19 Quotes by Garrard Conley

I came to therapy thinking that my sexuality didn’t matter, but it turned out that every part of my personality was intimately connected. Cutting one piece damaged the rest.

This affliction is what makes me smarter. This disadvantage is what gives me my ambition.

Keeping a secret, telling a lie by omission, made it much easier to see all of the other lies around me. An expert liar wasn’t merely an expert on his own lies, but those of others as well.

If I could have done it myself, I would have already done it: pried open my ribs and etched the Word onto my heart’s beating chambers. But it seemed my ex-gay counselors were the only ones with enough skill and experience to wield the scalpel.

Trauma has made dark what was once painfully clear

Masculine meant strong. Masculine meant straight. If we could only learn the essence of what it meant to be masculine, then we could learn the rest.

The chorus of voices will grow each year, revealing decades of pain, decades lost, families torn apart, relationships ruined because people outside the ex-gay world can never understand what we patients went through.

LIA was telling me on a daily basis that a loss of self meant a gain in virtue, and a gain in virtue meant I was drawing closer to God and therefore closer to my true heavenly self. But the means to that end – self-loathing, suicidal ideation, years of false starts – could make you feel lonelier, and less like yourself, than you’d ever felt in your life.

Sometimes it was what you left unsaid or undone that drew you into a state of wonder.