The son of a Baptist pastor and deeply embedded in church life in small-town Arkansas, Garrard Conley was terrified and conflicted about his sexuality as a young man. When Garrard was a nineteen-year-old college student, he was outed to his parents, and was forced to decide either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program (Love in Action (LIA), a residential ex-gay treatment program in Memphis, Tennessee) that promised to "cure" him of homosexuality; or risk losing family, friends, and the God he had prayed to every day of his life. Through an institutionalized twelve-step program heavy on Bible study, he was supposed to emerge heterosexual, ex-gay and cleansed of impure urges. Instead, Garrard found the strength to search for his true self, empathy, and forgiveness. This memoir traces the complex relationships among family, faith, and community. Garrard Conley's fiction and nonfiction can be found in The Common, The Madison Review and The Virginia Quarterly Review. He currently teaches English literature and promotes LGBTQ equality in Sofia, Bulgaria.