Backslider

The boy’s favorite word is “broken.” Staring from the corner of his eye, he points to a door left cracked, a toy knocked a few inches out of place on its shelf, and insists, “I want broken.”

Over time we learn that what he means is, “Fix it.” We try to teach him to say this instead. It never takes. 

In the forest behind the autism clinic, he gathers leaves and shreds them between his fingers. Inside, he tears Kleenex, tissue paper, Walmart bags—anything wispy—and repeats, “I want broken I want broken.”

When his mom arrives to pick him up, he darts off into the playroom, past all the toys he’s left untouched. 

She corners him and says, expectantly, “Jesus—” 

He groans and snarls. 

With urgency, a prayer within a prayer, she tries again. “Jesus—”

He squeals, squirming out of her arms. 

She kneels, pulls him close, and makes him meet her eyes. “Jesus—”

Reluctantly, he mumbles an answer to her prayer. “—heal me.” 

At the clinic, this is what we call an intraverbal. Witnessing this exchange, I wince, but think, Only a mother could transform our science to liturgy.

As he slips away, hissing softly, the boy snatches her purse and dumps it, leaving her scattered, her lipstick rolling under the couch. 

She turns to me with a tight smile, looking past the mess, and says, “That’s what we believe.” 

Behind her, the boy has found her pocket Bible, its tissue paper pages. 

***

I fell in love with this work during a part-time stint at a summer camp. I was twenty, barely. The kids were a bunch of lovable misfits, each diagnosed with their own developmental disability people could use to write them off. They were unable to learn. They were presumed to be broken, to be empty, something more like a malfunctioning automaton than a human. 

Or maybe these were my own assumptions, projected onto others. Either way, they didn’t hold up for long. I fell hard for the kids. 

There was the little boy who, every time we were waiting to get into the pool, would point at my bare stomach and giggle. “Your belly, Brandon!” He couldn’t get a hold of himself. “Your belly!” 

Or the girl who had everyone walking on eggshells, who communicated with her fists. We had a sand table on one side of the gym, a play kitchen on the other, and a strict rule that the sand had to stay in the table at all times. One day I found this girl at the kitchen, stirring a pot full of sand. There was sand in the sink, sand in the oven, sand in the little fridge. 

“How did you get all this sand over here?” I demanded, half-scolding, half-intrigued. 

In reply, she opened her mouth. Out poured a steady stream of sand.

***

I remember the moment I learned I was different. I was clothes shopping with my mom and grandma. Everything around me was a heaven of hue and bloom. I weaved through the racks of sundresses and nightgowns, veiled myself inside them and watched the fluorescent light filter through all that softness. My whole body relaxed. My wrist sighed.

My grandma snapped, “Boy, if I see that wrist hang limp again, I’m going to snap it.”

That was the moment I learned my body could evoke violence. After that, I learned to wrench my limbs tight—to monitor, to censor, to punish—to make myself a stranger in my own skin. 

***

Kirk Murphy was five when his mother saw a psychologist on TV. It was the ’70s, and the psychologist was promoting his research at UCLA on treating effeminate boys. He listed off ten warning signs. His mother counted out on her fingers all the ones that applied to Kirk. Too many. She took him in.

At the clinic, she met George Rekers, a doctoral student working with the influential psychologist Ole Ivar Lovaas. Rekers led her back to a therapy room where there were two tables stacked with toys, divvied up by typical gender preference. On one side: an army helmet, a dart gun, a toy electric razor. On the other: a Barbie doll, costume jewelry, a baby bottle. Rekers trained the mother on what to do: Whenever Kirk played with the feminine toys, she was to ignore him, neither looking at nor speaking to him (a procedure called attention extinction). When he played with the masculine toys, only then should she turn and praise him effusively.

They had to terminate the first session early. Baffled by his mother ignoring him, Kirk began to cry uncontrollably. He tugged on her arm over and over. When she refused to acknowledge him, he began to strike her.

