I DIDN’T KILL my father, but his loss felt as irreversible as an execution. I often wonder whether my actions were born out of a confused survival instinct or if something darker was at play. I first started lying about my father’s death in grad school as a way to dodge the inquiries of classmates, teachers, dates, and anyone else who attempted to unearth my personal history in casual conversation. Over the years, it had become rote. At times, I forgot my father was actually alive. At times, I forgot the truth.
I got my first erection in Sunday school. “He is risen!” my Adventure Bible exclaimed. It was a caption to a cartoon of Jesus exiting the tomb, though on that sweaty summer morning, it felt like a mocking description of the situation inside my elastic-waist Levi’s. The teacher, Dottie Tripplehorn, disturbed by the pained expression of the preacher’s son (especially when we were discussing a matter so profoundly joyous as the resurrection of Jesus Christ), shot me a chilly, McMansion Mom smile and asked if everything was okay.
I replied that everything was, in fact, okay, despite my growing fear that God was somehow punishing me, that the stiffness in my pants was divine penalty. How else was I, at eleven years old, supposed to interpret this? My body, which belonged to Christ, was no longer under my control. The Father must be disciplining me for my sinful thoughts about His Son, the olive-skinned Savior whose muscles strained under the white robe that cloaked His perfect frame, strained as He stepped from the tomb, radiant, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired, strong. I wanted His arms wrapped around me, I wanted to taste His lips, I wanted to tear off those white robes and see what lay underneath, to touch the body of Christ. I wanted him inside me the way Amy Grant described in “Fill Me with Your Love,” my mother’s favorite song, the one she’d play on Friday afternoons. “Let’s dance before Dad gets home,” she’d coo. We’d sway and twirl and listen to Amy sing about how she wanted our Savior to enter her body, to fill her with His love.
I wanted Jesus to take me in His arms like in the song my father sang from the stage on Sundays, the band rocking steadily behind him, the lights dimmed so he was just a silhouette of my father, barely recognizable except for the sound of his booming tenor, the lyrics to “Draw Me Close” soaring through space, putting words to my agonizing desire. I wanted the Lord’s warm embrace, and if I squinted hard enough, let my eyes soften in the darkness, I could imagine that my father’s silhouette was actually that of Jesus, the fixture of my daydreams, the hero who would step down from that pulpit, take me in his arms, fulfill my every need. And as my fantasy continued, I always felt myself stiffen.
Each erection terrified me more than the last.
I took to masturbating in the bathroom at church. It was the only way to rid my body of God’s punishment. I would stroke myself in the stall until my mind went blank with pleasure and I collapsed on the toilet seat. And then, with my dick softening in my hands, the shame would come flooding back. What I’d done was surely the worst sin of all, and I knew that God would soon inflict another erection on me, and the cycle would begin again.
I started a journal. A place to purge my anxiety. I ripped up a portion of the carpet in my closet and stuffed the thin notebook underneath, threw my old Nikes on top. I dug it out only in the middle of the night. When my parents were sleeping but I couldn’t. I’d record the fears that kept me awake, indent the pages with my heavy scribbles. Writing was the only path to rest. My way of surviving the night.
When I was twelve, my father gave a sermon titled “Sexual Brokenness.” Spit flew from his mouth as he quoted Leviticus 20:13. “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.” I sat in a puddle of my own sweat. My tailbone chafed against the unforgiving pew. My mother squeezed my hand, oblivious to my shame. I realized: Dad’s talking about me.
Dad wants me dead.
