THR Interview Series: Garrard Conley
“Teaching orders my life, and it gives me inspiration.”
The Headlight Review’s non-fiction editor Giselle Reid recently interviewed Garrard Conley, Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at Kennesaw State University. Conley is the author of New York Times bestseller and Lambda-nominated, Boy Erased, a memoir about identity, love and understanding, now translated in over a dozen languages. His story was adapted into is now a major motion picture directed by Joel Edgerton starring Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, and Lucas Hedges (Golden Globe nomination for best actor in drama). He has a Master’s in English from Auburn University and a Master’s in Fine Arts in Fiction from Brooklyn College.
GISELLE REID: What classes are you teaching at KSU?
GARRARD CONLEY: Currently, I'm teaching two creative nonfiction classes: one for graduate students and one for undergrads. Both of them are introductory classes. My idea is: “Let me throw a bunch of genres at you-- memoir, travel writing, humor pieces--and see what you like.” It’s built to be 50% theory-based, looking at how craft works in these books, and the other 50% is workshop.
REID: So, why did you choose KSU? Especially coming from New York City.
CONLEY: I lived in New York for three years; my husband and I own an apartment there. So, I’m invested in New York. However, I've always wanted to return to the South. As you know, I grew up in Arkansas and I went to Auburn. There’s also the fact that I love teaching; it structures my day. I have a pretty tight schedule. I make a strict schedule no matter what job I'm in, because I used to teach high school full time. That required me to get up at five in the morning, write until seven, teach all day and then do extracurriculars. By the time I got home at 9:00, I was like, “Give me my wine, and let's go to sleep!”
Here at KSU, I have an easier schedule. It's pretty flexible. I’m sure that will change as I take on more service opportunities and finish up on my novel, but right now I'm only teaching two classes, both once a week. So, I get to spend a lot of time preparing for those classes, reading things that inspire me, and—most important—writing. I always choose different texts for each class that I teach, so that I don't repeat myself very often, which means that I'm learning with the students. You know, some of the books that I choose, I haven't even read yet because I want to be excited whenever we go into it together. I've read reviews or I've asked colleagues about them. Like this one we're reading, called In the Dream House.
REID: I love that book.
CONLEY: Have you read it?
REID: Yes!
CONLEY: Yeah, it’s great! It’s terrifying. It rakes you over the coals, and you feel like you want to be swaddled in a blanket for weeks and never emerge. Yet it's beautifully structured, beautifully written. I knew it was not a traditional memoir. I knew that it was going to elicit conversation around what is the form of memoir: What can you get away with? What can you change?
To get back to why I chose to teach in the South: I grew up in a very fundamentalist environment with quite a bit of brainwashing. As a result, my worldview was limited. This doesn’t just happen in the South, you know, but the racism and the xenophobia that was in the water around me was part of my upbringing. Perhaps that’s why I feel uniquely qualified to teach a kind of openness to others’ experiences, which is what literature does best. I don’t believe these lessons have to be pedantic or punitive, but rather an invitation into a larger way of living, one that goes beyond the moment of our narrow lives. I feel I am a good fit for students who already understand this way of living, but I’m also a good fit for students who are in transitional periods of their lives, where they are just discovering the magic of literature. I am good at saying to that student: “Okay, I understand your background. I share it. I’m not here to trash Christianity or any of your other closely held beliefs (so long as they are not harmful ones), but I am here to open us all up to new ways of thinking.” That includes me as well.
So, when I was applying for jobs, I made sure to apply to the ones where I knew I could make a difference for certain kinds of students. In the end, it was between KSU and one other Southern university. However, the minute I met Tony Grooms, I fell in love with this program. He is a kind, brilliant person.
REID: Yeah, he is.
CONLEY: He’s thoughtful. He’s literary. He's that old school professor that you want to worship, you know, he's just so smart. I immediately felt a bond with him and with the program in general. Everyone was so kind. KSU really felt like a place where people were genuinely invested in writing and literature, and not all that cynical about it. That just sold me on it. And so, in the middle of the pandemic, I got the job offer. I was just trying to walk down one street in New York without getting infected, and I got the phone call. I was just like, “Nobody gets a job in the middle of COVID. Of course, I'm gonna say yes!” I’m really lucky.
