Lydia was the first person I think I would have used those two words to pin down. When she led Bible study, or even if I saw her in the dining hall (which was not that big a room at all, certainly not a hall), or wherever, she instantly made me feel like I was sinning right then, pretty much just by being alive, by breathing, like my presence was the embodiment of sin and it was her job to rid me of it.

  By Thanksgiving my own iceberg looked like this:

  There were nineteen of us disciples that fall, which was an impressive six more than the year before. (Ten of the disciples were returners.) Twelve guys, seven girls, plus Reverend Rick, Lydia March, four or five rotating dorm monitors and workshop leaders, and Bethany Kimbles-Erickson—a twenty-something, semirecently widowed teacher who drove her grunting maroon Chevy pickup from West Yellowstone Monday through Friday to oversee our studies. (She and Rick were also now dating. Very chastely.) Out of the nineteen of us there were, at any given time, at least ten disciples really committed to the program, to conquering the sins of homosexual desire and behavior, to melting their iceberg tips in the hopes of eternal salvation. The rest of the disciples got along pretty much the way that I did: faking progress in one-on-ones, amicable interactions with staff, and burning off steam through a series of sinful, thereby forbidden, thereby secret interactions with each other.

  At first, the constant scheduling, the routine of the place, was the hardest thing for me. After years of running wild with Jamie, with whomever, being unable to lock my door, to take off on my bicycle, to put in a video and watch it three times in a row, felt like the worst kind of punishment: way worse than meeting once a week to talk with Reverend Rick.

  If we weren’t in chapel, we were in the classrooms. There were two, and they each had a bunch of small tables and plastic chairs, a big whiteboard up front, the requisite ticking clock and pull-down maps, standard classroom fare; but when you looked out the windows, it was still all blue-purple mountain range and picture postcard, and the land and sky went on forever and ever, and every single time I looked out the windows too long, I felt like I was disappearing. And I looked out those windows for too long all the time.

  Bethany Kimbles-Erickson didn’t teach
so much as she corrected homework and occasionally might clarify something if one of us raised our hands while reading or working silently. The quiet in the classrooms was how I imagined a monastery. At times it was so thick and solid, I would scrape my chair back as hard as I could and go to sharpen my pencil, or to get a book I didn’t even need, just to break it. They ran things this way mostly because we weren’t all in the same grade and had come from different schools in different states, we had vastly different transcripts to consider, and it was next to impos-sible for someone to stand in front of the room and teach us ten different subjects at the same time. Our curriculum was mandated by the State of Montana and our sponsor school, Lifegate Christian, in Bozeman, where we would go in both November and May to take final exams. Study plans and learning goals were worked out one disciple at a time, and the whole thing was run as sort of an independent study in every subject. This was just fine with me. It meant a lot of “work at your own pace” time, which I liked, but some students definitely struggled, and Bethany would spend hours sitting next to those students, or crouched over them, or at a separate table where I guess she did her teaching one-on-one.

  First thing every Monday she provided each of us with photocopied packets of homework and reading assignments tailored to the state requirements for students at our grade level. To complete this homework, we used textbooks from the Promise library, a series of four six-shelf bookcases that held a bunch of older-edition textbooks and a set of encyclopedias, some other reference books, a shelf of “classic literature,” and two or three shelves of books on Christianity, as well as current and back issues of Christianity Today and Guideposts. I’m not sure what I’d been expecting, but the textbooks themselves weren’t really any different from those I’d had at Custer. Actually, I’m pretty sure that the government/economics book was the exact same text used for that class at Custer. And although there were a couple of science books that specifically denied the fossil record as proof of the earth’s nonbiblically correlating age, and also predictably discounted evolution as hogwash, there was also a book of essays by scientists who were evangelical Christians, such as Robert Schneider, essays that actually made the case that one can believe in evolution without denying the theological notion that God created the world and all that is in it. Finding that book on the shelf surprised the hell out of me. It made me wonder who had made sure that it was there, who had advocated for its inclusion.