When I finally recognized it, a shudder raced through my soul.
I didn’t like this voice. It sounded fine, but whenever this voice showed up it meant touching. It meant movement. It meant…
I didn’t like this voice.
But, unexpectedly, the reading voice remained. The hands on me felt different. Better. More secure.
Was this what safety felt like?
It wasn’t as soft as I expected. I’d always imagined safety to be a delicate thing. Something with no strength or sharp edges that could cause any pain. Yet the arms around me—I’d finally figured out that they were arms—were firm and unyielding. Their strength was undeniable, but that strength was solely used to support me.
I’d never felt comfortable relying on anyone else’s strength before. It was nice.
My mind floated away, completely forgetting that I even had a body. Who cared if it was being moved around. I may be helpless, but I was also comfortable, and that seemed like a good thing.
Of course, all good things are ruined, eventually.
A familiar feeling caught my attention as something was stuck to my skin. Electrical leads. Even without seeing them, I knew exactly what they were. I hated them. Even just the touch ofthem on my skin made me want to shriek and tear them away from me. I wasn’t sure what these specific ones were for, but I could tell they were doing something to me. Technically, it wasn’t bad. They didn’t hurt.
No, it was worse.
They made me remember.
Camp Green Hill.
It wasn’t really a camp. More like a boarding school where kids lived full time. My dad dropped me off there, barely looked at me as he said goodbye, then drove away without another backward glance. I wouldn’t learn until later what a conversion therapy institute was. Back then, I thought it was just a place for parents to leave their kids when they didn’t want to take care of them. I’d seen movies and shows about summer camp before, and this seemed very similar.
It had appeared promising, at first. Like a real camp, off in the woods with a bunch of cabins surrounding a lake. The kind of setting that belonged on a postcard, or in the pages of a children’s storybook.
That illusion didn’t last.
At first, it didn’t seem so bad. I was originally allowed to bring my clothes. I thought this meant the staff understood me and would let me wear them. Instead, my first night there, I was dragged in front of a bonfire by the side of the lake and instructed to burn all my “girl” clothes. I refused, of course, but they insisted that I had to be the one to do it. That burning them myself was part of my healing journey.
No matter how they tried to convince me, I stood in front of that fire until even the embers were cold. For a moment, I felt triumphant, like I’d won a contest that I didn’t even know I was competing in. Only then did I learn that every action had a consequence.
The next day, my meals were restricted. I was still allowed water, but no food. Then, in the evening, I was brought before the bonfire again. Still, I refused.
I lasted for three days.
After three days without food, hunger gnawed at my stomach with sharp teeth and my vision swam whenever I moved my head too fast.
On the fourth night, when they brought me back to the bonfire, I finally gave in and tossed all my clothes into the flames with my own hands. The fabric burned so easily, there one second then gone the next, like it never existed at all. Despite standing in front of a roaring fire, with each piece of clothing that disappeared, I felt myself grow a little colder until I was shivering hard enough to make my teeth chatter.
Once I was dressed in “appropriate” clothing, provided by the camp, I was then allowed to eat. My stomach clamored for it, begging for second and third helpings, but each bite was bitter on my tongue, and I could barely finish a single serving. After the meal, I didn’t even remember what I’d eaten.
But I remembered the lesson. At that camp, the staff held all the power. I could struggle and I could protest all I wanted, but at the end of the day I would still have to obey whatever they wanted me to do.
Things got better after that. I was allowed to join the other kids for therapy sessions, which mostly consisted of group therapy sessions where nobody really talked, and lectures where the staff lectured us about sin and morality. It was dull, but the threat of what the staff could do to me, what they could take away from me, kept me complacent.
In this way, my first few months at Camp Green Hill passed without much incident.
It was at these lectures that I finally understood why I’d been sent to the conversation camp in the first place. I almost laughed out loud the first time the staff referred to me asgaybut managed, just barely, to keep myself quiet. It was ridiculous. I knew what gay was, but I’d never thought about it in terms of myself. I’d never thought about my own sexuality at all before. So, when the staff labeled me with such confidence, I honestly thought they’d made a mistake. It took a while for me to realize that this all stemmed from my wardrobe. That “cross-dressing” and “homosexuality” were basically the same thing in their eyes. I “looked queer” to them on the outside, so I must be queer on the inside as well.
Luckily, by the time I realized this, I knew better than to try and explain the difference. These people couldn’t even understand the difference between clothing choice and gender identity, let alone the difference between gender and sexuality. I’d have better luck bashing my head against the wall and writing a dissertation with my own spilled gray matter than I would trying to argue with these people.
Besides, as it turned out, they weren’t exactly wrong.
When my first six months at showed no progress, the staff decided to up the ante. I was eighteen by then. Officially an adult. I guess they figured they were running out of time.