Teaching for me orders my life, and it gives me inspiration, automatic inspiration. Yeah, there are students that are sometimes frustrating to deal with. That happens everywhere. But in general, I feel like students are constantly inspiring. They're trying to do it, you know, they're trying to enter into an industry in which the gatekeepers are slowly crumbling. And, you see these doors opening up, which is very exciting, and to see it through the students’ perspectives is helpful. It gives you an insight that you can't get if you're this cynical New Yorker, sitting in your apartment, you know, worried about your next book deal.
REID: So, talking about book deals, tell me, how was that process? Because, I'm thinking, all of us are thinking, “We're going to write that book. Yes, we might get 30 rejections, but we will eventually get it published.” So, how was your experience?
CONLEY: I like the attitude and I like how you already said 30 rejections. It's good. It’s actually more like 50.
(laughter)
Do you know the writer Nicole Dennis-Benn? She wrote a novel called Here Comes The Sun.
REID: Yes, she's great. I’ve read her book!
CONLEY: I was at one of her panels, and she said that she had sent out query letters to 60 agents. She only got a couple responses back. 60! We're talking about an early draft of Here Comes The Sun, which had to be great, and had to be at least interesting on a subject level, right? We can also bring up the fact that she's a Black woman in America, which meets with a lot of roadblocks. But, the fact that someone as talented as Nicole Dennis-Benn sent out a manuscript to 60 agents is really telling of how hard it is in this industry to get anywhere.
I always tell my own story because I think it illustrates an important part of the process. I didn't write a word of Boy Erased for 10 years. I waited a decade before I wrote any of it because I didn't want to be angry, and I didn't want it to feel like I had a vendetta against people. I wanted it to be a work of real literature. By that, I mean creating a story with well-rounded characters, a world that’s not black and white, one with a lot of nuance. Obviously, it takes a side, but it also presents my parents very humanely, I believe (and so they’ve told me). About ten years after my experience in conversion therapy, I was in a nonfiction course in an MFA degree at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. It was a wonderful place. I only took one year there because I fell in love with a Bulgarian man and moved to Bulgaria, which is another story.
REID: That story sounds really exciting!
CONLEY: When I was enrolled in a nonfiction workshop at UNC Wilmington, the first day we had to go around the table and tell the class what we were going to write about. And I had no idea. I was just like, “I'm taking a nonfiction course, but I'm here for fiction. I don't know why I'm even in this class.” When it got to be my time, I just blurted out, “I think I'm going to write about conversion therapy and the time people tried to turn me straight.” And everyone in the room leaned forward. They were like, “Wait, what?”
It was this thing that felt so shameful, and even boring to me because it was my life. In the area where I grew up, conversion therapy was normal. My dad was applauded in that community for doing this terrible thing. And so, when people were like, “Wait, that's crazy, and fascinating! I need to know what happens,” that's when I knew I had a story. I really did leave that classroom thinking, “Oh, I think this is actually really important. And I think that it's going to be a book.” Then, when I went home over Thanksgiving break, I found the Love In Action handbooks that had been given to me at conversion therapy camp in the bottom drawer of my bedroom! I thought I had burned everything. I found it, I pulled it out and I started reading it, and I saw the notes that I'd written at that time. My first reaction was to walk out into the living room while my mom was sitting there and say, “I think this is gold. I think I just found gold for my project!” I wasn't traumatized. I was just, like, “Here it is.” Because it was documentary evidence that I could use for my book. It helped me enter into that world in such a better way.
Then, later that year, I attended AWP (Associated Writers and Presses). I went to the one in Boston, during the middle of that big snowstorm. This was in 2013. While there, I was invited to hang out with a writer friend I barely knew, who I’d met once at another event. And, you know, I wasn't a known writer. I hadn't published anything. So, I got invited to this really cool literary party and I didn’t know what to do! I was sitting at the party, and I think someone said that one of the writers of The Simpsons was at the other end of the table. And so, this man was going off about craft, and just sort of holding court, and I kind of hated it. I turned to the woman sitting next to me and said, “Are all writer get-togethers like this? Like, this is terrible!” And she was like, “Yeah, it is. It's always like this.” Then, she asked, “What are you doing?” I was like, “Well, I'm trying to write this thing. I don't know if it's a memoir, but it's about conversion therapy, and my dad being a preacher.” The woman's name was Maud Newton. She wrote a lot for the New York Times, and she wrote about fundamentalism. And, she had an agent whose party she was going to right after that dinner, and she said, “Well, you know, my husband wasn't able to come because of the snowstorm. Do you want to come as my plus one to this agent party?” And I said, “Uh, yes!”
