| Out
of Jehovah’s closet >> A Common Bond finds common ground for gay ex-Witnesses
by PATRICK LEJTENYI
Coming out of the closet is never easy, all the more so if you’re raised in a religious fundamentalist community. And of all the fundamentalist sects out there this side of the Taliban, few are as exceedingly intolerant of homosexuality as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Members of the congregation on the wrong side of God’s plan for procreation are ostracized-“disfellowshipped”-and cut off from the community they grew up in. They are considered dead. To return to the flock, they must renounce their Satanic ways, and either remain celibate or marry and multiply. There is very little room to manoeuvre for a gay Jehovah’s Witness. Founded in San Francisco in ’94, A Common Bond is a support network for the disfellowshipped LGBT Witnesses. ACB now has chapters worldwide, including one in Montreal. One-fifth of ACB-Montreal, which meets roughly once a month, is Hayley Juhl, a 31-year-old Gazette employee, mother of a six-year-old boy and one-half of a 15-year relationship. She drinks coffee, alcohol and smokes (the last of which being a disfellowshipping offence). She’s says she’s at ease with who she is. But that was a long, tough process. “When people are disfellowshipped because they’re gay,” Juhl says, “they lose their entire support network, often including their families. It’s kind of a grey area-you’re allowed to talk to immediate family, but some people are so faithful that they’ll cut off their children.” While Juhl admits she had it relatively easy, she does say that she still cannot talk about her sexuality openly with her mother. And since she renounced her faith at 19, several years before realizing she was gay, she hasn’t officially been disfellowshipped. But she is considered “bad association.” “Bad association,” according to the Witnesses, is anyone who isn’t them. Juhl says her non-Witness partner-with whom she’d been best friends since the age of 15-is considered a prime example of “bad association” for having, in the eyes of the faithful, first drawn her away from the flock, and then corrupting her into demonic sexual deviation.
The pain for gay Witnesses, however, doesn’t
just lie with being considered a pariah by one’s community. “It’s
a really guilt-based religion,” says Juhl. “[The hardest
part for a gay Witness is] dealing with the guilt that’s instilled
there no matter what. It’s something you deal with every day when
you don’t even think about it. It’s something that’s
there saying, ‘Wow, this is a bad life I’m living.’
That never goes away.” She also says the pressure, guilt and loss of support and contact that gay Witnesses face eventually translates into higher mortality rates as well. “There’s a lot of alcoholism and drug use. Suicide happens all the time. And it’s hushed up. But I think it happens far more often than I’ll ever know.” The difference between a gay Witness, Juhl says, and a gay person from a merely conservative family, is in the degrees homosexuality is considered an aberration. And for the Witnesses, homosexuality is as bad as bad can be. “Because homosexuality is considered
so totally evil, and you’ve been raised with this hope that you’ll
live forever (Witnesses believe that the righteous will be resurrected
into a perfect world), all of a sudden you’re giving up everyone
you know, plus this hope that one day you’ll be resurrected. So
all of a sudden death is scary, the world is scary, you know nothing
about the world, and you think everyone else is bad, because that’s
what you’ve been taught. You’re starting with nothing.”
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