Rekers and Lovaas wrote, “When the mother first withdrew her attention… [Kirk] put so much ‘pressure’ on her… to reinstate the attention, that we had to terminate the session and ask [Kirk] to leave for a minute. Before sending [Kirk] back to the playroom, we reassured the mother empathetically that she was doing the right thing and was doing it well.”

***

After I came out, I began having a recurring nightmare of my mother ignoring me. Though I rarely cry while awake, I’m sobbing in these dreams, screaming and tugging at her just like Kirk did with his mother in that therapy room. 

In the dream, my mother won’t even look at me.

***

One of the boys I worked with most closely at the summer camp had a severe brain injury. He couldn’t communicate, couldn’t dress himself, wouldn’t even play. While the other kids splashed in the pool, he would sit on the edge and rest his feet in the water. Everyone gave him a wide berth, treating him as if he were an empty shell, a bomb. I admit I assumed little of him. 

One time I was in the bathroom helping him use the urinal and, just as I helped him pull his pants down, he stepped back and began to gesture urgently at his untied shoe. 

“Go to the bathroom first,” I insisted, but he just kept pointing like his foot was on fire. 

“Okay, fine,” I said, and as I kneeled to tie his shoe, he urinated all over me. I was furious until I looked up and saw his eyes. They were full of laughter, of defiance. Of victory.

I didn’t make the mistake of underestimating him again. I was just an ignorant college kid, and didn’t know anything about alternative modes of communication, but I began to wonder why we assumed he couldn’t communicate. It became obvious to me that he was listening, that he understood much more than he could express. So, like some ancient human grasping toward language, I came up with the most basic mode of communication possible. I told him to tap my left shoulder for “yes” and my right shoulder for “no.” I’m sure he rolled his eyes at me, but he did it. 

One afternoon, sitting with him on the edge of the water while all the other kids were swimming, I asked him, “Do you want to get in the pool?” 

After a moment of thought, he tapped my left shoulder. 

I picked him up gently and held him in the shallow end. 

His whole body tensed up. 

“Do you want to get out?” I asked. 

Right shoulder. 

“Are you sure?” 

Left. 

After a few minutes his body relaxed. 

“Do you want to go deeper?” 

He tapped my left shoulder. 

By the end of the afternoon, he was splashing around in the deep end, giddier than I’d ever seen him. When I told his mother at pick-up, she cried in disbelief. “He’s never gotten into a pool before.” The camp gave me an award.

When I think back on this, what strikes me is that—awards and all—I’d still had barely enough imagination to let these kids in.

***

During home sessions, Rekers trained Kirk’s mother and father to give Kirk blue tokens for “masculine behaviors” and red tokens for “feminine behaviors.” He could trade the blue tokens in for candies or TV time. The red tokens could be subtracted from the blue, could land him in timeout, or—the researchers note almost as an afterthought—could result in “physical punishment by spanking from the father.”

Kirk’s mother remembers how the “spankings” could get out of control, how her husband’s belt would leave welts all down Kirk’s back.

At the beginning of their paper, Rekers and Lovaas make a special point of noting that Kirk’s family was “intact.”

***

My mother always warned me about the danger of backsliding. Some Christians believe in eternal security, believe “once saved, always saved.” Not us. Salvation was slippery, could fly out of your hands like a bar of soap. I prayed constantly for God to save me, sometimes several times a minute. My father’s altar calls every Sunday served as a regular reminder. Remember: Christ could return at any minute. Remember: Sin was as close as my own skin.

Late one night, around my twelfth birthday, I startled awake from a dream. In the dream, I had just woken from a deeper dream to find a snake floating above my bed. Fully awake now, I couldn’t fall back asleep, couldn’t find the snake. 

I snuck into my parents’ bedroom and woke my father. “Am I going to hell?” I asked. 

He didn’t know. We sat on my bed and prayed for my salvation, just to be sure.

***

Ole Ivar Lovaas would go on to pioneer an intervention for autistic children that would soon become synonymous with the emerging field of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA).

In a 1974 interview with Psychology Today, Lovaas said, “You see, you start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child. You have a person in the physical sense—they have hair, a nose, and a mouth—but they are not people in the psychological sense.” 

