Gay Conversion Practices in Memoir, Film and Fiction: Stories of Repentance and Defiance

For over half a century, organizations and individuals promoting ex-gay, conversion and/ or reparative therapy have pushed the tenet that a person may be able to, and should, alter their sexual orientation. Their so-called treatments or therapies have taken various forms over the decades, ranging from medical (including psychiatric or psychological) rehabilitation approaches, to counselling, and religious healing.

Gay Conversion Practices in Memoir, Film and Fiction provides an in-depth exploration of the disturbing phenomenon of gay conversion ’therapy’ and its fictional and autobiographical representations across a broad range of films and books such as But I’m a Cheerleader! (1999), This is What Love in Action Looks Like (2011) and Boy Erased (2018). In doing so, the volume emphasizes the powerful role the arts and media play in communicating stories around conversion practices. Approaching the timely and urgent subject from an interdisciplinary perspective, contributors utilize film theory, queer theory, literary theory, mental health and social movement theory to discuss the medicalization and pathologizing of queer people, the power of institutions ranging from church, psychiatry and family (sometimes in alliance), and the real and fictional voices of survivors.

James Bennett is an Honorary Academic at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is author of ’Rats and Revolutionaries’: The Labour Movement in Australia & New Zealand 1890-1940 (2004) and co-editor (with Rebecca Beirne) of Making Film and Television Histories: Australia and New Zealand (I.B. Tauris, 2011). He is a specialist in the histories of medicalizing and de-medicalizing homosexuality.

Marguerite Johnson is Honorary Professor in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, University of Queensland, Australia. She is the author of the second edition of Sexuality in Greek and Roman Society and Literature: A Sourcebook (2022), Ovid on Cosmetics (Bloomsbury, 2015), and co-editor (with Harold Tarrant) of Alcibiades and the Socratic Lover-Educator (Bloomsbury, 2012).