Frank Spinelli's Blog - Posts Tagged "suspense"
No Angels Wept Afterward
I wrote No Angels Wept over the course of nine years. In that time the story went through a series of revisions, the last of which I completed in 2016, when I decided to shelve the idea.
In that version—a dark one, since the book had been inspired by a 2014 NY Times article describing a revolutionary approach to treating veterans suffering with PTSD—I spent several days working on the central character who employed a psychomotor therapy that was neither widely practiced nor supported by clinical studies. Despite my decision to shelve the story, I found myself consumed with notion that in the wrong hands a psychological framework to treat a past trauma could lead to irreparable damage if used for nefarious purposes.
In 2021, I concocted an alternate story. Still employing the same psychological framework plus a new experimental neurocognitive medication, the central character’s main objective was forced gay conversion therapy orchestrated behind the veil of Christianity. Operating under the assumption that men who identify as gay are victims of a suppressed trauma. Once those memories were recovered and reset, these men would no longer see themselves as gay.
But gay conversion therapy is a thing of the past, I argued. A discredited practice just like repressed memory therapy, which Harvard psychologist Richard McNally called “the worst catastrophe to befall the mental-health field since the lobotomy era.” Yet, some right-wing religious groups still promote the concept that individuals can change their sexual orientation even though research on such efforts has disproven these methods and demonstrated the significant harm, particularly among LGBTQ+ youth.
For many reasons, I’m happy with this version of No Angels Wept though I never imagined at the time of its completion that Mike Johnson–the newly elected Speaker of the House–had partnered with an anti-gay conversion therapy group.
Had No Angels Wept been a work-in-progress at the time of Mike Johnson’s nomination, I would have acknowledged the popularity of his right-wing anti-gay agenda as a contributing factor to this story instead of an imaginative artifact inspired by a NY Times article. What I once considered an unbelievable idea now doesn’t seem that far out of the realm of possibilities.
In that version—a dark one, since the book had been inspired by a 2014 NY Times article describing a revolutionary approach to treating veterans suffering with PTSD—I spent several days working on the central character who employed a psychomotor therapy that was neither widely practiced nor supported by clinical studies. Despite my decision to shelve the story, I found myself consumed with notion that in the wrong hands a psychological framework to treat a past trauma could lead to irreparable damage if used for nefarious purposes.
In 2021, I concocted an alternate story. Still employing the same psychological framework plus a new experimental neurocognitive medication, the central character’s main objective was forced gay conversion therapy orchestrated behind the veil of Christianity. Operating under the assumption that men who identify as gay are victims of a suppressed trauma. Once those memories were recovered and reset, these men would no longer see themselves as gay.
But gay conversion therapy is a thing of the past, I argued. A discredited practice just like repressed memory therapy, which Harvard psychologist Richard McNally called “the worst catastrophe to befall the mental-health field since the lobotomy era.” Yet, some right-wing religious groups still promote the concept that individuals can change their sexual orientation even though research on such efforts has disproven these methods and demonstrated the significant harm, particularly among LGBTQ+ youth.
For many reasons, I’m happy with this version of No Angels Wept though I never imagined at the time of its completion that Mike Johnson–the newly elected Speaker of the House–had partnered with an anti-gay conversion therapy group.
Had No Angels Wept been a work-in-progress at the time of Mike Johnson’s nomination, I would have acknowledged the popularity of his right-wing anti-gay agenda as a contributing factor to this story instead of an imaginative artifact inspired by a NY Times article. What I once considered an unbelievable idea now doesn’t seem that far out of the realm of possibilities.
