Name Withheld, Atlanta Straight, Dec 1983 and the Summer of 1985.
In 1983, after being subjected to over six years of sexual abuse at the hands of multiple adults including my Episcopal priest and a music teacher in a private school, after becoming a chronic runaway, and after two years of self-medicating with various drugs, I sought help for what I believed to be drug addiction from a school counselor. She handed me a pamphlet for Straight Incorporated, the Atlanta location. I gave it to my parents, they attended an open meeting and a week later I was taken to the old grocery store building on Austell Road for an intake.
I sat in that little windowless, plain white room for well over eight hours that day. The two boys who interviewed me were from my hometown. I told them pretty much everything. I explained that I had been sexually active with the adults, that they had drugged me and I had been raped countless times. I told them that I had been using drugs. I even told them wildly inaccurate stories about the number and quantities of drugs I had used out of fear that I would not be a ‘bad enough’ drug addict to be accepted to the program.
No one bothered to tell my parents about the priest and the music teacher raping me for six-plus years. No one bothered to call the police and inform them about the sex crimes I had survived. And starting that first day, those two boys began conditioning me to believe that I, as a ruthless and super-intelligent ‘druggie’, had manipulated those poor innocent adults into having sex with me so I could get drugs from them.
My parents were brought into the room for a short goodbye with an executive staff member, and I signed myself into the worst nightmare of my life. I was strip-searched, including sexual humiliation during the search, and then led into the group and plopped down on the front row. It took me about ten minutes to realize that something was horribly wrong, and I asked a fifth phaser to let me leave. That was when I was told that I could not leave, despite having signed myself into the program.
I progressed slowly through the first phase of the program. I witnessed brutality. I participated in the physical and verbal harassment of other clients, as was expected of all of us. I experience much the same as other first phasers, limited access to food, bathrooms, medical care, dental care, a total lack of privacy, no access to the outside world, no reading – not even a cereal box- complete and total control of my every waking moment. I slept in bedrooms with the windows nailed shut and bolted locks that could only be opened from the outside. We were often crammed into those bedrooms like sardines on the floor, sleeping in only our underwear. The process of dehumanization was quite effective and complete.
When I was elevated to the second phase three months later, shortly after my eighteenth birthday, I reveled in the limited freedom it allowed and took a long bath while reading the Bible. I was reported to the staff by a first phaser (newcomer) in my care for being decadent and was placed on a seven-day refresher. I was not happy and chose to execute a self-withdrawal against clinical advice. They held me in the program for a full seventy-two hours after my request to leave, and I was forced to sit through repeated aggressive sessions with other clients and group staff to try and convince me to stay. Finally, my parents came over from my hometown, and I had to sit with them in an exit interview with an executive staff member for well over an hour.
When I insisted on leaving the program, by this time it was after nine at night, they put me out the front door with nothing but the clothes on my back, my driver’s license and a twenty-dollar bill. Staff did not want my father to give me the twenty bucks, but he insisted. I walked from the building on Austell Road along Delk Road all the way over to Interstate 75. I made my way into an apartment complex there where I had stayed with a client as a newcomer. He had withdrawn thirty or forty days earlier. I knocked on their door at close to midnight. They were, to say the least, shocked to find me at their door begging for a place to sleep. They were kind enough to let me sleep there for one night but insisted that I leave the next morning and not return.
I spent some of the money on breakfast that morning and then I struck out walking towards downtown Atlanta along the side of the interstate. I hitched a ride part of the way, but I walked the vast majority of the distance to the Varsity restaurant downtown, near Georgia Tech. I made my way to an Episcopal church near there where I knew the priest was the man who had baptized me as an infant. He agreed to meet with me in the office and I tried to explain what was happening to him. I must have sounded insane, perhaps I was. I was in tears, emotionally broken down, lost and confused. I was desperate. He found the local Salvation Army youth shelter for me and sent me there via mass transit.
It was dark by the time I arrived. They accepted me as a resident, despite me being over the age of eighteen. I don’t think they really believe anything I tried to explain to them about Straight or about the years of rape and abuse I had survived prior to being in the program. I stayed in that youth shelter for about a month, found a job and tried to live a life. I contacted the LGBT resource center in the midtown area and met there with a man.
