![]() Any photos from my teenage years, I’m standing awkwardly to the side. I dressed in oversized sweatshirts and baggy JNCO jeans. ![]() I pretended to enjoy playing baseball and hunting with my father, and I even had a girlfriend in fourth grade after a group of boys teased me for hanging out with her too much during recess. Frightened that I would be punished for simply existing, I suppressed my entire self and fought, perhaps unsuccessfully, to uphold heteronormative standards. I struggled with my faith and who I knew I was. We’d only had the hyper-charged “transsexual” and “transvestite,” as popularized by The Rocky Horror Picture Show (which I adore), and so we were left with feeling discarded at the side of the highway. A child of the ‘90s, non-binary representation was non-existent in media, and society had yet to concretely define the term. I may not have had the vocabulary to properly contextualize my identity, but I always fell outside the binary. I knew the fire and brimstone ideology was a sure path to self-loathing and regret. A high body count is just another reason to believe in God 一 or so I was taught. Broken glass, billowing smoke, a mangled body.ĭepicting real pain, those startling images remain the hallmark of modern-day evangelical Christianity. There was also a room dedicated to drunk driving. I didn’t want to end up like her, or any of the other characters littered throughout the attraction’s morbid halls. A young girl had slit her wrists and blood smothered the walls and linoleum floor. The room centered around suicide still haunts me most. ![]() In high school, I took a Halloween trip with my youth group to Liberty University’s Scaremare, a haunted maze aimed at striking fear about sin and eternal damnation. HOLLYWOOD UNDEAD TURN OFF THE LIGHTS SERIESI poured over the Left Behind book series and envisioned myself a missionary one day, traveling around the world spreading the gospel. I was so radicalized that I became addicted with end-times prophecy, cowering in fear that I would make one wrong move and be cast into the lake of fire. I had been indoctrinated against my will and never knew it. HOLLYWOOD UNDEAD TURN OFF THE LIGHTS PATCHI devoured the preacher’s sermon on Sunday morning, attentively completed sailor’s logs for the Patch the Pirate Club, and spent my weeks obsessed with contemporary Christian bands like Mercy Me and Newsboys. Not a day went by that I wasn’t told I was going to burn in hell for all of eternity. I grew up in a predominantly Christian community in rural West Virginia. ![]()
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