Alexandra Horowitz will get you thinking with this piece that explores the process of cloning dogs. Are clones the same as the beloved pets owners are attempting to recreate? Is it a morally acceptable practice? In a world that borders on sci-fi, Horowitz is a decisive guide.
But, if it is dogs’ individuality that we value, what should we make of the idea that their unique and unreproducible selves can, in fact, be reproduced? Cloning is the ultimate expression of genetic determinism—chromosomes as character. ViaGen’s Web site declares that a cloned dog “is simply a genetic twin of your dog, born at a later date.” The assertion is not untrue, as far as it goes, but it’s a sales pitch that dodges a host of complicated ethical and identity issues. There are issues of exploitation—both of the bereaved owners whose desire to somehow cheat death is being monetized and, more viscerally, of the unseen animals whose bodies are used in making a clone. There’s the issue of supply: the production of bespoke dogs in a society when so many good, naturally born ones in shelters are in need of adoption. Finally, there’s an existential issue: who, exactly, is produced when a dog is cloned?
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At some point in Cedric Lodge’s nearly three decades at the Harvard Medical School morgue, he decided to steal body parts from cadavers and sell them to customers—and got away with it for at least four years. Lodge’s case reveals an expansive network of human remains trading and trafficking, much of it legal. While the subject is undoubtedly unsettling for some readers, Ally Jarmanning reports a fascinating story on this macabre market for human body parts—and poses interesting questions about property, collecting, and preservation.
In 2018, prosecutors say, Lodge began stealing body parts from the morgue and taking them home, in his orange Subaru that bore the license plate GRIM-R, to his tidy split-level in Goffstown, New Hampshire. His wife, Denise, would take it from there, handling logistics. She’s the one who packed up the goods and took them to the post office, prosecutors allege; she communicated with the buyers and took payments through her PayPal account.
It was a lucrative business. Court records show that one buyer paid Denise Lodge more than $37,000, sending his payments with memos like “head number 7” and “braiiiiiins.”
Collectors all have their own reasons and rationales for wanting to own these unusual items. One said displaying a skull was “a flex for any goth.” Some admire human remains as medical antiques. Others treat them like fine art. One collector showed off an altar of skulls, where he left Jolly Ranchers and cigarettes as offerings.
A Delaware couple, Justin Capps and Sonya Cobb, doesn’t like using the term “collector” at all. They consider themselves “rescuers” of human remains.
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Kids are overdosing and dying from fake pills sold online. Because of its clandestine features, Snapchat in particular is an ideal platform for dealers to connect with and sell drugs to teens and young kids. (If you’re not familiar with how the platform works, messages disappear within 24 hours, wiped clean by the app’s delete function.) Paul Solotaroff spent eight months reporting this must-read feature, showing how Snapchat has become a safe haven to sell kids lethal drugs, how the company has failed to ensure the safety of its users, and how grieving parents are coming together to fight back.
How could a kid so loved and alive get addicted to a surgical anesthetic? Sheriff’s deputies had no answers, and the DEA wouldn’t comment. So Neville got off her couch and started digging.
The first clue came from a girl Alex knew. She hadn’t met the dealer, but she’d seen his online handle: He went by AJ Smokxy on Snapchat. Other friends in middle school copped from him, too; he’d deliver the pills right to your door. The next penny dropped when a ping came in on Facebook. I know who killed your son, said the stranger. It’s the same guy on Snapchat who killed my Hector.
This was manna for kids, who could text (or sext) each other without fear of their parents’ prying eyes. But that disappearing ink was a godsend for dealers too — a chance to sell narcotics and leave no breadcrumbs for the cops and feds to follow. This made all the difference to fake-pill pushers, whose product was as lethal as it was deceptive. Two milligrams of fentanyl — think 10 grains of salt — would asphyxiate a teen in his bed. Why fentanyl? Because it’s so plentiful and potent that you can produce a fake Oxy for less than five cents a pill — and sell that pill to kids for $30. Dealers, as a rule, don’t try to kill their clients, but with fentanyl, it’s the cost of doing business. No home cook can process a batch of “Xanax” without peppering chunks of fentanyl in the mix. Those chunks get pressed into the random pill — or half-pill, as sometimes happens. I know of one kid who split a “Percocet” with his girlfriend, then suffocated while she slept soundly. Per the latest report from the DEA, roughly 70 percent of the fake pills seized by agents contain fatal doses of fenty. For every pill they flag, though, many more get through and wind up for sale online.