For his part, Rekers went on to help found the notorious Family Research Council and to sit on the board of NARTH, the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, whose mission was to treat those with “unwanted homosexuality.”

Lovaas continued, “One way to look at the job of helping autistic kids is to see it as a matter of constructing a person. You have the raw materials, but you have to build the person.”

***

In the middle of the gym, away from everyone else—away from the screeches of delight and upset, away from the bustle of bodies—a teenager silently traces the holes in the volleyball net with his fingers, circling it slowly as if it were a monument, a shrine. 

I’d grown proud of my ability to connect with the kids at the camp, how I seemed to see them in a way the other staff didn’t. So I joined the teenager at the net. We acknowledged each other from the corners of our eyes. I let my fingers find the gaps in the net, felt the string resist my fingers as I walked alongside him on the other side, not saying a word.

The noise of the gym fell away. The net vibrated between us. Our silence: a prayer.

***

The first time I stepped into an autism clinic, I was interviewing for a job. I didn’t know anything about ABA therapy, only knew that I wanted to spend my days with Autistic kids. In the interview, the director quickly redirected me to use “people-first” language. “Kids with autism,” she corrected gently. It would be years before I learned that most Autistic people prefer the exact opposite. On my tour, every kid I saw was prompted to look me straight in the eye and say hello. When they did, their therapist stuck a Velcro penny to their token board. 

At the end of the interview, while the director and I spoke in the lobby, a child was screaming hysterically, throwing chairs at the wall while his therapist stood calmly by, not looking at him. The director reassured me, “We’re putting him on extinction.” 

I suppose it says something about me—and nothing good—that when I got home that night, I was so excited that I signed up for a master’s program in ABA.

***

Assigned to write a paper on diversity, I did a search for “homosexuality” in my field’s flagship journal—the one, it turns out, that had published the Rekers and Lovaas paper. I could only find one article. 

In it, the researchers projected a pornographic photo of a man, and for the first session or two, allowed their participants to feel whatever they wanted, a little cuff cinched around their penises.

Then, each session, the researchers would gradually fade in a superimposed photo of a nude woman, bit by bit, until it was all their participants could see. 

The researchers stood by, jotting notes and measurements on their clipboards.

***

After I became board-certified, one of my first clients would stim constantly, twisting up her face and flapping her hands as fast as she could in front of her eyes. Of course, everyone would stare. Of course, her parents and I thought our task was to teach her to stop, not them.

I was so proud of the program I designed, that it actually worked. The girl learned to distinguish the times her parents wanted her to stop stimming and when it was okay to do so. I presented my data at our state conference. Everyone applauded. 

***

In my undergrad at a Pentecostal university, I’d testified to my abnormal psychology class about how God had freed me from homosexuality. I even prepared a PowerPoint. The first slide was an ultrasound, something about “fearfully and wonderfully made,” something about my mother’s hormones. The last slide was a picture of me and my fiancée after I’d proposed to her on an island at the lake, our faces pink with laughter. Who could argue with that kind of joy? 

After my testimony, a visitor to the class came up and thanked me. She said I was a sign from God. The preschool where she taught had been trying to incorporate an inclusive curriculum. I’d given her the resolve to stand against it.

In that class, we learned of studies where participants couldn’t recall seeing clear evidence, moments before, that had contradicted their beliefs. The researchers called this belief perseverance. 

***

Here are some of the “deviant sex-role behaviors” Rekers and Lovaas note Kirk engaging in: wearing a mop as pretend long hair, avoiding the “rough-and-tumble” games of the other boys in his neighborhood, being “fussy” about his appearance, playing house with a neighborhood girl, declining to defend himself. They call him manipulative, noting how “he would offer to ‘help mommy’ by carrying her purse when she had other packages to carry.”

Their treatment was remarkably effective. By the end, “reports from [Kirk’s] parents, neighbors, and school teacher concurred that he was indistinguishable from any other boy.” In the discussion section, they note their primary reservation: “We do not know yet the extent to which we have produced changes in future preference for sex mates.”

