(cont.) "I grew up in what you might call a very conservative household, speaking from a religious standpoint. Which one? I don't want to say, because as far as I'm concerned, they're all equally bad, maybe not uniformly, but at the end of the spectrum that I happen to care about, which is the one that always seems to overlap with a serious hatred of gay people." 
"I understand this isn't exactly news, but it's something I think about a lot, given that I experienced it firsthand, and I have plenty of time to think here (laughs)." 
"My theory -- which I understand is probably not the most conventional, and is certainly not something you could prove with empirical evidence or experimentation -- is that homosexuality is linked to a kind of artifice that threatens people because it's completely unnecessary in a procreative sense. Like obviously if you wiped out homosexuals -- which is something that a lot of conservatives think is a good idea -- the human race could still survive. It might be a lot drearier (laughs), but my point is that gay people are not necessary for the technical survival of the species, which makes us useless in a very strict sense of the term." 
"But you know what else is 'useless' in a strict sense? Art. A-R-T. And I'm talking about non-functional art, which has no other purpose than to exist and maybe to look beautiful or make us think about what the fuck we're doing here." 
"And you know who else hates art, especially since the renaissance, when it started becoming a lot more secular? Religious conservatives." 
"So is there a link between the hatred of homosexuals and the hatred of art? Well, I obviously think there is." 
"The thing that many people who haven't lived in a conservative religious environment don't understand is how the religion is designed to program every second of your existence." 
"It's like an instruction manual that you have to follow constantly. This is what you wear. This is what you do on Monday. This is what you do on Tuesday. At 12:30 you have to do this. At age 14 you have to memorize this. Pray now. You'll get married to someone who we -- or your parents -- tell you to and then you'll have children and keep up the cycle of indoctrination. Eat this but not that. Get a job but give us a big chunk of what you earn. And so on and so forth." 
"And if you follow these instructions, I can promise you that you won't have a lot of 'me time,' which is to say time to ponder where you fit into the universe or to ask why you're here. You know, the really soul-crushing but illuminating questions." 
"Which is the same purpose -- at least as I see it -- that art serves. Or some art, anyway. It makes you think in ways that are anathema to conservative religions because they don't want you to think, they just want you to follow the rules." 
"And when you're gay, it's impossible to avoid these questions, because it's not like you're just going to procreate. Or I mean not without a lot of angst if you're having sex with someone just to pretend. Or even if you're having children -- which a lot of gay people are doing now I guess -- you still have to think about it. It requires some steps. It's like making a film: you need the technology. There aren't accidents." 
"My point is that, in most cases, being gay makes you think about who you are and why you're here, which are almost always dangerous questions from a conservative vantage point. Because if you're asking the question, it means that you're assessing, and because the world into which we're born is implicitly imperfect and 90 percent of the time seriously fucked up (laughs), you're going to want to do something about how you relate to the present." 
"I'm talking about 'change' or 'reinvention' or all of those corny political slogans that actually mean something to most gay people because we 'get' it. We're designed to be one thing and we become another. That's a process that threatens a lot of people, especially conservatives, who by definition don't want anything to change." 
"I'm not saying you have to be gay to change, of course, but it helps. It forces the issue." 
"Which is another reason we frighten conservatives. To them, this process I'm describing is radical because it threatens the institutions they value most." 
"I mean, it's almost a joke by this point. You see someone 'coming out' in a movie or whatever and the parents are like 'how could you do this to us?' and everyone laughs because we like to think that as a society we've reached a point where people are so enlightened that it's not really a big deal to 'come out' anymore and so parents who 'refuse to accept it' are the brunt of Hollywood jokes." 
"And most of the time, the radical action in these movies is truncated, and after a short period of turbulence, the child 'returns to the fold,' and everyone lives happily ever after." 
"And while that might happen in some cases in the real world, what you don't see too often are the situations -- and it's not nearly as uncommon as you might think -- where a person comes out and leaves everything from their old life behind." 
"And by everything I mean family, friends, geographical location, nationalism, and religious observance." 
"And this process -- and religious conservatives are correct to say that it's radical -- is very threatening to those left behind." 
"It's like the world is this big cocktail party and if a few people start leaving early, the hosts are going to get nervous that others are going to start asking why they're still wasting their time when the drinks are bad and the conversation is dull." 
"That's probably a pretty bad analogy, but you get the idea (laughs)." 
"Anyway, I was growing up in this very conservative environment and around the time I turned fourteen, I -- like every other fourteen year old in history -- started crushing pretty hard on someone who happened to be another boy." 
"Was I tortured about it? Not really. I knew it was wrong, of course, but I didn't realize quite how wrong it was, probably because -- unlike certain other kids who you might say exhibited more 'effeminate' mannerisms -- I was one of the bigger boys in my class. I didn't know what it meant to be teased or humiliated." 
"And this other boy -- the one I liked -- was similar to me. To most people watching us, I'm sure we were considered 'best friends,' which is what we were. It was a good situation, because we weren't even allowed to spend time with the girls, although we both talked about liking them." 
