At the beginning of Conversion, a man tells the story of his first love—and first loss.
At 15, he had a boyfriend whose parents had put him through a doctor’s treatment program in an attempt to convert him to heterosexuality. After classmates discovered the two youths holding hands behind the school, the boyfriend said he was terrified that he’d be sent back into the program.
Later that night, he took his own life.
“Our love killed him,” the man remembers thinking at the time. But, of course, what really killed the boy was society’s problem with homosexuality, as well as the doctor’s attempt to “cure” him through what’s often called “conversion therapy.”
Though this practice is now widely condemned and even illegal in nearly half of U.S. states, thousands of LGBTQ people have been subjected to it down through the years. Three of them tell their stories in Zach Meiners’s new documentary.
One of them, in fact, is Meiners himself, who recalls that he first realized he was different from his male friends when puberty hit and they suddenly became interested in girls. Worried that others might discover he didn’t share their feelings, he started looking for ways to change himself.
Among his stranger experiences with conversion therapy were sessions with a therapist who demanded detailed accounts of his gay fantasies. Meiners eventually began to suspect the therapist was doing this for his own benefit rather than his client’s, as the man often became visibly aroused during their time together.
Other memories are shared by Dustin Rayburn, whose religious family blamed their child’s sexuality on a “gay demon”; and Elena Joy Thurston, who was a Mormon wife and mother when she realized she had lesbian longings. Though Rayburn and Thurston’s experiences with conversion therapy were very different, in each case someone wrongly tried to blame their gayness on sexual assaults they’d suffered as youths.
Conversion is a heartfelt effort to spread the word about a pseudoscience that has made life exponentially harder for thousands of young people and that has no doubt driven many to attempt suicide. If the film doesn’t have as much impact as it might, it’s partly because similar messages have been delivered by earlier efforts such as Gregory Caruso’s 2022 documentary of the same name and Joel Edgarton’s 2018 drama Boy Erased.
In addition, Meiner’s apparently limited budget shows at times, as when the same still images keep cropping up over and over. The film also weakens itself by occasionally lapsing into sappiness and by spending an inordinate amount of screen time interviewing a former advocate of conversion therapy.
The documentary regains its sense of purpose, however, when it warns that conversion therapy remains a threat. The phony science may disguise itself by using different names and terminology, we’re told, and it may hide in back channels of the internet, but it has never really gone away.
Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)
Conversion was released July 2 through VOD and cable outlets.