***

In high school, Kirk ate lunch alone in the boy’s bathroom every day for three years.

***

Another ProQuest search conjures a name for what we’re in: a mixed-orientation marriage.

We try to make it work—our love on one side, my stubborn body on the other. Toward the end, we go to ridiculous extremes. We try to read a homoerotic graphic novel together. In it, a closeted Victorian gentleman goes to a sex party where a glass bottle breaks inside one of the guests. 

My depression spirals into something deeper, more immobilizing, something I have no name for at the time. When we go out in public, I have to sit in the car and wait for her. I can’t stand the thought of another person seeing me.

We get a divorce. Afterward, we take trips to the farmer’s market, bustling through its crowds. We sigh together over the ruddy apple seller, his dark curls. We hatch a plan for one of us to woo him.

One weekend, the apple seller isn’t there. He’s moved away, moved on. We try to, too.

***

As we worked with the girl to control her stimming, she began to try out new stims. Unbothered, we added each to our list to redirect. Eventually, her stims turned inward, turned violent. She tapped herself frantically, leaving finger bruises all over her body. She slammed the heels of her hands against her temples as hard as she could. She tore her teeth into her skin.

Over time we did teach her not to hurt herself anymore, to use her original stims again. I don’t suppose we deserve any congratulations for that.

***

When he was thirty-eight, Kirk Murphy died by suicide.

***

I remember all the men who tried to pray me away. Some were my age. Some were my father’s. Some had hot breath that smelled like fish. I remember how they would force-tremble their hands against my forehead. 

It would always end with me falling to the ground, pretending to be slain in the spirit, as we called it. There was no other way out. My body wouldn’t give. 

***

The first time a therapist suggested I might be autistic, I was thirty-five. It was two years after the first draft of this essay, ten years after coming out as queer. “I would know,” I scoffed. “This is literally what I do for a living.” I went home and, in a huff, took the online self-assessments she’d recommended. It troubles me that I don’t recall seeing a single result that complicated my belief in my own neurotypicality. Belief perseverance, the researchers had called it.

The second time, it was a year later, a different therapist. The persistent sense of alienation I’d felt my entire life hadn’t subsided in the decade since coming out as queer. It was becoming harder to ignore the way my senses blurred in loud, crowded places, to write off my repetitive noises as quirkiness.

I remembered my loose, flappy wrists, how my grandmother had interpreted them as a threat. That moment branched out now in multiple directions, no longer sure what it was meant to signify. 

I asked the therapist to write a referral for an evaluation. I didn’t schedule it for another year.

***

In the bathroom, our son screams. He is three, has just gotten out of the bath, and is refusing to pull up his goddamned pants. I see red. Instinctually, I begin to run an escape extinction procedure. I hand-over-hand prompt him to pull his pants up, snip, “That’s how you do it,” and then pull them back down: “Your turn.” We repeat. My son screams louder each time. He is indignant, furious.

My partner steps in to check on us. When they see what’s happening, they gape at me like I’m a body snatcher. “What are you doing?” they whisper. “Stop it!”

I look down as if seeing for the first time. My son’s face is wet, beet red. 

I gently pull up his pants for him. “I’m sorry, buddy,” I choke. He scampers out of the room, shooting me the same alien look as my partner.

My partner stares me down, demanding an explanation. 

“You’re right,” I say. “I’m sorry. I just went into work mode.” I’m stammering, trying to justify myself. “I know it’s ugly. But you have to understand why I’d have to do that with the kids I work with.”

The words curdle in my throat as I say them. 

***

Sometimes the only difference between a tool and a weapon is who’s holding it. A Bible. A hammer. A license to do anything at all.

***

F84.0. Autism Spectrum Disorder.

When I saw the ICD-10 code on the diagnostic evaluation—my evaluation—the first thing I thought about was all the times I’d typed it out on treatment plans. Them, I thought. Dozens of times? Them. Hundreds? Them. 

