Southern Alberta and Montana have a lot of similarities in climate, geography, and culture. We both proudly display our cowboys at events like the Calgary Stampede and Miles City Bucking Horse Sale in Miles City, Montana. We also share a strong streak of social conservatism running through the land. If you were to skip back twenty years, you can see how difficult it would be for a young person to be openly gay. It is in this social climate, in the milieu of Miles City, Montana author Emily Danforth sets her first novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post.
The title character faces life changing events, starting with the death of her parents, her adoption by her conservative and deeply Christian aunt, a romance, and a reveal which ultimately sees her sent to a gay conversion therapy camp for teens.
Author Emily M. Danforth grew up in Montana, roughly at the same time as she set the novel (early to mid-1990s). Given that twenty years ago, people in Calgary marched in the Gay Pride parade in masks to protect themselves against any negative repercussions, I asked her what Montana was like at the time for the visibility of any LGBT community. "There was really no visibility, so it’s difficult for me to make blanket statements that people would not have been receptive, but because I knew no one my age or older that was out and proud in any way...it certainly seemed to me that it was something that was shameful."
As well, Emily had friends who went to churches where they were told homosexuality was a sin. Of course there were rumours about people but no one was officially out. "The general climate was one of repression and I think fear and misunderstanding...because there was no visibility on the personal level it was something that was just unthinkable in terms of me being out of the closet." In an age when we are wired 24/7 into the Internet, it may be difficult to imagine a time just two decades ago where there were no online support groups, no Facebook groups, no gay-straight alliances – no contacts at all for a LGBT youth. This is the setting, the world the protagonist faces in the book.
Emily does give the character of Cameron a mentor figure to tutor her (as much as possible for Miles City in 1991) in lesbian culture. As Emily told me, these things that seem so small for people who were never in the closet or don’t have any sense of it are monumental to the protagonist. "Okay, so she introduces you to bands and sends you a copy of RubyFruit Jungle. But if you’ve got nothing and you never see any representation of the way you love reflected back to you – or you seek out these terrible movies just to see one inkling of some kind of lesbian attraction...it becomes crucial." Without a mentor figure to induct a person into the larger LGBT community, a character like Cameron Post would have been left to her own desires and own devices to cope with her sexuality.
Since the time the novel was set, it is difficult to say whether it has changed. In Canada, we’ve had a lot of changes in the past twenty years, but it is still safer to be openly gay in larger cities. Emily’s family is still in Montana, and her parents in Miles City in the house she grew up in. She says LGBT acceptance really depends on the part of Montana you’re in, as Montana is a really culturally diverse state. "There are pockets of extreme conservatism...where any sort of sign you are anything other than heterosexual...it could be potentially dangerous." Yet Emily told me there are places like Missoula that are diverse and very accepting of LGBT folk. Furthermore, there are some people who are now living out of the closet in Miles City – for a while there was a lesbian pastor at a church as well, so it has changed somewhat.
As to how much of Emily’s experiences growing up in Miles City shaped Cameron, she told me "Cameron is very different...starting from the fact she’s an orphan, and the fact she’s got this evangelical aunt move in who’s got particular ideas about her salvation. In terms of Cameron’s shame, there’s a kind of shame where she doesn’t know where it comes from, certainly that I felt. Her eagerness to seek out any kind of representation of anything other than heteronormativity was part and parcel of how I spent my adolescence." This included sitting through horrible movies that had gay or lesbian themes, reading books with LGBT characters – anything to feel and confirm there were other options. Also, while Cameron seeks solace with swimming and sports, Emily sought protection by being the class clown.
"Legitimately I was voted class clown my senior year, and that was how I manoeuvred my way through the halls of Custer County District High School, was to be silly and goofy. That’s a really common story: you’ve got this thing that you’re ashamed of, and so you make up for it by being funny, and always making jokes and hoping that people don’t pay attention to these other parts of you." She didn’t come out...she had some sense of herself as being gay at an early age, but she also felt she couldn’t come out while she lived in this part of eastern Montana.
If she had come out twenty years ago (and in some cases even today), sending Emily off to a "pray-the-gay-away" conversion therapy camp might have seemed the logical choice. The interesting thing about the novel is while Cameron is sent to this camp, it’s not all about it – the book still remains Cameron’s story.
Yet there has been some criticism the author didn’t pick a side in the ex-gay conversion therapy debate in her book. Part of this is because she feels there is only one side to choose.
"My side on the ex-gay camp debate is that they’re ludicrous and horrendous...I don’t see how one can have a side...they’re akin to torture." What’s even more appalling is that confused teenagers are sent there being told, "you must go to this because otherwise you’ll go to hell and you must try to correct this perversion on yourself."
However, this novel needed to be more complicated; so making this 15 year old girl the puppet or mouth piece for Emily’s views is just not what interested her about fiction. She felt it was more interesting to show the character interacting with these events as she tries to puzzle them out.
"For me as a novelist, that’s what I was trying to be true to: who is this girl, and how would she react in this situation, because she’s not me. She’s not the 30 year old me who has made sense of her identity and has specific things she can say about how teenagers should and shouldn’t be treated."
It would have been easy to make the operators of the gay conversion camp into monsters or broad caricatures; in earlier drafts this was the direction Emily went, but she realised the world is more complicated. "People who would devote their lives to running a facility like this do it because they think they are doing god’s work. They think that they are saving people’s souls, so there’s something more interesting to me than myeself as a 30 year old out lesbian saying you people are morons."
The book, just recently published, is getting a very good reception from critics, including a lovely review in the L.A. Times, and generous reviews on the NPR blog, Booklist, and Publisher’s Weekly. After reading it, what impressed me even more is that it is marketed as "Young Adult". Emily and I discussed this, recounting books by Judy Blume and other young adult traditional books like The Pigman. Similar to these other books, The Miseducation of Cameron Post content-wise can be upsetting or difficult for some readers, which suits Emily just fine.
"If it makes a reader think or even if it makes them angry and makes them want to have a discussion about something or just consider something in a way they hadn’t before, that’s one of the cool things that fiction can do." For Emily, she prefers the fiction that make a reader think, what is this person’s world, what is going on her mind, how does this world look like mine, and what does that say about my world and choices?
And certainly this book does make you think. I’ve reviewed other books in the past, giving them praise and even criticism. This is one of the few books I’ve read which I feel strongly enough to say "go out and buy this". Even if you’re an adult looking back, several years removed from your youth. Even if you ARE a youth now, read this book. The book paints a world and a protagonist we should always remember, if only to know we have made the world a better place because of our struggles to be free and to love freely whom we choose.