Saving Alex: When I Was Fifteen I Told My Mormon Parents I Was Gay, and That's When My Nightmare Began, by Alex Cooper with Joanna Brooks; HarperOne, $24.99
Last November, the Mormon Church issued policy changes that said that same-sex couples who marry are apostates and unwelcome in church congregations. Children of same-sex couples cannot be baptized in the church until they are 18, and then only if they disavow their parents. So LGBTQ members must not only leave the church, but take their children with them. Such draconian positions, despite Mormon leaders pledging last month to support anti-discrimination laws in Utah for LGBTQ people as long as the laws also protect the rights of religious groups, seem to provide cover for other less drastic homophobic religious institutions (such as Roman Catholics), who can always claim they are nothing like the bugaboo Mormons. With the exception of the Phelps cult in Kansas, Mormons remain among the last vestige of virulent hatred of gay, lesbian, and transgender people in American Christianity.
Certainly Alex Cooper's shocking memoir Saving Alex will do nothing to lessen the public's perception of this truth. In 2009, when Cooper was 15, she had an ordinary life in a sleepy suburban town in Southern California as part of a devout Mormon family. Yet something was gnawing at her that made her feel different. Those emotions exploded when she met Yvette, another Mormon teenage girl, who made her feel alive in a new way. "She had such a great way of making me feel comfortable and fully myself." Alex knew she was holding a secret that could shatter her family, but eventually she couldn't keep the truth hidden any longer. Being gay was who she was, and she couldn't deny it. "I can see how terrifying it must have been for my mom especially, because our religion told her there was no place for people like me, no place in the faith and in the community that held her world together, and no place in God's plan." She told her parents, "I like girls," and they immediately kicked her out of the house. So began her living hell. "I can see how scared my mom and dad must have been, and I felt bad for them. But with no idea where I would go or what would happen to me, all I could feel was the crushing weight of my mother's shame and my father's silence."
Soon her parents drove her to southern Utah and signed over guardianship to a strict Mormon couple who, despite having no therapeutic or counseling training, ran an unlicensed residential treatment program that promised to cure her homosexuality. The husband threatened Alex, "You can be here three months, or you can be here three years. It's up to you." Thus began Alex's harrowing eight-month imprisonment. She was physically and emotionally abused. When she tried to escape, refused to cooperate, or reveal Yvette's name, which she never did, she was punched, beaten with a sharp belt, then made to stand for 18 hours facing a wall and wearing a backpack filled with rocks weighing 25 pounds. "Being gay is a choice," the Siales couple said to intimidate her, "it's not how God made you! We know everyone in this town. We know the police, the schools, the courts. They all know us and trust us, as we take in troubled kids. It's your word against ours." After eight months she was permitted to attend school, and found a courageous teacher connecting her with a Salt Lake City attorney who agreed to represent her pro bono. Alex eventually made legal history in Utah by winning the right to live under the law's protection as an openly gay teenager within her parent's home, coming to a somewhat reconciling truce with them.
Ripped-from-the-headlines books often seemed forced, but not here. Blessed with a capable ghostwriter, Alex's story, at 21, is gripping, as she comes across as a reliable witness against the cruelties of so-called reparative therapy. Because of her bravery, LGBTQ teenagers in Utah don't have to undergo what Alex endured. Sadly, she still feels the damage in her back daily, with one shoulder blade out of alignment. But she doesn't wallow in self-pity.
Alex mentions a new group of Mormon mothers of LGBT kids who call themselves Mama Dragons, ready to defend their children from abuse. She hopes the Utah state legislature will end these debunked conversion therapies. With Alex's testimony, perhaps the days of coercive religion against LGBTQ people are coming to a deserved end. Alex writes, "I am sharing my story so that no more LGBT teenagers will find themselves up against a wall �" physically, emotionally, or spiritually." Because of courageous LGBTQ pioneers like Alex willing to fight to be herself in the face of adversity, the future seems bright for the LGBTQ civil rights movement.