Justin Torres } My Parents Put me in a Mental ‘cause I was Gay
Justin Torres today: 'Know that I am protective of my family, that I believe there is room for their version of events to be as true as mine. Remember that this is my version...' Photograph: Winni Wintermeyer for the Guardian
They came for me at the mall, in a head shop. I was 17 years old, tangentially connected to a pack of druggies swirling around the store, leaning over glass cases of glass pipes, flipping through racks of black-light posters, dicking around, pulling knit hats over each other's eyes. I felt close to two or three in the group, but I was high and having trouble connecting the other kids' faces to their stories. I was feeling paranoid, feeling very queer, and very slight; I needed to remember who my enemies were.
Then my father stared at me from the entrance, his arms folded across his chest. I stared back. I am looking at my father, I thought, but knew it to be impossible. My father lived hours away, in a house I had seen only a handful of times, with a woman and a boy I barely knew. My father had been gone for years, long gone. I closed my eyes, opened them, and still my father stared. He looked heavier, older, real. This man, my father, made no move and, ridiculously, I felt a tug at the corners of my lips, a smile easing on to my face. I raised my hands and placed them one on top of the other on my chest. Inside my chest were my lungs, and now they struggled to find air. Inside my chest was my heart, with its own struggles.
I was mighty high.
My father covered the distance between us in three long steps and clamped a hand on the back of my neck, and as he did so, semi-sober realisations struck my mind: that my father and I had been staring at each other from a very short distance, that everyone in the store had noticed and quieted, and that this was no chance encounter. Here is my father, he has come for me.
Still gripping tight, my father straight-armed me out of the store. Resistance was impossible. He pinched the tendons of my neck in a way that forced me to crouch and shuffle in front of him. My father learned this in the police academy: grips, chokeholds, domination. Someone – one of the tough, smart, stoner girls I ran with – ventured a brave, "Hey, man", but then my father and I were out of the store, and I was straight-armed on to the escalator, paraded towards the parking lot, past families who held their children a little closer at the sight of us.
In the car sat my mother and one of my brothers. Both turned, both briefly touched me as my father pushed me down into the back seat. Mother was red-eyed; she had been swiping tears and mascara across her face, as was her habit, and she had hairs stuck in each corner of her mouth. My brother looked tired, and disappointed, but I felt his disappointment to be soft and unfocused. In any conflict, I could scan either of my brothers' faces and instantly tell where their allegiance fell; whether they were pissed at me, or pissed at our mother; whether they were feeling protective, or enjoying the trouble I was in; or whether, like now, they simply found themselves let down once again, fed up with the awfulness our world seemed to insist on. This last, nonaligned stance was the worst. Whatever was coming, I would have to face it alone. Still, as we pulled on to the highway, I leaned conspiratorially close to his ear and asked where they were taking me.
"Don't ask me that," my brother whispered back, eyes forward. "Jesus, man, please don't ask me that."
The phone rings, my oldest friend calling; we've not spoken in some time. I tell her I am sitting down trying to write an essay, that I'm stuck, nervous about writing nonfiction, because if I tell the story too neatly, I'd be telling a lie.
"What's the topic?"
"The mental hospital. You know, the reason, the how and the why of it all."
This friend and I used to date in the second grade, when we were nine years old, back when she had long, jet-black hair that hung down past her butt and was sometimes separated into these two pigtails on either side of her head, which just killed me, the way the two ropes of hair moved and bounced in tandem as she ran across the playground. We never lost sight of each other, up through adolescence and adult lives and the thousands of miles that separate us now. Back then, those months in the hospital, she came to visit in the evenings, after school and a quiet dinner with her stable family. I would be bloated with medications seemingly named after sci-fi villains – Zoloft, Zyprexa, Depakote. I would be alternately dead-eyed or seething with hate, and I'd see her in the visiting room, trying to look comfortable with the other patients, trying not to be shocked, and I would want to make her laugh. She looked like my mother, that pretty face, that long black hair and, like my mother, I always wanted to make her laugh. I still do. I'd crack a joke, and we'd laugh until the tears confused us into something sad. But she came, again and again, to see me. After, she might meet my mother at a diner – my friend was still too young for the bar – and my mother, whose visits I refused, would ask after me, and cry, and explain herself, her motivations, the evidence against me, over and over, in the hope that some of her words would find their way to me, and my friend would listen.