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Mewing, that Very Online mouth-positioning thing that people do in order to accentuate their jawline, happens to be named after the dentist who invented the practice. And nearly 20 years ago, that dentist apparently stumbled on this technique while treating an adolescent named Gabriel Smith. Now, Smith has written a chilling (and absolutely hilarious) account of his time in Mike Mew’s chair. Say “ow”!
Mike Mew is a small and bizarre-looking man. He has a perfectly square head which, when Mike was a child, his dentist father molded using prototypical orthotropic methods. He is very short, and very slim, which gives the impression of his skull being about the same width as his waist. He wore, during our sessions, a tight shirt tucked into tight trousers, paired with square-framed glasses. He is bald, but fashionably so, and his manicured remaining hair frames the top of his strange little head very neatly. The impression he leaves is of an almost total cubeness, like a minor antagonist in a PlayStation game. He undoubtedly believes that his own physical format is somehow inherently correct, and in what he is selling: he has made himself into an example of it. “Look at your lips,” he said in one session. “Too big, too droopy, ugly. Now look at mine.” He turned to my mother. “This is how lips are meant to look. Firm and tight. Attractive.”
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Lane Scott Jones| Longreads | June 25, 2024 | 3,835 words (13 minutes)
“At last! This is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She will be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” —Genesis 2:23
In the seventh year of our marriage, on a cold day in October, my husband called me into the bathroom.
He was lying in the tub with his head submerged, but he sat up as I walked in, water splashing over the side. He wiped his face but didn’t look at me. From the halting way he began, I knew he was telling me something he’d been trying to say for a long time.
I watched the water lap around his edges, blurring and dissolving him. After 10 years together, I was so familiar with his body it had become an extension of my own. I could bring my eye to each point of him and know how it felt: the smooth skin of his shoulder, the surprising delicacy of his collarbones, the softness of his brown hair.
He never hid it from me. That surprises people. They ask, “Did you have any idea?” They imagine me walking in on him gazing into a full-length mirror, dressed in my clothes. They imagine the screaming, weeping, gnashing of teeth. But it wasn’t like that. As soon as he found the words, he laid them at my feet.
“I want to wear women’s clothes.”
Growing up in North Carolina, most of what I knew about sex and gender I learned in church. What to guard against: girls in spaghetti straps, girls in jean shorts, girls in low-cut tops. That girls who have sex are chewed gum, crumpled roses, licked candy bars. That boys will be boys.
I learned a surprising amount about oral sex from the Focus on the Family magazines stocked in the church library, with advice columns in the back where concerned parents wrote in about their teenagers. I read those scraps like a sacred text, carefully tearing out and ferreting away the pages to piece together a more complete picture.
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I met my first boyfriend at church. He was a lacrosse player and a recent convert. We had nothing in common apart from the fact that we couldn’t keep our hands off each other—in empty Sunday school classrooms, choir robe closets, altars, once the baptismal. We spent hours in the dark church parking lot in the halo of a street light. Exhaust fumes still taste like kissing to me.
It was nothing like they’d said. No one had mentioned how desire felt like power. How it coursed through you, animating you in new, unfamiliar ways. It scared him. He ran the treadmill of desire, guilt, repentance, and relapse. I took what was offered, then accepted the guilt of wanting it in the first place. A necessary flagellation.
I also met my future husband at church. I was 18.
After high school, I accepted a scholarship to Auburn University in Alabama. It was the first time I’d been away from home. I imagined reinventing myself, trying on imaginary identities like vellum dresses on a paper doll: a journalist, a visual artist, a published author. I saw myself moving abroad after graduation, or to New York City or the West Coast. I was ready to disentangle myself from my hometown church and all its restrictions. But college in the Deep South required a handbook I’d never been given. The rules and norms were incomprehensible to me—from everything that goes on during sorority rush to how my pageant queen roommate somehow always had the perfect powdered face of makeup.
My first college boyfriend was a Texan going through a quiet radicalization. God had told him to stop wearing V-neck T-shirts and shopping at thrift stores—a revelation somehow related to biblical manhood. We only ever kissed but, after we broke up, I heard how I featured prominently in his story of religious conversion: how I had led him into sexual temptation and how he’d triumphed over it. Instead of laughing at this, I absorbed it as a personal deficiency.
