Caveat Emptor: this post will address some weighty subjects, conversation therapy, suicide, sexual assault, self-harm and loss of religious faith among them.
In the opening moments of Boy Erased, a pastor compares a room full of damaged people with a dollar bill, reminding them that even if the bill is crumpled or is ripped up, that doesn’t change it’s inherent value. If it’s damaged it can be taped together, and it’s still legal tender. As such, people who are looking to heal their scars can be treated, they can find peace, and their scars can fade.
All true (provided your dollar isn’t more than 50% destroyed.) But it’s a deceptively wholesome moment. After all, a Dollar only has value because we’ve agreed societally that it does, and because most of the people in that room aren’t damaged in the way the counselor says. I see I’ve left out some crucial information. Before introducing the dollar to the conversation, the counselor leads the room in a call-and-response mantra: "I am using sexual sin and homosexuality to fill a god-shaped hole in my life. But I am not broken and God loves me." You’ll question just how much the pastor believes the second sentence over the rest of the movie.
Based off Garrard Conley’s memoir of the same name, Boy Erased is a slightly fictionalized account of conversation therapy practices. (I say slightly fictionalized - while the movie doesn’t follow Conley’s life entirely, it remains true to the events of the book, while removing some elements and adding real conversation therapy practices that didn’t take place in book.) Before addressing the book and the movie’s main subject matter, I have to take a quick detour and address the film making.
This project was adapted and directed by Joel Edgerton (young Owen Lars of the Star Wars prequel fame) and stars Lucas Hedges, Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe in a career best performance, and Edgerton himself. The supporting cast is made up of American theater staple Cherry Jones and two musician cameos, Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and singer Troye Sivan. There are no bad performances here. I’ve already mentioned Russell Crowe’s performance as a career best, but Cherry Jones, Kidman and Edgerton all deserve praise. Hedges and the other performers who play the “patients” in the conversion program were all awardworthy and it's a shame that most major awards chose to ignore this project. They play scared, determined, angry, confused, and they hide all that under masks of complete sincerity. That’s a lot to ask of any actor and it gets brutal.
As for the movie itself, it occasionally plays like a horror film, full of dark shadows, intense psychological harm, and self-loathing that can make it hard to connect to the characters, especially the parents of the kids being forced into this awful situation. Two minor, monstrous characters spring to mind; one a literal bible-basher who treats his son to a mock funeral that plays like the blanket party from Full Metal Jacket. The other monster is a coward and a rapist. Here, I have to bring up that the movie accurately portrays Conley’s outing as coming from an abuser who took advantage of, and raped Garrard. He later posed as school counselor, called Garrard’s family and outed him, including accusing him of abuse. This sequence is arguably the most horrifying moment in the movie, as the trauma of the event is shown to torment an already conflicted Garrard to the point of self-harm. It doesn’t help that Garrard’s father is implied to not believe his son’s protestations of innocence, or at the very least blames the victim, which feeds into Garrard’s self-loathing spiral.
Given the subject matter, I think I can forgive the movie as coming off like a horror film. That said, I have to clarify that the movie is never exploitative or shocking for the sake of being shocking. It’s difficult to watch, but nothing is played for cheap drama. Instead, it’s brutally, depressingly real. And somehow, it manages to keep to the memoir’s goal of finding understanding.
Garrard Conley’s memoir is not a muckraking expose; plenty of those have been written or filmed about the immoral and fraudulent practices of conversion therapy. (I wont go into detail of actual practices, but I am going to link to several stories from survivors and the APA’s condemnation of the practice.) Instead, Boy Erased is an account of traumas stacked upon traumas, search for understanding and healing - not just for Conley, but for his entire family. Ultimately, it’s Conley’s attempt to understand his father; a difficult love letter to a complex family. He doesn’t chastise his father for sending him to conversation therapy, nor does he denigrate his father’s faith. In fact, he implies that his relationship with his father, whose Christian faith remained intact, improved to a more understanding if not totally accepting relationship.
I feel like I’m loosing my point here. Let me return to something before I sum up; both the book and the movie of Boy Erased are definitely worth your time. Outside of some inconsistent tonal moments, the movie is a wonderfully filmed, if difficult to watch story and I believe it’s important to watch. Sadly, some of the book’s more poignant moments and some characters were removed for pacing reasons, but the essential story about healing and understanding remains. The book is powerful, compelling reading. It’s clearly affected me.
There’s a line from the books epilogue that speaks to me; “I will not call on God during this decade-long struggle. Not because I want to keep God out of my life, but because his voice is no longer there. What happened to me has made it impossible to speak to 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.” (Boy Erased, page 335)
It reminds me of scene from the movie Spotlight (2015), where Phil Saviano, founder of SNAP, tells the Spotlight investigative team that priests who molest children don’t just cause physical and emotional damage, they also cause spiritual damage.
Whether or not you believe in God, you have to recognize the danger of so-called reparative therapy practices. Insisting that a fundamental part of a person is worthless or corrupt or evil damages not just the psyche, but also the way these people see God. Most of the people who enter these conversation camps already see themselves as broken or sinful, and all they are told inside only compounds this negativity.
I’ve never had any conversion experiences like Garrard Conley, but I do come from extremely religious circles that condemn homosexuality. Much like the characters in Conley’s memoir, I grew up sincerely loving my faith, and over time exposure to the toxic beliefs of my peers or my friends wore down on my beliefs. I don’t know if I’ll ever seek any kind of religion again. Frankly it’s too soon to say.
The insidious thing about the opening of the movie is that the pastor is almost correct. People do have inherent value and that value isn’t dependent on anything, especially not an foundational part of human life like sexuality. But unlike a dollar, a human life’s worth isn’t just a social construct. That’s the hardest truth to relearn.