Really, the reason I went was because it was an open bar. I was really excited. Free alcohol!
I'm still a sucker for free anything. So, I went to this party at this bar, and I got four rum and cokes (which is a bad drink). At one point in the night, she said, “I want you to meet my agent, and I want you to sit down across from her and pitch your work.” And, I was like, “I'm drunk! I can't do this!” So, I sat down across from this agent and I was so terrified. It was actually her agent’s assistant, so he was also an agent, but he was filling in for her. And he said, “Well, what do you want to write about?” I just told him, “You know, my dad's a preacher, I got sent to conversion therapy, and you know, it didn't work.” And he just sort of laughed. Then, he said, “That's actually a pretty good pitch! Do you want to send me some pages?”
So, this is what I did. This is how you know that I was still savvy, even though I was getting the free drinks. Because I'd been trained to realize, just in that one year of grad school, that you should never pass up these opportunities. It's so rare. So, I immediately thanked him, got his card, went back to my hotel, drank a ton of water, took a shower, got coffee, and then sat down and wrote my query letter and edited the first 20 pages of this thing that I had been writing. I sent it to him immediately that night, because I wanted him to remember me. I wanted it to seem like I might be a little crazy, but I was also very motivated. For two days, he didn't respond, and I just thought, “It’s not gonna work, that was crazy. He was just drunk at a party.” But, he sent me a response back and said that he wanted to see more pages. And I just lied! I was like, “Oh, yeah, I mean, I have a lot more pages. I just need a week to clean it up.”
REID: And you had a week to write it!
CONLEY: I went back to my school, I skipped my classes, and wrote for 14 hours a day. That's all I did. I sent it to him. Within a day, he said, “I love this. I want to sign you. And I want to be your agent for as many books as you want to write.” That's really what happened.
REID: Wow. What do you call that? Luck?
CONLEY: Luck! It was just luck!
REID: What an amazing story! So, as an agent, he's the one who tries to get the publishers for you. Right?
CONLEY: Yeah. Now, my agent is Julie Barer, but at the time it was her assistant, William Boggess. He was wonderful. He took a risk with me. He was just like, “I see potential here. I know you're a first-time writer, but we're going to do it. We're going to shape it together.” Finding an agent like that is really rare. My agent, she'll read everything I write and give me edits before we send it to an editor. So, it's two rounds of editing. Three, when you get down to it, because I share with my friends first. Once we’re done editing, we share it with an editor who then edits it again. So, there's multiple layers of workshopping. That's really helpful. Basically what happens is that your agent goes, “Okay, I think the draft is ready, we're going to send it out to 15 to 30 editors that I think will like this.” The agent writes a specific note for each editor. And, if enough editors are interested, they'll have an auction. They'll say, “Okay, place your bids, and now we're going to have a second round of the auction.” I never had that because mine sold to one publisher. It was sent out to 30, and I talked with three people. The other two backed out of their deal, and the third one accepted it.
REID: Was that Penguin Random House?
CONLEY: Yes, so each big publishing house has what's called “imprints.” The imprints are the smaller parts within the bigger company. The imprints have their own flavors, like Riverhead, which is the one I'm with. They publish Marlon James.
REID: I’m waiting for Marlon James’ movie, hopefully they’re gonna adapt one of his books to film. It’s gonna be wild.
CONLEY: They also published R.O. Kwon and Brandon Taylor, really a lot of great writers. I was really excited to work with them, but they were my only option. They were the ones who came in and said, “we're going to work with you.” You know, it was not built as a big book. It was seen as a small print run, not a huge advance, just a literary memoir that they'll be proud to publish. One that might go on to win an award or something. That was how they framed it. Which I was totally okay with!
REID: Of course!
