by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched an excellent Lifetime TV-movie called Trapped:
The Alex Cooper Story which was the second
in their current “Ripped from the Headlines!” series of films based on actual
incidents (though they’ve certainly done more than their share of true — or
basically true — stories before). It was based on a memoir called
Saving Alex: When I Was Fifteen I Told My Mormon Parents I Was Gay, and That’s
When My Nightmare Began, written by the
real Alex Cooper with Joanna Brooks, and turned into a movie by screenwriter
Michelle Paradise and director Jeffrey G. Hunt. Alex Cooper (Addison Holley)
was a 15-year-old high-school sophomore in Victorville, California being raised
by a strict Mormon couple (Steve Kumyn and Kate Drummond) — the opening scene
of the film shows the three of them at a church service — whose doubts about
her sexual orientation suddenly come to the foreground of her consciousness
when she sees two blonde women walking and holding each other’s hands. It turns
out they’re not Gay — they’re the girlfriends of two jocks and they were just
holding hands on their way to greet their boyfriends — but Alex is sufficiently
turned on by the mere thought of
affectionate contact between girls she suddenly realizes she might be Lesbian
herself.
Her best friend at school introduces her to two women who’ve already
more or less come out as Lesbian. One is Colette (Natalie Liconti), a slender
young woman with severely cut short hair, but it’s the other one, Frankie
(Nicolette Pierce), to whom Alex finds herself attracted. (In real life Alex’s
first girlfriend was named Yvette, but it seems writer Paradise — herself a
Lesbian who grew up in the Mormon church — liked the irony of her two female
lovers both having masculine names.) One imdb.com reviewer hated this aspect of
the film because Frankie is an 18-year-old who has just graduated from the high
school Alex was attending — “So, a Lesbian woman sleeps with a minor, as in
someone underage, and the underage girl’s parents flip out that their underage
daughter is having sex with someone when she is unable to legally consent to it
… and they are the bad guys for it?” — but it seems writer Paradise was
anticipating that objection when she constructed the seduction scene and made
Alex the sexual aggressor. Frankie says, when the two of them are alone
(they’ve driven from Victorville to Los Angeles and Alex has told her parents
she was studying at the home of a fellow student, whom they called and caught
her out in her lie), “We don’t have to do this. We can just hang out.” But Alex
insists she does want to do it,
and they do, although reflecting the squeamishness that still afflicts basic
cable where Gay sex is concerned (though other taboos are coming down — the
word “shit” appears at least twice), director Hunt politely averts his cameras
before anything physical happens between Our Heroines. (The business of
underage Gay men or Lesbians coming on to adult partners is true: over the
years I’ve heard enough stories from people who remember their first same-sex
experiences in just that way and admit they were the ones who came on to the older partners, not
vice versa.)
When Alex returns home from her hot weekend with Frankie, her
parents confront her with all the sensitivity of Soviet KGB agents rousting
someone at 3 a.m. to take them to the Gulag. They run through all the gamut of nasties their
daughter might be doing — drinking, drugs, boys — and when they see a hickey
Frankie left on Alex’s neck they immediately realize she’s had sex but assume
it was with a man. “Actually, I think I like girls,” Alex tells her parents —
and they respond by immediately disowning her and throwing her out of the
house. A few days later — days during which she’s been sleeping on a
sympathetic neighbor’s couch — her parents come see her and tell her they’re
taking her to see her grandparents in Utah. They’re taking her to Utah, all
right, but not to her grandparents: instead they’re taking her to a small-scale
“conversion therapy” home run by Johnny and Tiana Simms (Ian Lake and Sarah
Booth) that features two other young inmates, Damon and Henry — one of them was
a juvenile delinquent who was given a choice of jail or the Simms’ boot camp,
while the other (you guessed it) was caught kissing another boy in high school
— along with the Simms’ own children. The Simms tell Alex that her stay there
can last three months or three years (until she turns 18 and therefore the
authority Alex’s parents gave them to keep her there expires) and can be as
easy or as hard as she makes it depending on whether she “works the program”
and stays “obedient.”
