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But it took effort for him to get to this point. Today Conley seems relaxed and loose, attuned to himself and his place in the world, with quick, amused eyes. LIA felt like everything I’d ever encountered in my youth, only more distilled and written down.” “Of course, I knew it operated as a cult, on some level, but it was still a shock.
“They took my book and analysed it to see whether it matched what they knew about cults, and it did,” says Conley.
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Conley later gave his LIA handbook to the law firm McDermott, Will & Emery, which works with the Mattachine Society of Washington, DC to archive LGBTQ history. Women were forbidden to wear “mannish/boyish” clothes, whatever that might mean, and men had to avoid “campy” behaviour. Other rules included restrictions on where residents could travel within Memphis, on their dressing and grooming (no “muscle shirts” no sideburns “below the top of the ear”) and on how they engaged with the secular world (no listening to Beethoven or Bach, or entering “non-Christian bookshops”, for example).
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When Conley handed over his notebook that day, it was part of a series of rules and prohibitions designed to maximise LIA’s mind control over patients during their treatment and beyond.
“If you don’t do their thing, you’re not of God, you’ll go to hell. “They’re destroying people’s lives,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 1993. Among the first to raise the alarm about its methods was founding member John Evans, who left in 1975 after a friend, distraught by his failure to convert to straight, killed himself. Stories like these were not uncommon at LIA, renamed Restoration Path in 2012, and widely considered to be the first modern “ex-gay” ministry predicated on changing the sexual orientation of gay men and women. Conley recounts a story in which a 19-year-old “defector” was forced to submit to a mock funeral, as other members read out his obituary, describing his slow decline into HIV and then Aids. The methods are cruel and frequently violent, from applying electric shocks while being forced to watch gay porn, to mind control games aimed at persuading LGBT “patients” their desires are rooted in dysfunctional or “disempowering” relationships with their mothers.Īt LIA the message was unequivocal: homosexuality meant unhappiness, isolation and death. In the US, research suggests that 700,000 adults have undergone such treatment, about half of them as teenagers. Conley’s story is far from unique, and far from the worst. Torture is a strong word, but if we get a museum that honours the centuries of suffering inflicted on queer people, a whole wing will need to be dedicated to that unique form of persecution known as conversion, or reparative, therapy, by which zealots acting under the banner of faith have sought to turn one sexual instinct into another. Home truths: Garrard Conley with his mother and father in the late 80s. You’ll never finish your education.” Conley’s response was: “Fair enough.” That was 14 years ago, the year – his mother likes to joke – in which they were abducted by aliens, a metaphor for the hallucinatory nature of the family’s crisis, when Conley’s father gave him an ultimatum: “You’ll never set foot in this house again if you act on your feelings.
He was 19 when he entered LIA for a two-week evaluation. “The concept is stolen from Alcoholics Anonymous, except AA doesn’t just have you stay in a place all day, monitored,” says Conley. Detecting and destroying FIs was how you got the gay out. “False Image”, a key tenet of Love in Action (LIA), referred to anything and everything suggestive of Conley’s homosexuality.
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“And he said, in a voice free of emotion: ‘False Image’,” recalls Conley in Boy Erased, his elegant memoir about the year in which his southern Baptist upbringing collided with his sexual awakening as a gay man. A blond boy confiscated the journal and yanked a bunch of pages free from the binding. H ere’s what Garrard Conley had to surrender the morning he arrived at the Love in Action facility in Memphis, Tennessee in 2004: his phone, his wallet, his driving licence and a Moleskine journal in which he wrote his short stories.