Now on the phone, that same friend, who was there, who has heard the narrative from more than one side, countless explanations, thinks in silence for a moment, then asks, "Shit, Justin, really. Is there even a reason?"
Memories are stories we tell ourselves about the past, created narratives, fictions. The story I tell myself about that time is the one I can live with, the one that allows me to forgive my family and to forgive myself for being a monstrous son. I can talk easily about how it all happened – to lovers in hushed tones when I want to spark their protective instincts, to strangers in bars when I want to be a person of mystique – but more difficult is explaining why. Fifteen years have passed and the answer to that question, why, is more difficult to parse than ever.
My mother and father each have their own answers, and if you ever get the chance to meet them, I think they'd be happy to tell you very different stories. And man, I wish you could meet them, too. I wish you could hear them talk, about themselves, about me, about their hopes and fears. They fascinate. They're from Brooklyn, my folks. Teenage parents, high-school dropouts; they raised us on their own and later managed to put themselves through college. Still, today, they are exceptionally youthful and attractive, and tough. They spin bullshit with hard truth. Cunning little foxes, self-protective at the same time they are crushingly honest, they'll get you in stitches and make you cry. I respect their memories of that time, the stories they tell, and the way they tell them. I learned storytelling from them, and more, I learned that controlling the narrative is a form of power. And although here I've usurped that power, know that I exercise it cautiously. Know that I am protective of my family, that I believe there is room for their version of events to be as true as mine. Remember that this is my version, and I don't tell it to condemn my folks, nor do I wish to exonerate. I want only to tell you about this wild ride that damn near killed me.
They took me to a special emergency room for mental cases. The waiting area was typically inhumane, drenched in fluorescence, with fibreglass chairs bolted to the floor. A hardened soul behind a double glass window passed intake forms through a slot to my mother. My father and brother flanked me like a couple of goons, making sure I would not bolt. We sat, four of us in a pathetic row.
Yes, I had been depressed. Seriously depressed. Not surprisingly, at 17, I did not want to be a faggot. This was the late 90s in a very rural, very conservative part of New York state, five hours and many cultural decades from New York City. Two fags had come out in my high school and both had been hounded, tormented, beaten, until they dropped out. Everyone watched this with participatory glee or resigned disgust, but there was no righteous indignation. Least of all from me. I knew those boys, and if not for pervasive, scalding shame, I could have loved them. But I kept my distance. I wrote sickly, sad stories; I drew, painted and sculpted emaciated figures, boys and girls crucified, covering up bloody genitals, pregnant, cut. The hip and compassionate high-school art teacher, fluent in teenage angst, encouraged these hacky attempts at art, told me I radiated artistic spirit. He made a show of my work in a glass case in the school hallway. Outraged staff complained and forced me to cover up nipples and crotches and certain offending words with strips of black paper, and teachers I had never spoken to before pulled me aside in the hallway and let me know that my work was trash, that I was immoral, and that I ought to be ashamed.
They needn't have worried.