The director of that center took mercy on me and offered to let me live in his apartment. He let me borrow his car, and I began going to the local gay bars, drinking and having dangerous sexual liaisons again. In pretty short order I had lost the job and been kicked out of the apartment, my life was out of control. But the youth shelter allowed me to move back in. I found another job nearby, and then an unbelievably grungy and horrid apartment in a flophouse right next to the fast food place I was working. I found a connection for weed and within a very short time, I had lost control of my life.
I took a bus back to my hometown at a time when I knew my parents would be at Straight visiting my sister. I stole some of their silver and sold it for drugs and had one long night of partying before they came back to town and found me sitting on their front porch completed disheveled and defeated.
Straight, by some miracle, I thought at the time, chose to allow me to return to the program. My second program did not progress as smoothly as my first. I was not content to move through the phases. I began to rebel. I was physically abused, psychologically tortured, deprived of proper nutrition, forced to sleep in filth, sexually molested and humiliated and even threatened with a gun by one parent who assured me that if I so much as though about stepping out of line in his home, he would simply shoot me in the leg, call the police, and explain to them that I had tried to stab him with a knife.
My mental state declined further. I began to carve in my own arms with my fingernails and had to have socks duct taped to my hands to keep me from making myself bleed out in the group. By that time, I had been moved into homes that were ‘known’ for their ability to make a rebellious newcomer start to ‘change’. In those homes, I was literally denied any food, forced to go without the use of a bathroom, and at one point forced to perform oral sex on my ‘oldcomers’ in order to avoid being beaten senseless.
And I have to point out, I was over eighteen, not court ordered, I could have left the program again. Except that I knew there was no life for me outside the program either. I had become addicted to the program. In many ways, I had become an emotional masochist.
I eventually did progress. In retrospect, I think they decided to just move me forward despite any real progress on my part. It was basically sink or swim for me. As I did progress, I enrolled in high school again, and when I made it to the fourth phase I was selected for ‘staff training’, much to my surprise. Maybe they saw the sadist within me that I didn’t even see within myself. When I made it the fifth phase, I was elevated to fifth phase staff trainee.
And that is when my real hell started. I had a knack for confrontation in raps. I was good at it. I could pick people apart with logic and reason and could bring people to tears, something that was a clearly defined goal for group staff. And then one day, during a period when there was a major outbreak of dissension and rebellion in the group I was pulled aside by a senior staffer and told in no uncertain terms that I was to take a group of fourth and fifth phasers into the bathroom, and then bring misbehaving clients into the bathroom and not let them out until they agreed to begin to ‘change’. I can remember the staffer’s words as clearly today as if he was standing in front of me now- ‘you will do whatever it takes, anything that needs to be done to make them change’.
And we did. We physically accosted them, threw them against the walls, dunked their heads in the toilet, poked them, slapped them, hit them. We brutalized them. Some of them were in there for well over an hour, maybe more. Some of it is still a blur, some of it only comes out in night terrors now. Some of it I can never forget.
The next day was a day off for me. I was called into the building. I was brought into the staff office and confronted. A parent had heard about it. The shit had hit the fan. When I told the staff members confronting me that I had been instructed that way, they denied it. I was set back into the group on a fourth phase fourteen-day refresher. I lasted three days before self-withdrawing again.
After I left the program that time, I went off the deep end in terms of drug use. I lived most of the next twenty years drunk or stoned. I continued to believe what had been conditioned into me from day one at the program, that I was a drug addict, that I had never been sexually abused, I had just sexually manipulated people. It was not until twenty years later that I finally found the help of a cult deprogramming specialist who finally saw the truth and helped me get to a point where I could begin to get my life back under control.
But even after two years in therapy, I continued to struggle. Repeated suicidal attempts, hospitalizations, and another ten years of therapy came after that. Today I am sober. Not because I think I am a drug addict, but just because I don’t care for the feeling of being out of control or drunk or high. I understand the depth of the depravity of my life. I was raped hundreds upon hundreds of times before I entered straight. They had an obligation to inform my parents and law enforcement, and they failed. And that was all because of their cultish obsession with drug use as a ‘primary’ problem.
I live with chronic post-traumatic stress disorder today. I rarely sleep more than a few hours at a time despite the best doctors and medications. And this is after almost seventeen years of therapy, individual and group. I keep a go bag packed and ready for admitting myself to a locked psychiatric ward because I never really know when the night terrors, flashbacks, dissociative episodes, and chaos are going to become too much for me to cope with without emergent help.
