SOMEONE THEY COULD DISPOSE OF

In 2011, a 15-year-old gay South African boy died after being electrocuted, starved, forced to eat feces, beaten with wooden planks, having his bones broken, and left chained to his bed at Echo Wild Game Rangers, a camp that promised to make manly men out of effeminate boys. The story of Raymond Buys’s murder mortified LGBTQ people around the globe. One of those disturbed by it was Damian Barr, the gay British author of the award-winning memoir Maggie and Me.

Buys’s death drove Barr to visit South Africa and investigate these camps with the idea that he’d write an