CONVERSION
Directed by Zach Meiners
Produced by Chronicle Cinema
THE DOCUMENTARY Conversion opens on a black screen with white lettering informing the viewer that 689,000 LGBT adults have gone through “conversion therapy”—indoctrination programs for young people struggling with their sexual orientation that claim they can help them convert from gay to straight. The film’s first images show us driving through a calm suburban neighborhood. In voiceover, Troy Stevenson recounts his meeting up years earlier, at fifteen, behind school with a friend of the same age, holding hands and talking. A group of school footballers catches sight of them and hurls anti-gay slurs. The boys run off to their separate homes and later speak on the phone. Trey’s friend is deeply upset, worrying that if his parents find out, they will send him back to a conversion program he’s already been through once before. He is deathly afraid. Trey plans to speak to him the next day, but he can’t. His friend has committed suicide.
Allen Ellenzweig, a longtime contributor to these pages, is the author of George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye (Oxford Univ. Press, 2021).