It’s not clear just how the Simms think they’re going to
“cure” Alex of being Lesbian — or, rather, of acting on her attraction to
women, since one of the least understood parts of the radical “Christian”
Right’s attitude towards Queers is they don’t think we exist as a community.
According to the Christian Right, everyone is naturally heterosexual and the
only reason people have sex with others of their own gender is they’re
psychologically or spiritually “broken” — either that or they’re simply and
arbitrarily rebelling against God and his “divine order” for humanity, which is
that everyone is supposed to have sex only within a heterosexual marriage and only for purposes of reproduction, not pleasure. (I
remember attending a workshop on religion and sexually taught by the late Rev.
Houston Burnside of Metropolitan Community Church, and I was especially struck
when he told the group, “Your sexuality is a gift from God.” It occurred to me
that most Christian churches wouldn’t even tell their straight congregants that their sexuality was a gift from
God.) The Mormons add a few wrinkles to the overall anti-sex attitude of most
of the Christian church in that they believe that your chances of getting into
the “Celestial Kingdom” (their name for heaven) depend not only on avoiding sin
yourself but keeping anyone in your family from sinning; at one point, in this
film’s most powerful dialogue exchange, Alex’s parents tell her they’re
subjecting her to the Simms’ abuse because they don’t want her homosexual
activities jeopardizing their
chances for salvation — and Alex responds, “You’re so concerned about the next
world you don’t care about what’s happening to me in this one.”
The Simms’
“therapy” practices include literally beating the shit out of Alex whenever she tries either to escape or to
let anyone outside know what she’s going through. At one point they force her
to wear a backpack full of rocks and spend the entire day standing in front of
a wall, facing it and doing exactly nothing from sunup to sundown — and when,
on a rare visit from her parents, she shows her mom the permanent bruises this
is leaving on her shoulders, her mom tells the Simms Alex tried to rat them out
and they respond by having one of the boys put more rocks in her backpack. The
Simms also warn her that they know everyone in their community — including the
police — so if Alex tries to report them, word will just get back to the Simms
and they’ll just up her already fearsome level of punishment and physical
abuse. (At the same time Johnny Simms is himself suffering from severe back
pain; his wife tried to get him to go to a chiropractor but he said he’d tried
that and it was useless. I liked the fact that screenwriter Paradise humanized
the character instead of just making him a black-and-white villain — and
powerfully and understatedly communicated the irony that the long-term effects
of him torturing Alex would be to give her the horrible back pains he’s going
through himself.) I remember interviewing Justin Utley, a folksinger who also
came out of a Mormon background and had to deal with being Gay, and one of the
things he told me was that a Mormon community is like a small town: everyone
knows everyone else’s business and feels free to step in when they think
someone is breaking the mores of
their church and their community.
The makers of Trapped got the Kafka-esque feeling Gay or would-be Gay
Mormons get that they’re constantly being watched and any step they take off
the straight (in both senses) and narrow will be immediately reported and
punished right, and they also got the extent to which Mormons in position of
authority will use their official powers to punish people who don’t follow the
rules of the church, especially
if the people they’re punishing are Mormons themselves. Eventually Alex
realizes that the only way she can get the Simms both physically and
psychologically to lift the weights off her back is to go along with the
program (such as it is, since the Simms’ “conversion” program seems only to involve coercion and physical torture; other
“conversion” or “reparative therapy” programs use elaborate plagiarisms and
perversions of either mainstream psychotherapy or 12-step programs to give them
at least a thin veneer of “science” to justify them, but not this one), and she
does a good enough job of convincing them that they’ve broken her that they
relent on the total isolation and allow her to attend high school in Utah
instead of insisting on home-schooling her. That proves to be a mistake
because, while most of the teachers and administrators at the Utah high school
are on board with the church’s anti-Queer agenda, one renegade woman English
teacher, though herself Mormon, doesn’t believe the anti-Gay crap and has
allowed herself to become the advisor not only of the school’s Environment Club
(Alex had been shown leading a recycling drive at her original high school in
Victorville before she came out and got sent to the Simms’ mini-gulag) but also of its Gay-Straight Alliance; and the
teacher introduces Alex to Jason (Stephen Joffe), a cute, red-headed Gay kid
who tells matter-of-factly about the many times he’s been bullied and
physically beaten by his classmates.
