Boy Erased by Garrard Conley; Riverhead, $27
In his searing and unfailingly honest debut memoir Boy Erased, Garrard Conley describes his experience in a Southern ex-gay reparative therapy program dedicated to molding boys into a prefabricated image of masculinity and suppressing just about everything else.
Raised by Missionary Baptist parents in small-town northern Arkansas, the author was a good son to his father, who sold cars then morphed into a preacher. His beloved mother was, as he describes her, "all blond hair and heavy blue mascara, blue eyes and a perennial floral-print top: a spot of Technicolor in this drab place."
Keeping hidden his burgeoning confusion about other men and his sparkling attraction to them, things were workable: intensive feelings placated, smoldering passion snuffed out, and a "half-hearted commitment" through high school to pseudo-girlfriend Chloe, whose "predilection for French kissing ran a cold blade through the bottom of my stomach." An episode of forced sex with his college roommate when he was just 19 set a series of events in motion that would forever change how he viewed his life, his family, and his role in the world. Like some sort of "deserved punishment," Conley's life went haywire. Once the roommate angrily called his mother and outed him, friends, family, and the local community pointed fingers and ostracized him to the point of his needing some sort of desperate deliverance.
This "rescue" came in the form of enrollment in Love In Action (LIA), a 12-step program with a branch in Memphis aimed at cleansing the "sin" from those whose inner lives had become corrupted by "sexual deviance" and homosexual "perversion." The program was led by John Smid, a fired-up religious nut who believed Conley and the others in the program (unfaithful married men and women, and former educators "shamed by rumors of their sexuality") were guilty of "using sexual sin to fill a God-shaped void" in their lives. Smid advocated stern adherence to the rules and regulations printed in the LIA's 274-page handbook on the proper way to take one's Moral Inventory, and to dress, behave, believe, and carry oneself as an authentic man or woman in God's eyes.
Conley's memoir oscillates between his revelations, good and bad, during time spent in the fold of the ex-gay ministry during his two-week stint in the "Source" trial program, and his personal and familial history leading up to an induction in the program. Particularly moving are his fleeting moments of same-sex attraction, feelings he was too young and fearful to recognize as genuine and natural, and of coming home to his parents after rejecting the program on his own and fleeing the increasingly negligent influence of Smid's psychological tactics. He also provides a timeline of the ex-gay movement itself, which presents an eye-opening history on these "reparative" ministries from their genesis to their current floundering state of disrepair.
Well-written, compelling, disturbing, and ultimately quite bracing, this is an important, refreshingly unsentimental perspective on the dangers and abuses of ex-gay therapy ministries, an atrocious, damaging, hypocritical network that still operates today. Only a small handful of U.S. states have outlawed the practice.