I sometimes cut myself, a bit of a trend then among gothic, artistic, miserable teens – I imagine it still is. The real cutters were covered in admirable scars, but I had only a couple of cat scratches on either wrist, not deep enough to scar, or impress (I was squeamish and wimpy with the blade). I had no intention of killing myself. Depressed, struggling mightily with what I felt to be a filthy sexuality, skipping school, drinking, tripping, getting high, yes, but simultaneously I excelled at advanced courses and had secured a scholarship to a prestigious university in New York City. I had my ticket out, nine months until emancipation. And in school I had allies: those lovely, fierce girls I ran with, an English teacher who listened and bought me books to take home and keep, and a school psychologist who pointed to a pink triangle pinned to the corkboard in his tiny, windowless office, and explained that triangle's significance. I hadn't come out to anyone, and didn't come out to him, and he didn't ask me to. He was a very wise, patient man, whom I trusted, and he knew I just needed time. I had support and a ticket out, and you'll forgive my boastfulness, but even in despair, I was a rather deft kid.
So even in that waiting room, as furious as I was at my folks for this bit of hysterical theatre, as betrayed as I felt, I knew I could find the calm to convince the doctors to release me. My mother had been forcing me to see a psychiatrist outside of school, once a week, and though I learned almost nothing useful from him (he was so insipid, I struggle to remember a single physical detail about him), I had learned a lot aboutmental health buzz words. I needed only to prove I was not a threat to myself or to others, and they would be forced to let me go. I planned to do just that.
But then, in that waiting room, everything changed.
My mother rose and asked the nurse behind the glass if she could use the phone. Those were the days when most phones still attached to walls or sat on desks. The nurse slid the receiver through the slot, my mother dug through her purse and passed the nurse a business card, and the nurse dialled for her. My mother was calling that dull and ineffective man, the psychiatrist, explaining to him what had not been explained to me: the reason for this abduction.
Pity Mother here. Make allowance for all she had ever suffered, how ferociously she loved me, how she was terrified, how I had transformed before her eyes. Pity her and make allowance. Left with three teenage boys to raise on her own, wild boys, and now the youngest had turned, something foreign rearing up inside him, make allowance, my 32-year-old self whispers to the 17-year-old. And I do.
On the phone, my mother rambled, tears poured down her face, she recounted the pictures I had drawn, the bloody pictures, and now she discovered I had cut myself.
"…and we found some writings, some things he wrote, and it's… sex stuff, gay stuff."
We all develop the strength to survive violation and humiliation over time, some of us much quicker than others. The young man who emerged from the psych wards, months later, was a hardened, shielded young man, with layers of scrappy defence, but the boy in that waiting room was soft and exposed, he had only the flimsiest of veils covering his nakedness, and in that moment the veil was snatched away.
I sat there, naked in my lusts. I sat there before my brother, before my mother, before my father, in shame.
"Did you read…" I asked my brother, who winced.
"Did you read…" I asked my father, who winced.
And here, I lose it. Not sure exactly what happens next. I know I moaned and wailed and slid to the floor. I cursed and threatened, tried to humiliate my parents. Multiple white coats forced me into a private room, my parents following along. Doctors asked me absurd questions that I answered with hostile and absurd answers. I put on a show. I dredged up every painful thing I knew about my folks and hurled words at them, the most vicious language possible, while the doctors looked on. I wanted, desperately, to shame them. And did I want to die? And did I want to kill? You're damn right I wanted to kill. You're damn right I wanted to die.
And they locked me up.
A bit of history on the forced institutionalisation of my people: until 1974, the American Psychiatric Association included homosexuality in the bible of crazy, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Until then, to be queer was unequivocally to be insane. The mainstream approach was to attempt to cure, or fix, the homosexual. The removal of homosexuality from the DSM was so bitterly contested in the psychiatric community that six years later, 1980, the year I was born, a new diagnosis, ego-dystonic homosexuality, was created for the DSM's third edition. The definition: (1) a persistent lack of heterosexual arousal, which the patient experienced as interfering with initiation or maintenance of wanted heterosexual relationships, and (2) persistent distress from a sustained pattern of unwanted homosexual arousal. Apparently this addition was a kind of truce, an olive branch extended to the significant portion who insisted on pathologising queer sexuality. Eventually this diagnosis was thrown out as well, but the connection between "abnormal" sexuality and mental illness survived, and survives, in many conservative pockets of the psychiatric industry in the US. There are places where you can go to be "fixed" or "cured", and they are utilised most by the extremely religious.
