In the new book Saving Alex, 21-year-old Alex Cooper details what happened after she came out to her parents as gay when she was 15. The subtitle of her book — When I Was Fifteen I Told My Mormon Parents I Was Gay, and That’s When My Nightmare Began — clues the reader into what she encounterd. But everyone’s idea of a nightmare is different. Does Cooper’s experience rise to the description? Depends on how you feel about authority figures forcing a teen girl “held captive,” as the book claims, being made to stand for hours facing a wall with a pack full of rocks strapped to her back. Or being punched in the stomach (“direct punches to the gut”) which Cooper says was also part of her “conversion therapy.”
How did young Alex Cooper end up in this environment? When she told her parents she was gay they took her from home in California to Utah and dropped her off — so she could be cured of lesbianism. Conversion therapy didn’t work, despite the violence, in Cooper’s case. She emerged a LGBT evangelist and won a landmark court case that allowed her to escape her impossible predicament. You can “Look Inside” Cooper’s courageous book at Amazon.
