Boy Erased Read online

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2016 by Garrard Conley

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  eBook ISBN: 9780698155558

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Conley, Garrard.

  Boy erased : a memoir / Garrard Conley.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-59463-301-0

  1. Conley, Garrard. 2. Gays—United States—Biography. 3. Sexual reorientation programs—United States. 4. Ex-gay movement—United States. 5. Gays—Identity. 6. Gay men—United States. I. Title.

  HQ75.8.C665A3 2016 2015024641

  306.76'6092—dc23

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Version_1

  For my parents

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  Timeline of the Ex-Gay Movement

  Part I MONDAY, JUNE 7, 2004

  THE PLAIN DEALERS

  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9, 2004

  OTHER BOYS

  FRIDAY, JUNE 11, 2004

  PRISONER’S CINEMA

  Part II THE SMALLEST DETAILS

  SATURDAY, JUNE 12, 2004

  DIAGNOSIS

  MONDAY, JUNE 14, 2004

  SELF-PORTRAIT

  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 16, 2004

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  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.

  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

  TIMELINE OF THE EX-GAY MOVEMENT

  1973

  The American Psychological Association declassifies homosexuality as a mental illness.

  Love in Action (LIA), a nondenominational fundamentalist Christian organization, rejects APA’s decision and opens its doors in San Rafael, California, promising to cure LGBT congregants of their “sexual addictions.”

  1976

  The first ex-gay conference takes place in Anaheim, California, where more than sixty-two attendees form what becomes Exodus International, the largest ex-gay umbrella organization in the world. LIA is its flagship program.

  1977

  Jack McIntyre, a four-year member of LIA, commits suicide, prompting one of the group’s founding members, John Evans, to condemn the program. In a suicide note, McIntyre writes: “To continually go before God and ask for forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take.”

  1982

  Exodus Europe, an independent organization working in coalition with Exodus International, holds its first ex-gay conference in the Netherlands. Ministries now exist in Australia, Brazil, and Portugal.

  1989

  Exodus expands its mission to include the Philippines and Singapore. The organization, which at its peak supported more than two hundred ministries across the United States, has reached mainstream attention, with spots on national television and radio.

  1990

  John Smid takes over as director of LIA.

  1993

  John Evans, a cofounder of LIA, writes an article for the Wall Street Journal denouncing ex-gay therapy: “They’re destroying people’s lives. If you don’t do their thing, you’re not of God, you’ll go to hell. They’re living in a fantasy world.”

  1994

  Under John Smid’s direction, LIA moves its headquarters to Memphis, Tennessee, purchasing five acres of land to house its residential program.

  1998

  Ex-gay leader John Paulk, soon to be featured on the cover of Newsweek with his ex-lesbian wife, founds Love Won Out, a series of yearly ex-gay conferences.

  2000

  First Latin American Exodus Conference is held in Quito, Ecuador. Ministries are now in China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan.

  2003

  LIA opens its controversial Refuge program, bringing together teenagers and adults suffering from various sex-based “addictions.”

  2004

  My ex-gay story begins.

  I

  MONDAY, JUNE 7, 2004

  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.

  “We try to blend several models of treatment,” Smid had assured me, swiveling in his office chair to face the window. An orange sun was climbing its way up the back of the hazy whitewashed buildings in the distance. I waited for the sunlight to spill over, but the longer I watched, the longer it seemed to take. I wondered if this was how time was going to work in this place: minutes as hours, hours as days, days as weeks.

  “Once you enter the group, you’ll be well on your way to recovery,” Smid said. “The important thing to remember is to keep an open mind.”

  I was here by my own choice, despite my growing skepticism, despite my secret wish to run away from the shame I’d felt since my parents found out I was gay. I had too much invested in my current life to leave it behind: in my family and in the increasingly blurry God I’d known since I was a toddler.

  God, I prayed, leaving the office and making my way down the narrow hallway to the main room, the fluorescents ticking in their metal grids, I don’t know who You are anymore, but please give me the wisdom to survive this.

  • • •

  A FEW HOURS LATER, sitting in the middle of Smid’s circle, I was waiting for God to join me.

  “You’re no better and no worse than any other sinner in this world,” Smid said. He kept his arms crossed behind his back, his whole body tense, as if he were tied to an invisible plank. “God sees all sin in the same light.”

  I nodded along with the others. The ex-gay lingo had by now become familiar to me, though it had come as a shock when I’d first read it on the facility’s website, when I’d first learned that the homosexuality I’d been trying to ignore for most of my life was likely “out of control,” that I could end up messing around with someone’s dog if I didn’t cure myself. As absurd as the idea seems in hindsight, I had little else to go on. I was still young enough to have had only a few fleeting experiences with other men. Before college, I’d met only one openly gay man, my mother’s hairdresser, a bearish type who spent most of his time filling out what I saw as a stereotype: complimenting my looks; gossiping about coworkers; discussing plans for his next fabulous Christmas party, his pristine white beard already sculpted for the role of Dirty Santa. The rest of my bigotry I learned from pantomime: limp wrists and exaggerated sashays from mocking church members; phrases that lifted out of natural speech into show-tune lilt—“Oh, you shouldn’t have”; church petitions that had to be signed in order to keep our country safe from “perverts.” The flash of neon spandex, the rustle of a feather boa, the tight ass shaking for the camera: What I did manage to see on TV just seemed further proof that being gay was freakish, unnatural.

  “You need to understand one very important fact,” Smid said, his voice so close I could feel it in my chest. “You’re using sexual sin to fill a God-shaped void in your life.”

