ARANJUEZ Gay Conversion Therapy

Change of Heart BOY ERASED, THE MISEDUCATION OF CAMERON POST AND GAY CONVERSION THERAPY In a society in which huge advances have been made in the rights and acceptance of same-sex-attracted people, vestiges of Western society’s Screen Education 94 I © ATOM

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homophobic past persist – one of the most confronting being the so-called gay conversion therapy offered by some Christian organisations. Delving into a pair of new films that, in different ways, explore the experience of undergoing this ‘treatment’ – with all its harms and complexities – ADOLFO ARANJUEZ finds affecting depictions of young people who need support rather than suppression. www.screeneducation.com.au

Change of Heart BOY ERASED, THE MISEDUCATION OF CAMERON POST AND GAY CONVERSION THERAPY In a society in which huge advances have been made in the rights and acceptance of same-sex-attracted people, vestiges of Western society’s Screen Education 94 I © ATOM

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homophobic past persist – one of the most confronting being the so-called gay conversion therapy offered by some Christian organisations. Delving into a pair of new films that, in different ways, explore the experience of undergoing this ‘treatment’ – with all its harms and complexities – ADOLFO ARANJUEZ finds affecting depictions of young people who need support rather than suppression. www.screeneducation.com.au

TALKING SOCIETY MY SS

he first time I saw a cinematic rendering of how homosexuality could be ‘cured’ was in A Love to Hide (Christian Faure, 2005), in which, ­following a lobotomy, Jean (Jérémie Renier) – now zombielike – expresses nothing but apathy for his war­ time lover, Jacques (Nicolas Gob). To call that reveal a gut-punch would be an understatement; seventeenyear-old me had just emerged from a traumatic break-up, my ex-boyfriend saving face by announcing to our entire school that I was ‘just an experiment’. His act reminded me of the suggestion that same-sex attraction could be spurious and eradicable, an idea that had been planted in my mind during my Catholic childhood. Perhaps it was something that, as my local priest had put it, you could ‘pray away’ and ‘develop strength to resist’?

While, these days, we no longer put icepick to cortex – with lobotomies having fallen out of favour in the mid twentieth century1 – the belief that the brain can be purged of ‘abnormalities’ such as same-sex attraction persists in some sectors of society. And that harrowing scene, which has become branded onto my memory as a depiction of an act of literal dehumanisation, kept haunting me as I watched The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Desiree Akhavan, 2018) and Boy Erased (Joel Edgerton, 2018). The latter tells the story of Arkansas teenager Jared Eamons (Lucas Hedges), who is sent by his parents, Marshall (Russell Crowe) and Nancy (Nicole Kidman), to Love in Action, a real-life Christian organisation that runs ‘refuge programs’ for young same-sex-attracted people

‘finding [their] way back’ to God. In a similar vein, Cameron Post chronicles the experiences of the titular Montana teen (Chloë Grace Moretz) at God’s Promise, a fictitious commune-like institution where adolescents continue their schooling while undergoing a counselling-based regimen that seeks to purge their ‘aberrant’ sexual desires. Both films chart their protagonists’ openness to, hesitations about and eventual disillusionment with the program they’re in, with confronting scenes and dialogue exposing the darkness behind these methods ostensibly guiding sexual ‘sinners’ back to the light.

The arrival of Cameron Post and Boy Erased in 2018 could not have been more timely for Australian audiences. The previous year, in February, the Victorian Government instituted a Health Complaints Commissioner, Karen Cusack, who would spearhead investigations into (and, if necessary, bans of) the largely religious practice of ‘gay conversion therapy’.2 Within a few months, the governments of Western Australia and the Australian Capital Territory similarly affirmed their commitment to stamping out contentious ‘counselling’ approaches.3 By February 2019, after extensive inquiries revealed the extent and damage of the practice, the Victorian Government announced that it would seek to outlaw gay conversion therapy – which premier Daniel Andrews described as ‘bigoted quackery’ – within the year.4 Later that month, New South Wales health minister Brad Hazzard asserted that his state government was ‘on the same page’ and would be championing legislation against the practice nationwide.5