Later, in high school, I would think of Jesus while stretched across Trent’s mattress, a hand tied to each post of the twin bed in his dorm room, as I had requested. Think of the pain Jesus must have felt, splayed out like that, forsaken by His Father on the cross. I was seventeen. Trent was twenty, a college student at a state university miles away from my hometown, but even so, it was not enough distance to keep the image of my father’s raging face from burning on the backs of my eyelids, reminding me of my place in hell. I demanded Trent call himself “Daddy,” a trick I’d learned watching gay porn on the family computer in the furnished basement of my parents’ house, my toes curling on the wall-to-wall carpeting while my father led Bible study upstairs. The word allowed me to access a private fantasy in which I was Jesus and Trent was God. He was punishing me but also relieving me, every slap across my bound body a reckoning that filled me with shame and sent blood racing to my cock.
Trent got boring. I turned to chat rooms in search of new frontiers. I lied and said I was twenty-one. The men were sometimes skeptical of my upper-lip peach fuzz when they met me, but no one turned me away. I was hotandhorny21 and I was looking for “a daddy who knew how to punish his boy.” They were more than happy to comply. They would punish me in the backs of their minivans while their wives slept at home; they would punish me in the Best Western ten miles outside of town; they would punish me in the woods next to the highway, my arms pinned to the nettles that blanketed the forest floor. They were thirty-four, then forty-three, then fifty-six. They were the subjects of guilt-ridden stories in my journal. They were my father, they were the Father, and I was always, in my mind, the son. I loved each of them as I was unable to love my own father.
Attending a Christian university was expected of me. I lived at home and commuted to Wheaton College, where I signed a community covenant that asserted immoral, homosexual relationships were against God’s will and would result in expulsion. I chose theater as my minor, hoping (but failing) to find other secret “sexual deviants” in our production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Oscar Wilde’s gayness was never mentioned during the course of rehearsals, but that didn’t prevent me from doing my own research. What started with Wilde continued with my exploration of Williams, Albee, Baldwin, Kushner, Lorca. I stopped writing in my journal and began penning plays instead. My amateur dramas were awful—esoteric dialogues between a character named Jonah and long-dead queer artists. But they made me feel less lonely. I confessed my desires to James Baldwin, shared my shame with Tennessee Williams, and they became part of my imaginary community, the source of what little strength I had.
Sometimes I wrote plays about my father, short one-acts that ended in my confession, his forgiveness. A fantasy, to be sure. I knew he would hate me for what I was.
I lived in fear of his hate.
But it was love that inspired him to put me through conversion therapy. After my father discovered my sinful chat-room habit—before I graduated from Wheaton College, when I was twenty-one and still living with my parents—he hired an ex-gay counselor, Doctor Jim. He was “our kind of Christian,” which meant that he had attended a Prestigious Evangelical University and was well versed in traditional fundamentalist theology. Whether he was an actual doctor was of less concern to my parents than his religious schooling and the fact that he was a specialist in dealing with “this kind of issue.” It was—as my father repeatedly explained to Doctor Jim—of the utmost importance that my treatment remain confidential.
In a particularly cruel twist of fate, the man charged with “curing” me of my homosexuality was, to put it crudely, hot as fuck. Doctor Jim possessed a muscular, corn-fed heft, a quarterback’s shoulders, and a movie star’s cheekbones. He favored tight, ass-contouring khakis and crisp button-downs, undone to showcase a tuft of dark chest hair that matched the perfect stubble outlining his jaw. A photo sat on the desk in his office: Doctor Jim beaming on a stretch of bright green lawn, clutching his cheery Christian bride, swarmed by four young daughters in pastel dresses gripping baskets that brimmed with colored eggs. Someone in an unintentionally menacing Easter Bunny costume lurked in the background of the photo, casting an incongruous dread over an otherwise idyllic Midwestern scene.
“God loves you, Jonah,” he said during our first session, placing his hand on my knee. A rush of heat and shame and desire shot through my body. “And with His guidance, we will heal you.”
