Garrard Conley: Boy Erased

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © 2016 by Garrard Conley

Artwork © 2018 Focus Features LLC

Garrard Conley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008276980

Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008276997

Version: 2018-11-19

For my parents

Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.

—FLANNERY O’CONNOR, “REVELATION”

If I’m looking at that wall and suddenly I say, “It’s blue,” and someone else comes along and says, “No, no. It’s gold.” But I want to believe that that wall is blue. It’s blue, it’s blue, it’s blue. But then God comes along, and He says, “You’re right, John, it is blue.” That’s the help I need. God can help me make that wall blue.

—EX-GAY LEADER JOHN SMID, IN AN INTERVIEW WITH THE Memphis Flyer

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Author’s Note

Timeline of the Ex-gay Movement

I

Monday, June 7, 2004

The Plain Dealers

Wednesday, June 9, 2004

Other Boys

Friday, June 11, 2004

Prisoner’s Cinema

II

The Smallest Details

Saturday, June 12, 2004

Diagnosis

Monday, June 14, 2004

Self-Portrait

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

During my time at Love in Action (LIA), no journaling, photographing, or any other method of recording was allowed inside the facility. To that effect, all events, physical descriptions, and dialogue have been reconstructed to the best of my ability. My mother’s and my memories, LIA’s ex-gay handbook, newspaper articles, blog posts, and personal interviews have supplemented the empty spaces where trauma has made dark what was once painfully clear. As in most memoirs, the chronology is accurate, altered only in places where the narrative requires it. I have excluded details that seemed irrelevant to the nature of the story. The names and certain identifying characteristics of some key figures in my life, including Chloe, Brandon, David, Brad, Brother Stevens, and Brother Neilson have been changed.

I wish none of this had ever happened. Sometimes I thank God that it did.

John Smid stood tall, square shouldered, beaming behind thin wire-rimmed glasses and wearing the khaki slacks and striped button-down that have become standard fatigues for evangelical men across the country. The raised outlines of his undershirt stretched taut beneath his shirt, his graying blond hair tamed by the size-five hair clippers common in Sport Clips throughout the South. The rest of us sat in a semicircle facing him, all dressed according to the program dress code outlined in our 274-page handbooks.

Men : Shirts worn at all times, including periods of sleep. T-shirts without sleeves not permitted, whether worn as outer- or undergarments, including “muscle shirts” or other tank tops. Facial hair removed seven days weekly. Sideburns never below top of ear.

Women : Bras worn at all times, exceptions during sleep. Skirts must fall at the knee or below. Tank tops allowed only if worn with a blouse. Legs and underarms shaved at least twice weekly.

“The first thing you have to do is recognize how you’ve become dependent on sex, on things that are not from God,” Smid said. We were learning Step One of Love in Action’s Twelve Step program, a set of principles equating the sins of infidelity, bestiality, pedophilia, and homosexuality to addictive behavior such as alcoholism or gambling: a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous for what counselors referred to as our “sexual deviance.”

Sitting alone with him just hours before in his office, I had witnessed a different man: a kinder, goofier Smid, a middle-aged class clown willing to resort to any antic to make me smile. He had treated me like a child, and I had relaxed into the role, being nineteen at the time. He told me I had come to the right place, that Love in Action would cure me, lift me out of my sin into the light of God’s glory. His office seemed bright enough to substantiate his claim, the walls bare save for the occasional framed newspaper clipping or embroidered Bible verse. Outside his window was an empty plot of land, rare around this suburban subdivision, an untended grassy mess peppered with neon dandelions and their thousands of seed heads that would scatter across the highway by the end of the week.