Bryan Borland

It was difficult to not become angry when reading Boy Erased, Garrard Conley’s memoir of growing up in a devout Southern Baptist household in a small Arkansas town and his brief-but-damaging contact with Love in Action, at the time, the largest ex-gay therapy organization in the world. It’s difficult because this book isn’t vindictive, and, oh, how I wanted it to be. No one gets what’s coming to them. There’s no palpable anger. There’s no penance or resolution. There’s just the uneasy co-existence between a cultural geography Conley has been conditioned to accept that doesn’t—and won’t—accept him back. But that […]