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THIS SPREAD, L–R: Boy Erased protagonist Jared Eamons (Lucas Hedges); The Miseducation of Cameron Post’s titular lead (Chloë Grace Moretz)

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‘I must be the change’

ABOVE: Jared with fleeting love interest Xavier (Théodore Pellerin) in Boy Erased

Cusack’s report presented ‘overwhelming evidence of the sig­ nificant and long-term harm’ that gay conversion therapy can impart on someone’s life.6 Her findings have been corroborated by researchers from elsewhere around the world: US-based Caitlin Ryan and colleagues, for instance, determined in 2018 that this form of intervention had lifelong reverberations, including ‘depression, suicidal thoughts, suicidal attempts, less educational attainment, and less weekly income’.7 The evidence is so overwhelming, in fact, that gay conversion therapy has been denounced by psychologists,8 medical doctors9 and social workers.10 Yet the practice continues. A substantial 2018 study by the Human Rights Law Centre and La Trobe University, Preventing Harm, Promoting Justice, found that up to 10 per cent of LGBTQIA+ Australians remain vulnerable to gay conversion therapy, with around ten organisations still carrying out the practice in Australia and New Zealand.11 In the US, where Boy Erased and Cameron Post are set, gay conversion therapy continues to exist within the bounds of the law in thirty-four states at the time of writing;12 UCLA’s Williams Institute estimates that 698,000 American adults have undergone the therapy, around half of whom experienced it in adolescence.13 This ‘therapy’ even goes beyond physical interactions: Texas-based Living Hope Ministries launched a gay-conversion-therapy app late last year, though it was soon pulled from sale by Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and, eventually, Google following public outcry.14 There has been no shortage of undercover and survivor stories15 – and this isn’t even to account for harsher equivalents of the practice outside the Western world.16

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ABOVE: Cameron with secret high school sweetheart Coley (Quinn Shephard) in Cameron Post OPPOSITE: Cameron with fellow God’s Promise participant Helen (Melanie Ehrlich) in Cameron Post

The source text for Edgerton’s film is one such story: 2016’s Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family by Garrard Conley, on whom Jared’s character is based. In the film’s press kit, Conley describes gay conversion therapy as ‘a tragic practice […] whose long-lasting negative effects have altered not just the lives of “­ex-gay” patients but also those of their families and friends’,17 and this description rings true with the resulting screen work, which focuses as much on Jared as on the tapestry of relationships he is surrounded by. Jared is sent to Love in Action after having been ‘outed’ by a university friend, Henry (Joe Alwyn), with whom he developed a homoerotic connection and who, during a fateful moment, assaulted him in his dorm room; fearing retribution, Henry attempted to silence Jared by ‘reporting’ him to his father. After a series of denials, Jared admits to his attraction to men (though without divulging the rape), leading Marshall to decree that his son cannot continue living with him and Nancy while he ‘fundamentally go[es] against the grain of [their] beliefs […] and against God himself’. Having summoned the weight of emotional blackmail, Marshall then asks: ‘In your heart, do you want to change?’

The idea of being able to, and desiring, change forms the anchor of both films; early in Cameron Post, the teenagers at God’s Promise are made to collectively declare, ‘Change will come through God but within me. I must be the change.’ The separation of person (‘sinner’) from practice (‘sin’) is a core tenet of gay ­conversion therapy; as Love in Action head Victor (played by Edgerton) describes it, homosexuality is ‘a behaviour – it’s a choice’. Similarly, during a meeting with Cameron, God’s Promise director Dr Lydia Marsh (Jennifer Ehle) contends, ‘There’s no such thing as homosexuality; there’s only the same struggle with sin we all face,’ before proceeding to compare same-sex-attracted people to drug addicts.

Because of this distinction it maintains between deed and doer, gay conversion therapy – unsettlingly mirroring legitimate cognitivebehavioural-therapy methodology – allocates significant time to ascertaining and reconfiguring underlying traumas and thought patterns so as to modify ‘problematic’ behaviour; as Lydia’s brother, ‘ex-gay’18 pastor Rick (John Gallagher Jr), explains, same-sex attraction is ‘a symptom of a larger problem’.