The day I met my future husband, our college minister had just finished his sermon, part of a series on Genesis. The ministry was housed in a white-steepled church that sat as the cornerstone of Opelika, Alabama, with a looming monument to Robert E. Lee and the Confederate cause in the courtyard. After the service, I was stacking chairs against the back wall when I saw a boy winding his way toward me. He was slim, with a mop of brown hair and a long stride. I’ll call him D. When he reached me, he stuck out an eager hand.
“Finally!” D said. “I’ve been waiting to meet you.”
D had been reading my music blog, full of album reviews and pirated songs. He was a musician studying piano and invited me to see a local band play the next night. At dinner before the show, his car got towed, and we spent the entire night tracking it down instead. We found it at an impound lot. He tried to talk me into buying bolt cutters.
We only ever kissed but, after we broke up, I heard how I featured prominently in his story of religious conversion: how I had led him into sexual temptation and how he’d triumphed over it.
D unlocked a sense of possibility in me. He did not make me feel ashamed. Only two years older than me, he seemed to have life figured out. He instructed me in lessons with the patience of a priest: Eating a banana calms the nerves, he told me. The key to making beautiful music is unwashed hair.
He grew up in an archetypal Alabama family—father a bank president, mother a homemaker—in a large brick house in a neighborhood of identical large brick houses. The family motto: “Don’t stand out.” But D had always been creative and strange, buzzing with dreamy romantic energy that chafed against his parents’ expectations. They worked hard to keep him contained. His mother wouldn’t let him try out for community theater. When he took up piano, they encouraged him to try sports.
D and I saw each other every day after the bolt-cutters incident. He would practice piano until late at night then climb the drain pipe to my second-story dorm room. I’d hear the velvety sound of my window opening and him hoisting himself in with practiced ease. He would shed his outer layers and burrow into my twin bed, pressing his icy hands against my warm body, fingers tapping against my hips, still silently practicing Bach.
A couple of months into dating, D arranged for a small four-seater airplane to fly us to the beach for a day. He loved sweeping gestures—always writing our love story in his head. We spent the day by the ocean and flew back to Auburn as the sun began to set in a blaze of orange and pink. The pilot leaned back and asked us, “Want to see that again?” Then he flew us up higher, westward, and gently back in time, where the sun hadn’t yet gone down.
That’s the only time I’ve ever seen the sun set twice.
We were in a hotel hot tub in Texas when D mentioned marriage for the first time. I was 19, in a red bikini, steam from the water making my skin flush pink. At first, I said no.
I’d never dreamt of marriage. I didn’t imagine a wedding, a dress, or a groom. My fantasies were of other things: the places I would go, the people I would meet, date, and break up with, the versions of myself I could become. No one single future captured me, but the breathtaking collective possibility of them all. Yet, over the years, the possibilities had seemed to narrow: a thousand small reprimands snuffing them out.
Marriage was a small box, within a series of increasingly smaller boxes that I’d been pressed into over the years—by every boyfriend, youth group, church service, and unspoken expectation of womanhood. But I accepted the shrinking, the need to make myself smaller to fit the life I was offered. The other futures I could imagine began to feel blurry and uncharted. Marriage, like religion, promised certainty. When I eventually said yes, it was the relief of acquiescence. It felt so easy to become the kind of woman I was supposed to be.
Religion had locked me into a competition of womanhood, the ring on my finger the final prize. On our wedding invitations, which I designed, there was a banner at the top with Adam’s words from Genesis, the moment he first met Eve: “At last!”
We married my senior year. I skipped graduation. We left the wedding reception on a motorcycle, running out of gas on a dark Alabama road. I got a ride from a man in a white pickup truck while my husband of three hours pushed the motorcycle up the hill toward the nearest gas station. We had sex for the first time at 4 a.m. in a cold hotel room. I cried afterward. D fell asleep immediately. I took a shower, trying to comb through the tangles of my bobby-pin-studded, shellacked wedding hair, and cried even harder.
I’d never dreamt of marriage. I didn’t imagine a wedding, a dress, or a groom. My fantasies were of other things: the places I would go, the people I would meet, date, and break up with, the versions of myself I could become.
On the honeymoon, we performed the roles of husband and wife like child actors in a play. We went to white tablecloth dinners in our nicest clothes. We lounged in beach chairs, slick with sunscreen. We floated alongside the swim-up bar, barely legal drinking age ourselves, ordering sugary cocktails with names like “Dirty Banana” that made us sick.
