Xandir O'Cando tells Cross Creek anti-queer brainwashing and abuse story at Bawdy Storytelling
Channel: ReidAboutSex
Date: 2011-06-11

Dixie: Because we have a brand new storyteller who’s never done this before or switching gears and I want you to be very respectful and very quiet for our final storyteller because what she’s going to tell us about is incredibly brave. I'm so proud to have her up here. She’s a queer activist who has been getting national attention for recent Facebook posts that’s been reprinted all over the place and to tell here her story is Xandir.

Xandir: I'm going to tell you guys a little story about boarding school and I'm sorry that isn’t as hot as it sounds. When I was 13 years old, I came out to my mother as a bisexual sitting in a family therapy session and I was crying and totally afraid that she’s going to disown me and she sat there and sat there. Expressionless, totally stoic and discontinued. She didn’t talked about it and had nothing to say about it and then few years later, I'm woken up in the middle of the night by 2 strangers. I'm screaming and crying and they tell me that if I don’t stop screaming they're going to handcuff me. I have no idea who they are and why they’re here. One of the people is rummaging through my clothes and the other person is very intimidating looking just standing over my bed at 2:00 AM and I asked them, “What is it that you want from me? What are you doing here? Who are you?” and all they say is, “We’re going to take you to a school.”

So I compiled with them because I don’t want to be handcuffed. They take out this belt and they put it under my bust and they tell me that this is standard procedure and that they're going to leave me around through the airport anytime that I'm outside or even inside so that I don’t run away. So of course I'm fucking humiliated being let around by this 2 strangers like a dog in front of all these people at the airport. I arrived at boarding school and they sign me… this boarding school, by the way, lovely Cross Creek manner in La Verkin, Utah. So they assigned me to a student mentor who already been there for a while and she’s supposed to tell me the rules and what's going on and all the stuff. She explains to me that this program has 6 levels and to get to each level you have to progress in points. In level 1 has the least amount of privileges and level 6 has the most amount of privileges so basically it was like some fucked up Mormons video game so I'm like, “Okay, whatever.”

We’re in our dorm, I start telling her some story about an ex-girlfriend of mine and she’s like, “No, no, no… stop! You can talk about that.” And I'm like, “Okay?” so I stopped talking about it and soon after that I’ve given this rule book about this thick with like a vagillion rules and then each of them being in 1 of 5 categories, 1 being the least amount of punishment that takes away a least amount of points and 5 being the most intense taking away all your points and levels. 

On one of the category 5 rules, my favorite blanket rule of all was “Sexual Misconduct”. Now, one again, this is not as sexy as it sounds. Their idea of sexual misconduct is, and I’m not exaggerating, hugging or touching someone’s shoulder for more than 3 seconds and I'm not exaggerating again, there was literally a 3 second time limit for hugging anyone.

So another rule that they had was talking about homosexuality which was a category 5 lost all your points and all your levels. So now I know why I can’t talk about it but I don’t really know why. I just know that I'm not supposed to and then if I do all get in big trouble. This is a really difficult story for me to tell.

So I start getting learning about the daily life at Cross Creek. Three times a day they have us listen to this “motivational” tapes and two times a day they have us watch this educational and “emotional growth” videos which include this horror stories as people were shooting at [inaudible 00:06:33] and on the streets and just horribly fucked up stories and lots of anti-abortion paraphernalia and blah blah blah. I’m sorry…

Audience: You’re doing good. It’s okay. You can do it.

Xandir: So we’re also required to go to group therapy multiple times a week. One of my most memorable group therapy was when they brought in pictures of horribly, horribly diseased genitalia and told us that this was the result of premarital sex. This pictures were like pictures of stuff and it gone unattended for long period of time so like cauliflower. I have no idea what the fuck that is. I’m sure that was a penis at one point type of pictures. And while they were doing this, they had absolutely no mention of safer sex. Just that if you had sex you would die and this what happened to you.