Garrard Conley begins his 2016 memoir “Boy Erased” in a semicircle of folding chairs under halogen lights. Conley, then 19, had only just arrived at Love in Action, a cruelly named so-called gay conversion center, in Memphis.
One of the practitioners stood in front of Conley and his cohorts, all dressed in uniform, and said: “The first thing you have to do is recognize how you’ve become dependent on sex, on things that are not from God.”
For people facing similar circumstances today, the Supreme Court just made it possible for things to get worse.
“We were learning Step One of Love in Action’s Twelve Step program,” Conley writes in his memoir, “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.’” It would only get worse.
For people facing similar circumstances today, the Supreme Court just made it possible for things to get worse for them, too. Last Tuesday, an 8-1 Supreme Court majority rejected a Colorado law that effectively banned gay conversion therapy for young people. Passed in 2019, Colorado’s Minor Conversion Therapy Law prohibits licensed mental health professionals from providing “any practice or treatment” with the express intent to change a minor’s “gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”
The case challenging the law was initiated in 2022 when Kaley Chiles, an evangelical Christian and licensed talk therapist, sued the state, arguing that her First Amendment right to discuss her faith and beliefs on “biological sex” was being violated. Colorado is one of 23 states and Washington, D.C. with similar legislation in place.
Conley joined the Velshi Banned Book Club, the franchise on MS NOW I edit and produce, this past week, to discuss the Supreme Court ruling and share his thoughts as someone who has lived through the harrowing experiences of conversion therapy.
Using flashbacks, Conley’s book explores the moments that lead up to Conley’s “treatment” — his religious upbringing as the sole child of devout Missionary Baptists, how he grappled with his sexuality in secret for so many years and how he was brutally outed to his parents by the very person who raped and assaulted him (Conley refers to the perpetrator using a pseudonym in his book) — and then what happened behind closed doors at Love in Action.
In our pre-interview on Friday, an exploratory time before a guest joins the host on a live television show, Conley explained the enduring significance of conversion therapy: “To me conversion therapy is connected to so many other issues that really animate me, like free speech, freedom of thought, open-mindedness, fundamentalism and what it does to our country. You’re looking at the way this kind of fundamentalist thinking works on a large scale when you watch what is happening in this country right now.”
Also inherent to this ruling is an acute medical threat, which Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed to in her lone dissent, writing, “[The Court has] open[ed] a dangerous can of worms. It threatens to impair States’ ability to regulate the provision of medical care in any respect. It extends the Constitution into uncharted territory in an utterly irrational fashion. And it ultimately risks grave harm to Americans’ health and wellbeing.”
“It is opening the flood gates for dangerous quackery that I thought we were rid of.”
Garrard Conley
I asked Conley, what comes next? He echoed Jackson’s dissent, saying, “This ruling could open up really dark avenues of thought. If I go to a [licensed practitioner] I am expecting them to be more educated than I am and be up on the science. I hope that they would at least offer some scientific basis for what I’m talking about in a therapy session. It is opening the flood gates for dangerous quackery that I thought we were rid of.”
According to LGBTQ+ nonprofit suicide prevention organization the Trevor Project, there were more than 1,320 conversation therapy practitioners in 48 states and Washington, D.C., in 2023. Fifteen percent of LGBTQ+ youth report being threatened with or subjected to conversion therapy, the organization reports. Thirty-five percent of those exposed to conversion therapy over the past year reported suicide attempts. That is 1 in 8.
Suicide and suicidal ideation are a painful refrain in Conley’s memoir. Conley writes in stunning frankness about his own suicidal ideations after being outed to his parents and about how common, almost pedestrian, it was at Love in Action. Not 30 pages into “Boy Erased” we’re introduced to a person called only T: “T, an obese middle-aged man wearing several black cardigans, stood before our group to confess, stone-faced, that he had once again attempted suicide. This was T’s seventh suicide attempt since coming to the program.”
Conley told Ali Velshi, “What’s even more damaging for the LGBTQ+ community is this idea that we are subject to be debated, that our very existence is something that can be argued over and is open for interpretation based on free speech. Every major medical organization in the country knows that LGBTQ+ people exist. It feels like an attack.”
Last week’s Supreme Court ruling is just the latest in several decisions that appear to favor conservative Christians. In 2023, a web designer was allowed to refuse to design wedding websites for same-sex couples. In 2022, a football coach was allowed to pray at the 50-yard line. There are more examples.
Justice Neil Gorsuch centered freedom of speech in the majority opinion, which included liberal justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, writing, “Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety, but the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”
Here, in this Supreme Court case and behind the closed doors of conversion therapy, fundamentalism and freedom of thought are inexplicable from each other.
“I am not attacking religion when I talk about this,” said Conley, who is a religious Christian. “But fundamentalism doesn’t allow for any open discussion. It shuts people down, it takes cheap shots … there is only one meaning, there is only one right way.”
Despite the odds, “Boy Erased” is ultimately about wholeness: “[Love in Action] was telling me on a daily basis that a loss of self meant a gain in virtue, and a gain in virtue meant I was drawing closer to God and therefore closer to my true heavenly self. […] You became all telling with no showing: not the extraordinary extra, but the stock player in a harp-and-halo bit. I came to therapy thinking that my sexuality didn’t matter, but it turned out that every part of my personality was intimately connected. Cutting one piece damaged the rest. I had prayed for purification, but the minute I felt its icy baptismal waters burning away everything I’d ever loved, I’d begun to open myself up, instead, to a former possibility: unconditional love, the original flame that had drawn me closer to God and my family and the rest of the world.”
Conley is happy to tell you how he survived his time in Love in Action, the long road of healing after he left and where he finds the strength now to revisit a terrible time in his life day after day: his parents (despite their role in placing him in conversion therapy) and his stubbornness. “[My dad] taught me from a young age if you believe something then you should be willing to stand behind it for as long as it takes. And my mom’s compassion is the other part of that. The main thing is I am stubborn. There is a part of me that is like you’re not going to get away with what you’re doing to these people. Even now.”
What Conley endured and overcame should be relegated to the same dusty and dark place where other antiquated medical brutalities, like leeches and trepanation, exist. His story and his perspective, while inspiring and beautiful, should not exist. Not today and not ever. This ruling means more people suffering like “T,” more lives turned to statistics and more shame. Even if a young person’s journey with their sexual identity doesn’t include a stop at a place like “Love in Action,” just knowing these centers exist is tremendously harmful.
The message is clear from this ruling: You are not free to be who you are. I hope that the next generation of young people who find themselves sitting in a semicircle of folding chairs under halogen lights find the wholeness that Conley writes of. Sadly, there’s no guarantee of that.
If you are an LGBTQ young person in crisis, feeling suicidal or in need of a safe and judgment-free place to talk, call the TrevorLifeline now at 1-866-488-7386 or the Rainbow Youth Project at 1-317-643-4888.
Hannah Holland
Hannah Holland is a producer for MS NOW's "Velshi" and editor for the "Velshi Banned Book Club." She writes for MS NOW.