By Charles Francis

“Welcome, Garrard!”, the creepy conversion therapy handbook greeted teen Garrard Conley when he was checked into the nation’s largest conversion therapy residential enterprise Love in Action (LIA) in Memphis. “You are the product of the world (and the Devil)”, said the Source Residential Program handbook that was intended to become his life in 2004 (and memories forever) while he underwent a “cure” of his “gay lifestyle”. “Admit it. Admit it! Tell your father you hate him!”, Garrard’s mother Martha Conley remembered a moment in the LIA therapy session. “But I don’t hate my Dad!”, he cried out to the Reverend in a circle of his peers. Thankfully, Conley never got “cured” by this Christian quackery promoted by the now-defunct Exodus International which worked with Love In Action. In later years,  he thrived.  Conley escaped the clutches of Love In Action (which later collapsed in 2012,  a steaming heap of controversy after the State of Tennessee intervened and the Reverend turned out to be gay). He went on to write a breathtaking memoir “Boy Erased” that became a major motion picture starring Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe and Lucas Hedges.  We thought all of this was behind us with conversion therapy outlawed in twenty states and the District of Columbia; that America had moved on with a new awareness of the stark harms of bad science harnessed by dark politics and evangelical religion.

We know better now.  

Last week, the Supreme Court announced it will review a conversion therapy case (Chiles v. Salazar) this October. They may greenlight this abuse in the name of a Colorado therapist’s First Amendment rights.  However, an October hearing gives the Justice’s Clerks plenty of time to better inform themselves and the Court by visiting the Smithsonian National Museum of American History (NMAH). There in the Archive Center researchers will find the Love In Action Collection of papers, thirteen boxes of LIA materials which the Mattachine Society helped preserve and donate to the NMAH in 2017.  Oh, how we wanted Garrard’s handbook to be preserved for this moment. Let the Court review the animus and bad science, the culty LIA methods,  the “moral inventory sheets” and gay “addiction workbooks” to make a teenager straight putting “sin, shame and Satan behind us”. The Court needs to review the texture of harmful “cures”— branded in belief– that drive teens like Garrard Conley to sink into depression and seriously consider suicide.

Katherine Ott, Curator, NMAH Division of Medicine and Science wrote an essay citing the LIA papers  entitled “The History of Getting the Gay Out” (2018). “These objects allow curators like myself to explore how real people experience these risks,” (the risk of being LGBTQ and driven into undergoing therapies from electro-shock and lobotomies to residential camps like Love in Action.) Let’s hope the Clerks will find time between now and October to visit the Smithsonian Archive Center.