  I was here. No one could say I wasn’t trying.

  • • •

  THE MAIN ROOM was small and halogen lit, with one sliding door opening onto a sun-sick concrete porch. Our group sat in padded folding chairs near the front. On the walls behind us hung the laminated Twelve Steps that promised a slow but steady cure. Aside from these posters, the walls were mostly empty. Here, there were no crucifixes, no stations of the cross. Here, such iconography was considered idolatry, along with astrology, Dungeons & Dragons, Eastern religions, Ouija boards, Satanism, and yoga.

  LIA had taken a more extreme stance against the secular world than any of the churches I’d grown up in, though the counselors’ way of thinking was not unfamiliar to me. Within the fundamentalist strain of Christianity that goes by the name Baptist, my family’s denomination, Missionary Baptist, forbade anything that had the power to distract the soul from direct communication with God and the Bible. Many of the other hundred or so denominations that comprised the Baptist spectrum often quibbled about what could or could not be permitted within the flock, with some churches taking these issues more seriously than others, subjects like the ethics of dancing and the pitfalls of non-Biblical reading still up for discussion. “Harry Potter is nothing more than a seducer of children’s souls,” a visiting Baptist preacher once told our family’s church. I had no doubt that my LIA counselors would also shun any mention of Harry Potter, that my time spent in Hogwarts would have to remain a private pleasure, and that I had entered into an even more serious pact with God by coming here, one that required me to abolish most of what had come before LIA. Before entering this room, I had been told to cast aside everything but my Bible and my handbook.

  Since most of LIA’s customers had grown up within this literal-minded Protestantism and were desperate for a cure, the counselors’ strict rules were met with mild applause. The unadorned white walls of the facility seemed appropriate decor for a waiting room in which we would wait to receive God’s forgiveness. Even classical music was forbidden—“Beethoven, Bach, etc. are not considered Christian”—a heavy silence blanketing the room during our morning Quiet Time, drifting into our daily activities and inspiring an atmosphere that seemed if not holy, then at least not secular.

  The study area at the back of the room, home to a bookshelf filled with inspirational literature and a hefty stack of Bibles, contained dozens of testimonies from successful ex-gays.

  “Slowly yet surely I began to recover,” I’d read that morning, squeaking my finger down the glossy page. “I began to recover from not having a male friend unless it involved sex. I started learning who I really was, instead of the false personality I created to make myself acceptable.”

  • • •

  I HAD SPENT the last several months trying to erase my “false personality.” I’d walked out of my college dorm one winter day and jumped into the campus’s half-frozen lake. Shivering, I walked back to the dorm in water-suctioned shoes, feeling rebaptized. In the hot shower that followed, I watched, dazed by the shock of icy heat on my numb skin, as a drop of water traced the edge of the showerhead. I prayed, Lord, make me as pure as that.

  During my stay at Love in Action, I would repeat the prayer until it became a kind of mantra. Lord, make me as pure as that.

  • • •

  I REMEMBER little about the ride to the facility with my mother. I had tried to look away, to prevent my mind from recording what passed by outside the passenger’s-side window, though a few details remained: the muddy caramel-colored Mississippi passing behind the steel girders of the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge, the scale of our American Nile feeling like the perfect stimulant for my uncaffeinated mind; the glass pyramid glittering at the edge of the city, spreading its hot light across our windshield. It was early June, and by midmorning almost every surface in the city would be too hot to touch for more than a few seconds, everything sweltering by noon. The only relief came in the morning, the sun resting at the edge of the horizon, still only a suggestion of light.

  “Surely they could afford something better than this,” my mother said, steering us into a parking space at the front of a rectangular strip mall. The location was more upscale than much of rest of the city, part of a wealthier suburb, though this strip mall was arguably the least attractive landmark for miles around, a place for lower-end retail stores and small clinics to find a temporary home. Whitewashed red brick and glass. Double doors that opened onto a white foyer with fake plants. A logo above the entrance: inverted red triangle with a heart-shaped hole cut out of the middle of it, a series of thin white lines spreading across the gap. We stepped out of the car and headed toward the doors, my mother always a few steps ahead.

  Once we entered the foyer, a smiling receptionist asked me to sign my name in a ledger. The man looked to be in his midtwenties. He wore a polo shirt that fell loosely from his chest, and his eyes were a bright honest cobalt. I’d been expecting some wan-faced wraith who’d already erased everything interesting about himself. Instead, here was someone who looked like he’d be willing to play a few rounds of Halo with me, then use video-game analogies to tell me a little about what God had done for him. You have to fight against the enemies, the aliens trying to invade your soul. I’d met plenty of hip youth pastors with a similar look and attitude.

  I can no longer remember his name. I can no longer remember if there were any signs in that foyer of what was to come, any paintings on the wall, any rules posted. The foyer exists for me now as a blindingly white waiting room, the kind you see in Hollywood depictions of heaven: a blank space.

  “Can I see the place?” my mother asked. Something about the way her voice lifted into a polite question made me feel uneasy, as if she were asking to look at real estate.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” the receptionist said. “Only clients allowed in the back. Security reasons.”

  “Security?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Many of our clients deal with repressed family issues. Seeing a parent, no matter whose parent, no matter if it’s someone nice like you”—a winning, deep-dimpled smile—“can be a little unsettling. That’s why we call this a safe zone.” He stretched out both his arms at his sides, sweeping them wide—slowly and a little rigidly, I thought, as though his movements had once been much grander and he had since learned to rein them in. “Since you’re only in the two-week program, you’ll have access to your son at all hours except program time.”