What letters from a nun taught me about religious (in)tolerance – Los Angeles Blade
Warning: this story contains frank discussion of teen suicide attempts and truthful depictions of anti-gay slurs and bullying that some readers will find traumatizing.
By James Finn | DETROIT – Last February, 16-year-old “Mark” painted his bedroom window black. Terrified he would be painted as a sex offender and bullied, he made himself invisible. He switched to online classes, and he left his room only to eat, often not enough for his growing body.
He never left the house.
In March, his mom “Tammy” came home from her church-secretary job and noticed he hadn’t been out of his room for food. She knocked. No answer. Mark’s dad broke the door down. They found the boy on the floor, unresponsive, barely breathing.
Tammy tells me yesterday that I can’t imagine the terror she felt. If you’re a parent, I bet you can imagine.
An ambulance rushed her boy to the ER, where a crisis team revived him from a massive opiates overdose. The doctors told Mark’s folks that if they’d waited even minutes longer, he would have died.
Mark tells me he meant to die. He wasn’t sending a message, he wasn’t asking for help. He desperately wanted the pain to end, and he believed death was his only road to peace.
That overdose was just the beginning of Mark’s pain.
As I talk to him on the phone Tuesday, I know his arms, legs, and belly are striped with deep slashes crisscrossed with black stitches. I’m talking to him not two hours after he was discharged from the hospital for cutting himself.
Mark is not a sex offender.
He’s a teenage boy who fell in love with a teenage boy his own age at church. He suffered months of bullying and abuse. He and Tammy reached out to me because they need you to hear their story. They both tell me they need to help other families like theirs.
Tammy swallowed her pride and and confessed her shame so she could help kids like Mark, so please, will you listen?
Meet Mark and his family
Mark is a sharp, well informed, articulate high school senior who turned 17 in April. He says that until January, he was a “school jock” with lots of friends. His mom is also super sharp and articulate. Ordinary for the conservative city she was raised in, she’s a committed Baptist active in her church and community service. Mark’s dad is a loving father, ex-military with a good job in the high-end trades.
Mark fell in love
About a year ago January, Mark was sitting in church youth group listening to a pastor “preach hellfire and brimstone about gay people.” A kid sitting next to him whispered, “This is all bullshit.” Mark nodded and smiled. He and “Patrick” soon became close friends.
One day, Mark told Patrick, “I want to trust you with the biggest secret of my life.”
Before he could get the words out, Patrick finished the thought: “We’re both gay!”
The boys burst out laughing, and within weeks Patrick pulled Mark in for his first kiss. They messaged all the time on Snapchat, typical starry-eyed teenager stuff.
“I miss you so much.”
“Wish we could be together right now.”
“Wish we could be open.”
Patrick took screenshots of a few messages. Maybe to look at them and daydream? I can hear Mark dream a little when he says Patrick’s name. I’m afraid to ask if he’s still in love. I don’t want to hurt him. More.
Mark’s world crashed down on him
Tammy tells me the details. After church in January, Patrick’s parents approached her and her husband, “acting very aggressive.” The four parents met for lunch, and Patrick’s folks whipped out his phone and and flashed those Snapchat screenshots. They accused Mark of sexually preying on their son.
Mark tells me his side, trying with little success to keep tears out of his voice. “They had no right to snoop! They thought it was all about sex. I just wanted to love somebody.”
Tammy tells me the screenshots contained nothing sexual.
Patrick’s mom phoned Mark directly — to threaten him. “She told me if I didn’t basically disappear she would tell everybody I was trying to make her son a fag.”
He tells me he painted his window black and made himself invisible because he believed her threats. What could he do as a 16-year-old with zero support, not even from his mom?
Tammy cries the whole time she talks to me.
She’s ashamed she didn’t support Mark. It takes me half the two-hour phone call to realize that changed only the day before yesterday. Until then, she’d been trying her best to make him stop being gay. She took him to Southern Baptist pastoral counselors. She tried talking him into conversion therapy.
That time he almost killed himself?
