For the first few weeks, the counsellors worked tirelessly to convince me that I was broken.

With Leviticus verses.

With sexual metaphors of plugs in sockets.

With reproductive diagrams and images of AIDS patients.

With ipecac porn sessions after breakfast and electric shocks before bed.

But I already believed that I was broken.

There were so many places to lay the blame.

A father who didn’t attend church enough.

A mother who’d allowed me to occasionally play with dolls.

The public school system.

The liberal media.

The counsellors traced on a timeline of my homosexuality on the whiteboard in red marker. I was the culmination of a million small mistakes.

But they didn’t need to try so hard. Most campers are forced to come. They’re kidnapped in the night and kept here until they’re cured.

Most have spent a long time as practicing homosexuals. ‘Entrenched homosexuality’, the counsellors call it, harder to treat.

I was a virtuous case, aware of the desire but never acting upon it.

I already knew I was broken. I had come to this place on purpose, not kidnapped but dropped off at the gate with a chaste kiss on the cheek from my wife. As we said our goodbyes, her eyes were brimming with hope that I might finally love her the way I was meant to.

This was our last chance and I was all in. I was the top student of our conversion camp. I poured over our workbook until the early hours of the morning. The camp director was my deity and his scripture was my path to salvation.

I was making progress until Adam arrived.

-Adam is very cool and very disinterested being ‘straight’ but also has never actually been with a man

-He smokes joints and swears and refuses to comply with the ‘therapy’

-narrator cannot resist the love he discovers for Adam

-they start getting up to immense shenanigans in the camp to sabotage the ‘therapy’ e.g.,

-decide to run away together

-but they both have wives and children in the world outside, is their love worth losing their families and leaving behind the lives they have built back home?