The methods are cruel and frequently violent, from applying electric shocks while being forced to watch gay porn, to mind control games aimed at persuading LGBT “patients” their desires are rooted in dysfunctional or “disempowering” relationships with their mothers.Īt LIA the message was unequivocal: homosexuality meant unhappiness, isolation and death. In the US, research suggests that 700,000 adults have undergone such treatment, about half of them as teenagers. Conley’s story is far from unique, and far from the worst. Torture is a strong word, but if we get a museum that honours the centuries of suffering inflicted on queer people, a whole wing will need to be dedicated to that unique form of persecution known as conversion, or reparative, therapy, by which zealots acting under the banner of faith have sought to turn one sexual instinct into another. Home truths: Garrard Conley with his mother and father in the late 80s. You’ll never finish your education.” Conley’s response was: “Fair enough.”
That was 14 years ago, the year – his mother likes to joke – in which they were abducted by aliens, a metaphor for the hallucinatory nature of the family’s crisis, when Conley’s father gave him an ultimatum: “You’ll never set foot in this house again if you act on your feelings. He was 19 when he entered LIA for a two-week evaluation. “The concept is stolen from Alcoholics Anonymous, except AA doesn’t just have you stay in a place all day, monitored,” says Conley. Detecting and destroying FIs was how you got the gay out. “False Image”, a key tenet of Love in Action (LIA), referred to anything and everything suggestive of Conley’s homosexuality.
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“And he said, in a voice free of emotion: ‘False Image’,” recalls Conley in Boy Erased, his elegant memoir about the year in which his southern Baptist upbringing collided with his sexual awakening as a gay man. A blond boy confiscated the journal and yanked a bunch of pages free from the binding. H ere’s what Garrard Conley had to surrender the morning he arrived at the Love in Action facility in Memphis, Tennessee in 2004: his phone, his wallet, his driving licence and a Moleskine journal in which he wrote his short stories.