Garrard Conley gets a lot of emails from people who don’t want their kids to be gay.
Sitting in his kitchen in Atlanta, the 40-year-old professor tells me about a recent one, from a father who’d sent his son to a wilderness camp that promised to make him straight—and was devastated that his son had tried to kill himself shortly after getting home.
“I don’t agree with the LGBT agenda,” the father wrote. “But I think conversion therapy might be evil. Would you like to talk with me about it and see what I should do with my son?”
After describing the contents of the email, which he’d received a couple days earlier, Conley told me he hadn’t responded to it yet. “I have to have the mental energy to talk to this guy who clearly hates gay people but doesn’t want his son dead,” he said. “It gets heavy.”
