One of the most shocking films in recent years is now playing in theaters across the country. It’s not a horror story or science fiction thriller but a dramatization of something that happens all too often, in real life.
“Boy Erased” is based on the memoir of Garrard Conley, who, as a teenager in 2004, underwent conversion therapy, also known as “reparative therapy.” It includes a host of pseudoscientific practices and faith-based counseling methods aimed at changing a person’s sexual orientation – that is, “curing” the person of homosexuality.
Conversion therapy is based on the belief that being gender non-conforming – i.e., lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning – is abnormal. This belief has long been discredited by psychologists, medical authorities, academics and even many religious spokespeople. Yet it persists.
In January, the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law estimated that about 700,000 LGBT adults in the United States have been subjected to conversion therapy at some point in their lives, including about 350,000 who received it as adolescents. The same study also estimated that 20,000 youth members of the LGBTQ community will undergo conversion therapy from a licensed health care professional before the age of 18 and that about 57,000 additional young people will receive the treatment from a religious or spiritual adviser.
“Boy Erased,” written, directed and starring Joel Edgerton (as a conversion therapist), is set in Bible Belt America. In it, a teenager, Jared (played by Lucas Hedges), has a sexual encounter with a member of the same sex. His actions are seen as an abomination and, potentially, an eternal break with God and his family. Jared’s fundamentalist Baptist pastor father (played by Russell Crowe) and devout Christian mother (Nicole Kidman) force him to attend a 12-day course of conversion therapy.
The film vividly depicts Jared’s confusion, shame and fear of losing his parents’ love. It displays his daily “therapy” sessions, which seek to make him more masculine and to view his same-sex urges as learned rather than part of who he is. The film makes clear that conversion therapy is a painful experience that doesn’t work.
Sadly, conversion therapy remains widely practiced in this country, and there’s evidence that it has the backing of key members of the Trump administration. Suggesting that he supports conversion therapy, Vice President Mike Pence, as a candidate for Congress in 2000, urged that federal health dollars be shifted away from fighting AIDS and “toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior.”
The Republican Party’s 2016 platform tacitly endorsed conversion therapy with language affirming the “right of parents to determine the proper medical treatment and therapy for their minor children.”
And, while appearing on an anti-gay radio program in 2016, Roger Severino, now head of the Office of Civil Rights within the Department of Health and Human Services, backed “any sex therapy that reinforces a person’s biology.”
The battle against conversion therapy is being waged at the state level. As of November, 14 states (and Washington, D.C.) and nearly 50 counties and cities have passed laws banning the use of these techniques on minors by licensed mental health practitioners. The bans do not apply to religious providers of the sort depicted in “Boy Erased.”
Sadly, many moralists believe that homosexuality is a sin, a transgression against God and the family. They believe it is caused by nurture, not nature, and can be reversed, though no evidence supports this. No person, especially a minor, should be made to suffer because of these beliefs.
It’s time for conversion therapy to end.
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