Straight is not solely responsible for all of this. The adults who raped me, who drugged and used me as a sex slave, they most certainly contributed to my condition. But straight complicated my disorder in ways that can barely be described or quantified. As damaging as the dehumanization process and the abuse was that I suffered, the worst night terrors and flashbacks are still the ones related to what I did to other people related to straight. I don’t have the energy or nerve to ever write out every one of those events. Suffice to say that they were far more numerous. I saw people get bones broken, people who were taken into intake rooms and came out at the end of the day covered in bruises. I saw a boy break the jaw of an executive staff member because he had been driven insane by the program. When they took him to jail a week later, we thought he was the unlucky one, but now I know, he got the better deal.
I listened to people talk about bestiality, about incest, about the most intimate and brutal things. Things that no teenager should ever have to talk about in a room with two hundred other teenagers, under emotional duress, in prisonlike conditions. I laid on the floor in those bedrooms at night and heard other boys trying to masturbate in silence because of the abject torture they had suffered the entire day, and because they were teenage boys- it was a natural thing to do- and then watched them be humiliated and harassed the next day for falling into the ‘instant gratification of their drug problems’.
What happened in straight was simply so far off the reservation that almost no one will believe it. No one wants to believe it, because it means they would have to accept a reality of American life that bursts their bubble of innocence. Straight was an American Madrassa. It was a torture chamber, a place designed to mold young people, and their families into some twisted ideal image of wholesomeness as if the world of Beaver Cleaver could somehow be brought back to life through the systematic abuse of young people.
The memories of straight, of what they did to me, of what they conditioned me to do to others, those memories will never go away. I am proud of the recovery I have made. I live a life dedicated to the service of others through volunteer work now. I am sober. I facilitate discussion groups for other young adults in the LGBT community. They turned me into a monster, and I managed to survive. But the nightmares, the night terrors, the sleep paralysis, the flashbacks, the fears…it never really goes away. Never.
Michael Patrick Carey, Atlanta, GA Straight, 83-84
Well I guess I need to begin with how I got in Straight Incorporated in the first place. It all started when I had my first brush with the law as the result of a juvenile prank. I pulled a false fire alarm at Lassiter High School in Marietta, Georgia. I was criminally charged and sentenced to 6 months of probation with the usual curfews and what not. I was raised by my maternal grandparents and god knows I tried their patience on many occasions but I was not a drug and alcohol abuser by any stretch of the imagination. Anywho, My grandmother would call the probation department if I was only 5 minutes past my curfew attempting to display "Tough love". This led to a few probation violations where they just added a few months to my probation and sent me home the next day. Well the third time was the charm. The judge decided I was to be "committed to the Department of Human Resources to be dealt with as they saw fit". (her words verbatim). So with this commitment came a drug and alcohol assessment. I was clear that I rarely drank and only beer when I did and I had tried weed a few times. That was my entire drug and alcohol history. They came back with two options for me and I got to pick. The first option was Milledgeville Juvenile Detention Center for 1 year. Yes, kid prison. The second was a drug rehab that was designed to be completed in 6-9 months. I asked why a drug rehab would be an option and the court service worker said and I quote "you said you tried marijuana right?" So that was the first clue of how the system worked and I missed it. Of course a 16 year old would take a rehab over jail, and less time too? Seemed like a no brainer to me at the time. I only wish I had known what I was in for. So I take rehab. If you haven't figured it out yet the rehab was Straight Incorporated on Austell Road right down the street from the youth detention center I was housed in at the time. So my grandparents come get me on Janurary 15th 1983 and take me to Straight and once the intake started I knew I was in for something I was sure I wanted no part of. So fast forward to December of the same year. I had been on first phase the whole time for only two reasons. One, I refused to stand up and just say what they wanted to hear. I tried to come up with some stories that would move me along in the program but I just couldn't do it. Second reason was because anyone who remembers me in there knows I was sat on behind group on a regular basis for misbehaving. So I finally make 2nd phase....I still don't know how, and I began seeing some light at the end of the tunnel. I got to spend Christmas that year at my home with my family and the coolest foster brother I could have asked for. Ashley Owen if you are reading this, message or call me 937-515-4079. I started thinking now that I was at home that this wasn't so bad. I can do this.Then