Now forget that last part. Forget the religious fanatic storyline. Because when I tell you that my parents had me institutionalised because I was queer, I mean something much more complicated, and much less sensational and reactionary. I mean that 15 years ago my parents believed in something like the ego-dystonic theory, they believed that the stress of not being straight, the stress of unwanted queer lust, could spark, did spark, mental illness. My mother, nobly, began to educate herself while I was institutionalised, she went to support groups for parents of queers, she quickly came around to the idea that societal norms and pressures were to blame for what she considered my sickness. Nowadays she is so progressive, so supportive, that she actively works with queer teen groups in high school. But back then, queer life was largely unknown to her, she knew only that I despised this aspect of myself, and she believed being queer was sufficiently catastrophic that I might kill myself.
I am convinced my parents did what they thought best for me. I am also convinced that I never would have tried to kill myself if they hadn't brought me there, and outed me.
The mental hospital is like a dog kennel, and when a new dog is introduced a few will run up to sniff you out, and others will hang back in the corners. The sniffers guided me through a kind of orientation (the time we ate, the way to procure cigarettes) and grilled me on the exact nature of my diagnosis (schizoid, later changed to bipolar). The literary and cinematic tropes of psychiatric institutions hold up shockingly well – the pills and the dehumanising routines, the burned-out nurses – the difference being that colourful incidents are much rarer, people are generally much, much sadder to behold, and the boredom, the immense, grey boredom, can never really be captured. The first few days I was on suicide watch and could not go to the bathroom, or sleep, alone. A nurse sat in my room through the night, with the light on. The doctors, while deeming me insane, simultaneously declared me too mature for the juvenile facility, where technically I belonged. They had me housed with the adult population. That first morning, one of the sniffers, a heavy, kind woman with stringy white hair, volunteered her saga, a lifetime of pain. Of course, I don't remember anything she said verbatim, but I remember the lovely cadence of her sentences, her story ended with something like, "Was about your age when they first locked me up, been in and out 43 years. Got so I'm missing inside when I'm outside, you know, the quiet, it's so easy in here. You'll see, how you can get used to a thing." And probably she was trying to comfort me, but a better argument for killing myself had never been more clearly presented. I would not become one of these people.
A month passed, Christmas, my 18th birthday. They let me out. The next day I swallowed all the medication in handfuls, the Zoloft, Zyprexa, Depakote, and some sleeping pills I had been prescribed, 90 pills in total. I went into a coma. A machine beat my heart and pumped air into and out of my lungs. I don't remember anything for about two weeks. My parents were at my side when I woke. I went back to another pysch ward for a couple more months. When I got out the second time, I stayed out. I soon stopped taking all the medication, and left for New York City.
I could tell you my parents put me in the mental hospital because I was queer, and that the violence of that act led to another even more violent act, that I tried to kill myself out of revenge for this violation of trust, but the very tidiness of the storyline is a lie. We were, each of us, afraid and hurting and inexplicable to each other. And even now, 15 years later, many of their actions, and my own, remain inexplicable. Wasn't none of it tidy.
My oldest friend is on the phone. Fifteen years have passed. Neither of us has children, yet. When my mother was our age, she had three teenage boys. I close my eyes and try to picture my friend on the other end of the line, that black hair, and in my mind she looks exactly like my mother. I see my mother talking.
"Shit, Justin, really," she says. "Is there even a reason?"
"Too many reasons. Too much to ever really explain."
"So don't explain. Besides, the beauty of the world isn't in explanations. The beauty of the world is in its mystery."
• Justin Torres' debut novel, We The Animals, is published by Granta at £12.99. To order a copy for £10.39, with free UK mainland p&p, call 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.
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