Joel Edgerton
As a straight man, what did you get from Garrard’s book?
I came to it out of curiosity. I’m fascinated by “institutions.” As a child they were always in my nightmares: being taken away from my parents and locked up, so I went in thinking it was going to be a slow train wreck and to enjoy the madness of it. I assumed it was a story of black and whites: hateful parents sending their poor child to a hateful therapist running a hateful facility. But what really struck me was that those parents did was a loving act; a misguided loving act. The culture they came from had created a scenario where homosexuality was to be feared, where the way to help their son, rather than just love and accept him, was to turn his sexuality around. That it was done out of love and not hatred fascinated me. The parents are the ones who needed evolution and beyond that, the (mainstream) community needs evolution, the culture needs evolution.