CONLEY: Yeah, that's the world I was in, and that's the one I wanted. I wanted that literary cachet. I wanted to be a writer’s writer, eventually. So, those were the only people I really cared about. I didn't care about a general public or a general readership. I didn't even think about that. It just wasn't in my brain to think of myself as being a popular author. I didn't even like most popular things. I'll watch a good blockbuster movie, or, every now and then, I'll read a really big, highly praised book. But, it's gonna be a critically acclaimed book, like In The Dream House, what I’m reading now. As much as I like her, I probably won't be reading Elizabeth Gilbert. There's just a difference in taste for me. But, that all ended when they decided to make a movie out of my book.
REID: So, before the movie, how long did it take to actually publish the book and see it on the shelves?
CONLEY: It took a while. I sold it in 2013, on proposal. What that means is that they read about 75 pages, said they liked, saw an outline of the rest of the book, and said, “Okay, well, we'll give you an advance and you write the rest of it. You'll get the rest of your advance when you turn it in.” I don't mind saying it, because I think it's important to be transparent. My advance altogether was $75,000. It was good. Especially for someone that was a grad student.
REID: That's really good. I mean, it's comfortable. You can write, and pay your bills.
CONLEY: Yeah, I mean, it's pretty much the equivalent of a really great, competitive fellowship. But, it was in $25,000 increments. So, interestingly, you were very compelled to finish it because you're like, “I want the rest of the money!” It’s actually a pretty good model. So, I got $25,000, but I stayed employed the whole time. I taught high school in Bulgaria for three years, which is part of that other story. But, I did have the cushion of having the money, which made things a little better. It was just so cool to be paid for writing to begin with, and I was so excited by that.
REID: I can't wait.
CONLEY: I know right, like, getting paid to write! What? It didn't matter if it was $500, I would have still said, “YES!” That's such a milestone, you know?
So, I sold it on proposal in 2013, turned it in 2014, and it wasn't published until May of 2016.
REID: So, it took two years?
CONLEY: My editor took a while to get back. She was very swamped. I lost my first editor, who went to another publisher. That's what's called being orphaned. It's a terrible term that they still use in the industry, because it makes you feel so bad! You're like, “Wait, what just happened?” And then you get passed on to somebody else! Luckily, my new editor, Laura Perciasepe, is wonderful. Without her, I wouldn't have gone on to do fiction, which I'll talk about later. She had a good vision for the book, but she also said, “This is your book, this is your personal story, and whatever quirks you have that you want to keep, keep them.” Because of this, the structure book is rather odd for some people. The way that I continue to use images over and over again can annoy the average Goodreads reviewer, if you look. But, you shouldn't. The average Goodreads reviewer doesn’t like all the highfalutin literary stuff.
So, it took about three years. Altogether, it was 10 years of waiting to write a word, then, basically five years of the whole process. It was a lot. For one book!
REID: So, soon after it was published, the film director found you?
CONLEY: Yes, the director Joel Edgerton. So, this is a crazy story as well! I live under some sort of weird star that I don't understand. And it will probably turn evil at some point and ruin the rest of my life.
REID: Well, in reading the book and watching the movie, it seemed like the movie did a pretty good job of bringing out that personality. That you’re genuine. And that makes a big difference. I can feel the genuineness in your heart, in the whole thing. To just agree to the therapy, because you want to do the right thing. You always wanted to do the right thing, and you always wanted to be honest about it. Somehow, that has to pay off.
CONLEY: I hope. In Greek plays, everyone always has a fatal flaw. Usually, it's blindness. And, I think that that's mine too. I was blind to how harmful people who love you can be. That's why I identified with Carmen Machado’s books so much. I thought, “Oh, she thought if she was loved, she was safe. I thought that too.” I think that's a really brilliant theme. But, yeah, I think that's my fatal flaw. I always believe that everyone probably has good intentions. I think that to live in any other way is kind of depressing. I want to believe that people can be good at heart. I know that that's Pollyanna-esque, but, maybe I’m Pollyanna.
REID: I felt a lot like that too growing up. I grew up in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.
CONLEY: Oh, I know them.
REID: So, yeah, it took me so long. So long to get out of that mindset that the church taught me. I don’t believe in everything anymore, but, still, I catch myself thinking, “They’re trying the best that they can. They’re doing what they believe.”
