Helpers and Abusers in The Education of Joshua Chastain
The Education of Joshua Chastain: A Gay Mormon Memoir traces the inner life of a gay Mormon teenager struggling to understand his sexuality in a world shaped by religious certainty, cultural silence, and moral fear. Along that journey, Joshua encounters two opposing forces that shape his development: helpers who offer affirmation and truth, and abusers who exploit power, authority, and shame.
This contrast—between those who nurture identity and those who seek to erase it—forms one of the novel’s central themes.
Lucy Ramírez: The Power of Affirmation
Among Joshua’s most important helpers is Lucy Ramírez, a volunteer at the local public library in Rosales, his hometown. One of the few non-Mormon Anglos in the community, Lucy immediately recognizes Joshua’s precocious intelligence and intellectual hunger. She introduces him to the English-language literary canon, steering him toward authors such as Chaucer, the Brontë sisters, and John Steinbeck.
Lucy does more than assign books. She expands Joshua’s sense of possibility.
She also recommends that Joshua read No Man Knows My History, Fawn Brodie’s biography of Joseph Smith. This text quietly destabilizes Joshua’s unquestioning acceptance of the official Mormon narrative and initiates a broader habit of critical thinking—an intellectual skill that will later prove essential to his survival.
Most importantly, Lucy becomes the first adult to whom Joshua confesses his sexuality. Her response is compassionate and honest. She shares her own painful experience of being married to a gay man who believed—tragically—that marriage to a woman could change his sexual orientation. Lucy does not shame Joshua or attempt to “fix” him. Instead, she affirms that, regardless of his sexuality, he is a good person with a meaningful future.
In a novel filled with fear and coercion, Lucy represents the life-saving power of being seen.
The Many Faces of Abuse
Joshua’s abusers appear in several forms, each reflecting a different abuse of power.
One is a scoutmaster who physically and sexually abuses Joshua while publicly humiliating him for not being sufficiently masculine. The abuse is both private and performative, reinforcing the message that Joshua’s body and identity are subject to ridicule and violation.
Other abusers include two high school bullies who manipulate Joshua into a sexual encounter and then beat him severely before outing him to the entire school. Their violence is rooted not only in cruelty but in social terror—the need to destroy what they fear in themselves or others.
Yet the most dangerous abuser Joshua encounters is neither overtly violent nor obviously cruel.
Dr. Chandler and the Violence of “Cure”
Dr. Chandler, the psychologist to whom Joshua’s parents send him, represents a particularly insidious form of abuse. A Mormon and Harvard-trained behaviorist, Chandler claims that homosexuality is merely a matter of conditioning and that Joshua can choose heterosexuality through faith, discipline, and willpower.
This process is known as aversion therapy.
Chandler’s methods include attaching electrodes to Joshua’s genitals and forcing him to view photographs of naked men alternated with images of women or idealized family scenes. If Joshua looks at a male image for too long, he receives a painful electric shock. In more extreme iterations, nausea-inducing drugs are used to associate same-sex attraction with physical suffering.
What makes Chandler’s abuse especially damaging is not only its physical cruelty, but its moral framing. Chandler insists that he loves Joshua and wants only what is best for him. His violence is cloaked in religious devotion and therapeutic authority, making it far harder for Joshua to resist.
Joshua finds it easier to defy bullies and predators than to question a professional who claims divine sanction for his actions.
Healing Through Resistance and Memory
Joshua eventually survives the damage inflicted by aversion therapy, but healing requires more than endurance. It demands that he challenge the authority of people who insist they understand his identity better than he does. It also requires that he hold onto the memory of people like Lucy—adults who knew the truth about him and still believed in his worth.
The novel underscores a painful reality: abuse often thrives where authority goes unquestioned, especially when wrapped in religious or scientific language.
A Historical Reality, Not Fictional Excess
It is important to note that the practices depicted in The Education of Joshua Chastain are not exaggerations. The LDS Church did not formally disavow aversion therapy until 2015. For decades, such practices were presented as compassionate interventions rather than psychological harm.
By documenting both helpers and abusers, the novel offers more than personal memoir. It stands as a testimony to the damage caused by conversion efforts—and to the quiet, radical power of kindness, honesty, and intellectual freedom.
Why This Story Still Matters
For readers interested in LGBTQ memoirs, gay Mormon narratives, religious trauma, or the history of conversion therapy, The Education of Joshua Chastain offers an unflinching examination of how identity is shaped—and sometimes saved—by the people we encounter.
Joshua’s survival is not accidental. It is the result of resistance, self-knowledge, and the memory of those who affirmed his humanity when others denied it.