Saturday, September 12, 2020

Boy Erased--"I wish none of his had ever happened. Sometimes I thank God it did."

Title: Boy Erased: A Memoir


Author: Garrard Conley


LGBTQ+ Representation: Main character and several secondary characters are gay


Content Warning: Conversion therapy, suicidal thoughts, depression


What it’s about (in 75 words or fewer): Garrard is sexually assaulted and outed as gay to his conservative religious parents when he is in his freshman year of college. His parents send him to Love in Action, a now-defunct conversion "reparative" therapy center in order to "cure" Garrard of his "sin of same-sex attraction" so he would become heterosexual. Garrard's stay at Love in Action is extremely psychologically damaging.


What I think: This post has been in my drafts folder longer than anything I have ever written--I read Boy Erased over two years ago, around the time I first started blogging, and it affected me profoundly. The book--well, I am going to quote myself from Ziggy, Stardust & Me:
I used to be able to read about topics of sickness and child death, but having kids seems to have wired my brain differently; now I get upset to the point of panic attacks when reading or watching children suffering (It's embarrassing. During one memorable incident at a teacher in-service I left the room sobbing after watching a PSA about children getting injured in a meth lab explosion).

I realize that Conley is over 18 even during the events in the book, but I could not help but imagine my trans child in conversion therapy, being told that something is very wrong with him, and my heart just breaks for every single person who has had to undergo that.

As I was reading the book, I filled nearly every page with sticky notes to mark favorite passages. I copied several passages into my draft version of the review, hoping that I would be able to coherently write my thoughts and feelings about the book, but I kept getting upset about what Conley endured to write anything that wasn't completely nonsensical. Therefore, I procrastinated finishing the post . . . for two years.

Today, I decided to go through my notes and make a list of what stands out to me the most about Boy Erased. 


1. The excellent imagery in Conley's writing
"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" (pg. 9).

Garrard Conley is an amazing writer, and I say this as a former writing teacher. I can imagine how thrilled his college professors were when they first read his writing.  

In Boy Erased, Conley describes how his Moleskin notebooks (tangent--I refuse to buy Moleskin because I know too many people who have and are now notebook snobs who refuse to write in anything else) are all confiscated when he joins Love in Action. Because journaling and writing short stories turns you gay or something? The description of someone losing their writing and their creative outlet in that way is devastating to read.  
 
This post started out as literally a list of quotes and examples of well-written prose that I wanted to highlight. I won't share ALL of the quotes because, well, I can't rewrite the whole book here! Let's just say that if I were to teach writing again, specifically imagery and word choice, I would use Boy Erased as a source for examples, such as:
"Until I was firmly planted in front of the enemy, usually some chimera that could have easily been lifted from an eighteenth-century bestiary, like horses with roaring lion heads, green slime globs with tree limbs for arms and canine fangs. A victorious battle would yield shiny new accoutrements, objects that, once itemized and collected neatly in the main menu, yield a sense of accomplishment" (pgs. 56-57).
SWEET.


2. Conley's relationship with his parents

Conley describes his close relationship with his parents--specifically close to his mother and wanting to please and have a solid relationship with his father, a devout born-again Christian. Conley knows that his religious father does not approve of "the homosexual lifestyle," but he's also worried that he would not be able to relate to his father if the "therapy" worked and he dedicated his life to Jesus:
"We had to give over our memories, our desires, our ideas of freedom, to Jesus our Master. We had to become His servants" (pg. 92).

I am not religious now, but I grew up Catholic and still practiced Catholicism until I was 30, and I am grateful now that I am free from the cognitive dissonance that religious texts and rules cause me.

In the story, Conley describes destroying his game system as a way to "punish" himself:
"My parents and I watched the water rush over the console and swirl into an oval before disappearing with a hollow gurgle down the drain. I imagined the water trickling through the motherboard, following tributaries formed by the microchips. I kept the water running for a few extra seconds than needed until I heard my parents shift uncomfortably behind me" (pg. 78).
One of the reasons this passage stands out to be is that it mentions his parents being there, caring about him and really wanting him to be "fixed" and happy. As a parent of two children with depression and anxiety disorders, I can attest that it is extremely upsetting to watch your children be so unhappy and not be able to fix it.

The whole story is even more heartbreaking since there aren't any "bad guys" to root against, just flawed people trying their hardest to do what they believe is right. However, Conley's realization that his parents didn't do anything to cause him to be gay is one way he is able to realize that therapy is something that he needed to escape from, not endure.


3. Numbness as a description of depression

So many neutrotypical people (those without any type of mental illness) think that clinical depression means that someone is just sad all the time and think that if happy things happen to them, they will be happy. People who live with depression know that this is not typically true. In my Darius the Great review, I discuss the lack of motivation that comes with depression. Another way depression manifests itself for me is numbness and apathy, similar to how Conley describes it here:
"My guilt and fear had all but disappeared in only a matter of days, replaced by what I could only describe as Nothing. In the brief moments when Nothing let me, I felt, just above an eddy of unsourced pain, a kind of pride. I can do this, I thought. I can do this better than anyone else here" (pg. 138).  