I experienced my first anxiety attacks over the strangest things: how dirty the hem of my dress had gotten at the wedding, the color of my hair in the photos, a pen mark on my leather bag. I took long walks around the manicured resort in white summer dresses, feeling ridiculous in my diamond ring. Dread settled over me as I realized the days of dreaming were over.
On the last day of our honeymoon, D and I took a small boat out to sea. We were pushed out beyond the wave break and released into the vast blue ocean. The current carried us away from the shore until we could no longer see the resort’s red umbrellas in the sand. We drifted for what felt like hours. When the wind finally picked up again, we didn’t care where it took us, as long as it was back toward solid ground. We ended up at a small cove a mile downshore from the resort. We left the boat capsized on its side, hiking back in our bathing suits and lifejackets, scrabbling barefoot over the rocky coastline.
When we returned home as newlyweds, we told this story as a hilarious anecdote. But I could never quite shake that feeling of immense helplessness.
Marriage required voluntary amnesia. My own thoughts suddenly seemed dangerous. They threatened to reveal my new life as an enormous mistake. To cope, I began to detach small pieces of myself, a little bit at a time. I stopped journaling. I stopped writing. I stayed as busy as possible, turning up the volume on the outside world to quiet that inner voice. I boxed away my old dreams and turned the lock. I would love being married. I would be a good wife.
This ritual dismemberment took place over a series of months, then years. D noticed the change. “It’s like a light turned off in you,” he told me, a couple of years in. I pretended not to know what he meant.
Still, D remained soft and steady. Gentle with me. He loved it when I sang to myself around the house. He knew how much I liked cardinals, so he bought a tiny bird feeder to put outside my window. I sat at my desk, watching him outside in the sun, golden and smiling at me, while he secured it to the glass. He was always doing that: bringing me little offerings of beauty, like consolations for the life we’d agreed to.
D’s gender identity did not emerge fully formed. It seeped into the edges like a developing Polaroid, both of us puzzling to make out the full picture. When he was a kid, he would dress up in his sister’s clothes when no one was home. He had always loved dresses and lace and long hair. He was drawn to the softness of womanhood, the parts of himself it allowed him to access. Neither of us was sure what it all meant.
We reached a tenuous agreement: D could explore his gender identity—but only so far. Only as long as it didn’t threaten the life we’d built. Where that line was, neither of us really knew. Nail polish, but no makeup? Jewelry, but no dresses? Would he shave his legs? Pierce his ears? Begin taking hormones? It would have seemed ridiculous to reduce gender down to such surface-level signifiers, some acceptable and some arbitrarily not, except that we’d been doing it our whole lives.
In public, D still wore his usual clothes and didn’t want to be called by new pronouns. He, too, had long ago locked part of himself away. He hated the feelings that were rising up now, decades of religious conditioning at war with the swelling music inside him. Near daily, he would swear off these feelings altogether, repeating never mind like a prayer. He started having panic attacks.
Nail polish, but no makeup? Jewelry, but no dresses? Would he shave his legs? Pierce his ears? Begin taking hormones? It would have seemed ridiculous to reduce gender down to such surface-level signifiers, some acceptable and some arbitrarily not, except that we’d been doing it our whole lives.
I watched him nervously for signs of femininity, chastising myself for my vigilance, but still fretting as his hair grew longer and I saw smudges of eyeliner. I found myself acting strangely territorial over womanhood. Possessive. I’d spent a lifetime trying to meet its exacting standards and feeling the shame of falling short. My alarm system had become highly attuned to any deviation. Now I couldn’t turn it off, even with my spouse. It was the meticulous pruning of aberrant ideas I’d been taught since girlhood. Except now I was the one demanding uniformity, both the prisoner and the guard.
One day that winter, I opened his underwear drawer to put the laundry away and noticed a flash of color and lace toward the bottom. My stomach jolted. There was that invisible line. The black ones were fine, but it was the tangles of red, pink, fuchsia—hidden the deepest—that alarmed me. I quickly closed the drawer.
I felt a churning unease at the renegotiation of the terms of our marriage. Until then, we had played our roles perfectly: good Christian man and woman, husband and wife. Resentment tightened in my throat. I had sacrificed so much of myself to fit into this marriage. So why couldn’t he? Of course, we both felt claustrophobic. Of course, we both felt stifled, suffocated, desperate with grief at the parts of ourselves marriage required us to abandon. I thought that’s what we’d agreed to.
That day in the bathtub, D broke the agreement, said the thing that couldn’t be spoken, the whispered possibility: What if there is more for us out there?
