Apr. 8, 2026, 5:46 PM EDT
By
Hannah Holland
Garrard Conley begins his 2016 memoir “Boy Erased” in a semicircle of folding chairs under halogen lights. Conley, then 19, had only just arrived at Love in Action, a cruelly named so-called gay conversion center, in Memphis.
One of the practitioners stood in front of Conley and his cohorts, all dressed in uniform, and said: “The first thing you have to do is recognize how you’ve become dependent on sex, on things that are not from God.”
For people facing similar circumstances today, the Supreme Court just made it possible for things to get worse.
“We were learning Step One of Love in Action’s Twelve Step program,” Conley writes in his memoir, “a set of principles equating the sins of infidelity, bestiality, pedophilia, and homosexuality to addictive behavior such as alcoholism or gambling: a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous for what counselors referred to as our ‘sexual deviance.’” It would only get worse.
For people facing similar circumstances today, the Supreme Court just made it possible for things to get worse for them, too. Last Tuesday, an 8-1 Supreme Court majority rejected a Colorado law that effectively banned gay conversion therapy for young people. Passed in 2019, Colorado’s Minor Conversion Therapy Law prohibits licensed mental health professionals from providing “any practice or treatment” with the express intent to change a minor’s “gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”
The case challenging the law was initiated in 2022 when Kaley Chiles, an evangelical Christian and licensed talk therapist, sued the state, arguing that her First Amendment right to discuss her faith and beliefs on “biological sex” was being violated. Colorado is one of 23 states and Washington, D.C. with similar legislation in place.
Conley joined the Velshi Banned Book Club, the franchise on MS NOW I edit and produce, this past week, to discuss the Supreme Court ruling and share his thoughts as someone who has lived through the harrowing experiences of conversion therapy.
Using flashbacks, Conley’s book explores the moments that lead up to Conley’s “treatment” — his religious upbringing as the sole child of devout Missionary Baptists, how he grappled with his sexuality in secret for so many years and how he was brutally outed to his parents by the very person who raped and assaulted him (Conley refers to the perpetrator using a pseudonym in his book) — and then what happened behind closed doors at Love in Action.
In our pre-interview on Friday, an exploratory time before a guest joins the host on a live television show, Conley explained the enduring significance of conversion therapy: “To me conversion therapy is connected to so many other issues that really animate me, like free speech, freedom of thought, open-mindedness, fundamentalism and what it does to our country.