When my depression gets to the point of numb, it's bad. I have never seriously considered suicide, but I know so many people who live with suicidal thoughts all the time. Suicide becomes something easy and casual to discuss, and I thought of that when I read this quote:
"I thought of a game my friends and I used to play after church as kids: one wrong step and you were dead, liquefied by lava; one wrong step and you had to sit it out on the sidelines and watch the other kids play. I angled my foot into the light, the plastic tips of my shoelaces glinting. If only it were that easy" (pg. 94).
"Though I wasn't suicidal, like T was, I liked flirting with death. The glamour of Ending it All, and so suddenly, wasn't much of a leap up from the End Times sensationalism of our family's church" (pg. 140).

      

Yikes. Please seek help if you find yourself thinking very casually about death and suicide. I know it's hard, but it's worth it.


4. The therapy itself

Duh, you might be thinking now. Of course the therapy is distressing. You have been talking about how you have procrastinated re-visiting it for over two years.

Okay, you're right.

However, there are some parts I have still remembered in detail since I first read the book. The idea that "gayness" can be cured just by altering the way a man walks. Really? Really:
"Later I would feel his touch again, on my elbow, as he corrected my flamboyant akimbo stance to something more straight appropriate, a flagging Cro-Magnon pose popular in small southern towns like the one where I grew up" (pg. 32).

Prior to the trauma of conversion therapy, Conley is raped by one of the first boys he meets when he arrives to the dorm in college, and this is the same boy who outs him to his parents. Conley completely blames himself for this incident and feels that everything that happens next to him is fitting punishment.
"Even if you know the person--especially if you know the person--rape, and the memory of it, becomes a blinding flash. A brush against something bigger than yourself" (pg. 116).
(If this had not have happened, how would Conley's path had been different? Would he have taken a path similar to Libby Anne's story in Love, Joy, Feminism? Maybe. Libby Anne's story and blog are amazing and you should read it).

Conley is taught through ex-gay therapy that his "sinful urges" of being attracted to other men, are just as bad as rape.  And when he is outed to his parents and told he "would never set foot in this house again if you act on your feelings" (pg. 135), Conley thinks this is reasonable. He even thought of his Aunt Ellen--would he go insane like she had? "Anything. I'll do anything to erase this part of me" (pg. 135).

He is also told nonsense like this from Cosby, the ex-AA recovering alcoholic: their "problem" is that they had not had enough sports in their lives. Sports, apparently, cure the gay. Also, you are too close to your mother. That causes homosexuality.

Understandably, shame and rage filled Conley where he had previously felt love. Ugh, I want to give him a hug so badly.

His college professors do reach out to Conley, which, since he was raised to be very religious, causes him cognitive dissonance:
"Either abandon what you've known your entire life and your family, or abandon what you're learning about life and new ideas. I began to see strong evidence in favor of the latter, although I didn't think it would be easy to forget the sense of wonder I experienced in my Western Lit class while learning about what the church referred to as a sinful pagan past" (pg. 166).

5. What ever happened to Chloe's younger brother, Brandon?

This article actually answers that question:

"Garrad Conley on 'Ex-Gay' Therapy, the Church, and his new memoir, Boy Erased"

Also, you should listen to the whole podcast series UnErased. I'm friends with the Mama Bear from North Carolina featured in the Mama Bear episode!


6. Conversion therapy today
"All that senseless torture going on somewhere overseas while glittery-eyed newscasters debated its constitutionality. I felt crazy. Wasn't it painfully obvious that we shouldn't be torturing people? And yet, at the same time, I thought I could easily be wrong. Hadn't I been wrong before? Wasn't this questioning, liberal attitude what brought me to LIA in the first place?" (pg. 81).

I went on an Internet article finding spree, seeking more information about everything that happens in the book. Then I did my best to narrow down my list of articles into something manageable.  Here are the articles from my research.
  

Other survivors of conversion therapy:
Former leaders of ex-gay therapy:

General information about conversion therapy:
My final takeaway (in 75 words or fewer): Do I really need a final takeaway? Read the book, even if it's hard, even if you can only get through it once. And no, I still haven't made myself watch the move yet.


Memorable quotes/passages from the book (That I haven't mentioned yet):
  • "I wish none of this had ever happened. Sometimes I thank God that it did" (from the Author's Note at the beginning of Boy Erased).
       
  • "But where was Jesus during my time at the facility? Where was His steady nail-scarred hand?  . . Nowhere. Nowhere was the answer" (pg. 142).

  • "Judge not," my father said . . . "lest ye be judged" (pg. 169).

  • "After nineteen years with God's voice buzzing around in my head twenty-four hours a day, how am I supposed to walk around without His constant assurance?" (pg. 223).


Other reviews: Medium--Ernest Sewell (a conversion therapy survivor) and Washington Post


If you liked this book, you should read All Eyes on Us, Saving Alex, and Ziggy, Stardust & Me.

**********

This book is available here: https://library.greensboro-nc.gov/




Learn more about the Rainbow Book List here: http://www.ala.org/rt/glbtrt
Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)