By Terrance Turner
Conversion therapy, also known as “reparative” or “ex-gay” therapy, is a controversial practice that seeks to change the sexual orientation (or gender identity) of LGBTQ people. According to Mic, the methods include verbal abuse, being burned with copper coils, and administering electric shocks to the hands or genitals. Largely discredited by doctors and scientists, conversion therapy remains legal in 37 states. Both Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama called for a ban on conversion therapy for minors in 2015, but Vice President Mike Pence lobbied for such therapies to be federally funded in 2000.
Earlier this month, The Miseducation of Cameron Post—this year’s Sundance Film Festival top prize winner—opened in select theatres. The movie tells the story of Cameron, a high school junior who is sent to a conversion therapy camp in Montana. The upcoming Boy Erased, which debuted its trailer in July, promises similar themes. But unlike Cameron Post (which is based on the novel by Emily N. Danforth), Boy Erased is based on a true story.
In the trailer for the film, Jared (Lucas Hedges) is a teenager growing up in rural Arkansas. He is outed to his parents (Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman) who, in turn, send him to a conversion camp in hopes that he can change.
Boy Erased is based on the book of the same name by author Garrard Conley. Like his onscreen character, Conley grew up in Arkansas. “My parents were always pretty religious,” he says in a June interview with the hosts of British TV program This Morning. As a child, he and his parents attended church three times a week. “When I was 16, my dad decided to become a preacher,” Conley tells the hosts. “My mom and I were sitting in church at the time and my dad just started screaming and shaking, and we were like, ‘What’s going on?’”
What was happening was a calling—a calling that inspired Conley’s father to become a Baptist minister. That led to a dramatic shift in the family’s religious views. “Everything became much more fundamentalist in our household,” Conley says. This new life was difficult for Conley, who’d known he was “different” since third grade. By the time of her husband’s ordination, Conley’s mother had already begun to suspect that her son was gay.
The confirmation came three years later. At 19, Conley was raped by a fellow college student (whom he calls “David” in the book). David then called Conley’s mother and outed him. Conley’s father gave him an ultimatum: either go to a camp that would “fix” him, or be cut off from friends and family—and they’d no longer pay for his education.
Still reeling from his rape, Conley submitted. His mother drove him to the Love in Action (LIA) facility in Memphis, Tennessee, in 2004. According to the Guardian, he was forced to give up his phone, wallet, driver’s license, and Moleskine notebook. Conley was told that the notebook was a “false image,” part of the language used by Love in Action. To ensure their purity, LIA counselors monitored and altered patients’ behavior, coaching them on how to walk and talk. “Every behavior that would seem effeminate for a man would be corrected and these were called ‘false images,’” Conley writes.
The “treatment” consisted mostly of talk therapy, with a familiar source. “It was modified off Alcoholics Anonymous and actually used the same steps as AA, but it was replaced by Bible verses,” Conley told Out in 2006. Love in Action’s Twelve-Step Program was a set of rules that equated homosexuality to bestiality, pedophilia, and addictive behaviors like alcoholism. Yoga, astrology, and the board game Dungeons and Dragons were considered just as sinful as Satanism. “Even classical music was forbidden—‘Beethoven, Bach, etc. are not considered Christian’—a heavy silence blanketing the room during our morning Quiet Time,” Conley writes in Boy Erased.
“Every movement we made—every smile, gesture, hand on hip, anything—was scrutinized and labelled in our rule books,” he told PinkNews. “So if someone did something that was considered to be ‘sexually suspect,’ then we were to report to a counselor and tell them that someone had done that. We had daily therapy sessions where we were asked to list off every sexual sin that we’d engaged in—that could be anything from a fantasy to an actual sexual experience, of which I didn’t have many. Then we had to tell that to the whole group every morning and we were shamed for it.”
The Guardian article described a distinctly homophobic environment: “At LIA the message was unequivocal: homosexuality meant unhappiness, isolation, and death. Conley recounts a story in which a 19-year-old ‘defector’ was forced to submit to a mock funeral, as other members read out his obituary,” writer Aaron Hicklin revealed in his June profile of Conley.
By the second week, the damage to Conley’s psyche (and faith) was irreversible. Things came to a head during an exercise. Conley was required to stare at an empty chair, imagine his father in it, and tell him how much he hated him. Unable to feel hatred for a father he still loved, Conley refused—and bailed. His mother bailed him out, realizing that her son was on the brink of a breakdown. One day, while they were in the car, Conley finally erupted. “I grappled for the plastic airbag cover in front of me, digging my fingernails into the cracks, tugging. I wanted the bag to inflate, to knock me back as far as it could,” he writes in Boy Erased. “I wanted the obliteration of every nerve connected to my skin.”
Shocked by this scene, Conley’s mother pulled over. “Are you going to kill yourself?” she asked. “I said ‘yes,’ and I believed it, but I also knew that it was the answer that might make her make a decision for me,” Conley recalls in an interview with WAMC Public Radio. “I don’t want a dead son,” his mother replied. “I would rather have you.”
That moment led to Conley’s mother removing her son from the program; they went home and informed his father of their decision. Conley returned to college, studied queer theory, and earned a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He then volunteered for the Peace Corps in Ukraine and went on to teach literature in Sofia, Bulgaria at the intriguingly-named American School. Conley now teaches in New York City, where he lives with his husband.
Conley has forgiven his parents and is on amicable terms with both. But the effects of those two weeks in conversion therapy have scarred him permanently. “What happened to me has made it impossible for me to speak with God, to believe in a version of him that isn’t charged with self-loathing. My ex-gay therapists took him away from me,” he writes in Boy Erased. The experience at camp also left Conley with a lingering sense of shame. “There are days where I still feel as though I can’t touch my partner’s skin without feeling like I’m on fire, or I feel these extreme bouts of shame that wash over me and I have to convince myself to get out of them,” he told PinkNews in 2017. “I think about all the years I lost to that kind of thought—I mean, how do you possibly get those years of your life back?”
Boy Erased is scheduled to open in theatres on November 2, 2018. For more information, visit focusfeatures.com/boy-erased.