CONLEY: I don’t think that that’s a bad attitude to have, as long as you can look clear-sightedly at the things that are flawed. It’s equally a mistake to cast them all as demons as it is to cast them all as angels. They’re just people.
REID: They are just people, trying to figure out who they are, trying to figure out how the world works, trying to figure out life and death and how to explain it. It’s cultural. But, the bad part is when they try to use that to control other people.
CONLEY: That is the bad part, and that’s where I try to focus most of my activism.
REID: So, soon after it was published, the film director found you?
CONLEY: Yes. it was rather strange because the producer of the film discovered my book by finding it on a shelf in her local bookstore. She saw it and went, “That's a good cover,” and then picked it up. I guess the key is to make sure it's a good cover.
She said that she had an immediate realization that she wanted the actor Lucas Hedges to play that role next. She thought it was meant for him because of his earnestness and his kindness. And a few weeks later, I was meeting with Joel Edgerton in a coffee shop in Brooklyn. My husband is a huge film person. He's seen everything, he knows everything. And he was like, “Is this really happening?” And I was like, “I don't know, you should come into the coffee shop and make sure I'm not just talking to an empty chair. I’m not crazy!” So, he actually did! He went into the coffee shop and got coffee, sent me a picture of it and then went back out. I'm talking to Joel and I look at my phone, and my husband goes, “It's real.”
REID: Wow.
CONLEY: Immediately, Joel wanted to meet with other survivors of conversion therapy. He was into it for the right reasons. Then I met Lucas, about a week later. We visited all these churches and talked about religion. He didn't really understand Christianity that well. He just grew up very sheltered in the opposite way. His father is a filmmaker, and his father made What's Eating Gilbert Grape, which is a great movie. He wrote the novel for it and everything. So, it was kind of strange to suddenly be in this environment where this family didn't really know anything about religion. And they all asked me to explain it to them. I go, “Well, you see, there was this Jesus guy.”
And then, it all went really rapidly. My mom and I were on set like five or six times. My mom got to know Nicole Kidman. They still email each other, which is crazy to me. It's amazing. Everyone that was involved in the making the adaptation read the book, and were very sensitive to the issues. They knew what they were doing. They were like, “We're gonna use this to try to end conversion therapy, we're going to popularize the issue, and that's what we're doing.”
REID: And that’s what they did.
CONLEY: Yeah, it had a huge impact. And then, the person who was so ambitious that he left immediately from being drunk at a party to write a cover letter was just like, “Oh, I can use this now to get a podcast and work with Radiolab, who I love. I can do dream things that I couldn't do before because every door has opened.” So, my friend David Craig and I--David was a co-producer of the film, and he was an actor. He played the role of the blond-haired greeter who's chasing me around at the end.
REID: Yeah! I was mad at him!
CONLEY: For months, he would go places and gay men would shout at him. Like, “Get outta here!” and would get mad. Isn’t that funny? He's the sweetest person in real life. We're really close friends now. He and I pitched our podcast for Radiolab— I mean, all the rest of it was awesome. Meeting Nicole Kidman, doing all that, that was fantastic. But, the coolest moment, honestly, was when I was allowed to pitch to the Radiolab team. I've been listening to Radiolab for 15 years and I love their research. I just did a really good pitch with David and they immediately went, “Yeah, we want to work with you.” And I couldn't believe that they said yes, I really couldn't. That was just amazing. That was even cooler to me than the rest of it.
REID: You’re no longer doing the podcast, though.
CONLEY: No, it was four episodes. I would want to do the podcast again, but it would take a lot to get everyone back on board, and their schedules are crazy.
REID: So, it’s been two years since the film has been out?
CONLEY: Yeah, it came out in November 2018. It was filmed in 2017, and it was actually filmed in Atlanta. It was filmed in Atlanta, in Decatur, and there was even one day of filming in Marietta.
REID: Wow. Now I'm going to go back and look at it to see if I recognize anything.
CONLEY: If you go on IMDB, you'll find all the locations.
REID: That is interesting. So, that's the first book that you actually decided to write and it was published. That's just so amazing. Do you have other projects in mind?