She tells me not even the shock of finding her son dying on his bedroom floor could change her. She’d fallen so far down a rabbit hole of misinformation that she sincerely — desperately — believed she had to save him from “indoctrination.”
When Mark tells me his side, I can almost see his eyes roll. “I’ve been raised in the straightest, most religious environment known to man, and I’m still gay.”
Tammy tells me, “We’re a Fox News family,” mentioning Republican conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene, Moms for Liberty, anti-LGBTQ Instagram accounts, and a newsletter from the far-right American Principles Project.
“I listened to Tucker Carlson say they wanted my son to remove his penis and make him a girl. On Blaze TV, I heard that if my son is gay, that lesbian and gay are a thing of the past, and that they’re taking kids who are gay and trying to make them transgender.”
“You have to understand,” she tells me, choking on the words. “This was my whole world. It’s how I was raised. It’s the only thing I knew.”
Mark steps outside for a second so his mom can’t hear him. He sounds disgusted, though I don’t think he wants to. He clearly loves his parents. He desperately wants them to love him back. He tells me one good thing about that horrible time in January:
“I thought my dad was gonna beat [Patrick’s] dad’s ass. He told me he doesn’t even care if it’s true, but he doesn’t want people talking down to me. He wasn’t supportive, but he defended me!”
What I hear is Mark trying to say, ‘See, my dad really loves me!”
“He took it better than my mom. She’s a beautiful person, but she listens to the pastors. The wrong web sites.”
His voice breaks. “This past week, I saw a bunch of changes in my mom. I heard her cuss the pastor. She defended me! She never did that before!”
How Mark found help and how Tammy struggled to climb out of her rabbit hole
After Mark almost took his own life, he spent a lot of time on TikTok. He met a few other LGBTQ kids, and he kept hearing about the Rainbow Youth Project.
“I heard on TikTok a trans person say she got help from Rainbow Youth. Then I saw more videos about them. Trevor Project were nice and sent a lot of emails and stuff, but I needed help. I called Rainbow and was on the phone only about 15 minutes and they brought [a psychologist] on. And I was kind of shocked because nobody else did that. I talked to her for about an hour, then she asked me to get my parents’ permission.”
That phone call began a roller coaster of hope and despair.
With Mark’s consent, the Rainbow Youth psychologist called his parents, and they initially agreed to counseling. He began intensive therapy, but Tammy was not happy.
“I told him, ‘if [Rainbow Youth counseling] is what’s going to keep you here, then do it,’ but they were the enemy to me at that point. I was convinced they would try to make him a girl. They kept explaining that our son identifies as gay not trans, but it didn’t outweigh what I was seeing everywhere.”
She adds, “He started counseling with [Rainbow] sometime end of April. Three times a week till June. He was high risk for suicide. We signed the consent form. Online counseling from UCLA. We each (my husband and I) did 4 hour-long sessions before Mark started.”
But she called the Southern Baptist Convention for different referrals.
She canceled permission for Mark to talk to his Rainbow Youth psychologist and started taking Mark around to counselors who agreed with her that being gay is not okay.
Two of them were pastors without mental health qualifications. The first one was a disaster.
Tammy says, “I’d never seen my son like that. I sat in the vestibule. Mark was in there for no more than 15 minutes. I heard lots of anger and swearing. My son was angry and crying. He never spoke the whole way home.”
Mark says, “First thing he said to me was, ‘You’re gonna burn in hell if you don’t change right this minute.’ He wanted to pray with me. I told him, ‘You’re the fucking devil.’ ”
The pastor called Tammy and said conversion therapy was the only option. Mark put his foot down. He showed her data about what happens to kids in those programs. He showed her suicide stats and ugly first-person accounts.
She still couldn’t climb out of the rabbit hole, but she didn’t force him.
“When he was cut off from Rainbow, he lost 14 pounds. Stopped eating except snacks. Not talkative.”
“His father and I decided we needed to make sure he was talking to somebody. I was so shocked because I had been so rude with them, and yet they didn’t hesitate and they put him right back with the same counselor and they started that day.”
Mark got better over the summer with regular therapy, but Tammy was still convinced her son was being indoctrinated.
