Aussie Super-Team Tackling Gay Conversion Therapy
Thursday, June 8, 2017 at 3:58PM 
by Jason Adams
This weekend you can stare into the wonderful sad eyes of Joel Edgerton onscreen via the small-scale emotional assault of It Comes at Night (I just reviewed it over at MNPP if you're interested) but today he's announcing his next adventure in familial distress, this time behind the screen, and it sounds pretty amazing - he's signed on to write and direct Boy Erased, an adaptation of Garrad Conley's memoir about his time spent suffering in "gay conversion therapy."
Have any of you read the book? Conley was the son of a Baptist minister and was accidentily outed at the age of 19 to his parents - they then forced him into a "Pray Away the Gay" program (basically mental abuse via scriptural brainwashing and isolation) as an ultimatum between everything he knew and explusion.
The film's lining up quite the cast - Manchester by the Sea star Lucas Hedges will play Conley, and in supporting roles Edgerton's supposedly calling in some fellow Aussies... ones that go by the glossy names Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe. Maybe you've heard of them? One assumes they're playing the parents, but Deadline doesn't specify.
Anyway with religious whack-job Mike Pence one Twitter breakdown away from the Oval Office "gay conversion therapy" is a real hot topic these days, so this could turn out to be a scarily timely story. But it could certainly also be a moving one either way, especially with such a talented group of folks dedicated to giving this real world horror emotional life on-screen. It's definitely a tale in need of telling.
Reader Comments (3)
The book is a gem, not least of all because the author clearly still loves his parents, and he manages to reveal how damaging gay conversion therapy was for him without ever casting them as villains. Everyone—and I mean everyone—in the book emerges as fully human. There are very few other memoirs about such a trauma written with so much sympathy and nuance.
This sounds terrific. I will read the novel as soon as I can catch up
With a stack of other novels to be read. Too much Too little time
Kidman and Crowe sounds like *perfect* casting and they've wanted to work together for decades ever since the Eucalyptus debacle. And I'm glad to see Hedges not just jumping onto some franchise.