Garrard Conley, author of Boy
Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith and Family, said in a recent
interview that the culture of conversion therapy is homophobia.
At 19 and while attending college,
Conley was outed to his conservative parents. The only child of a
car salesman who was about to be ordained a Baptist minister, Conley
was terrified of his father's response to learning about his
sexuality. His parents sent him to conversion therapy camp.
Conley's 2016 book is being turned into
a major Hollywood film starring Nicole Kidman, Russell Crow and Troye
Sivan.
Speaking with UK LGBT glossy Attitude,
Conley said that the program he attended to alter his sexuality was
laughable.
“The conversion therapy part is
blinding,” Conley
said. “It's easy to mock.”
“There’s the 275-page handbook with
dozens of rules about how to dress and stand and engage in eye
contact. There are the bastardised Freudian models of behavior. There
are the sessions where men are asked to watch sports – to learn
proper masculine reactions.”
"To have it all laid out in a
handbook with numbered pages, to see the institutionalization of
homophobia, is to see bigotry for what it is: absurd.”
“You don't have to be in conversion
therapy to be in conversion therapy,” he said.
Conley added that “some people died
because of it.”