“Born to an alcoholic mother who would beg, borrow, and steal (and even prostitute herself, if necessary) to provide for her children, and a drug-addicted father, and exposed in early life to violence, pornography, witchcraft, and homosexuality, just to name a few, I was called upon to start helping my dad with his drug trade as a very young boy. When he went to prison, I smuggled drugs to him to sell inside when I was just eleven. By the time I was in fourth and fifth grades, I was already having sex with both boys and girls. It is no wonder that upon dropping out of school and running away with a girl at fifteen to start a new life for the two of us in Dallas, Texas, all I knew was crime. Like my elders before me, I was soon addicted to a life of alcohol, drugs, partying, crime, and violence. In short, I was bound for Hell, and there didn’t seem to be anything that could stop me. Thankfully, that was not the end of my story.” —Marty Perez
