Review of Boy Erased (2018) by Devon D — 25 Nov 2018

As a Non-binary, Non CIS, gender-fluid gay demiboy who is also trans, I am always glad to see more movies geared toward LGBTQIAPK queers. My only complaint was the setting of comfortable, upper-middle class, white suburbia privilege emanating from a movie that had every possibility to be more inclusive. To show bit-clip examples of gay people of color just does not cut it, in 2018. The movie lacked racial diversity in the exact same way that Love, Simon and The Miseducation of Cameron Post lacked: almost every gay person is white! The main character struggling with his "gay affliction" is always some WASP, some rich-boy lily-white kid. A black boyfriend asked me why Hollywood thinks "gay is only a white-kid issue"? That is entirely wrong: there are plenty of poor, black and non-white gay kids struggling in the exact same way as the white gay kids, but worse. Can you imagine: being both black AND gay, in THIS racist country? I would be very interested in seeing a movie about that double-struggle.

Around the world, non-white gay men are slaughtered for their forbidden love. Yet we focus our concern on first world white privilege, from the standard fundy disapproving parents and their mild Bible-verse grumbles, rather than the gays in Uganda who get hung or shot for their forbidden loves. The gays in the Middle East who get stoned to death or blindfolded, then shoved off tall buildings, to their deaths. But even and especially here, in America, black and non-white gays face such a horrible struggle. Their voices deserve to be heard.

This was also too lite on white supremacist Christians, who invented AIDS just to kill off the world's gays, way back in the 1980s. This worked in two ways: 1) It gets rid of those evil homos, and 2) The church can slowly kill off the rest, through these "therapy" programs! They carried out their evil genocidal plot under the misguidance of the homosexual god of their Bible, and murdered millions, just to "carry out God's will". A teenager getting literally struck with a stack of Bibles could not possibly compare to an expose of the true evils of warped Christian fundamentalism, their invention of AIDS to satisfy their vengeful god, and how many lives of gay men it stole, whether through AIDS genocide itself, or the voluntary suicides of the whipped up Bible-beaten victims.