At this point it did occur to me that
Jason and Alex could have “bearded” each other — posed as boyfriend and
girlfriend to get Jason’s bullies and Alex’s adult tormentors off their backs —
but instead of going there the filmmakers have Alex get so enthralled by
talking to Jason and the teacher who’s their one kindred spirit in the whole
school that she misses a bell and shows up late for a math class. The math
teacher immediately calls the
Simms on her and they respond by pulling all her privileges and announcing that
she’s going to have to wear that backpack of rocks and face the wall for the
next two years. (At one point the Simms tell her that they’re like Jesus and
she’s being tempted by the devil — but any less jaundiced viewer of what’s
going on with her would identify her
with Jesus and the Simms, her parents and the rest of the Mormon establishment
with the people in ancient Palestine who tortured and crucified Him for what He believed.) Fortunately, before this happened the
teacher and Jason had contacted a lawyer in Salt Lake City who appears to be
both Black and Gay (two things the Mormon church has traditionally hated!),
and on the night the Simms issue their ukase that Alex is sentenced to wear the rock-filled
backpack she’s able to slip out and escape, and lucky for her she’s found by a
Black woman cop who seems to be one of the few people in local law enforcement
who aren’t in the Simms’ pocket.
Thanks to a secret journal Alex kept while in the Simms’ custody, they’re
arrested and their vest-pocket gulag
is shut down, and Alex not only gets back her freedom, her parents finally see the light of day and accept her as who she is.
But, alas, that’s not enough of a happy ending for Michelle Paradise: in a
weird cop-out that I didn’t like even before I read an online interview with
the real Alex Cooper (http://www.newnownext.com/trapped-the-alex-cooper-story-interview/09/2019/)
saying it was B.S., Alex’s girlfriend Frankie turns up and they have a joyous
reunion. “Unfortunately, unlike in the movie, I
didn’t get to be reunited with my girlfriend,” the real Alex Cooper said. “It
had been eight months and we went our separate ways, and we haven’t seen each
other since just before I went into conversion therapy. But I was able to focus
on school, graduated early, and started dating a bishop’s daughter. We were
able to get a court order saying that I was legally allowed to do normal
teenage things, like date a girl.” And, quite frankly, this is one of those
cases where the truth would not only have been more accurate but better drama
as well: the ending of Trapped would have been far more poignant if “Frankie” had
remained a bittersweet memory on the fringes of Alex’s consciousness that would
haunt her all her life even as she ultimately blossomed and eventually did find a working relationship with a woman. (This is also
one of my problems with the Harvey Milk biopic Milk: its screenwriter, Dustin Lance Black, invented a phony
and totally inaccurate scene in which Milk’s former partner Scott Smith
approached him the day before he was killed to seek a reconciliation. The real
Harvey Milk had completely and definitively rejected monogamy as an expectation
for Gay men years before he died, but Black wanted to rewrite him to make him a
suitable role model for the same-sex marriage era.)
Aside from that one
fictional lapse at the end, though, Trapped: The Alex Cooper Story is not only a well-above-average Lifetime movie but a case
study in how individuals needing love and help can be done in (or almost done
in) by authority figures dripping with stuffy self-righteousness — and it’s
also an indication of what I still don’t like about religion even though I’m
far friendlier to it as an institution than I used to be in my militant-atheist
days (the fact that all three of my serious boyfriends have been religious
believers — and two of them, including my husband, serious students of the
Bible — has helped mellow me): not only do organized religions manipulate
people by offering them the carrot-on-the-stick of immortality (“Do what we
tell you to do and you’ll have a better life after this one; disobey us and
you’ll burn in fire and brimstone for all eternity”) as a way of exerting
authoritarian control over them in this one.
