Two days after Alex Cooper told her parents that she was gay, they took their fifteen-year-old daughter to Utah, where they signed over their parental rights to a group of fellow Mormons who promised to "cure" Alex from her homosexuality. For eight harrowing months, Alex was held captive in an unlicensed "residential treatment program," one of several "therapeutic" boot camps scattered across southern Utah: a virtual gulag where thousands of American teenagers have been sent by fundamentalist parents.