In a survey of the history of the practice, activist and former gay-conversion-therapy patient Anthony Venn-Brown details the distinct ‘treatments’ that have been used over the years. Today, he explains, faith-based organisations have dispensed with more physically intrusive methods (not only lobotomies but also aversion therapy through electric shocks, drugs or starvation) in favour of ‘talk therapy’, which seeks to reprogram the brain to suppress same-sex attraction consciously rather than out of reflex.19 In the two films, we indeed see an array of ‘talk’ methods: in Cameron Post, the teens self-assess in pairs and fill out an ‘iceberg diagram’ to pinpoint the ostensible root causes of their same-sex attraction; in Boy Erased, the participants devise genograms tracing the hereditary trajectories of supposedly same-sex-attraction-causing sins like alcoholism, gambling and abortion, and channel rage towards a literally absent parent imagined to be sitting opposite them. The ensuing evaluations may seem simultaneously canny and comedic – Cameron’s same-sex attraction, for example, is equated to cannibals’ select ingestion of ‘worthy’ enemies, while the Love in Action participants are compared to crumpled-up one-dollar bills whose intrinsic value is nonetheless intact – yet they do match several accounts published in Preventing Harm, Promoting Justice to a T.20

teens self-assess in pairs and fill out an ‘iceberg diagram’ to pinpoint the ostensible root causes of their same-sex attraction; in Boy Erased, the participants devise genograms tracing the hereditary trajectories of supposedly same-sexattraction-causing sins like alcoholism, gambling and abortion.

‘The flames of hell’ Boy Erased begins with a series of proscriptions. After some preliminary scenes that build intrigue, the film proper commences with Jared being dropped off by Nancy at Love in Action. Soon, we listen as he and the other new recruits read out the multitudinous rules that are to govern their lives at the facility – things like always needing to be accompanied by a staff member to the toilet (to avoid the temptation of self-pleasuring), the surrendering of all outside media and a vow to never speak of in-camp proceedings outside its walls. At the end of the pronouncements, Victor invites the participants to repeat after him: ‘I am using sexual sin and homosexuality to fill a God-shaped void in my life. But I am not broken and God loves me.’ It’s not long, however, before Victor contradicts himself (‘God will not love you the way that you are right now,’ he says later in the program) and even pits their yearning for their heavenly Father’s love against their fear of his wrath (alleging that their same-sex attraction brings them closer to the ‘flames of hell’). Rules are similarly smothering in Cameron Post, though their presence is depicted more subtly; in one scene, a teen shares his confusion around figuring out whether masturbating to prevent himself from acting on same-sex attraction is acceptable in the eyes of the Lord.

The program participants’ encounters with such moral imper­ atives parallel the overarching expectation that good Christians unquestioningly abide by God’s moral and natural laws, as set out in the Bible. Homosexuality is an oft-cited violation of these: ‘Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.’21 Notwithstanding the Church’s inconsistent enactment of biblical guidelines for life, along with the striking internal contradiction of framing same-sex attraction as both a choice

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In Cameron Post, the

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ABOVE, L–R: Jared running with friend and eventual abuser Henry (Joe Alwyn); Love in Action head Victor Sykes (Joel Edgerton), both in Boy Erased

and something inborn (the ‘God doesn’t make mistakes’ line, invoked in Cameron Post),22 gay-conversion-therapy programs manage to convince same-sex-attracted individuals of their inherent ‘flawed-ness’. As portrayed in both Cameron Post and Boy Erased, a central (though contentious) line of thought relied on by gay-conversion-therapy initiatives is that of the alignment of biological sex and sexual orientation, along with the concomitant norm of opposite-sex attraction – what gender theorist Judith Butler has called ‘compulsory heterosexuality’.23 In some scenes, this normativity manifests in the briefest of moments, like Lydia’s ridiculous assertion that Cameron’s ‘masculine name’ has caused ‘gender confusion’, or Marshall’s suggestion that Jared’s flirtation with a female classmate embodies a ‘small step towards manhood’. But it is also evident in the overarching structures of the portrayed gay-conversion-therapy treatments themselves.

