Who Gets to Tell the LGBTQ+ Story?
Nicolas Shumway's new coming-of-age and coming-out novel, The Education of Joshua Chastain: A Gay Mormon Memoir raises an important question: who gets to tell LGBTQ+ stories? And perhaps more importantly, what stories do LGBTQ+ people get to tell themselves?
Joshua Chastain grows up in Rosales, a small Arizona town whose inhabitants are two-thirds Anglo (mostly Mormon) and one-third Mexican-American (mostly Roman Catholic). The youngest child of a devout Mormon family, Joshua is born into several stories he did not choose.
The first is the spiritual narrative of his church and his exceptionally devout mother told. According to this narrative, God created Josh for a specific purpose: to help build the Kingdom through being a faithful Mormon, finding a wife, and having many children. God's commandment to Adam and Eve, "to multiply and replenish the earth" (Genesis 1:28), is as binding on young Mormons as it was on Adam and Eve. As Josh discovers his sexual orientation, he realizes that as a gay man, he has no place in this spiritual narrative.
Another story inherited by Josh (imposed on Josh?) is his family's history. Josh descends from Mormon pioneers who, in the mid-nineteenth century, fled persecution in the Midwest, migrated across the Great Plains, and founded settlements ranging from Idaho to Northern Mexico. The success of their farms, ranches, and elaborate irrigation systems confirmed in the minds of believers that they were indeed a New Israel, destined to fulfill the Biblical prophecy that "the wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them, and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose" (Isaiah 35:1).
For Joshua, this story of persecution, migration, and colonization is two stories. The first is Isaiah's prophecy, which would have Josh believe he is destined to play a role in a prophetic narrative. The second is the pioneer story. Josh remembers the sermon of a prominent church leader who said, "Consider those courageous Mormon pioneers, your forebears in many cases, who fled persecution and endured untold hardship to cross the Great Plains and found towns and communities like Rosales. Be loyal to your heritage. You are a royal priesthood, heirs of the covenant, the new Israel. Never betray that legacy and forget your debt to those brave and faithful Saints." These two stories, one based on Biblical interpretation and another on LDS history, impressed Josh at an early age. But because of his sexual identity, Josh intuits that he has no place in either story.
Another story Josh inherits is told more in social customs than in words. Like virtually all American children, Josh grows up submerged in heteronormative stories and rituals. These include movies, novels, and TV shows whose plots revolve around heterosexual courtship and marriage, as well as rituals like school and church dances designed to bring boys and girls together as they prepare to marry and have children. Gossip in Joshua's high school often revolves around tales of who is dating whom, who has broken up with whom, and who is going steady with whom. Although not attracted to women, Josh tries to fit into this heteronormative narrative in various ways—for example, by inviting a girl to be his date at school proms or by accepting a girl's invitation to be her date on Sadie Hawkins Day. But given his sexual identity, he knows that it is a story in which he has no place.
As Josh enters puberty, another powerful force inserts itself into his story: an overwhelming sexual attraction to members of his sex. Most of his male classmates comment freely, and often crudely, about their growing interest in the female body. At first, Josh suspects they merely repeating what they see in movies. But he soon realizes that their sexual feelings are accurate and that he does not share them. As Josh becomes agonizingly aware of his differences, he learns to hide his sexual interests and desires. He thus becomes acquainted with the homosexual closet, a lonely place that seeks safety through deception. Said differently, he learns to live a lie.
Josh's first sexual experience with another man occurs when he is fifteen years old. Given the heterosexual norms of his church and society, how does Josh become sexually active at such an early age? This question has several answers, the most apparent being that Josh already sees himself as a sinner, so why not go one step further? In addition, Josh desperately wants to find a friend like himself—a gay friend who experiences and sees the world as he does. He finds that friend in Harold, a college music major whom Josh meets in a piano store in Phoenix. Harold soon becomes Josh's first organ teacher and a sexual partner, friend, and mentor.
Josh's experience with Harold helps him develop his own story and reject the stories imposed on him. This new story is later strengthened by Josh's summer affair with Father Tovar, a young Roman Catholic priest who is the first man Josh falls in love with. Their affair involves both sex and sophisticated discussions about religion in which the priest opens Josh's eyes to the possibility of an understanding and merciful God who, unlike Josh's Mormon god, is swift to accept and slow to punish. In his later years, Josh is repelled by tales of predatory priests who force themselves on vulnerable young men. He does not, however, recall his affair with Father Tovar in these terms. Instead, he remembers an intimate friendship that increased his self-awareness and contributed to his ability to tell his story.
In the spring of his junior year, just after his seventeenth birthday, Josh is outed by a high school bully, thus making common knowledge the secret he had so carefully tried to hide. Wanting to do right by Josh and protect him from the cruelty of his classmates, his parents send their son to a live-in clinic in Phoenix administered by a Mormon psychologist named Dr. Chandler, who claims that he can cure young men of their "homosexual tendencies" through prayer, counseling, and aversion therapy.
In the clinic, Dr. Chandler seeks to impose a new narrative on Josh, one in which homosexuality is an illness that can be cured. A behaviorist, Chandler argues that through proper conditioning, Josh can choose to suppress his homosexual urges and get in touch with his authentic heterosexual self. Chandler's methods include aversion therapy (i.e., shock treatments, medication, and mental exercises that condition the patient to find men unattractive) and positive reinforcement (i.e., similar exercises that condition the patient to find women enticing). Chandler combines these theories with religious teachings. He retells the biblical story of how God supposedly destroyed Sodom and Gomorra to punish homosexual activity. He quotes Leviticus 20:13, where God dictates that men who lie with other men should be put to death, and Romans 1:27, where St. Paul denounces men who leave "the natural use of the woman" and burn "in their lust one toward another." Chandler is particularly fond of the Book of Mormon, the dictum that "wickedness never was happiness" (Alma 41:10), thus suggesting that Josh is destined for an unhappy life if he doesn't choose to change his sexual orientation.
Frightened by Chandler's aversion techniques, Josh flees to Los Angeles, where he meets Angelo, a stunningly handsome but deeply closeted Vietnam veteran. Through the guilt-obsessed Angelo, Josh becomes acquainted with a different kind of Catholicism. Whereas Father Tovar found Catholicism a source of comfort, Angelo remembers his Catholic upbringing as a story underpinned by mindless legalism, sexual and intellectual repression, and a system of control based on fear of punishment. Worse, tortured by memories of Vietnam and conflictive feelings about his sexuality, Angelo is given to outbursts of anger that on one occasion lead him to savagely beat Josh when Josh dares point out that Angelo is gay. From Angelo, Josh thus sees another homosexual story, one permeated by anger and self-loathing—a cautionary tale that Josh needs to avoid.
Joshua's education involves contact with many individuals, some kind and others most certainly not kind. Whether kind or not, they expand Josh's frame of reference, allowing him to understand and develop his own story as he compares it to other people's stories. In short, The Education of Joshua Chastain describes how Joshua learns to control his narrative and make it coincide with his experience of himself. The challenges facing him are multiple. He was born into a series of religious and social narratives that had no place for a gay teenager. He was then assaulted by a dangerous psychotherapeutic narrative that had little to do with his life as he lived it. Learning to tell his own story and not let someone else tell it for him is part of his coming out and coming of age. It is, in short, the essence of his education.