- Lindsey T.
- Friday, October 07, 2022
I’m With The Banned is a series that promotes books that have been recently challenged as unsuitable for young readers, giving parents and readers a deeper understanding of the themes involved. This blog post is focused on the book Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family by Garrard Conley.
Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family is another victim of Texas Rep. Matt Krause’s massive 850-title list of materials to be evaluated by school libraries to see if they “contain material that might make students feel discomfort.” Many of the titles on this list are written by minorities and tackle topics like race and LGBTQ+ themes. During the auditing process, schools are removing these titles from their shelves, severely affecting the diversity of materials students have access to. Ironically, the effects of a lack of diversity can be seen in Boy Erased.
About Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family
Boy Erased describes the journey of a young adult, Garrard Conley, as he begins to confront his homosexuality. Raised in the fundamentalist Baptist tradition in Arkansas, he views his homosexuality as a sin, so he volunteers to attend an ex-gay conversion program called Love in Action (LIA). His time in LIA ignites a crisis of faith and eventual acceptance of his LGBTQ+ identity.
Boy Erased chronicles the dangers of an either/or society that provides a single viewpoint (or source) of information. It’s either Christianity or LGBTQ+, family or identity, masculinity or homosexuality... During his time in LIA, Garrard is instructed to place single letters or symbols next to his family’s names on a genogram to represent their sins (A = alcoholism, $ = gambling, D = drugs, etc.). As he comes to his own name, he is terrified that the H he places there to represent his homosexuality will be the only representation he will ever get in his community, and that all his other quirks, virtues, and faults will be erased.
“And when they discovered that secret, nothing would stop them from retroactively dismissing each detail of my personality, each opinion of mine, as mere symptoms of homosexuality.” (pgs. 47-8)
Intersectionality doesn’t exist in Garrard’s community where members believe there is only one source for spirituality, identity, and politics. For them, there is no possibility of an LGBTQ+ Christian. Garrard knows he must choose one or the other. Either continue his identity as a Christian or tear away from God, his family, and his community—his entire history—to embrace his homosexuality.
Thus, Boy Erased shows the necessity of diverse resources. Secular books were banned by Garrard’s church, so Garrard lacked a vocabulary to even begin a conversation with his parents about his sexuality, resulting in disturbing and unhealthy behaviors.
“It wasn’t that I thought violence would solve our problems. It was just the need to tell my parents something—anything—was overpowering, and at the time I didn’t have a proper language for it.” (pg. 58)
Once Garrard started to confront his sexuality with conversion therapy (recommended to his father by their one-source community), his self-esteem plummeted and triggered a crisis of faith. His few homosexual experiences were colored by shame and even rape, and without another source to provide a different viewpoint, Garrard believed that “rape and shame was what gay sex was all about” (pg. 133). He believed that homosexuality was the same as pedophilia and bestiality. With the ‘clobber passages’ hot in hand, he believed that he would be better off dead. This is the danger of censorship.
In the end, Garrard experiences a crisis of faith that comes to a crux when he curses God and decides to leave LIA. For the entire book, Garrard has prayed to be pure, to have his homosexuality cured, but as his father is ordained as a minister in front of the church, he has an epiphany.
“I had prayed for purification, but the minute I felt its icy baptismal waters burning away everything I’ve ever loved, I had begun to open myself up, instead, to a former possibility: unconditional love, the original flame that had drawn me closer to God and my family and the rest of the world.” (pg. 294)
He rejects the angry and depressed person he’s becoming with LIA’s either/or teaching. Instead, he accepts his humanity and his sexuality through the Christian values instilled in him by his community and plots to run away with his heart and faith still relatively intact.
Why is it banned?
There are a couple of possibilities why this book was challenged. The first is that it has a LGBTQ+ narrator. According to PEN America, an organization advocating for the freedom of expression in literature, between Jul. 1, 2021, and Jun. 30, 2022 there were 2,532 instances of individual books being banned, affecting 1,648 unique book titles. Most of these books have LGBTQ+ or race themes.
Like many LGBTQ+ books facing bans, Boy Erased talks about sex and sexual trauma in the form of rape. Most of the sections containing these topics are brief (maybe half a page at most) and usually nonexplicit. However, these sections are necessary to this book as they portray Garrard’s inner turmoil as he tries to reconcile his LGBTQ+ and religious identities—a fairly common intersectionality in the South—as well as providing a warning against eliminating other viewpoints in a community.
Many critics of LGBTQ+ literature argue that young adults shouldn’t be exposed to materials with any sex at all and will pull certain lines out of context and call it pornography. But because of the context of these sections in Boy Erased, they aren’t considered pornography by Cornell Law, which states that “the presence of nudity or sexual acts in piece of media does not necessarily make that media pornographic if the purpose of that media form is something other than sexual stimulation.”
Another reason Boy Erased might be banned is its use of language. There is profanity in this book—some of it directed toward God as Garrard’s faith deteriorates. However, it is clear that this book is not anti-Christian. Despite the damaging actions LIA committed in God’s name, Boy Erased is a work of compassion—to the LIA counselors, to his family, and to his religious community. While Boy Erased documents a crisis of faith and all the internal struggles and doubts that come with it, Garrard longs to hear God’s voice again and return to that piece of his identity.
So far, Boy Erased is not officially banned from Texas school libraries, but some schools have pulled it from their shelves during the auditing process.
Sensitive readers might want to watch out for:
- Extreme internalized and externalized homophobia
- Descriptions of a gay conversion curriculum
- A brief description of rape
- Mention of sexual experimentation between children
- Suicidal ideation
- Eating disorders
- A crisis of faith (Christianity)
- Profanity