During the Love in Action program’s initial stages, Victor brings in a guest counsellor, ex-con Brandon (Flea), who spares no time in subjecting the male participants to gruelling ‘manly’ tasks and to taunts about their deficient performances of masculinity.

The main assignment he sets them is to ‘fake it till you make it – become the man you are not’, an exercise grounded on the idea that ‘who you are on the inside can be affected by the outside’.

The importance of ‘keeping up appearances’ is, certainly, a theme interrogated by the two films. While it’s more forthright in Boy Erased (Marshall sending Jared away, Victor and Brandon’s chauvinistic teachings, Henry’s closeted deflection), it’s also embodied in Cameron Post’s ongoing motif of mirrors and photo-taking, as well as in Lakota two-spirit character Adam Red Eagle (Forrest Goodluck), whose presence in God’s Promise is courtesy of his newly elected, newly Christian father’s fear of his child’s gender identity ‘fuck[ing] his image’.

This preoccupation with presenting the ‘right’ gendered be­ haviour taps into longstanding scholarship on the relationship between sexual identity, performativity and subjugation. As philosopher Michel Foucault scrupulously examines in The History of Sexuality, the transformation of sex from a private act into an aspect of public life was significantly tied to the entrenchment of industrial capitalism in modern societies. With sex (in the sense of the procreative act) being integral to population growth and, thus, to growths in production and purchasing manpower, it easily invited policing in the form of monogamy and marriage – an intertwining of economics and morality. Moving beyond the sole influence of religion, this policing soon took hold in wider society, facilitating the designation of non-heteronormative sex/ualities

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depicted in Boy Erased and Cameron Post especially notable is the way they interweave this demonisation of sex/uality with ceremonies of public ‘confession’, which have the ultimate effect of shaming each individual in a collective context.

ABOVE, L–R: Cameron with newfound peers Jane (Sasha Lane) and Adam (Forrest Goodluck); God’s Promise director Lydia Marsh (Jennifer Ehle), both in Cameron Post

‘This wasn’t “hurting to help”’ In Cameron Post’s final act, Cameron protests, ‘How is programming people to hate themselves not emotional abuse?’ She is speaking to an investigator (Andre B Blake) who has been tasked with evaluating the logistical soundness of God’s Promise’s activities. As the film shows, the institution’s asphyxiating combination of surveillance, isolation and scrutiny – matching that of Love in Action – irrevocably breeds in its young people a disempowering degree of shame; as Cameron puts it after a short time in the program, ‘I’m tired of feeling disgusted with myself.’ It should come as no surprise, then, that the self-pity and self-hatred engendered by gay conversion therapy can often lead to acts of self-harm. In a poignant scene, Akhavan forces us to sit with the discomfiting development that Mark (Owen Campbell) – whose father has refused to welcome him home despite the God’s Promise staff’s assurances that he is ‘better’ – has cut off his own genitals. It’s this turn of events that precipitates Cameron’s outburst against gay conversion therapy’s reprehensible implications.

Speaking of sexuality, Butler has argued that ‘oppression works not merely through acts of overt prohibition, but covertly, through […] the production of a domain of unthinkability and unnameability’.27 Here, we are reminded of the moral weight of the loaded terms in both films’ titles: ‘erased’ and ‘miseducation’ both hint at this process of making unthinkable, of making conceptually non-existent.

Arguably the most extreme expression of self-hatred is, of course, a desire for self-annihilation – a damning fact that Boy Erased dramatises during its denouement. By then living safely back at home with his parents, Jared is informed by police that a fellow Love in Action participant (Britton Sear) – who had endured relentless taunts from Victor and Brandon for being too ‘soft’, and even an exorcism incorporating a baptism that bordered on waterboarding – has taken his own life. This isn’t merely a dramatic plot device; as Ryan and her colleagues have established, the frequency of suicide attempts by young people doubles when they have undergone gay conversion therapy or related attempts at ‘curing’ same-sex attraction.28 A recurring, if subtle, motif in both films is the act of running. At various points, Jared and Cameron are shown engaging in the activity for leisure or as an outlet for frustration or anxiety. Running is also

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as both medically aberrant and illegal – and, as such, as things that could be both ‘detected’ and ‘rectified’.24 What makes the gay-conversion-therapy programs depicted in Boy Erased and Cameron Post especially notable is the way they interweave this demonisation of sex/uality with ceremonies of public ‘confession’, which have the ultimate effect of shaming each individual in a collective context. Apart from the intimate paired-up conversations, God’s Promise’s teenagers attend regular ‘circle therapy’ sessions, during which five adolescents – with Lydia’s careful coaxing – share their deepest, darkest thoughts.

