BOY UNERASED

IF I TELL YOU HOW MANY WE NUMBER, will you listen to our stories? If I tell you that before we possessed this figure, before we learned that there are 700,000 conversion therapy survivors in the United States alone, and that very few people we met could express anything other than incredulity and doubt upon learning that we exist—would you believe me? “But this is 2019!” these people say. “This only happens in the South, in small towns, hick towns, places crammed with backward people, flyover country!”

To many of these incredulous onlookers, we survivors are time travelers—lonely souls from a barren land that would be better off seceding from the country. If I tell you that at one of my readings in New York City, a man