My current name is Wes Unruh, but I was born “Boy Harper” in 1974, in Twin Falls, Idaho, at the Magic Valley Regional Medical Center, and I spent most of my life trying to learn that fact. I am an unruly adoptee… a disruptor. I am bad at being adopted and I claim this ‘badness’ from the work of Betty Jean Lifton, a writer, activist, and scholar who laid the groundwork for the modern adoptee activist movement. She articulated this ‘badness’ in her 1979 book Lost and Found, one of the foundational books in my own maturity as an adoptee. I hope this podcast will honor that work, without which I would have been lost. She is the author to split out adoptees as performatively “Good Adoptee” or “Bad Adoptee” as determined by how the adoptee acts, and it was her juxtaposition of Moses as a “Bad Adoptee” which helped my thoughts coalesce. In this podcast I’m hoping to tease that idea out, juxtaposing how the “Bad Adoptee” archetype has continued to manifest and change in popular culture, and the very real personal and political repercussions of these representations.
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