MOUNTAIN HOME, Ark. (KTHV) - The motion picture Boy Erased opened in theaters this week in Little Rock. The film is about an Arkansas native and the controversial practice of gay conversion therapy that he underwent as a 19-year-old. It uses Hollywood heavyweights to tell an important hometown story.
“I know personally of a lot of people from Arkansas and from Tennessee that have gone through conversion therapy,” said Garrard Conley, who wrote the book that has now been turned into the film.
He still fondly remembers his childhood in Cherokee Village and later Mountain Home where his father was a Baptist preacher. His parents sent him to a Memphis conversion therapy camp when he was outed. Both are depicted by Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman in the film.
“I was very careful not to paint Arkansas or the South with a heavy brush and only one color,” Conley said. “I wanted to show that there's actually a lot of complexity to the South and a lot of people who live in it."
That was something Conley impressed on director and actor Joel Edgerton as he passionately took on the subject.
“It was tricky,” Edgerton said. “You want to create real human beings that are kind of colliding with their agendas with each other. And that can cause pain. It doesn't mean they're bad people.”
Numbers are hard to pin down, but Conley and local advocates say as many as 700,000 people have gone through the discredited process over the years.
“There's this idea that you can pray the gay away,” said Penelope Poppers, the outgoing director of Lucie’s Place, a shelter for homeless LGBTQ people. “My feeling as an openly LGBT person living in the South is that this is something that is very, very prevalent.”
Conley and Edgerton said the movie is not about judging people here. They hope it can go beyond preaching to the choir and literally preach to the preachers.
“We're not painting villains in this movie,” Edgerton said. “Maybe there's a safety aspect to that and it will allow people who are coming to this subject with their arms folded to actually accept the viewing of it.”
“This is not a sort of expose designed to make people angry at the people who sent me there,” Conley said, referring to his parents. “Instead we want to make feel that bigotry is no longer something that they want to engage in.”
The film is being screened at Little Rock’s Riverdale 10 Cinema. It is also playing in Memphis.