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. “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.