I caught myself being a dick to my new comers. I realized then that I had to go and I was only going to get 1 shot at it so I had better not screw it up. I watched many people run for the doors and get tackled and their hopes of freedom shattered. I knew that was not the way I was going out. (no pun intended). Then it occurred to me that I get to find a job and go to work on third phase. That was it, get a job, go to work, leave. It couldn't have been simpler. I put in for third phase the first chance I could but didn't make it. The following open meeting was on a Monday. I put in for third phase again and made it. I stayed with my grandmother, grandfather, foster brother, and newcomers until about 3:00 am waiting for my job permission to work at head start across the street from the building to get approved. Finally when they came back with it approved I could only think of leaving. The next morning I stuffed some clothes in a gym bag and headed out. My grandmother asked me what was in the bag and I wasn't prepared for the question. I told her the first thing that popped in my head; "oh just some games and stuff to play with the little kids at Head Start". She bought it and we were off to the building to drop off my new comers and foster brother. I signed out with a 5th phaser, got back in my grandfather's Chevy Chevette and he drove me across the street and dropped me off at Head Start. I slowly walked along the side of the building looking back over my shoulder watching for him to pull out onto Austell Road and then I could go and go I did. I kept walking to the fence line behind the day care. (Head Start was a day care for those of you who don't know or remember). I remember climbing over the fence and being in some apartments which I think was The Doral apts but am not sure. I flagged down this lady who was pulling out of her parking space and asked if she could give me a ride to the Atlanta airport. She did and I called my biological father in Ohio and told him all the shit I went through there and he had me on a plane the next day. Once I got to Ohio he hired an attorney and got the State of Georgia to release me to his custody and I never saw the inside of that place again. I wish I could remember the new comers I had when I left so I could apologize to them so if you are out there and remember me I am sorry.
Thanks for reading,
Michael Patrick Carey
1/15/1983 to 1/12/1984
Atlanta Straight, Austell Road, Marietta, Georgia
Aleshia Faye Crabtree, Atlanta, GA & Cincinnati, OH Straight, 1983-1986
I am a survivor!!! I was in Atlanta /Marietta straight in Georgia then sent to the cincinatti program from 1983 -1986.there is no way of describing the day after day mental and physical torture that place put on me...I was 13 yrs old and court ordered to the program for taking a tylenol 3 with codeine in it at school (that my mother gave me for menstrual cramps) Cobb county had a 0 tolerance law in effect and I was arrested in handcuffs and taken out of school in the 7 th grade -put in detention center tip I was released to STRAIGHT INC I absolutely thought I had died and gone straight to HELL, being screamed at and spit on during intake, the one girl waving a piece of paper saying if I DID NOT SIGN that I would NEVER EVER see my parents again, promising me I could talk to my Moma as soon as I sighned it ...which turned out to be the first of MANY LIES, I understood then that I was on my own w /o any communication to my family that I had to protect myself from THEM (straight Inc) so the trust was broken on the day of intake and some kind of animalistic survival mode kicked in for me and from that day ..I didn't even recognize myself anymore I was scared of what I saw being dragged into this big huge room by my belt loop of my pants, the girls were angry, and I wasn't sure why, I had never met them before why are you screaming and calling me names, why are they cursing, I am looking for an adult for help to get my parants and that's just it ...there WERE NO ADULTS..it was all KIDS and they were pissed off when they stood to talk but when they would finish the group would SCREAM \"LOVE YA \"what the hell kind of \"love \"is this shit? At the age of 13, even I knew this is NOT love ...I was scared to death and really believed my life was over..I gave up, I had NEVER been a violent child or ever tried or thought about harming myself but under those circumstances I fought back, feeling bullied and out numbered I began to inflict pain on myself, banging my head against floors and walls, carving holes in arms legs and ankles with my own fingernails...I was 13 and hearing these people talk about needles and prostitution I had to ask, \"what does that mean? \"Having no idea what they were talking about, they wanted me to \"relate \"share my experience I COULDNT!!!!! I didn't do those things, hell I was still a virgin and got put on the floor in a \"girls rap \"because I \"lied \"about sexual experience, I knew I would get screamed at again if I told them \"I didn't \"so I said \"I did \"and they said \"you're lying \"and it never ended!!! nothing I could do ....I could not believe what what happening...and I believe that place killed something in me, it damaged me emotionally and my ability to trust. I could go on and on telling one horrific tale after tale but...today I just have to tell myself I am SAFE and THEY CANT HURT ME ANY MORE ....ALESHIA ITS OVER NOW, YOU ARE OK ..YOU ARE A SURVIVOR!