D decided to go back to church.
It had been seven months since the bathtub confession, and over a year since the pandemic lockdowns had begun. We had stopped attending church by that point. But we had gone to couples therapy on Zoom. We had been shopping in the women’s section of Goodwill in matching blue face masks. I had dressed D in my clothes and started a shared Pinterest board.
We were bumping up against that invisible line more often now, feeling its shock like an electric fence, its boundaries momentarily illuminated. D’s panic attacks became more frequent. The frantic beating against the locked door in my mind grew louder. We ignored it all with the desperation of two people who weren’t ready for their lives to change.
It was this desperation that led D back to church—the place we had always gone for assurance. Even condemnation is a kind of certainty. D went to the office of the unmasked pastor who gave D, unhelpfully, a book on how to resist the temptation of homosexuality. The pastor had a cough but told D, “Don’t worry. It’s just a cold.”
We were bumping up against that invisible line more often now, feeling its shock like an electric fence, its boundaries momentarily illuminated.
D got COVID first. I followed a few days later. Initially, it was almost a relief. The emotional torment of the existential identity questions was replaced with the more immediate, bodily torment of illness. After months of relentless talking and arguing, we were finally still. We lay together in our big white bed, exhausted and feverish, watching YouTube videos about the deep sea.
The deepest part of the known ocean is the hadal zone, named after the Greek god of the underworld. No light can penetrate. The pressure there would crush you immediately.
We relaxed into quiet companionship, letting our hot eyes rest on the unknowable black water.
Only five percent of the ocean is thought to be accurately mapped; the other 95 percent remains a mystery.
Over the last few months, new thoughts had begun to emerge from the depths of my mind like creatures from the abyss. I was surprised to find my resentment toward D had morphed into jealousy. Both marriage and religion had required exile from ourselves, a systematic suppression of our true identities. It was an adaptation that felt necessary for survival. But as I watched D explore, interrogate, and reinvent womanhood, changing the rules before my eyes, I wondered if I had been wrong.
Over the next few days, as D recovered, I grew increasingly worse. My breathing became irregular. I stopped eating. On the seventh night, I woke up at 3 a.m. with a sharp pain in my abdomen. Stumbling into the bathroom, I was so hot I tore off my clothes. In the mirror, my reflection seemed to glimmer like heat waves.
When I woke up on the cold bathroom tile, I was naked and terrified. I was certain this was what dying felt like. I had only one thought: to get back to D. I fought toward our bedroom, knocking into furniture as my vision went dark at the edges, and collapsed at our closet door. D found me there and laid me on the bed, stroking my damp face until my panicked breaths grew steady.
Our love had always been a balm for the ways we’d been forced to shrink over the years. We had entered into this marriage as confused evangelicals, barely in our 20s, trying so hard to play the roles of husband and wife. We had both changed so much in the past decade, but the shape of our marriage had stayed the same. The pressure was crushing us both. I thought of our first date, with the bolt cutters, the sense of freedom and possibility D had unlocked in me then. They were doing it again now.
I fell asleep with D watching over me, their cool fingers on my cheek. When I woke up the next morning, my fever had broken.
A month later, our marriage was over.
What I thought would feel like exile instead felt like escape.
We left the Garden and went in separate directions. D went west, to California, a land of lush abundance. I went east, to New York and New England, and then across an ocean to Portugal, Italy, and France.
We had entered into this marriage as confused evangelicals, barely in our 20s, trying so hard to play the roles of husband and wife.
Everything seemed open, all those glorious branching futures I’d seen when I left for school, back within arm’s reach. It was a time of freedom, confusion, and expansion. I would no longer tolerate exile from my own mind, not for a god, not for a marriage, not for a moment longer.
I walked along the Seine, summited the Swiss Alps in a swinging cable car, sunbathed naked on the rocky beaches of Croatia. I ate sticky figs in Tuscany, golden-yellow custard tarts in Lisbon, and buttery croissants in Biarritz.
In Orvieto, I visited a cathedral with the story of Genesis carved in bas-relief on its marble façade. In the panel Creation of Woman, Adam lies asleep on the ground, side cut open, rib removed. Eve has emerged from his body and sits upright, looking God directly in the eye. The tree’s branches drape heavily overhead, dense with fruit. This is before the serpent. Before the apple. Before knowledge. Before escape. Yet in the tilt of her head, I think I can already see the wild seed of desire beginning to grow.
