Frann Michel considers some ideas of the new head of HHS, and recommends the horror novels Manhunt (2022) and Cuckoo (2024) by trans writer Gretchen Felker-Martin.
Fair use image: cover of Gretchen Felker-Martin's novel Cuckoo. Image of a bird's nest seen from above with all but one egg broken, gooey insides oozing from the others. Tagline: "One of these things is not like the others." Critic quote: "A soaring, boundless ode to queer survival"--Paul Tremblay.
Text/transcript (scroll down for audio)
I'm a little late to this news, but back in summer 2024, news outlets began reporting that RFK, Jr. advocated creating "wellness farms" where those struggling with addiction could be healed by being in communities, growing organic food, and avoiding screen time.
Now, on the face of it, that doesn't sound entirely bad. Like so much of the Make America Healthy wellness grift, it overlaps with some ideas that are reasonable and even popular on the left. Lots of people recognize the psychological benefits one can feel from gardening; lots of people think organic food is better for the health of people and planet; lots would agree that most Americans could use more community and less screen time.
So, putting aside for the moment the larger context of the assault on public goods, Kennedy's wacky record, and the fact that drug rehab farms have been tried in the US and failed (apparently methadone works better in keeping people off opioids); putting all that aside, one can see the potential appeal.
But, of course, one can't really put all that aside, and the coercive elements of RFK Jr's plan would undermine any possible benefit of the experience, making it punitive and dangerous. One of his models for such farms is Italy's San Patrignano, known for physical violence as well as psychological abuse. Even if people have a "choice," will it be the kind of choice given to houseless people--would you prefer to go to a mass shelter or a jail? Wellness farm or prison?
Moreover, as others have noted, "Kennedy has explicitly argued that Black kids need to 'get reparented,' ... in a 'rural area' where they are denied most contact with family and friends." And "'Treating' Black youth by making them do unpaid agricultural work isn't exactly subtle, as far as racist fantasies go."
But there are more candidates for these reeducation camps, too. Kennedy has suggested they would be not just for people addicted to illegal drugs or opioids, but also places for people with ADHD or depression to get off Adderall or antidepressants.
There's a lot to say about psychological medications--their use is often contentious, their mechanisms unclear, their discontinuation difficult or dangerous, their profits for Big Pharma huge. But, just as vaccines and pasteurization have saved millions of lives, so too have psychotropic medications proved tremendously helpful for many people.
And does this plan stop at benzodiazepines and SSRIs? What about other chemicals that people take on an ongoing basis? What about those nicotine pouches Kennedy kept stuffing in his lip during questioning by the Senate? What about insulin? What about hormones?
Ah, yes. Well.
Anyway, when I finally heard about this idea of wellness farms that he says would "reparent" people with addictions--when I heard that the Secretary of Health and Human services likes the idea of reeducation camps, I thought of Gretchen Felker-Martin's 2024 novel Cuckoo.
It opens in the 1990s. Parents worried about their child's nonconformist behavior decide to send them to Camp Resolution, a desert ranch in Utah, where the kids can be reparented, taught hard work and Christian values, and sent home cured of their wickedness.
It's a horror novel, of course.
The early 1990s really did see the burgeoning of residential programs for teenagers. Variously called wilderness therapy programs, boot camps, academies, these programs promised parents that they would address their child's addictions, or mental illness, or disobedience, or queerness, or whatever.
In 2007 the Government Accountability Office released a report investigating residential treatment programs for teenagers in the US from 1990 to 2007, and found thousands of reports of abuse and deaths in these places.
In Cuckoo, the queer and trans and gender non-conforming teens are confronted with the smiling Pastor Eddie and his family, who turn out to be mostly taken over by some alien interdimensional monstrosity, like something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Thing. The mechanics of it all are left somewhat vague. The grotesque body horror, though, is definitely graphic, as are the sex scenes among the campers.
You know how you feel about raunch and gore, and whether you can stomach descriptions in which, for instance, someone's "face opened up like a flower, splitting into fleshy petals lined with jumbled baby teeth and dripping thick, opaque secretions."
Neither horror nor erotica is usually among my preferred genres, but I was held by the compelling vision, the gripping plot of rebellions both successful and tragic, and the diverse and complex characters.
By the end of the story, in the twenty-first century, the alien thing has absorbed not only large swathes of conventional society, including cops and legislators, but also others, and we're left with uncertainty: "To never know, even in a lover's arms, who was us and who was them."
Felker-Martin's 2022 novel, Manhunt, is often described as very different--its characters are adults, its genre more dystopia than horror. But it shares with Cuckoo both the penchant for raunch and gore and the centering of diverse, appealing, and flawed trans and queer characters, along with a plot rich in tension and thrills.
There's no reeducation camp in Manhunt, though there is a concern with getting hold of life-saving hormones.
In Manhunt, the world has been changed since "T-day," when, as one reviewer summarizes, "The estrophaga 't. rex' virus has spread rapidly across the globe, turning anyone with enough testosterone in their blood into flesh-hungry rape machines with ripped skin that oozes pus under the pressure of expanding muscle, scar tissue, and subcutaneous tumors."
It's clarifying in some ways--as one character thinks, "At least he won’t try to make me feel bad before he kills me," and there's no more wondering whether that guy wants to attack you, because he definitely does.
But if you're a transwoman, so do the TERFs. Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists are at war not only with the no-longer-human males, but also with trans women whom they see as "vectors," because they rely on testosterone-blocking and estrogen-enhancing homebrews to keep from turning into those tumorous feral zombies.
Of course, the dangers are not as simple as the TERF perspective pretends. There's a rumor, for instance, that J. K. Rowling was killed in her bunker by a girlfriend with PCOS, Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome, which causes spikes in testosterone among people with ovaries.
Despite the occasional bitter humor, these are gruesome books for gruesome times. But they are also portraits of queer communities of resistance and love, with fat, disabled, BIPOC heroines, who see--or learn to see--through the false promises that you can find safety by hiding away from those others, or that these people really want to help you.
As with those profitable and lethal teen boot camps, the MAHA movement is not going to make anyone healthy, though it might make some people even richer, at the expense of the rest of us.
I don't mean to suggest the government is ready to haul off to camps all the suburban white people on antidepressants. But the wellness camp idea can give the carceral state another lever over the 25 percent of the U.S. adult population currently taking a prescription drug for mental health reasons. It can offer the for-profit prison industry another revenue stream.
It adds to the long turn from social to individual framings of health, from scientific to moral models of illness, from collective care to scapegoating of Others. The MAHA devaluing of anyone deemed to fall short of a fantasy of perfect wellness is part of the intensifying health fascism that has been growing since early in the SARS2 pandemic.
In a world where the ruling class is eviscerating Medicaid and food stamps and scientific research and environmental protections and so much more, fictions that include more literal, corporeal eviscerations can help channel and organize our sense of horror at the ongoing apocalypse, remind us we are not alone, and remind us we can find each other.
You might find Manhunt and Cuckoo at that socialist institution, the public library.
- KBOO