A boy is baptized in an inner sanctum of his Mormon church, his father leading him to the font that should cleanse him from the stain of being born in a human body. A boy secretly searches forgay pornography on the internet at night in his father’s study. One of these fearsome gateways to adulthood proves to be dingy and anticlimactic, the other leads to transcendence: “My stomach boiled, my heart pounded, my mind reeled, my body shook, my eyes strained . . . I felt myself elevate,” poet AJ Romriell writes in “The Stain,” remembering his first experience of masturbating to climax while viewing porn. It’s the second essay in Romriell’s new memoir-in-essays, Wolf Act (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025), a book in which the sacred and the profane are hidden in each other’s disguises, like Red Riding Hood’s Granny with her suspiciously sharp teeth.
Romriell, a former theater kid, uses the structure of the three-act play to organize his memoir, weaving a motif of the wolf throughout. In fact, his first crush, he recounts, was a fellow castmate in a high school production of Stephen Sondheim’s fractured fairy tale, Into the Woods. The crush was another semi-closeted Mormon youth who, unlike Romriell, chose to keep fighting his nature into adulthood.
To his roster of mythic canids—from the wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus to the Norse deities Skoll and Hati—I can’t help adding the pseudo–Native American moral tale, “Inside you there are two wolves,” an admonition about feeding the “good” part of yourself and starving the “wicked” one. One internet meme variation reads, “Inside you there are two wolves. They’re both boys and they are kissing.” For Romriell, this turns out to be true, and also, the wolves are both himself.
You see, salvation—or self-purification, or healing, or whatever your subculture calls its desired end state of personal flourishing—is never a once-and-done affair. Moments after his baptism, eight-year-old Romriell is still dogged by intrusive thoughts that make him doubt whether the ritual worked. He writes, “I wondered if I’d done something wrong by thinking of the water park instead of Jesus.” As he enters puberty, he repeatedly makes and breaks vows to himself that he’ll stop watching gay porn and desiring other boys.
In his late teens, he cuts short his mission trip and comes out to his family, but the damage of purity culture takes years to work through. A beautiful, heartbreaking pair of essays titled “The Magic Kingdom” depict the breakdown of his first marriage to another young man similarly burdened with religious shame, against the backdrop of Romriell’s job at Walt Disney World, that manufactured fantasy of happily-ever-after. What’s refreshing is that Romriell isn’t snarky about Disney the way you would expect a traumatized millennial guy to be. He fully embraces his sentimental, romantic side, while grieving that he wasn’t ready to be a faithful Prince Charming.
Je est un autre (“‘I’ is someone else”) is a psychological truth not limited to conflicted gay poets like Romriell and Rimbaud, but the disorientation is particularly sharp when you’ve been taught that your secret self is a deviation from the person God designed you to be. Sometimes you can only recognize yourself when cosplaying as someone else. In a memorable early scene, the author is watching the TV show Smallville with his sister, excited by the sight of teenage Superman’s chest through his wet white shirt. Afterward, Romriell stands outside in the summer rain until his own shirt is similarly drenched and transparent, then looks in the mirror. “[S]omething unfamiliar rose up in my gut,” he writes, “an unsure kind of something, that maybe, just maybe, I could see my body, my own skin, as something to be desired. . . . I bared my teeth and smiled.”
Doubling and parallel narratives characterize the innovative form as well as the content of Wolf Act. Most of the essays are braided sequences of vignettes that juxtapose two or more narrative arcs in order to put Romriell’s formative experiences in dialogue with each other. His training in poetry shines forth in how he leaves resonant silences between these anecdotes, letting the reader decide how to hold their contradictions and ambiguities together—a still open question for the author as well.
The stunning piece “A Dictionary of the Voiceless” is a hermit crab essay in the form of alternate definitions for poetic terms like “Volta” and “Negative Capability,” one for each letter of the alphabet, that together tell the story of learning to trust his own unorthodox perceptions of love, desire, and the sublime. Under “Kenning,” a figurative compound that is a more poetic way of restating an ordinary noun, he writes:
“In 2012, at 19, the boy stood in front of a mirror and finally accepted the truth that he was gay. The person peering at him through the glass was a stranger. Someone he didn’t yet know. He called the broken boy ‘you’re-gay,’ and I became just a little less shattered.”
The shift from “he” to “I” in the last clause is significant.
The aforementioned baptism/pornography essay, “The Stain,” reminded me of the iconic cross-cutting sequence in The Godfather where Michael Corleone stands as godfather to his sister’s child, while elsewhere his henchmen brutally gun down his Mafia rivals. In both cases, it seems to me, the baptismal ritual represents maintenance of the patriarchal order, while the orgiastic spilling of blood—or in Romriell’s case, semen—gives the lie to the heterosexual family’s façade of purity.
Fortunately, Romriell’s family is not the typical adversary in a queer coming-of-age narrative. By the time he’s an adult, his parents and siblings have left the Mormon church. They can keep nurturing the close-knit family bonds that Mormonism fostered, without requiring hypocrisy as the price of inclusion. Their reasons for deconversion aren’t explored in depth, but the church’s doubling down on its homophobia in the 2010s clearly played a role. It seems that the family’s anxiety about Romriell’s emerging sexual identity had more to do with the example of his older brother, also gay, who became a drug addict to cope with religious trauma.
All the theater gays I know are mad for the spectacular new movie version of the musical Wicked. Its central dilemma is the one that haunts Romriell’s wolf-boy alter ego as well: Can we resist or reclaim the villain role that was assigned to us, or is the combined pull of structural oppression and self-destructive reactivity too strong? In the essay “Ghost Boys: A Bricolage,” he describes a period of lonely and compulsive promiscuity that ended with him contracting HIV, seemingly fulfilling the tragic destiny that his church predicted for all gay men.
But Wolf Act not only ends in joy and love, it bursts with it throughout. There is something operatic about how Romriell leans into every emotion, be it exquisitely painful or pleasurable, without the defenses of ironic self-mockery or stoic masculinity. Wolf Act is a romantic book in the aesthetic sense of finding ultimate reality within the heart and in the grandeur of the wilderness. In rapturous encounters with caves, rivers, and the night sky, Romriell senses that God’s creation isn’t broken and so maybe neither is he. Though the dichotomy of “clean/dirty” follows him out of Christian purity culture and onto the dating apps, he finds unconditional love after his diagnosis with his partner, Terrence. For this kind of salvation, his so-called stain doesn’t have to be washed away or hidden. As he writes in “Ghost Boys,” “Here: ask me what it feels like to come alive; my body is telling the story.”