I remembered the teenager at the volleyball net, how I’d congratulated myself for my ability to connect with him. How easy it had been to fall into that silent stim. How long had we circled that net together? How badly had I needed to walk away from the reverberating racket, from the baffling assault of faces and small talk? The predictability of my fingers on this square, and then the next.

Me.

I remembered the children on my tour of the autism clinic, their forced eye contact and greetings. Their Velcro pennies. Of course I’d been impressed. My body was nothing if not a jar of self-administered pennies. Another scripted smile. A reciprocated question. Carefully monitored eye contact—a little more. No, not that much. 

Me.

I remembered the burning out—the panic in my throat when people would look at me, how I’d sit in my wife’s car outside of JOANN’s, Aldi, the farmer’s market, biting the sides of my fingers as hard as I could. The headaches lingering from how hard I’d hit my head.

Me.

In my body, those pennies jangle dissonantly, still wanting to believe they’ll be cashed in someday.

***

It might still be somewhere, dust-covered in the back of some cabinet: a VHS, home-recorded, labeled something like, “Easter Egg Hunt, 1994.” 

I remember watching right after it was taken—“Let me see!” I’d squealed, pulling my aunt’s camcorder down to my face. 

I remember how my body looked in those frames—remember seeing it as if for the first time—the way its looseness brimmed over with bliss. 

I realized it, then, the problem. My body.

I asked my aunt to erase the video. She wouldn’t. 

So I tried to erase every trace from myself.

***

What I always longed for as a child: a hiding place so good I might even lose myself. A rack of floral dresses no one would think to peek into. 

***

If Rekers’ name sounds familiar, you probably know that, around the same time Kirk died, Rekers was hiring a male escort to accompany him on a vacation to Europe.

***

Late-identified. Mixed-orientation. High-masking. All these multi-hyphenated ways of gesturing to my hiding places. 

***

When I was ten, my grandma took me to see The Truman Show at the drive-in movie theatre, Jim Carrey’s face projected up into the night sky, his voice thundering through our car radio.

For years after, I was convinced I was like Truman, my every move televised to some unknown audience. I’d search the bathroom walls for hidden cameras, run my fingers along every inch of trim. The movie felt eerily familiar in a way I couldn’t name then—the constant sense of surveillance, the feeling that my moves were somehow scripted, an act I’d convinced even myself was true.

I wondered if God, too, saw my days as if through a camcorder—or if he could probe even deeper, find his way into my thoughts, my dreams. Was there any place I could be unseen, maybe one cramped room in a back corner of my body?

Sometimes a trucker would blast his horn as he sped by our street. Home alone, I’d panic, certain it was Gabriel’s trumpet slashing open the sky—my family raptured, leaving me behind. I’d run back the day’s footage in my mind. Had I backslid, again? Accidentally let something inside me peek out where it could be seen? When my parents finally returned home, I found myself wondering if even they were actors, paid to love me convincingly.

I fantasized about an exit like Truman’s. A door painted over to imitate the sunrise. 

If I could just find the knob, I thought, maybe the whole sky would open wide, and take me in.

***

There was another girl. The first time I went to her house, there were holes in every wall. The back of the toilet was smashed in two. She would grab her mother by the hair and pull her to the ground. The assessment showed that she would do all of this for “attention.” On a good day, she was charmingly ornery—loved nothing more than to get a rise out of others—but that drive for mischief had carried her away. 

The behavior analyst before me had addressed her destruction with an attention extinction protocol—the same one used with Kirk. But this girl had the opposite reaction from him: She made it her goal to find every behavior that couldn’t be ignored. She attacked her grandmother. She defecated on the floor. Now, having been inadvertently reinforced for only her most severe behaviors, she terrified her team of therapists. Her parents were past their breaking point. 

Our first change was the bare minimum: Cut the extinction procedure. As we got to know the girl, we saw how all these over-the-top behaviors were her misdirected attempts at connection. A goofball at heart, she had a laugh that could rattle the light. When someone had the insightful idea to teach her pranks, we gathered every hand buzzer, Whoopie cushion, and fake moustache we could find. She couldn’t get enough. We quickly became experts at exaggerated surprise. Her destructive behaviors virtually disappeared. It turned out all she wanted was to light up our faces. 

