“It’s just one version of normal”

“It’s just one version of normal” is Marcel’s answer when Colton recalls wanting to be straight so he could escape the abuse of the conversion camp. The sentence directly challenges the camp’s claim that heterosexuality is the only legitimate life, and gives Colton a different way to understand the identity he once tried to suppress. Its force lies not in treating his past as resolved, but in meeting his painful memory with recognition rather than correction.

The memory behind the phrase

Colton’s reflection begins with Marcel’s question about parents and the desire for something normal. Colton answers that he knows what it is to want normality: at the camp, he lay in bed wondering whether he could pretend for the rest of his life, because that seemed preferable to being condemned as a sinner. The imagined alternative was not an expression of a freely chosen future; it was a survival strategy formed under coercion.

Colton then describes how the camp’s abuse turned his own bodily responses into a source of anger and confusion. Staff aroused him and hurt him whenever his body reacted, while he wished he could simply stop responding. He says he eventually understood that he could not escape who he was. The recollection makes clear what the word normal had meant under those conditions: not an ordinary preference, but a standard imposed through punishment and the demand to become someone else.

Marcel’s response and Colton’s change

Marcel’s reply is pointedly specific: being straight, having a wife and children, is not normal in any exclusive sense; it is one version of normal. He does not dispute that Colton once wanted that life, nor does he demand that the memory be minimized. Instead, he breaks the presumed link between heterosexuality and the universal standard against which every other life must be measured.

Colton responds with a softer laugh and says he knows this now. He explains that he has been in therapy since arriving in Fairfield and no longer believes he must become someone else to be happy. The exchange therefore places Marcel’s reassurance alongside Colton’s own developing understanding: the phrase offers affirmation, while Colton’s answer establishes that he has begun to accept its premise for himself.

Meaning in the story

The expression reverses the camp’s stated project of making Colton not gay. Where the camp treated his sexuality as a defect to be corrected, Marcel names heterosexuality as one possible way of living rather than the definition of normal life itself. The contrast also gives the conversation its emotional shape: Colton can speak about the wish to fake a different identity, and Marcel answers without asking him to defend or disown that earlier fear.

The phrase is thus both a statement about the limits of the word normal and a moment of recognition between the two men. It does not erase the abuse Colton recounts, but it helps articulate the change he describes: happiness no longer depends on pretending to be someone else.