Erase Her

Cassandra Langer's memoir recounts the experience of a dyslexic, lesbian teenager undergoing conversion therapy and behavior modification in 1950s America at the Quakerbridge School and camp in Croton, N.Y. This memoir also features an appendix with helpful questions for kids and their parents.

As a nice Jewish girl raised in an upwardly mobile, status-seeking family, Cassandra Langer never conformed to her mother's gender expectations. When her mother fell prey to a cult leader representing himself as a child behavior expert, Langer was incarcerated for two years as a teenager and barely escaped a lobotomy. The author hopes that those who feel helpless might find some skills to survive and thrive in this book. Her story of surviving 20th-century conversion therapy is set in 1950s Miami and upstate New York. She aims to put secular conversion torture in a historical context to understand the development of homophobic policies and systems active now in red states such as Florida with its "Don't Say Gay" laws.

Art historian and critic Cassandra Langer became the accidental biographer of Romaine Brooks (1874-1970) when a search to uncover the artist's aesthetics led Langer to rethink the flawed narrative of Brooks' life. The award-winning author and former Smithsonian post-doctoral fellow is best known for her books, "Mother and Child in Art", "What's Right with Feminism", "A Bibliography of Feminist Art Criticism", and "Feminist Art Criticism." Her articles and reviews have appeared in Art in America, College Art Journal, Arts Magazine, Art Criticism, Women's Art Journal, Art Papers, MS. Magazine, Women's Review of Books, Cleo Psyche, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, and the Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. She has organized several exhibitions, lectured widely, and authored essays on a variety of topics within the studies of feminism and LGBTQ+ history.