Sometimes she’d offer us the same exact pack of gum a dozen times a night. Our gasp as we pulled back snapped fingers might have been fake, but everyone’s laughter afterward wasn’t. Hers was a laugh of total glee. Ours was something like love, sighing with relief.

***

In English translations of the Hebrew text, the words sometimes rendered “backsliding” are elsewhere translated as “rebellious,” “stubborn,” or “faithless.” The most vivid image is of one that “slideth back as a backsliding heifer”—a breathing being wriggling out of her yoke, daring to yank back against her master’s weight, his whip.

***

Every Sunday, all through my childhood, my father’s sermons hacked apart the body and spirit. I was taught that the body was evil, something to be overcome—to be “crucified,” in the language of St. Paul—that the spirit was the only true thing about me.

Like a misguided parent trained in attention extinction, I learned to ignore my body—but it screamed, pulled at me, tackled me to the ground.

When forced to choose between my body and my spirit, I found I had no choice at all. So I turned my back on my spirit instead. 

My spirit let me ignore it. It sat still inside me, quiet as my breath.

***

I turned thirty-eight last year, the age Kirk was when he died, and I can feel it, the pressure cooker of nearly four decades of locking yourself up in your own body. 

I’m lucky enough to have been handed some keys (I imagine a comically large keyring, like something jangling from the waist of an animated jailer), lucky enough to have been told that the keyholes are somewhere inside my body, to maybe even have found one or two, to feel the small inbreath that arrives with the loosening. The opening. 

The boy who emerges, in parts, too young. 

The quick outbreath of recognition.

Oh. There you are.

***

When I wrote the first draft of this essay, I was still the director of an autism clinic. I had chosen to stay, to try to channel Autistic perspectives into my clinic and work for reform. I tried to teach our therapists to listen to the kids in every way we could, to follow their lead and give them the tools they wanted, not the ones we thought they needed. To teach them to love their difference. To hop along with their Autistic joy.

One day I was on the verge of quitting, troubled by all the damage we could do. I was sitting with a boy on the floor during a snack, holding his hand in mine and forming it into the sign for eat for probably the thousandth time that month. Each time his fingers touched his lips, I handed him blueberries, a few at a time.

Then he did it. He lifted his fingertips and tapped them to his mouth on his own. He was hungry. He had told someone for the very first time.

So I didn’t quit, not that day. I gave him the whole bowl.

***

These days, all I do is backslide. Tell me: What system is safe to believe in? All my beliefs turn on me, exposing their underbelly while I try to look away. 

***

At the last state conference I attended, a case was presented where a trans Autistic teenager was referred for treatment of self-injury, for attempting to cut off his breasts. The clinician assessed the situation and designed a startlingly simple behavior plan: First, teach the teen how to wear a binder; second, train those in his life to use his correct pronouns. 

Any behavior analyst would be giddy with the data, the self-injury sharply reducing to zero. 

What actually matters: A boy at ease in his own body, his parents calling him by name. 

***

My partner and I start reading from prayer books before our meals. We meditate. Pull tarot cards. Every once in a while, on Sundays, we walk with our son to the Lutheran church down the street, the one that hosts a queer camp every summer. 

The pews are as wooden and hard as the ones from my childhood. The service, though, is different: orderly, inflected with liturgy. Leading the Kyrie, the pastor begins, “Lord, have mercy.”

“Lord, have mercy,” the congregation responds.

Sitting there in silence, I remember the Autistic boy’s call-and-response with his mother, how by watching us teach him fill-in-the-blanks, she’d learned to teach him a liturgy of her own.

“—heal me,” he’d answered. “I want broken,” he would say.

In the pew, my partner takes my left hand, my right stimming so silently even I don’t notice.

The pastor has a blood-red stole draped around his neck. He calls out, his inflection now almost a question.

“Christ, have mercy.”