Broken Open

A Memoir of Conversion Therapy and Other Acts of Defiance

von Adam Massman

318 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

He was thirteen, standing in a bathroom in Alabama, practicing being someone he wasn't - because every adult in his life had taught him that someone else was what he was supposed to be.The man they sent him to had a pleasant office and a reassuring voice. He called it counseling. It was conversion therapy - the project of making a gay kid into someone else - and the sessions were only the beginning. The real curriculum ran for two more decades: through a marriage, through a family's silence, through every room where a voice from a front-row chair kept insisting he was broken and could be fixed.Broken Open is not the story of a remarkable man. That's the point. It happened in an ordinary house, to an ordinary kid, arranged by ordinary parents who believed they were helping. If it took a monster and a saint to make this story, you could close the book and feel safe. It took neither.This is a memoir about what conversion practices actually do to a person - long after the sessions end - and about the slower, stranger, funnier story of getting free: a chosen family, a Christmas that wasn't supposed to be possible, a candid photograph of a man glowing without permission, and the discovery that broken open is not only a description of the damage. It's a description of where the light gets out.This book is for everyone who was ever told they were the problem: you were never broken. And it's for everyone else - everyone willing to look at what conversion therapy actually does to a person, and at what it takes to come back whole.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798188218430
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 22.09.2026
• Größe: 216 x 140 mm
• Verlag: Independently published