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 But it was only after watching "Boy Erased," the movie version
of his own story, that what happened to him fully came home.
"With memoir and writing, you are able to create some padding
around the experience. But on film you can't hide anything,"
Conley said.
"I was able to have some distance from it and to see myself and
think 'Oh, I didn't do anything wrong.' I submitted to
conversion therapy under duress - I was going to lose my family,
the God that I knew, and the community. When you see it enacted
on screen it makes it a little bit clearer," he said.
"Boy Erased," opening in U.S. movie theaters on Friday, stars
Lucas Hedges as Conley, with Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe
playing his parents.
It dramatizes then 19 year-old Conley's stay at a "Love in
Action" religious fundamentalist center in 2004 where gay men
and women were beaten with bibles by family members, drilled in
"manly" sports, and told their same-sex attraction was linked to
alcoholism and gambling in their families.
Some 700,000 Americans have been forced to undergo a form of
conversion therapy, according to the Williams Institute at the
University of California, Los Angeles. Some 36 U.S. states still
allow the practice.
Conley hopes the film will serve both as an act of solidarity to
those who have gone through such programs and to help end them.
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He has helped set up a website, with the backing of LGBT groups, and
a podcast series, "Unerased," that takes a comprehensive look at the
history of gay conversion therapy through the stories of those who
have gone through it, their parents, and some of those who used to
administer.
One of them is former "Love in Action" director John Smid, who
resigned from the organization in 2008, later married his gay
partner, and who has apologized publicly.
"I am happy to see John doing the right stuff, and it is important
for him and people like him to say, 'This never worked'," Conley
said.
Conley says the real heroes are people like his mother, who rescued
him from the conversion program, but who still live in small
American towns where LGBT people are shunned.
"My mom is out here in Los Angeles for the film, getting applause.
But when she goes back home to Arkansas people are like 'Oh, I'm so
sorry your son is gay'."
"She has to deal with that bigotry on a daily basis, like I used to
have to. Those are the heroes that actually change culture. The rest
of us leave," he said.
(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; editing by Darren Schuettler)
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