We began our weekly sessions. Doctor Jim was determined to unearth the “root cause of my homosexuality,” a process that involved delving into my family’s past. Doctor Jim seemed eager, at first, to blame my mother. Is your mother overbearing? Does she prevent you from connecting with your father? Has she pushed the positive male role model from your life? Much to Doctor Jim’s consternation, the answer to all these questions was an emphatic no. Far from being overbearing, my mother was expert at fading into the background, ever the obedient servant to her husband the pastor, keen to conform to the submissive role assigned to her by the church’s patriarchal theology. She never spoke up, never questioned my father, always had a casserole at the ready. With his theories about my mother debunked, Doctor Jim had no choice but to move on to my father. Is your father absent from family life? Does his busy work schedule prevent you from seeing him regularly? Did you lack a masculine role model in the home? Once again, Doctor Jim’s theories failed to hold up. My father worked, yes, but always made it home in time for dinner. My relationship with Dad had been the picture of heteronormativity, complete with playing catch on the front lawn and father-son fishing expeditions. If anything, it was my mother who had been absent, pushed toward the edge of our family’s frame, like the grotesque Easter Bunny in Doctor Jim’s photo, a portrait my gaze often turned to in these moments of interrogation. I wished I could transport myself into the honey-lit normality of their Midwestern family.
At the end of every session we prayed to God that we would find a solution to the problem of my sexuality, that He would deliver me from this life of sin. And yet I felt nothing. Nothing except the sting of failure. God had abandoned me in my time of need. Maybe God hated me; maybe I hated God; maybe I hated myself.
I definitely hated myself.
Worse than the sessions was the reception I got from my parents afterward. Every week it was the same. I’d open the door to the smell of my mother’s macaroni and cheese baking in the oven. It was my favorite dish from childhood, a homemade casserole with four types of cheese and a crust that crackled when my mother sliced it. We’d sit at the table and I’d stare at my plate, desperate to avoid the hopeful smiles of my parents, the looks that said: Maybe this week it worked. Maybe God has shown our family grace. Maybe this nightmare is finally over. They never pried—it was always assumed I would volunteer news of my progress. Every week, I was filled with shame as I mumbled, “We’re still working through things.” Their faces would fall, and my mother would turn the conversation to the weather, or the Bible, or the boring details of her day.
Doctor Jim assigned me homework. I played football with my classmates, I purchased more masculine attire at the Army/Navy surplus store, I asked girls out on dates. Nothing worked. Doctor Jim supplied me with a Victoria’s Secret catalog one week, and when that failed, we moved on to harder stuff—Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler. Doctor Jim was careful to mention that the use of pornography was typically a sin but that God would make an exception in this case. We needed to employ drastic measures. I was forbidden to masturbate to these magazines—that would also be a sin—but was told to monitor my levels of arousal when I looked at the naked women. An erection meant that I was finally letting God into my heart, that I was eliminating my wretched “same-sex attraction.” And so, as I’d done before in childhood, I once again offered my cock to the Lord. This time, locked in my bedroom with a copy of Penthouse, I hoped that the blood of Christ would surge to my dick. Still nothing. Soon, I defied Doctor Jim’s orders and attempted to rouse my penis by stroking it, begging for God’s forgiveness as I touched myself, praying that He would pardon this lesser sin in light of the fact that I was attempting to rid myself of a greater one. I would clutch the magazine in my left hand while failing to get off with my right; I tugged at my flaccid penis until it chafed, then threw the magazine against the wall, buried my face in my pillow, and screamed until my throat was sore. I’d then cry softly to myself, attempting to conjure the magazine women in my mind, hoping that perhaps my studious appraisal of this pornography had cured me, as Doctor Jim promised it would. Maybe those images just needed a moment to soak in. My fantasies usually returned to the blond woman bound up in my Hustler, her mouth gagged with a white bandanna, her eyes wide with terror, her arms and legs tied to the posts of a rusty bed on a set resembling a torture chamber. I’d begin to stroke myself again, but as I did, I would always imagine myself in her position, ready to be punished, ready to be filled by the hard cock lurking at the edge of the frame.
I wanted to die.
