Posted on 06/20/2018 3:27:17 PM PDT by Ennis85
It's not unusual for a writer to dedicate a book to their parents - but for Garrard Conley to have dedicated Boy Erased to his mother and father and thanked them in the acknowledgements is more surprising, given that it is all about what they put him through.
They are the ones who told him he had to go through "gay conversion therapy" or leave the family forever.
Conley had been outed to his parents by his rapist after being assaulted in college. But, to his Baptist preacher father and his mother, the crime was in him being gay.
They lived in Arkansas, in Bible belt southern US, where it was taught that yoga is wrong and Harry Potter is evil. Conley, both terrified of (and conflicted by) his sexuality, felt at the time there was only one solution - to go through with the controversial practice.
"I had believed there were actual demons possessing me," Conley tells BBC News. "I had lived 18 years of my life in this almost cultish environment. It was cult-lite."
The programme he was sent to was "a full-on cult", he says, but he found the strength to break out of it and the path his family expected him to take.
He went on to study queer theory and is now living with his husband in New York, having written of his experiences in Boy Erased.
Now a film is being made of that memoir by actor and director Joel Edgerton, with Lucas Hedges starring as Conley. Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman will play his parents, with Troye Sivan starring as another victim of conversion therapy.
"I waited 10 years before I wrote a word of the book," Conley explains. "I was so worried about looking stupid -
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
“Here in Georgia, we teach that Harry Potter is wrong, and yoga is evil.”
Ditto for here in eastern Tennessee.
Being gay is not a crime. Acting on it is sinful. Just like adultery.
Christ would say to the homosexual, as he did to the adultress (after having expelled the hypocritical accusers):
"Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." (John 8:11)
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