From a young age I have felt a disconnect from church. I moved to a new ward when I was 6. Due to marriages connecting families or families living close together the members of the ward were inseparable and had a long rich friendship with each other. And I was a new, weird, poor kid…
I was abused by the boys in my neighborhood when I was 4-6 years old. I didn’t understand it at the time. But I was coerced and sometimes physically forced to do things with my mouth which no child that young had any business knowing about, nonetheless doing on a repeated basis. Most of these…
Long story short; When I was 11, I was molested. At 15 I was raped. I told the bishop and he told me I was going to hell and it was my fault. Then he proceeded to tell me that everything that happened was my fault and how premarital sex was a sin. I was…
When I joined the church as a teenager, a week later the Bishop met with me and conducted a worthiness interview that asked a long series of inappropriate questions using terms I had never heard before (masturbation, petting, anal sex, grinding, heavy petting, wet dreams, pornography, etc.) I asked that he explain many of the…
My first two and a half years after I when to collage about four people saw the inside of my apartment. I could barely tolerate having anyone in my apartment for an hour much less allowing someone to touch me. I got off easy all things considered, only probing questions like “Are you sure you’re…
When I was a young teenager, I had a bishop ask me if I masturbated. I wasn’t even sure what that meant. I don’t completely remember how I responded. I just know I was thrown off guard and felt terrible about the question. I was already nervous about going to interviews for the first time…
I lived in Dallas, Texas in the early 1980s… I am almost 50 now. Like most normal boys, I was excited to find some “dirty magazines” when I was walking home from school. I found them to be very interesting, to say the least, and being 13 or 14 at the time, I did what…
I am so thankful that you are doing this. I hope the LDS Church takes action to stop these interviews. I grew up in Montana and my mother made me and my sisters go to church every Sunday. Our father was Lutheran so that made for some difficult family dynamics because mom was constantly trying…
When I was 15, I went to confession with my LDS bishop in his office at the church. 😞 I told the Bishop I needed to confession to a hot and heavy make-out session with an LDS boy. The bishop then asked for the play-by-play (intense details about the acts, who did what, did I…
Another personal story for you and Sam Young as he Hunger Strikes to Protect LDS Children. This one is the hardest for me because I was complicit and bare the shame of this. This is about my child and I am using my favorite, colorful language in this post (you have been warned). When I…