In Love in Action, this takes the form of ‘moral inventory’: a ‘catalogue of sins’ (as Victor puts it) shared aloud in front of both the cohort and the camp video camera. As Foucault has argued, while confession has become mainstreamed in modern secular societies – particularly in the form of psychotherapy – the Christian underpinnings of the practice as a way to ‘cleanse’ oneself of guilt remains.25 And, in intensifying the affective impact of confession by situating it in a public context, God’s Promise and Love in Action succeed in heightening the sense of constant scrutiny: it’s no longer just God’s judgement that the gay-conversion-therapy participants have to worry about, but also scrutiny by each facility’s staff and by their peers.26

ABOVE: Jared with his mother, Nancy (Nicole Kidman), in Boy Erased 59

ABOVE: Jared and other Love in Action participants being ranked by a peer according to perceived masculinity, as seen in Boy Erased

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framed as having catalysed each character’s encounter with gay conversion therapy: Lydia suggests that it fosters Cameron’s excessive masculinity, while Jared’s friendship with Henry developed out of their mutual love for the exercise. As metaphor, running is employed (if a little heavy-handedly) to ground the films’ overarching themes. On the one hand, it evokes freedom; on the other, it’s about escapism, the activity – track and field for Cameron, jogging for Jared – always circling back to the point of departure. Through all of these details, the films emphasise the way their protagonists are being forced to run from their struggles with identity, and from their true selves. But whereas, at the conclusion of Boy Erased, Jared manages to let his coming-out journey run its course, allowing him to embrace his homosexuality and establish himself as a proudly ‘out’ writer, all we know about Cameron is that, by narrative’s end, she has run away from God’s Promise.

That we don’t know the outcome of Cameron’s story is in line with Cameron Post’s decidedly more ambiguous approach to its subject matter; as Moretz has said of the production, ‘We didn’t want to beat people over the head with a lesson. It was more about showing the viewer these beautiful interpersonal relationships’.29 Indeed, what the film gives us are insights into what Akhavan describes as ‘the teen experience overall […] when you realize that the adults don’t have all the answers’.30 Nevertheless, both Cameron Post and Boy Erased do proffer a ‘message’ through the two protagonists’ mother figures. At that pivotal moment when it finally sets in that their so-called therapy is notquite-right, each teen breaks their institution’s code of silence and reaches out to their female maternal figure. While Nancy seizes this cry for help and begins interrogating what goes on at Love in Action, Cameron’s aunt Ruth (Kerry Butler) – her de facto guardian, following her parents’ death – caringly dismisses her, entreating her instead to ‘give it a chance […] I’m doing this because I love you.’

As Conley has explained of gay conversion therapy, ‘this kind of bigotry can be perpetuated by people who, at their core, love one another’;31 in Akhavan’s words, ‘Good intentions can lead to terrible actions.’32 Lest we lose or endanger any more of them, it is incumbent upon those of us who are parents, guardians and ­authority figures to not only listen to these same-sex-attracted young people when they confide in us, but also ensure that they are treated with the respect and affection that they deserve.

In as­piring to ‘save’ them from a life of difficulty, we must ensure that we don’t inadvertently run from our own difficult responsibility of treading the bumpy road ahead with them. In a world where some still demonise same-sex-attracted individuals’ romantic and sexual desires, the real change must come not from them, but from us.

