Boy Erased (Focus Features, Perfect World Pictures, Anonymous Content, Blue-Tongue Films, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next night, Wednesday, July 24, Edi, Charles and I watched a quite good film about the so-called “ex-Gay ministries,” Boy Erased. The film was based on a true story; the protagonist’s real name was Garrard Conley (though he’s called “Jared Eamons” in the film and is played by Lucas Hedges) and he was a young man from Arkansas whose father was owner of a Ford auto dealership and a part-time minister on Sundays. When “Jared” went off to college, after he’d broken up with his high-school girlfriend Chloe (Madelyn Cline) because she wanted to have sex with him and he didn’t, he was befriended by a man named “Henry” (Joe Alwyn) – his name, like that of all the other real-life characters in the film, was changed for the movie – who ultimately raped him. Henry acknowledged that he’d done this to at least one other boy, and Jared was horrified and returned home. Henry then called Jared’s father, posing as a school counselor and “outing” Jared as Gay. As a result Jared’s parents, Marshall (Russell Crowe, who’d begun his film career playing a young Gay man in an Australian movie called The Sum of Us whose father is so sympathetic to his son’s sexual orientation he spends the whole movie trying to help him find a boyfriend) and Nancy (Nicole Kidman), enrolled him in the Love in Action “conversion therapy” program, headed by a man named “Victor Sykes” (Joel Edgerton, who also directed and wrote the film) whose real name was John Smid. At first the Eamonses think the program will only last 12 days or so, but Jared soon discovers that they will keep him there for weeks, months or even years until “Victor” is convinced he’s no longer Queer. (There’s one woman in the program, Lee, played by Emily Hinkler, but other than that everyone, either staff or patient, is male.)

There are even dark allusions to “the houses,” where particularly recalcitrant inmates are kept and subjected to even nastier tortures than most of the supposed “patients,” and security people who prowl the grounds and ensure that the “patients” cannot leave. (According to the Wikipedia page on Garrard Conley, this part was invented by the filmmakers and doesn’t appear in Conley’s memoir, on which the film was supposedly based.) One aspect of the Love in Action “treatment” the film stresses is that the patients are not supposed to tell anybody, especially their parents, what’s going on inside the “camp.” That becomes a major issue when one young man is severely injured when baseballs are spat at him by a pitching machine. Having either no idea or no inclination that he’s supposed to respond by swinging at them with the bat they’ve given him, he’s struck by the balls and knocked down. He somehow gets word to his dad, who shows up and pulls him out, threatening the organizers with legal action if they don’t let him leave with his son. One of the “queenier” inmates, Gary, is played by openly Gay South African-born singer Troye Sivan, who also contributed two songs to the film, “Revelation” (nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Song) and “The Good Side.” But the person the people running the operation really comes down the hardest on is Cameron Van Heusen (Britton Sear) precisely because aside from being Gay, he’s the epitome of all the masculine “butch” values, including being a football star, they’re trying to inculcate in the other campers/patients/inmates. They stage a mock funeral for Cameron, complete with a real coffin, and instruct his fellow inmates to beat him with their Bibles. (This too is something writer Edgerton added to Garrard Conley’s memoir.) Eventually Jared bails on the camp, aided by his mother, who’s come around to his point of view that nothing – especially nothing Love in Action is trying to do to him – will make him no longer Gay. Once out of the camp, Jared learns that Cameron committed suicide, and this leads him to write an exposé for the place and place it with the New York Times, since he’s decided to leave Arkansas and settle in New York.

The film ends ambiguously in terms of Jared’s relationship with his parents: mom at least accepts him as he is, but dad is still trying to reconcile his “Christian” beliefs with his son’s sexuality. There’s a nice bit of symbolism in that throughout the film we’ve seen the Ford logo, emphasizing not only what Marshall does for a living but his plans for his son (he had planned that Jared would take over the Ford dealership, marry a woman and keep the Eamons family line going). We’ve even seen the young pre-“conversion” Jared wear a T-shirt with the Ford logo – but when he’s finally settled in New York as an “out” Gay man we see him driving a car with an Asian logo on the hub of the steering wheel, an unobtrusive but definite symbol of his rejection of the life his dad had in mind for him. Ultimately the film’s credits tell us that “Jared Eamons” – like his real-life prototype, Garrard Conley – is living in New York with his husband, and “Victor Sykes,” like his real-life prototype John Smid, is living in Texas with his husband. Conley’s Wikipedia page mentions Smid’s later repudiation of “conversion therapy” and quotes him as saying he “never met a man who experienced a change from homosexual to heterosexual.” Though it could have been even stronger – I’ve been told by people who’ve gone through “ex-Gay” programs that they are, among other things, great places to cruise, and Edgerton seems to be hinting at secret sexual goings-on between the men in the program but never comes out and shows any – overall Boy Erased is a quite powerful and moving film, and Lucas Hedges brings his character vividly to life.