Name Withheld, Atlanta, GA Straight, 83-84
A 'drug rehab' huh?..........funny that term just never seems to gel with me in
context of speaking about Straight Inc......unless the idea was to
rehabilitate with the 'right' types of drugs.........or is it more fitting to
say foreign substances/chemical compounds/poisons?. This is where I must be
careful, I think, in not trying to come off as a 'know it all' or a budding
sleuth (I'm neither)....in fact, wouldn't my assertions that Straight may have
been one big blind clinical drug trial, sort of make me sound 'stupid', after
all, I did buy into it and eventually complete this program, thinking i had been
completely chemical free the whole time.............'heavily drugged at a drug
rehab, what a sap!' I just want to say that this whole idea of using certain
types of drugs to control someone, or get them to act/say whatever you want is
not a new idea at all. This notion, although unproven, now colors most all my
strong memories of the Straight Inc., so feel free to read ahead with your own
prejudices:
In January of 1983 I was driven to Atlanta GA from my home in Nashville to
attend a 'new' type of treatment center for troubled youths...............back
up, guess I should mention some of what might have given my parents concern
that I might need such a place. I had this friend that told me about some
neighbors of his that were gonna be gone for a while and said we could use their
place, hang out and drink their beer, etc.....'wow!...you got really cool
neighbors man!', I thought.............anyway, we were arrested and dude fessed
up to the idea being all his and some other questionable stuff he'd done, while
I just sort of looked on in disbelief (not true amazment mind you, 'cause I'd
always known guy was at least a little 'crazy', but a good friend forever I
thought)...........this was one of the instances that would make parents and
others in community think that this place might be a good fit.......
So, sometime in January of '83 I find myself sitting in one of these 'intake'
rooms being interviewed for my 1st day of 'processing' into this experimental
Straight Inc. deal....I must not have put up much resistance because I was
'accepted' into the place, introduced to 'the group' and was assigned to a very
relaxed oldcomer-this term, as you might know by now stood for another teen who
had been in Straight for a little while longer at least, and generally meant
that they had authority over 'newcomers'-............still feels kinda weird
using all this old Straight lingo................ after staying a couple of days
in group, I decided that this was not for me 'aw.....naw, I gotta go' the
juxtaposing of the laidbackness of my oldcomer (who I was housed with at nights)
and what I saw/heard in the 'group sessions' during the day....was just.....I
mean the guy just seemed like he literally could've have been one of my
brothers, but something had happened to him here and I knew it wasn't normal or
right, so I left in the morning (approx. 2:00 A.M.) and got some free coffee at
the Denny's nearby, mulling over my route and ride situation-there were no such
thing as a cell phone available to the general public...and if there had been,
who would've have believed me!!!...what friend or family member would've driven
400 plus miles to deliver me back home??? well maybe 1 or 2...but it wasn't an
option so I decided to hitch it....I took, at most, 4 seperate rides (with at
least 1 'character' in that mix) to get back to my hometown......I'm tempted at
this point to go into a little of the ppl. I met on the road that morning, but
not sure how much it had to do with Straight Inc.......only later, after being
brought back, do I now realise that the one ride-dude was SICK- had at least
something to do with how I was treated sometime during my 18 month stay.....I
would sometimes write in my nightly required journal or 'moral inventory' about
how I fooled him and misdirected him from continuing all this crazy shit-talk
admissions/suggestions and 'just give me a ride back to interstate, and I'll
pretend you never told me these things about urself' I might have even hinted
that I had relatives in the Chattanooga police force .....I would sometimes,
also, maybe laugh about the whole situation in one these 12 hour group sessions
at the Straight Inc.....somebod(ies) must not have liked my
'unserious attitude' when retelling this story to 'the group' for some
reason.........
