Boy Erased by Garrard Conley

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Garrard provides an account of his experience of so-called ex-gay “therapy” and his wider experience of growing up gay within a conservative Christian family.

While the experience of small-town Christian America is not replicated here in the UK the social pressures that bear down on Garrard can be found here. The world is changing fast - there are so many more role models for LGBT+ young people than there were ten years ago – but the impact is uneven and so there are many communities, many families, in which growing up gay remains an experience of deep pain. And of those families as disproportionate number will be religious.

At one point Garrard talks about Cosby, who is leading one of the sessions at the ex-gay programme “He didn’t need this documentary to be straight. He just was. His straightness buzzed off him, inhabited the room … with none of the self-consciousness the rest of us felt. … Though over the years I’d done my best to pretend otherwise, I’d had a string of male crushes that wouldn’t go away, a constant guilty ache that ran through my body for so long that I came to believe the feeling was just a part of what it meant to be alive.”

This contrast between the easy self-identity of someone society defines as “normal” and someone society defines as “other” is not unique to the LGBT+ experience, within “western” society “normal” is white, male, heterosexual – if you don’t tick all of the boxes you will have an uphill struggle, if you don’t tick any of the boxes it can become a mountain climb.

At the very end of the book, reflecting on the time since he went to the ex-gay programme he writes “I will not call on God at any point during this decade-long struggle. Not because I want to keep God out of my life, but because His voice is no longer there. What happen to me has made it impossible to speak with God, to believe in a version of Him that isn’t charged with self-loathing. My ex-gay therapists took Him away from me, and no matter how many different churches I attend, I will feel that same dead weight on my chest. I will feel that pang of a deep love absent from my life. … Perhaps one day I will hear His voice again. Perhaps not. It’s a sadness I deal with on a daily basis.”

This, for me as a person of faith, is a great scandal, those who claim to be Ministers of the Gospel are blocking the path to God. And it doesn’t need a fully fledged ex-gay programme to happen – I know of plenty of LGBT+ people who have been driven from the church, driven from God, by the denial of their being by those that claim authority within the church. Some have fled to protect their own wellbeing. Some do find places of encounter with God elsewhere but for too many the church has become an enduring barrier between them and God.

I find myself increasingly disappointed and despondent about inclusion within the Church of England – ongoing engagement with its institutional life and Synodical processes is leaving me embittered but I feel called to remain because the alternative would be LGBT+ invisibility that plays into the hands of our oppressors. But this means I have to divorce my self-worth and my faith any official positioning of the Church.

Europe’s Deadly Century Edited by Forbes, Page, and Pérez

One of the strengths of this volume comes from bringing essays from different parts of Europe together.

In the UK we have a particular narrative associated with the “Deadly Century” of the title, having been on the “winning” side in both World Wars as well, arguably, as the Cold War – this creates a strong temptation to frame our relationship with the physical remains of those conflicts within a context of pride.

The contrast to this is powerfully explored within the essay about the relationships to the monuments and other physical remains from the Franco era in Spain.

While Michael Kimmelman is cited as saying that Franco’s monuments should be ignored because “they have been displaced from Spanish collective memory” there is a concern that this can create a silence around them and “silence belongs with dictatorship and is the product of fear and trauma”.

The essay looks at both the “monuments” put up by Franco and the regime and also some of the other remains, in particular the Carabanchel Prison, where political prisoners with held and tortured. The site has been demolished – and some would see that as a positive act, cleansing and allowing Spain to move on. But there is a risk that this allows a dark era to be forgotten – and forgetting favours those that might support authoritarianism more than those that support liberty.

We end up with “sanitised, apolitical visions of the past” when Jameson claims that “History is what hurts”. They go on to say “A narrative that presents everybody as a victim or everybody as a perpetrator is politically irresponsible. As Hannah Ardent wrote: ‘Where everybody is guilty, nobody is; public confessions of collective guilt are the best defence against the discovery of culprits, and the magnitude of a crime is the best excuse to not do anything.’”.

This plays out beyond our relationship with remains of war.

When governments give apologies for past wrongs it can be a powerful act of reconciliation, but it can also be used to draw a line – a logic that says that once the apology is given no further inquires needed, it can act as a way of blocking access to the truth.

It is also at play in some of the debates within Universities around statues of past benefactors who made the money they gave to the institution from slavery. There needs to be an open relationship with that past – if you are too quick to take down the statues and rename the colleges and lecture halls you can miss out on a real acknowledgement of the link between the crime of slavery and the good of the University. Hiding that past is potentially as problematic as celebrating it. It would be better, for example, to explore how you might use historic links to slavery as a motivation to action tackling modern slavery?

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

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This is a tale of holding back – Renée hides her inner life, playing the role of concierge that the other residents expect. She ensures the outward observed habits of her life are consistent with the status of an uncultured working-class woman – she sees this as a route to successful interaction with the other residents, who are her employers.

If they knew of the inner life, her passion for art and culture, they would she her as trespassing on their territory – they would feel she was demanding a status akin to their own, they might have to treat her as an equal, as a person, and the functional relationship would be lost.

It is an exploration about whether the caterpillar can become the butterfly – there is a risk in breaking open the shell and becoming a new self, that fear is very real.

If this was not a French novel (read in translation by Alison Anderson) one might worry that it was a caricature – the social world of the novel is not one that exists in England – although the themes of status and pretentiousness are universal.