CONLEY: I do. I sold once again on proposal, I guess that's what I do. I sold a novel, and actually it's due in November. I have to finish it by November. It's a novel that is currently called The Great Revelation, and it is about an 18th-century English minister in the colonies and his family in Massachusetts. It's set during The Great Awakening, which is the big period of revival where the Protestant faith became a little bit wilder.
Do you know Jonathan Edwards? He did “Sinners In The Hands of An Angry God,” which is a very famous sermon where he describes a sinner’s soul as a spider over a candle flame. It's pretty scary.
REID: I don’t remember that one.
CONLEY: Basically, to give you an idea of it, it's The Great Awakening. So, suddenly preaching, which was very staid, very proper, almost like they're reading from notes, suddenly becomes emotion. Everything is about emotion and everything is about the fear of hell. Or, about all of those questions, like, “Are you saved?” At the time, most of the big churches in the colonies were Congregationalists, which means that they believed in the Elect. The Elect means that, before you were even born, it was decided whether or not you were going to go into heaven. So, you could really do nothing about it if you're a horrible sinner. Every mistake that you make is another indication that you might be going to hell. The image was very important, like you had to also present as a good Christian. Within that environment, I placed this preacher and his family who are all queer, even though they're a traditional family and they don't know it about each other yet. And, there are no words for being queer at that time. So, the whole book explores what it is to be in a family that presents as straight, but every single member is queer.
REID: Interesting.
CONLEY: It was difficult to write. It mostly focuses on the brother and sister, who are younger, because it's easier to get into their psyche because they're not completely corrupted. It's really fun. It's kind of a mix between a romp--there's a lot of like action that I'm not used to writing--and a lot of psychological torture. Which is stuff that I'm good at writing, you know, I'm very good at showing people tortured by their belief systems.
I like to think that it's a little bit more fun. Boy Erased is very hard for me to even read anymore. It's just so dark.
REID: I was moved from the book. I was afraid to watch the movie because I was thinking to myself, “Okay, now I'm going to watch it. Like, it's going to be bad. Because I was, really upset with even the thought of it. I didn't know that conversion therapy was so widespread.
CONLEY: And it's still widespread. It's actually widespread in places over the place, now. It's just hidden.
That’s when they do it even more though. That's when they get real, they're like, “Let's just go underground and find churches that will be sympathetic to us.” I don't know any specific stuff about the area, but I can guarantee you that the minute that LGBTQ rights become mainstream, these places go underground and they usually attach themselves to churches.
REID: Yeah. Because that's where it starts.
CONLEY: There were secular versions, but it was mostly tied to churches. The churches wouldn't have been able to do their work if it hadn't been for the cultural poison that was already there. Love In Action had this whole campaign that I found out through later research. They campaigned around the fact that this one man was dying of AIDS, and they wrote this horrific letter of what he looked like and how he was being tortured by his medication and dying. They advertised it, saying, “You don't want this to happen to your kids.”
The thing is that the church had nothing to do with that. The organization just used what was already in the culture about people with AIDS. That was Reagan, that was laughing at people dying. Yeah, the church had a big role, but I think people are kind of missing the point if they think that the church didn't rely heavily on the bigotry that already existed in the culture.
REID: This culture is based on the church too. “In God We Trust,” right?
CONLEY: Yeah, “In God We Trust.”
REID: So, you’re a fiction writer and a nonfiction writer.
CONLEY: You know, I don’t really know how to separate out the two. I mean, one of the things in my courses that I always say is, “I'm going to teach you all about these genres, and then I'm basically going to tell you that you can do whatever you want. And that genre is mostly only your major concern when you're invested in marketing or selling your book.” I mean, there are lots of novelists who write autofiction, which is a combination of fiction and non-fiction. There are plenty of non-fiction writers who are adding fictional elements to their books. It’s like a Pick Your Own Adventure.
REID: I, myself, wanted to write non-fiction. I told myself, “I'm going to write the true story.” For, I read a little bit of what you said from an interview that you said about how it was very difficult to go back to that. I found it so difficult to go to that point, that painful part, that I decided I was going to make it a fiction so that I can remove myself and still talk about it. How did you find the bravery to be so transparent about your life?
CONLEY: You have to be sort of built for it, I think. A lot of people have so much squeamishness around it like, “Who am I to tell my version of someone else's life? If I look at my mom in this book, is it accurate?” The way I got around it, after like a year of thinking about it and worrying about whether or not I was telling the truth or not, was that this is my memory. That’s what a memoir is. It's a collection of one person's memories and memories are flawed.
