Jake Johnson didn’t set out to be a writer—he barely believed he’d survive long enough to become one.
Growing up in the conservative enclave of Medina, Seattle, the odds were stacked against him: undiagnosed ADHD, dyslexia, a society that prized conformity over curiosity, and a church-blessed bootcamp that tried to pray the gay away. The kid once deemed “unmanageable” has emerged not only intact, but in full bloom—with a book deal, a found family, and a fiercely tender novel, The Giving Home, that’s turning heads and healing hearts.
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Now based in London, sipping tea and talking to PinkNews over Zoom, Jake shares, “Writing was like therapy.” It shows. His debut novel follows Caroline, recently single and jobless, as she returns to Amsterdam to stitch her life back together. It’s fiction—but not far off.
Jake’s own plot involved leaving a corporate job at Amazon, crossing the Atlantic, and—finally—coming out not just as queer, but as someone worthy of love.
“The parts that were super rewarding were the moments of emotion and self-discovery I had for myself.”
Let’s rewind a few chapters.
Jake describes his childhood as a confusing swirl of good intentions and bad outcomes. His parents were loving but overwhelmed, trying everything—from Prozac to Lithium—to help their “rambunctious” son stay afloat. “They were just trying to find some way to get me to calm down,” he says. But what nobody saw—or could handle—was the queerness bubbling just beneath the surface.
At just nine years old, Jake was sent to Majestic Ranch in Randolph, Utah. Marketed as a reform school for “behavioral issues,” the now-closed institution operated more like a pseudo-religious prison for the nonconforming. And Jake, with his ADHD, his big feelings, and his quietly emerging queerness, fit the bill.
Mornings were spent in classrooms with religious overtones, writing essays on “why it was wrong to like boys.” Afternoons were for free labor on the ranch. The message was unambiguous and unrelenting: to be loved, to be safe, to go home, he had to change.
“They’d build these lies on top – I won’t be able to go home [unless I change], that I’m a danger to my family, people won’t love me, I’m going to go to hell.”
There were paper mâché effigies meant to represent Jake’s queerness. They were burned. “This is you removing this part of yourself,” he was told. Jake wasn’t just being re-educated. He was being erased.
And the trauma didn’t stop there. Jake shares that he experienced sexual, physical, and emotional abuse—primarily from older boys, but also at the hands of an adult therapist. When he tried to report the incidents?
“Anytime those incidents occurred, anybody involved was reprimanded.” Even when it was a staff member, “I would get in trouble for that.”
Communication with the outside world was censored. The letters Jake wrote pleading with his parents to come home? Never delivered. “I truly felt abandoned,” he says, exhaling sharply. And worse, the lines between abuse and affection blurred painfully. “These people want me, they’re making my body feel good, and I’m getting reprimanded for people trying to show me love.”
After three years, Jake was transferred to another facility in Logan, Utah—smaller yard, darker atmosphere, and a more explicit mission: ‘convert’ the gay kids. There, Jake encountered more abuse, and was taught to conflate homosexuality with predation. His anger hardened into despair.
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“I remember feeling utterly defeated. Any sense of me trying to do good in my mind was gone. I became very angry.”
Then came the turning point. While touring yet another potential facility, Jake spotted one of his abusers. “I lost my shit,” he recounts. “I was like, ‘I will not survive if I go to this place’.” For the first time, he told his mother what had happened. “My parents had no clue that any of this abuse was occurring. And she took me home.” He was 13.
Jake’s story is a brutal reminder that even when parents mean well, systems can chew up kids and spit out silence. “Conversion therapy,” he insists, was never their goal. “They just wanted to find a solution for what they could see.”
Back home in Seattle, Jake tried sleeping with a woman—yet another attempt at ‘fixing’ himself. “She knew I was gay, and she was like, ‘I can help’.” It didn’t work. But it cracked open something vital: the courage to come out. Slowly, he began reclaiming his identity. And though that freedom was exhilarating, it was also confusing.
“What I don’t know if a lot of people understand is that when you try to integrate a kid back into society who’s been told their whole identity is wrong, that identity dysmorphia is really damaging.”
What followed was a messy, queer coming-of-age—marked by empathy, defiance, and eventually, a quiet mastery over his once-chaotic ADHD. It’s tempting to frame Jake’s journey as one of survival. But it’s more than that. It’s a late bloom. A renaissance.
In the UK, a promised ban on conversion therapy has stalled for years. Jake is unflinching in his criticism: “It’s horrible that these programmes are still around. It shows how much religion is still baked into communities.”
Asked what might change that, he responds plainly: “Stories like this. You’re really damaging the psyche of these young adults.”
He advocates for therapists trained in queer issues and government funding for organizations like PFLAG to support families who may not understand—but desperately want to.
Because had Jake been heard sooner, his trajectory might’ve looked very different.
“I would have become an author earlier on. And I would have gone to college if I wasn’t spending so much time trying to understand who I am and find connection.”
“I got to where I was supposed to be eventually. It just took me an extra decade because I spent so much time playing catch up on the identity part of myself.”
And now, he’s not catching up. He’s leading.
The Giving Home is a novel about healing—but more than that, it’s proof that healing is possible. Even after being burned, erased, and exiled, Jake Johnson didn’t just survive. He wrote his way home.
Source: PinkNews