Lilies Not for Me’s Will Seefried on romantic gay drama’s depiction of so-called conversion therapy: ‘I dove deep’

Will Seefried (Image: Paul Perelka) Based on real events, Lilies Not for Me presents a harrowing procedure aimed at curing homosexuality. What led you to choose this subject for your first film?

The idea for Lilies Not for Me started when I learned about a shocking procedure from the 1920s which claimed to “cure” homosexuality. This history struck me as a chilling expression of the violence that queer people still endure to this day, while evoking the books and films that were most influential to me as a young person — haunting period romances with queer relationships at their centre, like James Baldwin’s masterpiece Giovanni’s Room, Todd Haynes’s Carol, and Merchant Ivory’s Maurice (from the novel by E.M. Forster), to name a few.

I wanted to make my debut feature in this tradition. Society loves to pretend that

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