“The concept is stolen from Alcoholics Anonymous, except AA doesn’t just have you stay in a place all day, monitored,” says Conley. Detecting and destroying FIs was how you got the gay out. “False Image”, a key tenet of Love in Action (LIA), referred to anything and everything suggestive of Conley’s homosexuality. “And he said, in a voice free of emotion: ‘False Image’,” recalls Conley in Boy Erased, his elegant memoir about the year in which his southern Baptist upbringing collided with his sexual awakening as a gay man. A blond boy confiscated the journal and yanked a bunch of pages free from the binding. H ere’s what Garrard Conley had to surrender the morning he arrived at the Love in Action facility in Memphis, Tennessee in 2004: his phone, his wallet, his driving licence and a Moleskine journal in which he wrote his short stories.
