Garrard Conley didn’t choose to be outed. He was 18, a first-year college student, and already grappling with the heavy burden of being queer in a world that offered him only one story: be straight, or be cast out. That choice turned into a mandate when his roommate—retaliating after Garrard reported him for a disturbing confession—called Garrard’s parents and claimed he was living an “openly gay lifestyle.”
What followed was a descent into conversion therapy, where Garrard was subjected to what he calls “arts and crafts from hell.” With 274 pages of rules, shaming sessions, and the assumption that queerness belonged in the same category as abuse, his time at the conversion center was surreal and scarring. And yet, a semester of Western literature, featuring books like 1984, The Iliad, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, gave him something conversion therapy couldn’t extinguish: perspective, and the power of alternate stories.
In the latest episode of the Educating the Human Potential podcast, Garrard speaks with vulnerability and wit about growing up in a tiny Arkansas town, his father’s sudden transformation from car salesman to Baptist preacher, and the escalating pressure to conform in a world with no room for difference. But the moment that changed everything came in a quiet car ride with his mother, who had always followed the rules—until love demanded otherwise.
As they drove without direction, she turned to him and asked, “Do you think you’re going to end up like one of those kids that killed themselves?” Garrard didn’t know if it was true, but he knew what the answer might reveal. “If I say yes,” he thought, “I’m going to find out if my mom really loves me.”
So he said yes.
Her response was immediate. “We’re never going back there again,” she said. “And we’re going to talk to your father right now and I’ll settle it.”
That moment of love and defiance wasn’t the end of the story—it was the beginning of a long journey of reconciliation, reflection, and writing. His bestselling memoir, Boy Erased, brought that hidden history to light and inspired a major motion picture. His latest novel, All the World Beside, imagines queer life in Puritan New England, blending research, resilience, and radical empathy.
But perhaps most powerful is Garrard’s message for educators: that expanding the stories available to children—especially those questioning who they are—can literally save lives. “Stories change the world,” he says.