If you don’t know any conversion therapy survivors — other than as the subjects of Netflix documentaries — give it some time. A 2019 report from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law estimated that 698,000 American LGBTQ adults ages 18 to 59 have undergone conversion therapy at some point in their lives, almost half of whom were adolescents at the time of their “treatment.” As the nuclear family continues to outsource its queerphobia to charlatans of varying professional credentials who promise to “cure” their children, queer and trans writers and filmmakers are returning to older genre work — from ’70s and ’80s horror to ’90s camp to 2010s teen franchise revivalism — to dramatize conversion therapy in queer American life.
For every gay banking app or prize for the first nonbinary war criminal, there’s a new law banning health care for trans children.
Conversion therapy purports to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity to heterosexual and/or cisgender. Interventions include forms of talk therapy, aversion therapy, medical practices (including hormones, steroids, and surgery), and religious rituals, some of which may, according to a 2020 United Nations report, even “amount to torture.” Although 22 states and the District of Columbia have banned licensed mental health professionals from using it to “treat” minors, religious organizations don’t fall under this exclusion. Last year, the Trevor Project released a report that tallied over 1,300 active conversion therapy practitioners across the U.S., almost half with professional licenses — and those were just the ones advertising publicly online.
In 1973, homophile activists succeeded in pressuring the American Psychiatric Association into removing homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Only a few years after the Stonewall riots — the coming-out party, as it were, of America’s gay liberation movement — this achievement ought to have initiated the total discountenance of conversion therapy, in all its forms, in this country. But as the following half-century has shown, queer genders and sexualities are not immune to capitalist co-optation. These days, for every gay banking app or prize for the first nonbinary war criminal, there’s a new law banning health care for trans children — with more on the horizon.This evolution is mirrored by representations of conversion therapy in the LGBTQ pop culture of the past quarter-century. The happy ending of camp classic But I’m a Cheerleader, released in 1999, closes out the decade that brought us the coming-out movement writ large (see Ellen DeGeneres’ Time magazine cover: “Yep, I’m gay”) with a gesture toward the power of self-acceptance within an ascendant civil rights struggle. In the 2010s, the sanitized melodrama of The Miseducation of Cameron Post and Boy Erased — both released in 2018, both about teens sent to conversion camps in the ’90s and ’00s, respectively — situate conversion therapy as a fringe practice belonging to a dark past in which gay marriage didn’t exist and gay sex was criminalized. Now halfway through an increasingly repressive decade (“I’m afraid we’re coming to the end of our Weimar Era,” tweeted writer and historian of queer New York Hugh Ryan recently), with the threat of a civil rights backslide a prominent talking point of the forthcoming presidential elections, we find ourselves in the future that was supposed to be tolerant. Contemporary queer and trans artists are no longer writing happy endings.
Body-snatching, shape-shifting, and undying — conversion therapy has found a fertile host in contemporary queer and trans horror.
Like popular depictions of vampires and zombies, Gretchen Felker-Martin’s second novel, Cuckoo, released this June, vivifies traumas whose monstrosity may otherwise go unnoticed by the culture at large. Sent to a remote Utah compound in the mid-1990s, the queer and trans teen prisoners of Camp Resolution are coming of age in a country in which anti-sodomy laws haven’t yet been ruled unconstitutional and euphemisms like “reparative therapy” are still picking up steam. These campers aren’t referred to as queer unless they’re being bashed (by a relative or camp counselor, take your pick), let alone as trans, the inchoate prefix-as-identifier. Though hailing from diverse backgrounds, each camper has a home life of neglect and violence. Camp Resolution is effectively the subcontractor that delivers dehumanizing abuse that parents are not willing to mete out themselves, no matter how badly they want their kids to be straight.
In clear homage to Stephen King’s 1986 horror epic IT, Felker-Martin’s protagonists return for a final confrontation with Cuckoo’s eponymous monster — an extraterrestrial mother-parasite of Lovecraftian proportions that colonizes human bodies before sending their replicas back to their unsuspecting families — almost 15 years after their harrowing escape from Camp Resolution, and just a few years before the legalization of gay marriage and the so-called Transgender Tipping Point. In the novel’s showdown, the monster appears to be destroyed. But Cuckoo’s ambiguous final pages presage the political reality: that in real life, the demand for what Camp Resolution is selling has increased since the ’90s. Able to convince families all over the country to condemn their own offspring to torture and even death, the Cuckoo embodies the American identity crisis that locates queer and particularly trans children as an existential threat. Felker-Martin — and America’s all-too-real organized assault on trans kids — suggests that radical politics demands the liberation of all children.
Contemporary queer and trans artists are no longer writing happy endings.
We see this horror remix of straight texts on screen, too. The psychological thriller TV series Ratched (2020), developed by Ryan Murphy, is the prequel to the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The show follows Nurse Ratched (Sarah Paulson) as a young closeted lesbian who, per Netflix’s promo copy, “infiltrates the mental health care system.” While Ratched is meant to represent a sociopathic cruelty, it’s hard to see her sadism as very different from a system that’s already treating homosexuality with boiling water — as if her sadism could be meaningfully differentiated from the institution that empowers her. A similarly twisted approach to conversion therapy features in American Horror Story: Asylum, also created by Murphy and starring Paulson. In They/Them (2022), a forested conversion camp is terrorized by a serial killer, an undeniable reference to the iconic Sleepaway Camp (1983), whose transfeminine-coded villain carved its place in women’s and gender studies for decades to come.
This summer’s indie horror hit, I Saw the TV Glow, by writer/director Jane Schoenbrun, follows two isolated teenagers bonding over their obsession with a Buffy-esque show. Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), abused by her stepfather at home and by a former friend at school for being a suspected lesbian, disappears into the TV show, and Owen (Justice Smith) is left alone with the misery of life as an egg, the limbo of the non-transitioning trans person. Like Schoenbrun’s other movies, I Saw the TV Glow is marketed as horror and characterized by overtly trans themes, including the agony of gender dysphoria. Schoenbrun’s suburbia could be read as a kind of conversion therapy in and of itself, an inculcation of internalized transphobia so extreme that external enforcement is hardly necessary.
Body-snatching, shape-shifting, and undying — conversion therapy has found a fertile host in contemporary queer and trans horror. Like the work of their predecessors, these novels and films often include narratives of childhood, coming of age, and institutionalization; unlike them, their optimism — if there’s any to be found — is located in the atomized resistance of individuals and their affinity groups rather than in movements and benevolent institutions. These writers and filmmakers offer up gruesome monsters that attack the supposed horrors of transness and queerness and, in so doing, force their comparison. How could we fail to tell the difference? How could anyone?
Davey Davis is a novelist and writer living in Brooklyn. They’re the author of the earthquake room (2017), X (2022), and Casanova 20: Or, Hot World, forthcoming from Catapult in 2025. They write a weekly newsletter on sex and sensation at itsdavid.substack.com.
Photo illustrations by Sharanya Durvasula.
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