After a year of treatment, Doctor Jim had still not discovered the root of my homosexuality. My parents’ patience wore thin. The macaroni casseroles were replaced with frozen dinners nuked by my depressed mother. My father, unable to contain his disappointment, began skipping family meals, taking his hot plastic tray directly from the microwave to his study, where he would eat while poring over the Bible. Once, my mother made the mistake of suggesting that it would be “good for the family” if my father joined us at the table.
“Don’t you tell me what’s good for this family,” he snapped.
“Doctor Jim says it’s important for the father to . . .” My mother trailed off, fearful of his seething expression.
“Are you implying that this is somehow my fault?”
“I just think we need to keep Jonah’s health in mind,” my mother insisted.
“Why do you think I sent him to this useless therapy!” my father screamed, throwing his frozen dinner across the room.
“Dad, stop,” I yelled, standing to confront him. He pushed me to the ground and stepped over my body. Seconds later, his study door slammed.
The following week, Doctor Jim was unusually solemn. He explained that we’d come to a critical point in my treatment. “I know how seriously you’ve taken our sessions and how hard you’re trying here. But because you can’t remember the specific moment that led to your same-sex attraction, I believe that you may be repressing this memory.”
At last, an answer. A way out. A reason. An end to this torture. Tears welled in my eyes. I wanted to scream, I wanted to dance, I wanted to leap out of my seat and hug Doctor Jim. Here will be the thing that heals my family, I thought, the thing that repairs all that is broken in my life.
“Jonah, I believe that you were molested as a child,” Doctor Jim said gravely.
My feelings of relief vanished. My rib cage tightened; my breathing grew shallow.
“But I . . . I don’t remember . . . that never happened to me,” I sputtered. “I would’ve told you, I promise.”
“I know you would’ve told me if you remembered. But many of our most traumatic childhood memories evade our conscious recall, and childhood trauma frequently causes the same-sex attraction you struggle with.”
“What do we do?”
“We’ll recover these memories, Jonah. And with the Lord’s help, we’ll work through them. God will heal you if you let Him.”
Doctor Jim instructed me to lie on the thin carpeting of his office floor. Tough red fibers dug into my shirt, making my back itch. Doctor Jim told me to relax, told me that we would pray for the Holy Spirit to “join us in this room today.” I closed my eyes. As Doctor Jim prayed, his voice dipped lower, flattened, lulled me into a hypnotic state. Doctor Jim asked the Holy Spirit to guide me into my unconscious, and soon I felt my body melt into the floor. Doctor Jim’s words floated at the edge of my thoughts. I was both in the room and not, both conscious and unconscious. My breath grew deeper, calmer, as Doctor Jim began to delve into my childhood. He mined it for past trauma, searched for the awful memory of a male relative or family friend or stranger from the park. Once I had discovered that memory, I was supposed to go beneath the surface and unearth the horrible truth. You said you want to be a playwright, Jonah. What we’re doing here is kind of like that—we’re building a story. Building it with little blocks of truth, truth from deep inside you.
This process continued for months. At first I came up empty, nothing but happy memories of my father at my tenth birthday party and the head deacon pushing me on the swing behind our church and the ice cream man handing me a dripping vanilla cone in a strong, hairy fist.
My father’s rage deepened. He stopped speaking to my mother and me save for resigned grunts of acknowledgment in the hallway of our home. He spent an increasing amount of time in his study, eventually sleeping there, away from my mother, away from me, as if the knowledge and theology contained in his personal library could somehow shield him from his family’s collapse. I, too, grew increasingly despondent, removed. I would hole up in my room and dream of ways to kill myself, listing them in the notebook I’d once devoted to ideas for plays. The only thing that stopped me was the literal fear of hell; the sinful double whammy of suicide and homosexuality would keep me toiling in the underworld for eternity. I resigned myself to life on earth while fantasizing of ways to leave it.