“I hated seeing him happy in being gay. I hated knowing they were affirming that for him. This whole time, I’m seeing a pastor who’s telling me I’m sending my son to hell. ‘Can you live with that? Can you accept that?’ ”
Then the self harm started
“He stayed in counseling until August 22 when I pulled him out again. They told me they needed to have a teleconference. They called me back, four people with the counselor.”
“One of them told me he tried to kill himself when he was 19. He said, ‘I understand your faith, but I want to tell you God doesn’t hate anybody. Hate almost ended my life. I believe God loves me.’ ”
She almost whispers as she tells me, “He really spoke to me, but I’d just had another newsletter from American Principles with pictures of surgical procedures. It was too much. The counselor told me if we pulled him, he would be at high risk for suicide. I said, preach your propaganda somewhere else. I pulled parental permission.”
She says Mark, “fixed me with the coldest, bleakest stare I’d ever seen. He said, ‘I hope you know you just killed me.’ ”
Mark says he told her, “I’m gay and you can’t change that. You can either help me or I can just wither away.”
Exactly one week ago, Mark came out of his room on a very hot day in a long-sleeved sweatshirt and sweatpants. Tammy immediately thought something was wrong. She called her husband, and they made him take off the heavy clothes. She was horrified to see his whole body covered with self-inflicted slashes, some of them deep and gaping.
She rushed him to the hospital. Doctors sewed up some of the cuts. He was admitted for observation but refused to tell anyone what was going on. Tammy was still struggling inside, but she let him restart Rainbow Youth therapy on Saturday, from the hospital.
But this story isn’t over. Mark wasn’t done hurting himself.
On Tuesday, Patrick’s mother followed through on her threat. Lying in his hospital bed, Mark read an email Patrick’s family sent to him and everyone at church.
He chokes as he tells me what was in it. “They called me a sexual predator.”
He tells me he lashed out. “Yesterday at the hospital I was dreaming about that preacher telling me I was going to hell, and then I woke up and couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I grabbed a pencil and started stabbing.”
Tammy’s pastor called her and asked the family not to come back to church.
She lost it:
“With every ounce of energy in me, I told him if he did not take Christ’s most important value of love, he could shove [the Bible] straight up his ass. He told me Satan got to me. I said if Satan taught me to love my son, I’m OK with that.”
She sobs as she repeats those words to me.
Mark says she “cussed him out.” He sounds astonished by joy. She defended him! She believed him! She loved him!
The family say they want their journey to be loving from now on, but Mark is not out of the woods.
I learned yesterday from Rainbow Youth that his therapist is seeing him daily because she believes he’s still at high risk for suicide. She’s recommended inpatient care, but Mark refuses. He’s internalized some of the nastiness the “rabbit hole” is full of, and he’s worried Child Protective Services will show up, that police cars will pull into his driveway, and he’ll be taken from his home — even though he’s done nothing wrong.
Can you blame him? In the meantime, Tammy has him home, and she’s desperate to ask parents like her to climb out of rabbit holes of misinformation and fear mongering.
Her beloved son almost died because she listened to conspiracy theorists and preachers who know nothing about sexual orientation and gender identity. Mark suffered for months, Tammy blames herself, and she begs other parents to do better for their children than she did.
As for Patrick? Not long ago, he was hospitalized for two weeks under mysterious circumstances. Mark has no idea why or if he’s okay. But the rabbit hole is deep, and wide, and everywhere. He’s afraid his first love’s parents are caught in it, unable to find their way out.
If you’re reading them, can you help them, or other parents like them?
If you’re an LGBTQ young person in immediate crisis with thoughts of suicide or self harm, please dial 988 to reach the National Suicide Hotline. You can reach Rainbow Youth at (317) 349–4073. Or visit their website. Response times are fast, and access to professional mental health care is free.
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James Finn is a columnist for the LA Blade, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, an alumnus of Queer Nation and Act Up NY, and an “agented” but unpublished novelist. Send questions, comments, and story ideas to [email protected]
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The preceding article was previously published by Prism & Pen– Amplifying LGBTQ voices through the art of storytelling and is republished by permission.