The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
‘Boy Erased’ looks at gay conversion therapy
Adaptation of memoir was filmed in Atlanta, opens Thursday.
During the film “Boy Erased,” Joel Edgerton’s therapist character Victor Sykes compares “choosing” to be gay with “choosing” to play football. His students nod their heads but don’t look remotely convinced.
Their pinched, pained expressions define the experience hundreds of thousands of gay men and women have gone through in what is called “gay conversation therapy.” It’s still legal in most states.
“Boy Erased,” which stars Lucas Hedges and Oscar-winning actors Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman, is based on a 2016 memoir of the same name written by Garrard Conley. The film opens at Tara Cinema on Thursday night and will be available in other local theaters Nov. 16.
The film is set both in Arkansas and Tennessee but was shot in metro Atlanta last fall with reshoots in the spring.
Edgerton, a Golden Globenominated actor who has been in “Red Sparrow,” “Loving” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” garnered a big hit as a producer in 2015 with the horror thriller “The Gift.” After reading Conley’s book, he spent 18 months trying to get “Boy Erased” turned into a film. “I became so carried away, it literally changed the course of my life,” he said.
The focus of the film is Conley’s character, fictionally named Jared Eamons. Edgerton chose Hedges, whom he first met seven years ago while working on the film “The Odd Life of Timothy Green” with Jennifer Garner. Hedges’ father, Peter, was the director, and he met the young Lucas playing basketball at Atlantic Station.
“I’ve watched Lucas’ career develop as a family friend,” Edgerton said. And when he read “Boy Erased,” he imagined Hedges — whom he had just seen in “Manchester by the Sea” — playing Conley. His imagination ultimately became reality.
“Lucas is a blank canvas,” Edgerton said. “I think that is a great quality for an actor. He’s able to shift his energy and be anything you want him to be. There’s something glamorous and not glamorous about him.”
Indeed, Hedges plays Jared as a seemingly normal teen who can’t be who he really is and internalizes most of his thoughts and feelings.
While Kidman and Crowe resemble Conley’s parents, Hedges and Conley do not actually look like each other.
“But his facial expressions,” Conley said, “the way he captured that time in my life is extremely accurate.”
Conley lived through one of these programs 14 years ago when he was a teenager. The film largely follows his storyline. His fundamentalist Arkansas parents (played by Kidman and Crowe) found out he was gay and gave him a choice: take part in this gay conversion program or they’ll cut ties with him.
Feeling he had no choice, he gave the program a try and quickly realized it was a sham built around false “science.”
“It was repressive,” Conley said. “They force you to confess to things that aren’t actually bad. It makes no sense. They want you to feel shame. It’s mental torture.”
Edgerton said there is a wide variety of these types of programs. Conley’s version that “Boy Erased” portrayed had a “welcoming corporate sheen to it but also had this insidious feeling to it.”
In the film, Sykes tries to get Jared to express anger toward his father, as if that is why he “became” gay. Jared gets angry — but at Sykes.
“It’s like a bad interpretation of Freudian theory,” Conley said. “They worked on models that have been discredited by every medical organization. It’s like they threw everything on the wall but nothing stuck. There is no there there.”
Conley managed to get out without permanent psychic damage, but he said many others have suffered far worse fates and have even taken their own lives. “To me, that’s deplorable,” said Edgerton.
The film is set in 2004. Gay rights have come a long way since then, including the legalization of gay marriage. Unfortunately, Conley said there are still plenty of gay conversion programs nationwide with thousands of active participants.
Conley hopes this type of so-called therapy is eventually banned in all 50 states but believes in this divisive political environment, progress has slowed.
Five years ago, he used to tell skeptics that “I’m human like you. I’m just as boring, just as messed up. You could make that appeal, and people would reasonably accept it. Now there’s a coldness to people when I say these things. They say I have a hidden agenda. They won’t listen. That to me is terrifying. No matter what you say, they won’t believe you.”
Conley knows that big names like Kidman and Crowe might get folks to watch who might not otherwise agree with the film’s message. But he also knows that may not necessarily happen. At the same time, plenty of closeted or repressed gay people have already contacted him after seeing the film trailer and expressed a sense of solidarity.
“One of my baseline goals is to make sure everyone knows about conversion therapy, no matter what they think about it,” he said.
In the end, Conley is thrilled the film was made at all: “This movie is a beautiful art piece. It’s also a great tool for advocacy. I’m proud of it.”