The more the men in her life pulled away, the more desperately my mother attempted to bring us together. Mirthless Parcheesi that ended in screaming. Dinners no one ate. Church functions where we drifted to opposite ends of the room immediately, repelled like magnets with warring poles. My mother begged my father to put an end to my treatment. My father refused. Instead, he called Doctor Jim nightly from his study, unleashing rage and blame and fire and brimstone. Why isn’t it working? My father’s shouts filled the house, echoing up the stairs and into my bedroom, where I would sit alone and clutch my pillow and cry.
Over the months, a story began to emerge. A story that Doctor Jim coaxed out of me, session by session. It started with the shameful memory of my Adventure Bible. The way Jesus made me stiff. Made me ashamed. Made me gay. We traced it back to that one memory: Dottie Tripplehorn frowning in my direction, knowing something was awry with one of her pupils. Yes, that was the moment I knew. Looking at Jesus in that book. The blasphemy of my suggestion terrified Doctor Jim at first. It was not possible that Jesus caused my same-sex attraction. But soon, Doctor Jim developed a theory to explain it all: What if it was not, in fact, Jesus who turned you gay? What if it was someone from that period of your childhood, Jonah? An authority figure that your young mind confused with Jesus, the ultimate authority figure in our lives? What if your memory of abuse was so traumatic that you repressed it and convinced yourself that it was Jesus who disordered your desires? Jesus didn’t molest you, but we will figure out who did.
Gradually, we “reconstructed” the memory of the trauma that “turned me gay.” But which authority figure in my life had preyed on me? My Sunday-school teacher was ruled out: too female, too shrewish, too sexless. The ice cream man was too distant, too uninvolved, the church deacons too holy (and, I would later suspect, too friendly with Doctor Jim).
One day during hypnosis, Doctor Jim asked me to see Jesus as He had appeared to me in my earliest sexual fantasies. “And now, Jonah, we’re going to peel away that fantasy and unearth the reality behind it. Look hard at this figure. It’s not Jesus, is it, Jonah? It’s someone else. Someone who hurt you, someone who touched you, someone who sent you down this sinful path. Someone with authority, someone you trusted with your entire heart and soul. Who is there, Jonah? Who molested you?”
As he spoke, I pictured a pair of male hands as they touched me, embraced me, aroused me. I imagined this man’s scent, the sweetness of his breath, the smell of his robes. Yes, I knew that fragrance; I smelled it every Sunday, starch and detergent and cloth. As I lay on Doctor Jim’s floor, the answer occurred to me. Finally, a way out of this torture. Finally, a story that made sense, or at least the type of sense that would satisfy my conversion therapist. Finally—through the fog of confusion and coercion and suicidal ideation—I saw it: an escape.
“My father.” I gasped. “It was my father who molested me.”
At the moment, I wasn’t sure if it was a lie. But I knew it would save my life.
Doctor Jim hugged me. I wept in his arms, willing my statement to be true. Because if it was true, then there was a clear path to salvation. A way to fix this, even if it meant destroying my father.
Revenge, sanctioned by our Savior.
The devastation of my family was swift. That afternoon, Doctor Jim summoned my mother to his office and calmly told her that I had been molested by my father. My mother collapsed in panic, her knees hitting the thick red carpet on the very spot where I’d been lying for months, conjuring the image that would devastate us all. She cried and said it couldn’t be true. Doctor Jim insisted it was.
After our session, my mother rented a hotel room outside of town, the same Best Western I had secretly visited with so many older male companions. “I love you, Jonah,” she said through tears as she shoved the key card into our door. “And we’ll get through this together.”
She left me alone and went to confront my father. It all happened so quickly, too quickly. Had my father really molested me? It suddenly seemed impossible; absurd, even. Alone in the hotel room, I began to doubt my own recollection, the memory I’d constructed under Doctor Jim, lead architect. No, my father never molested me. But Doctor Jim seemed so sure of his methods, so confident in his discovery. What choice did I have but to believe him? Yes, I would believe him. That felt much easier than believing myself. If Doctor Jim, an expert on this issue, said it was true, then it must be.