I saw D again in San Diego. It was exactly a year after we’d both been so sick. Two years since the bathtub. Ten years since the bolt cutters. Her thick brown hair was long and pulled back, the California sun catching glints of gold. Champagne glitter fizzed on her eyelids. She had chosen a new name for herself, one that meant “beloved wife.”
We met near the water and walked past a hostel she had stayed at once, right after the divorce. She said, “I want to show you this,” and we snuck in as another guest was leaving. D went to the front desk and said, “This is my ex-wife. Ex-wife? Is that right?” She turned to me and we both laughed at the term. “I wanted to show her around.” They wouldn’t let us in, so we walked along the boardwalk. The sun was setting, illuminating the water on either side of us. We talked about D’s new life in California.
She had been in the art supply store recently, wearing a miniskirt and platform boots, and an older woman had approached her. D felt nervous, thinking of all the white-haired church ladies in Alabama and Tennessee, but instead, the woman had complimented her.
“Just look at those legs,” the woman said. “You could be a Rockette!”
D laughed, then dropped her paintbrushes to do a couple of kicks for her.
Listening to D tell the story, the barefaced joy of dancing for a stranger in the paint aisle, I was reminded of all the reasons I had fallen in love with her in the first place.
What do we call that thing that beckoned Eve? The promise of truth, of being able to look at one’s whole self—the full picture, not just the sanctioned parts—and to rest in the knowledge that it is good? Whatever it was that beckoned her, beckoned me too. It sought me like a serpent, whispering possibility. It tempted me with promises of knowledge and freedom, harmony with my mind, instead of constant battle.
We walked back along the boardwalk while the sun sank below the horizon. I thought back to our date on the airplane, that ridiculous show of love, when we had been flown gently back in time and discovered a second chance.
Womanhood as defined by the church, marriage, and the South had been such a tight box to fit into. It couldn’t hold the entirety of me or my spouse. I can’t say what was happening in D’s mind during all this—I witnessed her becoming but I will never understand what it was like.
What I do know is this: I didn’t realize we had permission to change until D showed me. She took the first bite. And then she extended it to me, gleaming like forbidden fruit, an offering from a beloved. Our eyes were finally opened. At last.
Lane Scott Jones is a writer from North Carolina now traveling the world full-time. She is currently working on a memoir. You can subscribe to her Substack newsletter here.
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A dive into the depths of the movie “Jaws.” Olivia Rutigliano has given a lot of thought to the themes and meaning of the film, analyzing it like a literary novel. This piece will make you think about this timeless classic differently.
Not unrelatedly, another reason I like watching Jaws amid all the fireworks is because it localizes so many of the depressing actualities about America—the movie features a mayor who cares more about the local economy than the lives of his citizens, a medical examiner who covers up inconvenient means of death for gain, a scientist no one listens to, and in a new and relevant reflection, beaches being open when they shouldn’t be. But these aspects are not incidental to Jaws; the film is very much a pointed criticism of our particular American condition, one which places greater value on the perks of convenience and capitalism than on human lives. Neatly dovetailing all of this is Jaws’s constant stressing the insignificance of human civilization and the puniness of human existence in the face of nature.
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Greater Grace World Outreach has thousands of members. Over its 50-year history, the church has been accused of being cult-like and of turning a blind eye to a culture of abuse. Now a group of former members, who call themselves the Millstones, are demanding a reckoning. This is the first installment in an investigative series:
The guys drove up to the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains that brisk November day, set up their tents, lugged coolers from the car and started a fire. That was one thing they had learned in the church—how to work together, heads down, focusing on the shared task.
That evening, the young men sank into folding chairs around the fire, cracking open beers. The camping trip was an annual tradition, a way to support each other as they carved out lives beyond Greater Grace World Outreach, the East Baltimore-based evangelical megachurch in which they were raised.
This time, the conversation turned dark. I’ve got to get something off my chest, one of the friends said. Years ago, he said, my aunt was babysitting and she walked in on a man molesting his son. He named the man, a prominent pastor in their church.
For a moment, the only sounds were the pops and crackles of the fire. Then another man spoke up: That same pastor…his son abused my sister.
Soon they were all talking at once. There was youth leader and coach Ray Fernandez, serving time for molesting three boys years ago—including one man sitting at the campfire. And Jesse Anderson, a camp counselor and Sunday school teacher who received an unusually light sentence for sexually assaulting a boy.
They spoke of loved ones who had been victims of abuse. My sister. My cousin. My friend. Me.
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