The Long Walk Out of Home

Lauren Hough, Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing: Essays

Lauren Hough has spent her life walking away from toxic situations. Like malicious compliance in the U.S. Air Force, for instance, or the smiling malignancy of Washington, DC’s once-thriving gay community. Even being born into a notorious sex cult fades into the background of a life defined by violence and resistance. So much so that we’re almost halfway through her story before she even addresses the topic in depth.

In eleven autobiographical essays, Hough breaks down a life defined by escaping the violence. But she doesn’t address her story chronologically; she prefers to go thematically, starting with her Air Force stint. She followed the rules scrupulously, adopted military culture, and tried going along to get along. Yet her fellow airmen made her hitch a continual torture, as despite her efforts, she couldn’t conceal her main outsider characteristic: her homosexuality.

Hough spent her first quarter-century passing through environments where, as a woman, she existed for men’s comfort and convenience. Growing up in the infamous Children of God, she was taught that as a woman she existed, body and soul, for men’s pleasure. Except from an early stage, she knew men didn’t interest her. Oh, like many lesbians from “good” religious backgrounds, Hough tried to fool herself. It didn’t work.

The cult that raised her has changed names multiple times, but Hough describes it under its most famous name: the Children of God. Though Christian and Pentecostal in foundation, it turned bizarre when the founder began issuing messianic prophecies. You probably know the Children of God for its libertine sexual practices and accusations of child abuse. Hough’s telling, however, emphasizes its apocalyptic doomsday theology.

It took multiple attempts for Hough’s mother to successfully smuggle Hough out, an attempt only partially successful, as she left Hough’s father and two older sisters behind. But they escaped to another version of Hell: north Texas. Where the Children of God encouraged sexual profligacy, Amarillo’s dominant Christian denomination encouraged sexual repression, and shared the Children’s apocalyptic worldview. Hough soon realized she’d bounced from one cult to another.

Lauren Hough

So at the first opportunity, Hough dropped everything and joined the Air Force. (Hough is approximately my age, and joined the USAF around the time I tried to join the Corps, so I appreciate the unstated dedication required for that means of escape.) Once there, though, she found the Force used social programming techniques almost identical to those used in her cult, for almost exactly the same purposes.

Brief reminder: Hough doesn’t tell her story sequentially. I synopsize this way as a useful thumbnail. Instead, Hough introduces readers to the themes which will dominate her telling: the deadpan humor she uses to describe an increasingly awful campaign to break her spirit and make her compliant. She finds this campaign present throughout American life, military and civilian alike, religious and secular. To hough, deeply programmed compliance is everywhere.

This campaign takes some pretty awful turns. Hough describes some pretty awful personal violence, efforts that, cumulatively, probably count as torture. She describes everyone dogpiling some pretty horrific treatment upon her; readers of a sensitive disposition should approach this book with caution. Because although she maintains her wry humor throughout, Hough never flinches from telling us the more harrowing aspects of the torments she endured.

Moreover, thought she keeps thinking she’s escaped from organized, systemic torture, she keeps finding it scattered throughout American society. Ultimately outed and removed from the military, she crash-lands in DC’s formerly thriving gay community. But for all its vaunted bohemian luster, she finds the same forced compliance. So Hough does the unthinkable: she gets a regular job, only to discover that capitalism has the same cult atmosphere.

I already anticipate outsiders’ criticism: because she grew up in a cult, Hough sees everything in cult terms. After all, if you only have a hammer… And I can’t disagree with this assessment, since Hough sees everything through one lens. Life is more complex than that. But even as Hough probably doesn’t see reality with enough nuance to satisfy everybody, she presents a necessary alternate way for us to see.

Someone once said that only the completely personal is truly universal. Hough evidently agrees. Throughout most of this book, she focuses on her unique experience; only in her final pages does she turn her gaze outward and examine broader society. But ultimately she does say she’s writing about us. About the enforced roles we’ve accepted, and the tortures we take for granted. And she reminds us: we, too, can leave.