"And as I began to succumb to my infatuation, I started to think that maybe he felt the same way about me as I did about him." 
"I fantasized about him. Not in an 'adult' way -- I was too inexperienced -- but I knew I wanted to kiss him. I had seen him naked plenty of times, but I wanted to cross that line into something erotic. In this way I'm sure I was completely normal. Or well, except for the part where I had seen him naked in the showers, which I'm guessing doesn't happen when you're a boy and you like a girl at the age of fourteen (laughs)." 
"Which is another reason religious conservatives hate gays. They have this whole system where you don't 'mix' with the opposite gender, but it's obviously built on the idea that everyone is heterosexual." 
"Very faulty assumption (laughs)." 
"And rather than say 'oh we're going to change the system to accommodate the fact that some significant percentage of people are not heterosexual, we're just going to uphold the system and do everything we can to degrade these heathens and let them know our official position, which is that they're not at all welcome here and are basically subhuman and if for some crazy reason they do want to belong, they're going to have to change their tune about who they're attracted to." 
"So I was in love with this boy and whether I was delusional or not, I thought that he loved me, too, so one night I worked up the courage to do something about it. We were wrestling and at some point I had him pinned with his arms above his head and I leaned closer and closer until I could feel his breath on my face and he kept telling me to get off -- but he was still laughing and smiling -- except I didn't think he really meant it. So I just leaned in and sort of kissed him. Like I put my mouth against his." 
"It was pretty embarrassing, because I hadn't ever kissed anyone before. I just knew it was what you were supposed to do." 
"At first I thought it was going pretty well. Like I could feel his tongue against mine and he wasn't really resisting -- or resisting at all -- and there was something very reaffirming about it. Like I knew that my body and my soul were coming into some sort of alignment." 
"Maybe it lasted three seconds. Definitely no more than five. Then I rolled off and we both stared at each other for a few more seconds, and I could see his eyes shift from a kind of residual desire into a something closer to shock and then hatred -- or self-hatred -- and I knew it was over with us. Like we had arrived at this fork in the road together and I was going one way and he was going the other." 
"He told on me, of course, and I didn't try to deny it. There was just no way. I had tasted something and I wanted more." 
"It's not like I was the first kid to do something like this. I mean, they were prepared. There were talks with my parents and various other 'elders' who emphasized to me that what I was feeling was the work of evil forces that were a part of the world but that, with enough work and some patience, could be expelled from my body. I was merely being tested." 
"By this point I had a good idea of what was going on, so even though I nodded and agreed, I was already retreating to a different place. I just needed to wait. I was completely ready to fail their test." 
"When I was fifteen, I got sent to this camp designed to teach you how to be straight. It was maybe an hour or so from my house -- very rural, set in the woods -- and it was a two-month program." 
"I don't even want to describe the kind of bullshit exercises we did. It was extreme, even for religious nutjobs like the ones running this place. It was all about mental and physical distraction when the 'urge' arose -- that's how they referred to it, like it was a craving for a candy bar or a cigarette -- along with all sorts of propaganda designed to show you how 'dangerous' it was to be a homosexual because you would die of AIDS or something else even worse, not to mention spending an eternity in hell. It was almost laughing at the time. Not really, but a little. It was just so patently ridiculous." 
"There was one thing we did that I will always remember, though. It was an exercise where you stood across from someone you felt attracted to and you would have to look into their eyes and deny it. For me, they paired me with the kid I had kissed, because even though he had told on us, he had to go to the camp, just to make sure. And I have to say, standing there about twelve inches from him and looking deep into his eyes for ten minutes in front of a group of other closet cases was about the most intensely erotic thing -- or homoerotic thing -- I could have ever dreamed up. It was like having sex. Words just didn't matter. We were two flames burning from the same material. Looking back, I can see why he couldn't handle it. I barely could myself. LIke I had tears just pouring down my face and I was not a kid who ever cried. They thought I was making 'progress.' Maybe I was. You go through something like that and the lines between desire for love and the desire for death become very blurry." 
"But we were already on different paths, as I already mentioned, which didn't make what happened any less disturbing, even if it now seems kind of mundane and predictable. Or maybe it's never mundane, even though it happens all the time. Maybe that's the real tragedy: that we as a society haven't changed enough to stop this kind of thing from happening. For me, I couldn't handle it. There was no way I was going back. So the next afternoon, after they found him dead in his room, I jumped out of my window -- I was on the second floor -- and ran into the fields and then into the forest, where I hid until it got dark. And that's where I saw them. You might speculate that I imagined everything because I was in a state of terror and grief, but to me, they were real. They looked like people except they were glowing. That's about all I can say. I followed them to the road, where I eventually got a lift from a passing truck and I went to the nearest city and did unspeakable things to survive, which I guess will have to be Part II of this interview. But at least I never looked back. Or at least not until I did." 
Pictures taken in Cambridge, England on May 2, 2016. Text excerpted from The #Gods Project: A Training Manual (Section 2, "Interviews with the Institutionalized.")