Anyway, to make a long story longer I just want to say that my stay there there
can be charaterized by long stretches of oblivious boredom, punctuated by pure,
complete terror.........I don't, in fact, even remember graduating or
'7-Stepping'...the ceremony, anyway........although I've been assured that I did
(graduated Summer of '84)......don't really even remember the last 7 or 8 months
or so......
Sometime in my 9th month there I was told by a phaser friend about some
'wonder-drug' they had tried in their past.....I was on 3rd phase @ time and
trusted this person to a big extent, even though I felt the conversation was
going somewhere that it prolly shouldn't (look how hard I've worked just to get
the 'priveledge' of getting out of the Straight building and trying to be
'normal').....................
the only other memories I have of this time period involve some true
hallucinations.........by that I guess what I mean are actually seeing things
that aren't there......not traces or 'shape-shifting' objects or cartoon
characters......but seemingly real things and people that just simply are not
there...........drifting in and out of consciousness..............I once, after
being very hungry and fed small rationed portions of non-healthy food, I once
know I 'saw and consumed' a delicious plate of hearty breakfast food that was
pure air in actuality......
To me, all those little memories, or parts of Straight Inc. have become
the WHOLE ..................................One Big Mean Mirage
Brad Finger, Atlanta, GA Straight 82-84
I was fifteen when I was put in the program on February 19,1982 until September 4, 1984. After an all-day intake, I was stripped searched and introduced to the group. I did not want to be there but I soon found out I was court-ordered. My first attempt to leave was by taking the globe of the ceiling light fixture (while my oldcomer was sleeping) placing it under my mattress on the floor and snapping it into sharp knife-like pieces. For hours I cut into my wrist peeling back a thick layer of skin. My goal was to make them think I was crazy so they would send me to a mental ward. I thought that was better than this mad house I was in. Well after staff showed up and jumped on me, they broke the glass in my hand and sliced my leg open. They took me to get sowed up and took me straight back to the building where I was to be confronted. I was on first phase for fifteen months. I fought back but it made matters worse for me.
They tried alot of ways to break me. I remember standing in a corner for a week once and if I moved or turned my head I got my face shoved in the corner and was held up by two upper phasers. By this time I stopped fighting because I would find myself on the ground with two or more phasers sitting on me. I went through a peanut butter diet for over six weeks. I ate peanut butter, other than that I ate the one shitty meal at the building. The peanut butter was better than what they served but I still was not broken. Then there was the bread and water diet. I became very malnourished and thin. I must have made the staff really mad because I was taken to an intake room and forced to do sit ups, push ups, jumping jacks and running-in-place for hours. I became dehydrated through this painful process and every time I moved I would suffer severe cramping. The four upper phasers would be screaming at me the entire time and when I physically could not move Any longer, they would pick me up like a puppet on strings and make me do more. I still did not change.
They sent me to my own home as a newcomer to humiliate me but that did not motivate me. So then to screw with me some more, I had to ask for every bite of food that I took and if I asked too fast I was told NO!! So then I was put on janitor detail of the month where I was lead around cleaning everything from bathroom stalls to baseboards. I was in hell. Because it was so hot in that building with no A/C, it felt good to my skin to clean those pissy toilet's. I would ask for water and they would not give me anything to drink, so I would rub toilet water on my skin to cool down. After three weeks I was broken. I made 2nd phase two times and ran away {split} or copped out as they called it, only to be found and kidnapped and took back to the group for more screaming.
Well I did make it through the program after thirty-one months. I was in the Atlanta group. I think about alot of the other kids I was in with. I wonder who is still alive what they are doing with their life. As for me, I'm turning forty-two this this year. I live in a different state. I was married for ten years and I have a lovely thirteen year old daughter and a sixteen year old son that live with me. I currently work in management and enjoy spending time with my children. I have been a relationship for four years and I share with her my experiences with Straight. At times, it has been very difficult for me to open up and talk about Straight, but I have found that it has helped me to heal. I still have dreams of running from Straight from time to time but other than that I am happy in life. It took a while but I think as time goes by it gets better. Every day away from that insane hell hole is a blessing. This is my story in a nut shell. There is so much more I could talk about and I'm really just scratching the surface. I wish everyone the best of luck in Life. I know we will never forget this part of our life but for me, I have found my happiness through my own children.
BRAD FINGER
, Copyright 2009 Surviving Straight Inc. All rights reserved.