Saving Alex: when I was fifteen I told my Mormon parents I was gay, and that's when my nightmare began
Biography, LGBTQ+ biography, Women biography
Human-narrated audio
Summary
Two days after Alex Cooper told her parents that she was gay, they took their fifteen-year-old daughter to Utah, where they signed over their parental rights to a group of fellow Mormons who promised to "cure" Alex. For eight harrowing… months, Alex was held captive in an unlicensed "residential treatment program," a virtual gulag where thousands of American teenagers have been sent by fundamentalist parents. Forbidden from attending school, Alex was beaten and verbally abused, and forced to stand facing a wall for up to eighteen hours a day wearing a heavy backpack full of rocks that literally broke her back. "God's plan does not apply to gay people," her captors told her, using faith as a cudgel to punish and terrorize her. With the help of a dedicated legal team in Salt Lake City, Alex would eventually escape and make legal history in Utah by winning the right to live under the law's protection as an openly gay teenager. 2016.