It remains impossible to be an out queer or trans Witness. Meanwhile, I continued to witness the harms that JW policies did, whether around shunning, education, blood transfusions, the treatment of women (abysmal, in case you’re wondering), or failing to protect children from sexual abuse. I was too intimidated by the prospect of starting a memoir, so I worked some of the story into novels. Those same friends asked when I was going to write about all this. Photograph: Jeff Blackler/Rex/Shutterstock What do you mean your Smurf toys were demonic and you had to destroy them? What do you mean you could accept a birthday gift as long as it wasn’t on your actual birthday? Did you really believe that all your classmates would die a fiery death at Armageddon, but because you were no part of the world, you’d survive and have to bury the bodies? These things didn’t sound strange to me when I was growing up. But I would later learn that this view was too simplistic to explain the effects of falling out of Jehovah’s grace.į or years, friends heard bits of my story, and were struck by the surreal aspects of life as a Jehovah’s Witness. For most of the two decades that followed my dissociation, I assumed that the experience was safely in my past, based on a commonly accepted narrative around leaving a high-control group: once you’re out, you’re out.
From my standpoint, it was simply cruel punishment. From a Witness standpoint, the terms of my exile were unproductive. They reasoned that the expulsion would encourage me to return to the congregation, but I never magically became straight, and I never put on a meeting suit again. It was filled with grief, uncertainty, and a kind of power, but I don’t remember much of what I wrote and I didn’t keep a copy.Īs per the rules, the Witness community quickly shunned me, and did it in the name of love. I composed my letter of disassociation and dropped it into the mailbox. Was I planning to turn my back on Jehovah and disappoint my family, my community, my creator? I didn’t have much of a choice.
A few weeks later, our congregation’s presiding elder called me on the phone and asked if I was “a homosexual” and planning to live as one, as if the two can be separated. But word travels quickly in a closed religious community.
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