Boy Erased (2018) on Netflix
Jared, a college student, is the nineteen-year-old son of a Baptist pastor. Outed to his parents, he is sent to a conversion therapy program and told to change or lose his family.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.9/1046,613 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes80%
Trailer
Plot summary
Jared Eamons, nineteen, is the son of Marshall Eamons, a Baptist preacher and car dealer, and of Nancy Eamons, a hairdresser. Nancy drives him to Love in Action, a conversion therapy assessment program in Memphis, where he signs in, surrenders his belongings, and hands over his journal. Victor Sykes, who leads the sessions, teaches the group that attraction to the same sex is a choice shaped by poor parenting, and sets them to making moral inventories of themselves and their families. Jared and Nancy stay in a motel nearby. Between sessions he thinks back on high school, on his girlfriend, and on his first year of college.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Boy Erased (2018)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film's pivotal scene of a lapsed participant being forced to his knees before a coffin and beaten with a Bible appears nowhere in Garrard Conley's memoir; neither do the dunking of a young man underwater or the guards' attempt to stop Conley leaving the facility.
- John Smid, a real figure from the Love in Action program's history, spent years preaching its ex-gay ideology before abandoning the program to live openly as a gay man; he had married two women before marrying a man.