I climbed into the hotel bed, turned on the TV to numb my nerves, and waited for my mother to return. I watched QVC on maximum volume, attempting to drown my thoughts with the deafening promises of an over-tanned jewelry saleswoman. The whole set can be yours for the low, low price of $29.99. I found myself longing for the uncomplicated moral universe of the home-shopping channel, where the only choice was the right choice, the easiest decision you’d ever made. Just call now.
Doctor Jim held an emergency meeting that afternoon attended by my mother, my father, and the entire elder committee of our church. My father denied everything, insisted he’d never molested me, wept before the baffled committee. Never had the church dealt with such an issue. The committee removed my father from his position as head pastor and forbade him to set foot on the church campus. Furthermore, they demanded he visit Doctor Jim for counseling. This would be kept a secret from the church congregation to avoid scandal, and a mysterious “medical issue” would be the explanation provided for my father’s sudden disappearance. Divorce was a sin in the eyes of God, so my mother was instructed to remain by his side as he worked to “cure his brokenness” with Doctor Jim.
That night, she returned to the Best Western.
“Jonah, what on earth are you doing?” my mother yelled over the cacophony of QVC; she grabbed the remote and hit Mute. She sat on the bed and hugged me and told me about the surreal events of the day. We returned to our house the following morning. My father was gone. He’d drained our family’s bank accounts. He’d left no note. He never returned.
Gossip spread. The “medical issue” excuse the church provided was flimsy. My mother got a job as a receptionist at the local dentist’s office. The dentist was a major donor at the church who took pity on my mother. She was desperate for a way to support us now that her husband, the sole breadwinner, had vanished, so she endured the daily indignity of curious stares from patients who knew her history. The meager receptionist’s salary was not sufficient to replace my father’s considerable megachurch earnings (or pay the mortgage on our stately McMansion), so she took a second job at a local diner, heading there every day after clocking out at the dentist’s.
My mother grew depressed and distant. She was rarely home, and when she was, it was only to down a bottle of wine before crashing. She was forced to sell our house, and we moved into a small, one-bedroom apartment, where I slept on the giant leather sectional that had fit perfectly in our former home but now crowded the tiny living room of our new place. Somehow, in the midst of everything, I managed to graduate from Wheaton. My mother wanted me to get a job, help her pay the bills. I never got one. Employment would only anchor me to my hometown, give my mother an excuse to keep me trapped in her apartment.
I was supposed to complete the remainder of my therapy with Doctor Jim, but my mother was far too exhausted to make me go. We had both been so traumatized by the results of my treatment it was impossible to summon the strength to return.
“Was this all my fault, Jonah?” she’d slur after polishing off a magnum of grocery-store chardonnay. “Did I fail you?”
“You didn’t, Mom,” I’d always reply, clenching my jaw. “You didn’t.”
My claustrophobia grew, followed me outside the confines of our tiny apartment. I needed to get away from my mother, from our tiny apartment, from church, from God. I needed to cut ties. To erase my past.
I weaponized my mother’s guilt, used it as a tool to engineer my escape. I applied to graduate school in Ohio, desperate to put a state line between us. I’d study playwriting, focus on dreaming up other people’s misery instead of fixating on my own. My mother cobbled together my tuition using a small chunk of money the church had given her out of pity (a sum that would’ve been my missing father’s severance), her own meager earnings, and a considerable amount in cosigned student loans.
I thanked my mother by rarely calling her, desperate to pretend she didn’t exist. But then I’d cry myself to sleep in my dorm room, longing for her. I missed the way she used to stroke my hair as we danced to Amy Grant in our big, beautiful living room, in the happy, innocent years of my childhood.
Most often, I would think of my father. Think of the way I’d ruined his life to save my own. I was racked with guilt, weighed down by the truth that haunts me to this day: my father never molested me.