Adolfo Aranjuez is editor of Metro and subeditor of Screen Education. He has also edited for Archer and Liminal, and is a freelance writer, speaker and dancer. Adolfo’s essay on queerness is the cover story of the Autumn 2019 issue of Meanjin, and his queer-migrant coming-of-age account is anthologised in Growing Up Queer in Australia. <http://www.adolfoaranjuez.com> SE Endnotes See Frank T Vertosick Jr, ‘Lobotomy’s Back’, Discover, 1 October 1997, <http://discovermagazine.com/1997/oct/ lobotomysback1240>, accessed 6 April 2019.

2 Matthew Wade, ‘Victoria’s Health Watchdog to Ban Anyone Practicing “Gay Conversion Therapy”’, Star Observer, 3 February 2017, <http://www.starobserver.com.au/news/ national-news/victoria-news/watchdog-ban-conversion -therapy/155356>, accessed 6 April 2019.

3 Shalailah Medhora, ‘“Ludicrous Practice” of Gay Conversion Therapy to Be Scrutinised’, Triple J Hack, ABC, 21 September 2017, <https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/gay -conversion-therapy-to-be/8969414>, accessed 6 April 2019.

4 Adam Carey, ‘Victoria to Ban Gay Conversion Therapy’, The Age, 3 February 2019, <https://www.theage.com.au/national/ victoria/victoria-to-ban-gay-conversion-therapy-20190203 -p50vdn.html>, accessed 6 April 2019.

5 Jenny Noyes, ‘NSW Government “on the Same Page” as Victoria on Gay Conversion Therapy’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 24 February 2019, <https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/nsw -government-on-the-same-page-as-victoria-on-gay-conversion -therapy-20190223-p50zu6.html>, accessed 6 April 2019.

6 Karen Cusack, quoted in Carey, op. cit.

7 Caitlin Ryan et al., ‘Parent-initiated Sexual Orientation Change Efforts with LGBT Adolescents: Implications for Young Adult Mental Health and Adjustment’, Journal of Homosexuality, 7 November 2018, pp. 1–15.

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See, for example, ‘APS Calls for Australia-wide Ban on Gay Conversion Therapy’, media release, Australian Psychological Society, 4 February 2019, <https://www.psychology.org.au/ About-Us/news-and-media/Media-releases/2019/APS-calls-for -Australia-wide-ban-on-gay-conversion>, accessed 6 April 2019.

9 See, for example, ‘Doctors Criticise Gay Conversion Therapy Remarks in Marriage Equality Debate’, media release, The Royal Australasian College of Physicians, 18 September 2017, <https://www.racp.edu.au/news-and-events/media-releases/ doctors-criticise-gay-conversion-therapy-remarks-in-marriage -equality-debate>, accessed 6 April 2019.

10 See, for example, Jordan Hirst, ‘Australian Social Workers Call for States to Ban “Gay Conversion Therapy”’, QNews, 7 February 2019, <https://qnews.com.au/australian-social -workers-call-for-states-to-ban-gay-conversion-therapy/>, accessed 6 April 2019.

11 Timothy W Jones et al., Preventing Harm, Promoting Justice: Responding to LGBT Conversion Therapy in Australia, Human Rights Law Centre & La Trobe University, Melbourne, 2018, p. 3, available at <https://static1.squarespace.com/static/ 580025f66b8f5b2dabbe4291/t/5bd78764eef1a1ba57990efe/ 1540851637658/LGBT+conversion+therapy+in+Australia +v2.pdf>, accessed 6 April 2019.

12 See Tim Fitzsimons, ‘Massachusetts Becomes 16th State to Ban “Gay Conversion Therapy”’, NBC News, 10 April 2019, <https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/massachusetts -becomes-16th-state-ban-gay-conversion-therapy-n992581>, accessed 15 April 2019.

13 Christy Mallory, Taylor NT Brown & Kerith J Conron, Conversion Therapy and LGBT Youth, The Williams Institute, UCLA, Los Angeles, January 2018, p. 1, available at <https:// williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Conversion -Therapy-LGBT-Youth-Jan-2018.pdf>, accessed 6 April 2019.

14 Matt Novak, ‘Following Intense Criticism, Google Finally Removes “Gay Conversion Therapy” App’, Gizmodo, 30 March 2019, <https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2019/03/following-intense -criticism-google-finally-removes-gay-conversion-therapy-app/>, accessed 6 April 2019.

