Mormon leaders want to complain about being bullied recently for their "unpopular beliefs" on the issue of "same sex attraction."

But, I find it more appropriate to share the stories about bullying of LGBT people by Mormons, and their "deeply held convictions."

BYU electrodes comes instantly to mind as well as Packer's talk about beating up gay missionary companions.

I also remember being really mean to my own brother when he came out of the closet and I was still Mormon.

I've apologized for that many times. But, not surprisingly, did I hear Mormon leaders apologize for what they taught me. They condemn "bullying" and "discrimination" of gays now - unless it's of course discrimination that they control still through their doctrines.

What other stories would you share, if you wouldn't mind, of their bullying?

Thank you.

I was 20 years old.And for the first time in my life I found it in me to say these words: I am a homosexual. 20 years. That’s how long it took me to say it without first seceding to the shame over it implemented in me as a youth… Unfortunately, the only other person present for this moment wasn’t a loving parent, a special friend, a sympathetic role model… but rather a cold, ill informed, prideful mission president.

I had been a missionary for 10 months.And I hated everything about it. I even hated the stupid little name tag. Every day saw another crack in the shiny veneer. I was desperate to reach out to someone and to feel something real. Something not premeditated, something not for the stage of being a missionary.

I reached out to my mission president because as a missionary you can’t even reach out to your family.

Here’s how he initially reacted.
Silence.
An awkward pause.
Shifting of crossed legs.
A blessing to “deal with” my problems.

And I was sent on my way.

So here is how the next two months went…

Suddenly every missionary knew I was gay and my current companion at the time was uncomfortable living with me (That bastard had no cause to worry). So a second meeting was orchestrated.

The mission president looked me squarely in the eye and told me that I should not tell any more people that I am gay. He told me it needed to be a secret until I was home and could talk to a therapist.

He told me he was worried about my future.
He told me he was worried I would support gay marriage (the horror!).
He told me I was a “disgrace” and a distraction to “the work”.

He later organized for me to see a counselor from LDS family services. The counselor showed me the mormonsandgays website which just came out (haha, pun) and we watched numerous videos of gay men living straight lives.

Yes some therapy there.

I was out of the mission by my 13th month.
But a certain theme continued at home… suddenly everyone there knew I was gay too. A bishop. A stake president. And my entire family. The mission president had personally made several calls, he told me just before I left, so that it would be easier for me when I got home.

He outed me and then sent me on the several hour plane ride alone to face it.

The secret I carefully kept for 20 years and tied so much self hate and doubt and shame to thrown in the wind ahead of my plane beating me home.

Local leaders didn’t miss a beat though.

I was told in numerous following interviews to:

Stay true to what I knew.
Marry a woman.
Pray for help.
Date females.
Spend more time around girls.
Read the scriptures every night.
Dont watch porn…

And most importantly to marry a woman.

This all came from several leaders but it was all the same…

The church likes to say it has stopped counseling gays to marry heterosexuals… but it hasn’t.

Anyway, it took me a year of all that to finally stop going to church. I even still paid tithing up to that point if you could believe it. Pretty warped if you ask me.

I never had any traditional bullying, but this stuff has had an influence on how I view myself. I still never really feel good enough. I still cry several nights a month because Im scared of winding up alone (I had previously vowed to myself and god celibacy as a missionary). I still find myself ashamed for not being “right” I still sometimes wish I could just be straight.

But progress has been made and shows no sign of slowing.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/28/2015 04:01AM by nonsequiter.

I'm still not out to most of my family. They think I'm a loner. I pretty much keep to myself and have zero social life.

I've heard all the hate all my life; comments from mum and dad about poofters and q ueers. I've heard it at church too - they taught me and other kids that being gay is a choice. Telling straight kids that the poofters at school choose to be gay and can stop any time is setting them up to be bashers. Telling gay kids they aren't really gay they just choose to be attracted to their own sex creates confusion, self doubt and hatred, and despair when fasting and prayers do not help change.

I contemplated suicide many times, and the only thing stopping me was the knowledge - yes I was 100% convinced, that this shitty life was as good as I was ever going to get. If I killed myself it was spirit prison then wherever the murderers go. I was resigned to the knowledge I would never see my family and would be punished for ever.

I hoped for oblivion. How telling of the message Mormonism spreads. People hoping and wishing they had never existed.

Attending the funerals of THREE, yes THREE very close friends who committed suicide because of the treatment they received for being gay members of the Mormon Cult pretty much sums up by very painful experience with bullying. Jay, David, and Will are their names, two were RMs, and I will never forget.

Hmm, where to start....

I'm not sure what the parameters are for the bullying you're asking about. What was damaging to me wasn't physical violence but rather the environment created by TSCC in which I could not feel safe acknowledging who I was and made me miss out on literally decades of life experiences intended for me while I wallowed in self loathing.

I was less than a week away from turning 12 when my grandfather told me with a mischievous grin that he'd sneak me into the audio broadcast of the priesthood session of conference. Thanks to BKP, that evening in 1976 turned from a bonding experience with grandpa into the beginning of my long fight against myself.

