A ‘Boy Erased’ and a Mom Who's Hard to Miss

When Martha Conley and her son, Garrard, arrived at the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of “Boy Erased,” a movie based on Garrard Conley’s memoir, Martha Conley found herself confused by the throngs of festivalgoers they passed on their way to the theater.

“I said, ‘Who are all those people?'” recalled Martha Conley, 64, who had flown up from Mountain Home, Arkansas, for the event last month. “And Garrard said, ‘Mom, they’re here to see the movie.’ But that’s me in that line! I’ve always been in that line.”

Now, Martha Conley gets to skip to the front. In “Boy Erased,” Lucas Hedges plays the young Garrard Conley, who struggles with his homosexuality and is sent to a conversion-therapy group at the behest of his father, a Baptist pastor (Russell Crowe). Martha Conley, played in the film by Nicole Kidman, seems less certain that the program is right for her son; eventually, she will fight to remove him from it. (The film, set mostly in 2004, actually uses different names for the Conleys. It is the second movie about gay-conversion therapy set for release this year. The first was “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” in August.)

“Boy Erased” (due in theaters Nov. 2) adopts a muted aesthetic palette: As the young men in conversion therapy are instructed to repress their personalities, the film is drained of any color bolder than khaki. The exception is Kidman, who remains a vision of suburban glamour throughout. Her hair is a carefully coifed blond cloud, her necklaces are the very definition of statement jewelry, and she paints her lips a ruby red found nowhere else in the film.

It’s a larger-than-life portrayal that may still understate the real thing. Martha Conley is an effusive Southern belle with celebrity-level charisma, and at the party before the premiere, as she sashayed through the crowd in a strapless, black-and-white Marchesa dress, people clamored to meet her. “When she enters a room, she’s impossible to ignore,” said Garrard Conley, who described his mother as “a spot of Technicolor.”

Did Martha Conley feel that Kidman had nailed her sense of style in the film? “Oh, yes!” she said in her musical twang, before leaning in to offer one conspiratorial quibble: “I think they picked out a few too manyWal-Mart tops.”

Conley is not a Wal-Mart kind of woman. When Hedges first visited her home to discuss the movie, Conley wore feathers: “I went to the door in a boa and all my curls and said, ‘Son!’ And he went, ‘Mommy!’ ”

She has felt even more of a responsibility to deliver looks since the trailer for “Boy Erased” was released this summer: “Now I can’t go to the post office or the drugstore without makeup on and my hair done,” Conley said, “because I feel like I’m going to let Nicole down.”

Conley and her son have been inseparable since he was young. Before that, even. “He was the most wanted and loved child that had never been born,” Conley said later in a phone interview. “We could not wait for him.”

As he entered his teenage years and started to detect his own difference, their dynamic changed subtly. “Mom probably didn’t even know we were papering things over,” Garrard Conley said. “We would go see a movie and I would pretend that everything was fine.”

When he was outed in college, his mother had no idea how to react. “I was so naïve 14 years ago,” she said. Conley and her husband called the Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, which referred them to a Love In Action conversion-therapy group touting an “84 percent cure rate” for homosexuality.

“At that time, I still wasn’t aware of how phony this place really was,” Conley said. It was not until her son enrolled in the group, then fled it, that she began to research gay-conversion therapy, which is outlawed in nine states and has been denounced by medical groups.

“I was doing the homework that I should have done before we took him, and that’s part of my guilt right there,” she said. “I’ll let anybody believe what they want to believe because of the way I was raised, but conversion therapy, you should not believe that even one part of it is good. We want it to be illegal.”

Conley greeted the Toronto crowds as a newfound activist, but her husband stayed behind in Arkansas, wished her the best and fretted about his future. “My husband loves his son so much,” she said, “but he still is a Baptist pastor, and he believes that you should not act on those feelings.”

“He has a congregation of 150 people that he’s really worried about losing,” Garrard Conley said about his father, but added, “I think my dad has changed personally, I know that. But as a public figure, he has not changed. And that’s very tricky.”

Still, he has his mother. “It would be really lonely doing this without her support,” said Garrard Conley, who hopes the movie will prove useful for parents who have trouble broaching the issue of their children’s sexuality. “I think in many ways, it can operate as a guidebook for people who’ve really messed up with their kids and want to reconcile that,” he said.

Martha Conley had not seen “Boy Erased” before its Toronto premiere. When I spoke to her at the film’s after-party, she was still shaking. “All I could do was hold on to Garrard,” she said. “I had tears that would not fall. They just stayed in my eyes through the movie, and about 20 minutes before it was over, they started pouring. I was trying to be so strong.” After the premiere, when the cast and the Conleys took the stage, “she basically just stole the show,” Garrard Conley said, laughing, and added, “She took over the microphone.”

But he did not mind: “I feel like no matter what, I gave this movie to her. She saved my life.” He also gave her Alexander Skarsgard. At the “Boy Erased” after-party, Garrard Conley asked the actor, who starred with Kidman in “Big Little Lies,” if he would say a few words to his star-struck mother. The two spoke for several minutes, Skarsgard in a tight white T-shirt towering over Martha Conley.

Once they parted, Martha Conley was blushing. “Isn’t he gorgeous?” she exclaimed, before making a beeline for her son.

“I told y’all he’s a good boy!” she said.