Identity, Faith and Family: A GLBTQI+ Memoir

Garrard Conley’s fiction and nonfiction can be found in Time, Vice, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and on CNN.com, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Elizabeth Kostova Foundation writers' conferences. Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family (Riverhead Books) was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. A beautiful, raw and compassionate memoir about identity, love and understanding. Soon to be a major motion picture starring Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, and Lucas Hedges. The son of a Baptist pastor and deeply embedded in church life in small town Arkansas, as a young man Garrard Conley was terrified and conflicted about his sexuality. When Garrard was a nineteen-year-old college student, he was outed to his parents, and was forced to make a life-changing decision: either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program that promised to "cure" him of homosexuality; or risk losing family, friends, and the God he had prayed to every day of his life. By confronting his buried past and the burden of a life lived in shadow, Garrard traces the complex relationships among family, faith, and community. At times heart-breaking, at times triumphant, Boy Erased is a testament to love that survives despite all odds.

In 2010, Jaie Laplante joined Miami Dade College’s Miami Film Festival as Executive Director & Director of Programming. Additionally, he directs and oversees MDC’s Tower Theater Miami. Mr. Laplante has served on numerous international juries and film panels. Most recently, he programmed cinema cycles for Faena Arts in Miami Beach, and served as mayor Carlos Gimenez’ appointee to the Miami-Dade County Film & Entertainment Advisory Board from 2013-17. In 2017, he was named one of 25 Knight Champions. In 2018, Mr. Laplante received the decoration Knight’s Cross of the Order of Isabel la Católica from Felipe VI, King of Spain, for his career work in the exploration of contemporary Spanish and Spanish-language cinema in the state of Florida.