There was no overt anti-gay bullying in my teen years in TSCC because I wasn't out, but I was called names and ostracized because the other guys knew something was off. My more swishy friend F* got the worst of it. That may not sound so threatening but it went on for years and it grinds your self esteem to dust.

I fell in love with a companion on my mission and confessed to having sex with him to my MP. I escaped punishment on a technicality but was sent to the most remote corner of the mission (there was no bus, plane, or train service) and told to go home and never speak of it again.

I didn't tell anyone about it for over 25 years, during which time I sat through hour after hour of church meetings feeling like a fraud and spent the rest of my time avoiding close friendships that might expose me.

So... bullied? They got me to do it to myself.

As hard as I'm working to undo the damage I still feel a lot of days like they won.

Which is what bullying is.

Thank you for sharing.

While my experiences have been very tame in comparison to what a lot of Gay Mormons go through, I figured I should share. I came out at around 14 to a few select friends in the church that I felt I could trust and was soon out to everyone because of the mouthy-ness of the youth I told. Pretty quickly I started to pick up on some negative attention I was receiving at dances and stake events. It was typically from people that had heard about me before they got to know me. So at every church event I would catch people just kind of glaring at me and making me feel very uncomfortable.

One kid confronted me about it and called me a @#$%& in front of some of his friends. Later, during Youth Conference at the Oakland Temple, a guy I had never seen before came up to me, stuck his finger in my chest, and declared to me in front of everyone, "I hate you." He then promptly walked away.

I just turned 17 and I am now out of the church, but for the last few years especially, even those that I considered to be my friends began being very cold to me, not speaking to me unless I initiated conversation, walking away if I came close, and overall just treated me like someone to be avoided. Because I was taken out of public school when I came out, the church was my only social life. So imagine having those kinds of interactions on a daily basis without any kind of outside upport.

I am so sorry that this has happened to you, Scottwritten. You deserve so much better than that. The people that you have been around are truly uneducated and ignorant. Someday I hope that you are living in an atmosphere where you feel love and acceptance. Until then we are here for you.

Wow, I'm so sorry. By coincidence, just today I was at lunch with my parents, and the topic of the many great gay and lesbian teachers I had years ago, at my Catholic high school, came up. (Kind of a long story how we got onto that topic.) Anyway, I then mentioned how my former high school now has a student club for gays and lesbians. My dad commented that while that is a good thing, he doubted many gay kids would want to join such a club because they'd be picked on, laughed at, etc. Oh, no, I insisted: "Not nowadays. Maybe in other parts of the country, sure, but not here in the Bay Area."

Yet you're only 17 and dealing with this crap in the SF Bay Area. (Or so I assume since you mentioned the Oakland temple.) Shows what I know. :-( I do believe things will be much better for you when you go to college (assuming it won't be a Mormon one). Please try to stay strong until then.

Thank you for your kind words, Summer and NeverMo in CA. Luckily I was able to convince my TBM parents that being in the church has been devastating to me emotionally and that it's not having the uplifting results they wanted. Now I have started Community college (I tested out of Highschool) and I'm meeting lots of amazing people. The world is not as frightening as youth in the church are led to believe. Thank you for your support. I plan on writing my exit story soon.

TBM family. Bishop father all of my youth. RSP mother.

When I was about 11 I called my brother a Q***r thinking it meant "weirdo." My mother overheard and explained to me what the word really meant and what Heavenly Father and the Prophet thought about it--you can imagine.

Those words from my mother. That was me--I already knew that. The Q word just hung in the air. It didn't mean weirdo anymore.

What I learned at that point was that what I was, who I was down deep, was not acceptable to anyone, especially God. In fact it was explained to me that Qu**rs made people sick to their stomachs.

I lived in panic someone would know, someone would see. I shut myself down as best I could. I tried so hard to mimic being like the other kids. The burden was unbearable sometimes. The terror was constant. I knew the price of being found out. No one needed to explain further. No matter what I did, no matter how much I prayed, it was always there.

No matter how much I kidded myself, down deep I knew I would always be what made other people sick. That is no way for a child to live.

To this day I find it unbearable to hear Mormon's talk about their Heavenly Father's love.

Understandable, blueorchid. That's absolutely no way for a child to grow up. I'm very sorry you were the child subjected to this.

Thank you. That was decades ago for me and my life turned out to be fantastic. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, no?

I can not believe that all these years later nothing has changed and the Mormon church is still not a healthy or safe place for a gay child to be. Actually I don't think its safe for any child at all.

And that is what it comes down to.

I saw my future husband as living his life out alone and hating himself. That was the main reason I married him. I didn't want him to be alone. He tends to bring that out in people who care about him. The kids would tell you the same thing.

And so I can't regret what I did. He has a family. He isn't alone. He has a good life. And now he is free to be who he was born to be. The greatest gift I gave him was to accept him for who he is.

The lds leaders don't give a damn about anyone. We are all just pawns in their game.

