From bestselling memoirs to Pulitzer Prize-winning novels to historical accounts, these Pride Month-themed selections offer insight to the LGBTQ+ experience.
I tried to convert myself from gay to straight. It doesn’t work
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By Holden Sheppard
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When I was growing up, I didn’t want to let myself exist.
In 2004, I thought I was a normal boy. But puberty’s tsunami of hormones changed everything. When I watched footy, I suddenly noticed my favourite AFL players’ bulging muscles. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.
WA author Holden Sheppard tried to ‘pray the gay away’ and now knows the trauma associated with the practice.
The mother of Garrard Conley, author of
Boy Erased, has said that putting her son through conversion therapy was the “biggest mistake of her life”.
Boy Erased is based on the true story of conversion therapy survivor Garrard Conley, who, as a teenager, was sent to a Christian conversion camp to “cure” him of his homosexuality.
Conley wrote about his harrowing experiences in a 2016 memoir which served as the source material for the 2018 film of the same name, written by Joel Edgerton.
In an opinion piece for the
Miami Herald, Conley’s mother Martha has opened up about her son’s traumatising experience, and said that sending him to conversion therapy was the “biggest mistake of her life”.