Review by Robert Horton for Seattle Weekly
Every kid at the gay-conversion-therapy center must draw an iceberg. If they can fill in the huge, below-water section of the iceberg with reasons for their homosexual activity, they will better understand how they could have slipped from the straight path. And then they will be “cured.”
In The Miseducation of Cameron Post, the iceberg is a running joke, born of despair. The teenagers trapped in the therapy center try to think of gay-causing explanations they can write on their icebergs—a childhood trauma? an overbearing parent?—and sometimes borrow other kids’ scrawlings (how well I remember being a Catholic schoolboy and trying to come up with two or three credible transgressions to offer up in the confessional every week, so I would sound believably sinful). You have to wonder whether the organizers of God’s Promise, the fictional gay-conversion school, have really thought through this iceberg metaphor. Are the teenagers the icebergs, or are they the ships steaming toward a collision?