Father Benson’s conversion camp

Father Benson’s conversion camp is the institution Colton’s parents sent him to after they discovered he was gay. Presented through Colton’s later disclosures rather than as a sustained setting, the camp is defined by its stated aim of changing his sexual orientation, the abuse he endured there, and the lasting effects that shape his escape and subsequent life.

Purpose and Circumstances

Colton first begins to tell Amit that he is Mormon, that he does not know what he is now, and that things became ugly after his family learned he was different. He describes the camp more directly to Marcel: his parents sent him there after realizing he was gay, and its purpose was to make him stop being so. The account locates the camp within his family’s rejection, not as a choice Colton made for himself.

Colton identifies Father Benson as the Catholic priest who ran the camp. He does not provide a broader account of its organization or procedures, but his description makes clear that its stated effort to change him was accompanied by serious harm. He later explains that the priest used electricity in an attempt to cure what the camp treated as an affliction. Colton’s dry clarification that this did not work underscores the fundamental failure of the camp’s premise: he remained gay, while the abuse left consequences that continued beyond his time there.

Abuse and Escape

Colton says he ran away because the experience kept hurting him and he feared Father Benson would kill him. He was sixteen when he fled. After living on the streets for a time, he was arrested for vagrancy and sent to Ted House, a group home. The sequence connects the camp to the instability that followed: escape ended his immediate exposure to the priest, but it did not give him a secure home or a simple path forward.

The camp’s aftermath also appears in Colton’s account of his family. When Sage contacted his parents, they did not want him to return. Colton says they would have had to go through the courts to regain custody and face scrutiny over the camp, and that he never saw them again. He believes the police may have pursued the camp for child abuse, but he is uncertain what happened; his therapist and Sage did not want him involved, and he wanted to move on. The narrative therefore distinguishes what Colton knows of his own treatment from the unresolved legal outcome.

Lasting Consequences and Narrative Significance

Later, while explaining scars on his thighs to Marcel, Colton says he has nerve damage: some areas are very sensitive and others numb. He connects that damage to the electricity used at the camp. The disclosure makes the camp’s harm a continuing physical reality, not only a painful memory, while Colton’s measured explanation shows him choosing how much of his history to share.

The camp also helps explain why Colton’s later circumstances cannot be reduced to a single setback. He leaves the institution through flight, enters foster care only after time on the streets, and faces the age limit that makes Ted House temporary. Much later, a university denies his financial aid because his parents were never legally stripped of custody, so their income counts against him despite his foster-care experience. These are distinct events, but together they show how the consequences of parental decisions and institutional rules persist after the camp itself is no longer present.

Marcel’s response gives Colton’s disclosure a different kind of consequence: he listens without asking for further details and asks what he can do to help. Colton’s story of the camp thus becomes part of a relationship in which his past can be witnessed without being treated as something to correct. The contrast is central to the camp’s significance: it claimed authority to change Colton, while the later scenes emphasize his right to name his experience and remain himself.