I was too afraid to come out until I was 19 and moved away to college. I spent years hating myself because of the church. I think I was 12 when I first started really paying attention to the things that were said not only at church but also by my tbm family. I spent my teen years having no friends at church and only a small number at school and of those few, I have one remaining friend since I came out. The girls could tell something was off, I guess and so they didn't want to be around me and well guys just weren't friends with girls in my small town.
My high school is in a small utah town that has a very high mormon population and one of the twelve was from that high school so church standards are held through the entire school and the students, even the non-Mormon ones either followed the standards or openly rebelled.
So senior year when I was kind of outed (rumors were spread but I never confirmed anything) I lost all but one friend who ended up dropping out. I spent the full year being either ignored completely or having insults and slurs thrown at me, being shoved into lockers and tripped on the stairs. All this because I was an evil sinner who was trying to destroy the world by making all the other girls gay.
I finally got up the courage to tell my mother when I was 18 and I was told that if I told anyone else in the family I would be kicked out of the house. I hadn't told them about what had been going on at school and I was lucky enough that the rumors hadn't spread outside of the school. My mother than told both her family ward bishop and the singles ward bishop as well as sending me to see a counselor at lds family services. This only caused my depression and anxiety to get worse due to me being on edge constantly for years either trying to hide who I was or watching my back.
My mother, the bishops and the counselor all told me that if I went to church and lived the gospel and married a rm with a good spirit as soon as possible then somehow that would turn me straight and I could live a happy life.
The thing that was making me unhappy was the fact that I could not be myself. It wasn't until I left home for college and stopped going to church that I finally am able to start to undo all the damage caused by the church and its hateful policies.

When I was in Colonial Singles Ward in Alexandria, VA, I told the Bishop about my homosexual problem. He was very kind and understanding. In retrospect, I'm sure all those guys who graduated from BYU without getting married and moved to DC had to have a large number of closeted gays among them. I wasn't the first who had confined in him.

However, he retired as bishop and was replaced by an older man, who seemed equally kind. Instead, he quickly went on a witch hunt, declaring he would excommunicate every gay man in the ward.

He called me into his office and falsely accused me of having sex with another man in the ward. It was that moment that my faith in the church finally broke. Between the time I left his office and the time I drove home, I had decided to leave the church.

I believe that some in the ward complained to relatives in SLC and got his witch hunt shut down, but I know a few people who quit the church over that.

I hope, axeldc, that you will correct how you think about this. Homosexuality is not your problem. It's the church that has a problem with homosexuality. You are just you.

That was me years ago.

Of course I don't think this way now.

This didn't happen to me. ..but I remember how one of my high school friends had a companion on his mission who was 'struggling' with same sex attraction. He was told by the MP specifically be in situations where he was forced to interact and see comely females. My friend from High School loved the assignment. ..his companion not so much. In fact my friend liked it so much he met his future wife...lol

Being that I'm also trans, my story is a little different, but mostly the same.

The utter, utter hostility I was surrounded with against anything that wasn't super straight heterosexuality & "correct" gender expression put me in horribly deep denial for decades. I was taught in the cult that being anything than what is "acceptable" to God is so much worse than any real sin. I tried so hard for so many years to be an "acceptable" straight girl/woman. & I couldn't. I honestly feel like a failure because of it. (This has more to do with messages from regular mainstream society.)

I didn't even begin to deal with anything until a little less than 4 1/2 years ago. I'm basically 15-20 years behind my peers in dealing with who I really am.

I'm in therapy now, & it's helping. However, I will never be OK. I will always struggle with a lot of things.

My TBM mother is still extremely homophobic. If she were to find out, she would die of a heart attack, & then my dad would call me a killer. My dad would try to have me committed. & if my mom didn't die of a heart attack, I know she would tell anyone at church that she could about how much of a sinner I am & how I have been deceived by Stan, so she can play the martyr even more.

(ETA — For those that don't know, I'm a transgender man, & I identify as gay, & I'm also asexual. Due to the type of dysphoria I have, as well as health problems, I'm not transitioning medically.)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/28/2015 07:59PM by Tristan.

This thread should be archived. It is a historical testament to the Church's true heartlessness and cruelty.

One story I love is not really bullying, but kinda fits here.

At work one day I got in a debate with a what I would describe as a NOM wannabe TBM.

She was completely anti-gay marriage. She said that she would fight it until the day she died. I was able to counter every argument she gave. I let her have the idea that she apposed it on religious beliefs so long as she did not fight to impose her beliefs on me and others that are not of her faith. I said she had no right to deny the "religious beliefs" of people of religious faiths that believed gay marriage was acceptable.

Anyhow, the debate ended, she got engaged as spent many hours planning and blabbing about her wedding. I sat right next to her and heard it all.

One day, I sort of rolled my eyes when she started in on her blabbing about her wedding plans.

She said "MJ is so burnt out on all this talk about my wedding"

My reply was "No, I am not burnt out, it's just that I know you oppose gay marriage. You are so happy planing your wedding, but it is a happiness that you would deny me. Every time you talk about your wedding, I am reminded that you would not allow me that happiness, and it hurts. Every time you talk about your wedding, I am hurt"

She never talked about her wedding in front of me again.

Did she talk to you about ANYTHING after this?

Yes, just not the wedding plans.

After reading all these sad stories, I have thoughts of going and burning down a few chapels...