So, the contract with the reader is very important from the beginning. They need to know that this is in some ways artificial. And what parts are artificial? Well, dialogue is artificial because you can only remember the gist of it. You're recreating it based off of what you know, and interviews with other people.
You're never going to have the perfect dialogue. You're probably going to forget that the teapot was red instead of blue, and you're probably going to leave out something really important. It's just like you're talking to a friend who tells you about a memory. You know this person's fallible, right? Like, this is probably another side to the story, but are you still interested? Yes. Why are you interested? Because the individual exploration of one collection of memories is interesting. I think that when you approach it that way, it becomes easier. I think where writers sometimes get mixed up is when they think that they can capture the Truth, with a capital T. That's why a lot of my readings are kind of messing with that, or showing that you can use other genres to enter into that truth. What we're really getting at in other memoirs, or fiction, is emotional truth. I think you have to go with wherever you can enter into that emotional truth. If it's fiction that gives you a facade that allows you to enter into the pain, then do it. For me, it was non-fiction because I felt that this was a social issue that I could shed light on.
I also felt that people didn't always believe me or understand my experience, or they just talked around it or they made it into a joke. Or, they said like, “Oh, well that was stupid that you signed up for that.” It was just unfathomable to so many people, especially in New York. They just couldn't get it.
When I would say, “Actually, there's two clinics right up there, up the block. You also have conversion therapy,” they just couldn't see it as happening in their own backyard. They saw it only as a Southern thing. So, I saw that if I was going to make it fiction, then that would limit some of the power that I had to speak the truth. In order to prove that this was important and not some crazy exaggerated story, I had to say, “No, this actually happened.” And yes, that sacrificed some of my comfort, but I was so upset that survivors didn't have their stories out there, that we weren't believed, or that we were made fun of. Or that there was only one story and the story was comedy.
South Park had an episode about it, where somebody killed themselves, and it’s played for humor. I love South Park, but it wasn't the story I wanted to tell. The other one was an SNL sketch. It was also funny, and assumed that everyone was going to sleep with each other.
The other one was But, I'm A Cheerleader!, which is a great movie. If you haven't watched it, it's really campy and it has a RuPaul in it. Wonderful movie, but it's a jokey, comedy movie. It's meant to be played for laughs. And I just thought, “No, the truth is more terrifying than the fiction, actually, because these are people who, out of love or out of good intentions, did horrible things.”
That to me was a bigger story. It was a more American story. It even had elements of Gatsby in it where it's like, “You want to become whatever you want? Well, you can lie about anything and become that. This is the country where you can do that, and we will now export it to every other country.” It's a kind of deconstruction of the American dream, which you can't do in fiction. With fiction, it would be too heavy handed. It would be gauche, almost, for me to do all of that stuff. People would go, “There's no way they said that.” Well, here's my handbook. Here's what they actually said. Then, people are more shocked because they realize that this is happening right now. It was that kind of energy that I needed for the book. I was willing to sacrifice my comfort to do that.
REID: Thank you. There's a lot of thought that went into that decision, and it's good that you have the insight to realize that that's what the best choice is. A lot of times, people don't think that far.
CONLEY: Well, it didn't come to me at once. Really, what caused it was me making a pros and cons list about what would happen if my family hated me because of this book. I thought, “Is it worth it?”
And, “What's the worth of what I'm doing? Is it one person feeling less alone? Is it one person not sending their kids to conversion therapy? Is that worth losing my family again?” And, the answer was yes. A resounding, “Yes.” There were many nights I stayed up thinking about that, selfishly not wanting to do it, but the answer was always yes. I mean, my dad shouldn't have been a preacher if he didn't want me to do this work because I absorbed that. You do what is calling you. You do the right thing, even if it's unpopular, you do it.
REID: Yes, he created you that way.
CONLEY: One time, I was at a church in Tacoma, Washington, and I was speaking with a group of church members. It was a good place, but it was not completely comfortable. I sent him a picture of me standing behind a pulpit. And I said, “Look, we're doing the same thing.”
And, to his credit, he laughed.
