Garrard Conley, whose memoirs inspired the 2018 film Boy Erased, is a conversion therapy survivor. And that word – survivor – is important, because his name appears in a Supreme Court amicus brief alongside others who were sent to conversion therapy but who didn’t survive.

His mother, Martha Conley, told the Court that she didn’t understand much about what it meant to be gay when her son was outed to her after his first semester in college. So she sought help from her church’s leaders, who suggested she take Garrard to a Love In Action conversion therapy practice.

“At the program, I watched my vibrant son grow visibly more depressed,” Martha Conley wrote in an amicus brief for Chiles v. Salazar, the case about whether Colorado – or any of the 27 states that ban conversion therapy – is violating therapists’ free speech rights by banning conversion therapy. “We had no idea that what we thought was help would become the source of trauma he carries to this day.”

She described how the program told Garrard he had to recognize that he hated his father and blame his parents for their “deficient parenting” that turned him gay. When he tried to leave the program, they withheld his personal possessions so he couldn’t use his phone to call his mother for a ride.

Colorado’s conversion therapy ban – and all the other states’ bans – wouldn’t have done anything to protect Garrard. That law only bans conversion therapy for minors, and Garrard was already a college student when he was sent to Love In Action. Moreover, that ban only applies to state-licensed therapists, and Love In Action, like most conversion therapy practices, is a Christian ministry without staff who are trained or licensed in science-based approaches to therapy.

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So why is Martha Conley telling her story to the Supreme Court?

“These laws don’t attack religion or loving parents. They protect us,” she wrote. “They ensure that licensed therapists cannot abuse their professional authority by offering treatments that have no scientific basis and that can destroy young lives.”

“As parents, we’re vulnerable when we’re told our child can be ‘fixed.’ We want to believe there’s a way to make their path easier. Laws like Colorado’s protect us from being misled by those who would profit from our fear and love.”

LGBTQ Nation’s March 2026 Issue is about conversion therapy, as well as the assumptions that drive it. Some of those assumptions are that:

• LGBTQ+ people can intentionally change their sexual orientations or gender identities to conform to their parents’, religion’s, or community’s expectations of them,
  
• LGBTQ+ people need to be ashamed enough of who they are to want to change,
  
• Those who don’t change are selfish, prideful, faithless, or evil,
  
• Community leaders, churches, and governments have a right (or even an obligation) to punish LGBTQ+ people until they feel ashamed enough to at least stop publicly identifying as queer or trans.

Conversion therapy is a practice that occurs in a room with a licensed therapist (or in a church with a priest, at a group therapy session in a quack’s basement…), but it’s also a part of the broader culture and affects how people see the world even if they have never participated in such a practice, which is why conservatives are fighting to the Supreme Court to overturn Colorado’s ban even though it has never been enforced.

Throughout the month, LGBTQ Nation will be publishing stories about people’s experiences with conversion therapy and their fights to free themselves from shame. We’ll be talking to an activist who won a conversion therapy ban in his own state, who then had to deal with the trauma that fight brought.

We’ll talk to real therapists about why exactly conversion therapy is so insidious, even when it gets constantly rebranded. One of those is even a former conversion therapist who changed his mind on the practice.

We’ll have a few pieces to provide a transgender perspective, since conversion therapy bans are now being stopped and overturned on the basis that trans people’s identities are less legitimate than anyone else’s.

We’ll also be publishing stories submitted by readers about how they “converted” to self-acceptance. One way we fight back against homophobia and transphobia is by loving ourselves for who we are.

Another way to fight back is to be informed. The Supreme Court could overturn Colorado’s ban, and people like Martha Conley, who don’t know much about the science behind sexual or gender identities, will get the message that conversion therapy may have some merit.

Martha Conley’s story appears in a brief alongside several others from parents who regret sending their kids to conversion therapy. All the stories involve religious conversion therapy practices, not state-licensed therapists, and none of the other stories are from parents whose kids went on to write books that got turned into Hollywood movies.

In fact, most of them are about kids who didn’t survive. Joyce Calvo, the mother of Alana Chen, didn’t find out that a priest at their church had been practicing conversion therapy on their daughter for years until Alana started cutting her arms.

“I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” Alana told the Denver Post after she left conversion therapy. “Was I going to hell? But I was still extremely faithful, and I felt like the church and the counseling was the thing that was saving me. The worse I got, the more I clung to it.”

“I think the church’s counsel is what led me to be hospitalized,” she continued. “I’ve now basically completely lost my faith. I don’t know what I believe about God, but I think if there is a God, he doesn’t need me talking to him anymore.”

But the damage was already done. Alana took her own life at age 24, shortly after that Denver Post interview.

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