15 See, for example, Farrah Tomazin, ‘“I Am Profoundly Unsettled”: Inside the Hidden World of Gay Conversion Therapy’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 9 March 2019, <https://www.smh.com. au/national/i-am-profoundly-unsettled-inside-the-hidden -world-of-gay-conversion-therapy-20180227-p4z1xn.html>; Clair Weaver, ‘Undercover in a Gay Conversion Camp’, Now to Love, 15 July 2016, <https://www.nowtolove.com.au/news/ real-life/what-really-goes-on-during-a-gay-conversion-therapy -session-10468>; and Deb Cuny, as told to Alexa Tsoulis-Reay, ‘What It’s Like to Experience Gay Conversion Therapy’, The Cut, 24 January 2018, <https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/conversion -therapy-experience.html>, all accessed 6 April 2019.

16 See, for example, Gavin Butler, ‘Exorcisms Are Being Used as Gay Conversion Therapy in Indonesia’, VICE, 7 December 2018, <https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/3k95x5/exorcisms -are-being-used-as-gay-conversion-therapy-in-indonesia>; ‘Doctor “Treating” Homosexuals with Electric Shock Summoned

by Delhi Court’, The Times of India, 8 December 2018, <http:// timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/67002592.cms>; and Kammila Naidoo, ‘Sexual Violence and “Corrective Rape” in South Africa’, Global Dialogue, vol. 8, no. 1, April 2018, <http://globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/sexual -violence-and-corrective-rape-in-south-africa/>, all accessed 6 April 2019.

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ABOVE: Cameron Post’s Adam, Jane and Cameron having escaped from God’s Promise

Garrard Conley, ‘A Note from Author Garrard Conley’, in Universal Pictures, Boy Erased press kit, 2018, p. 5.

18 Lydia, a qualified psychologist, has turned her attention to gay conversion therapy after having successfully ‘cured’ Rick of his ‘illness’. The fact that gay-conversion-therapy camps’ staff are often themselves ‘ex-gay’ is emphasised in both films; of Boy Erased, Edgerton muses, ‘When I first realized that many of the staff identified as ex-gay, it fascinated me.

It was a cycle of abuse’; see Universal Pictures, ibid., p. 10.

19 Anthony Venn-Brown, ‘What Is Gay Conversion Therapy? (and What It Is Not)’, Ambassadors & Bridge Builders International website, 22 October 2017, <https://www.abbi. org.au/2017/10/what-is-gay-conversion-therapy/>, accessed 7 April 2019.

20 See Jones et al., op. cit., p. 34.

21 Leviticus 18:22 (King James Version), available at BibleHub, <https://biblehub.com/leviticus/18-22.htm>, accessed 7 April 2019, emphasis removed.

22 For an accessible discussion of this, see Stephen Law, ‘What’s Wrong with Gay Sex?’, The Philosophy Gym: 25 Short Adventures in Thinking, Review, London, 2003, pp. 10–24.

23 Judith Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, in Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale & David M Halperin (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, Routledge, New York, 1993, p. 318.

24 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley, Penguin, Melbourne, 2008 [1976], pp. 23–6, 44.

25 ibid., pp. 58–65.

26 The pre-emptive fear of scrutiny, as enabled by ­surveillance, and the way it results in self-policed (and -policing) behav­ iour is explored by Foucault in another extensive work; see Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, Vintage, New York, 1995 [1975].

27 Butler, op. cit., p. 312.

28 See ‘First Study Shows Pivotal Role of Parents in Conversion Efforts to Change LGBT Adolescents’ Sexual Orientation’, media release, Family Acceptance Project, 8 November 2018, <https://familyproject.sfsu.edu/conversion-therapy-begins -at-home>, accessed 9 April 2019.

29 Chloë Grace Moretz, quoted in Beachside Films, The Miseducation of Cameron Post press kit, 2017, p. 6.

30 Desiree Akhavan, quoted in Beachside Films, ibid., p. 5.

31 Conley, quoted in Universal Pictures, op. cit., p. 5.

32 Akhavan, quoted in Beachside Films, op. cit., p. 4.

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