REID: This could be off the record. See, the rape scene was uncomfortable for me. It was very uncomfortable. I mean, that's the issue that I'm going to be writing about. And so, I was wondering if you ever thought about addressing that issue as well. Since I've been an MAPW, I’ve been doing research about female sexual perpetrators and same sex rape. Are thinking about tackling that issue in the future?
CONLEY: I feel like it was left undone. I put that in there because it was truthful, and it shows a certain logic to the church that's really messed up. Basically, because of what I've been taught, I was like, “Oh, if a pedophile raped me, then I must be a pedophile and I need to be cured.” Even though there had never been any attraction to children in my life, I still internalized that. It was important for me to show that as part of my motivation to join, and how Love In Action used that against me in some really messed up ways. Even though they didn't know. They were messing with my mind, triggering me constantly with methodology. I think I could have brought more of it into the second half of the book. I just didn't because I was like, “Ugh, I want to move past that.”
REID: It's difficult. You tend to want to just get past that. For me, I wonder how much of that affects who you are, because it's buried there, but it's still there.
CONLEY: I know, and no one ever talks about it either. I mean, I'm actually grateful that you asked that question. I think it should be on the record. I think it's important. I do want to tackle it again, especially after reading In The Dream House. It feels like she opened a door to more discussions about it. Male-on-male rape is something that is often only described in prison literature, or discussions of that nature. I think queer people don't want to talk about it because it seems to confirm certain bad stereotypes about us. A lot of people in conversion therapy said, “Well, if you were raped or abused, then that's a good reason why you might be gay.”
It just confuses you when they use that against you. There's no evidence to support that, that being raped correlates with being gay. I was already attracted to men before that. If anything, it has the adverse effect to make you not want to explore your sexuality more and not understand more about yourself. I just think that would be a really interesting thing to tackle. Will I tackle it yet? No. I'm going to do a fiction, I'm going to do a few more essays, and then I'll maybe do that, when it's time.
REID: It’s a struggle with telling the truth. Especially when it's in a family. I'd just rather fictionalize it, and if they read it, they'll figure it out. They’ll know it's them.
CONLEY: Do you know Alice Sebold? She wrote The Lovely Bones. It's narrated by the ghost of a girl who was raped and then died. It's a really haunting book. Then, Alice Sebold also wrote a memoir about her own experience of getting raped and left for dead, and she survived. So, she said she turned the other book into a kind of therapy because it was like, “What would have happened if I died? And would it happen to my family if I died?” So, that was an exploration of an alternate reality in which she had actually died, when in reality she had been left for dead and she survived. She wrote two different books from one experience. I think that would be really interesting, like if I was going to go back in, maybe I’d fictionalize it.
REID: I mean, at this point everyone already knows that it happened.
CONLEY: Yeah, exactly. It would lend credibility to my story, if anything. Yeah. But I'm not sure I want to.
REID: You don't think you want to do it.
CONLEY: Yet.
REID: It's hard. People don't really understand the depths of it. Society overlooks it. Like you said, all this time, no one's ever asked you about it. People just overlooked it. They didn't want to hear it. They want to pretend it didn't happen. They want you to pretend that it didn't happen. They want you to think that you're making it up or you asked for it or you caused it. It was your fault. It wasn't their fault.
CONLEY: There were older gay men who told me that my rape was not real because it wasn't anal rape. They told me that, because it was a forced blowjob, that it couldn't have been real. That was a real thing that many people told me. Luckily, I was on solid enough ground to be like, “Okay, you need to see the therapist. I'm sorry that whatever happened to you has made you think that's okay to say.”
REID: That's the reason why, a lot of times, it gets really hard for men because men have been raped by women as well. And, they won't say it because of the masculinity thing.
CONLEY: Yup.
REID: And then, people don't believe it! People just go, “Well, you must've liked it,” you know?
CONLEY: Or, like when women who are teachers rape younger boys, people are always just like, “Oh, well that's the dream.” Even if the boy enjoyed it, that is psychological damage. He doesn't know that later, that's going to be a thing. It's just too young to know. Too young.
REID: I’ve kept you so long, and I appreciate you.
CONLEY: No, I enjoyed it!
REID: Hopefully, I’ll see you on campus.
CONLEY: Yeah, definitely.