RELIGION
Son’s Suicide Leads Dad to Take on Mormons
Fourteen-year-old subjected to Church’s homophobia, invasive interviews
BY MATT TRACY
A Las Vegas man has embarked
on a mission to
raise awareness about
the deeply entrenched
homophobia permeating the Mormon
Church after his 14-year-old
son’s suicide, which the father attributes
to the institution’s anti-
LGBTQ teachings and culture.
Brian Bresee, who was a sixthgeneration
Mormon but ditched
the Church after the death of his
son Samuel, told Gay City News
during a phone interview that he
did not initially draw conclusions
about why his child committed
suicide. But after speaking with
Samuel’s friends from church and
hiring a private investigator to
pore through his son’s computer, it
started to make more sense.
The fi rst warning sign that
something had gone awry with
Samuel came when the boy was
12 years old. He participated in a
“worthiness interview,” a typical
rite of passage during which Mormon
Church bishops meet alone
with children and ask a series of
deeply personal questions about
sexuality, sexual identity, and
masturbation.
Children who answer such
questions in a manner consistent
with Mormon teachings are able
to proceed with Church activities,
but those who fail are deemed “unworthy.”
“Before the fi rst interview took
place, Samuel had been fairly comfortable
talking about sex,” Brian
explained in a blog post he wrote
for the Child-Friendly Faith Project
, an organization that raises
awareness about child abuse in the
religious realm. “But afterward, he
became unusually troubled and
grew increasingly evasive when the
subject of sex arose. Looking back
on it, it’s hard to believe that I and
so many other parents allowed our
children to take part in such an
inappropriate and creepy ritual.
But, at the time, I was unable to
see that the worthiness interviews
could have been harmful.”
Two years later, in 2014, Brian
Brian Bresee with his son Samuel, who died from suicide in 2014 after suffering from anti-LGBTQ abuse
and a culture of intolerance in the Mormon Church.
said he noticed a “dramatic and
disturbing change in Samuel’s behavior.”
In January of that year,
the Bresee family moved to a different
Las Vegas neighborhood and
joined the local Mormon congregation.
Samuel, at his dad’s urging,
joined boys down the street who
were playing hockey and became
friends with them.
As it turned out, some of those
boys were being subjected to anti-
LGBTQ abuse to the point that one
of them was suicidal. The same
bullies targeting those boys then
turned on Samuel and accused
him of being gay. That abuse carried
over into school, where many
other Mormon students attended.
Samuel, then, became more
withdrawn and showed resistance
to attending Boy Scouts and
church. He increasingly started
engaging with both friends and
strangers in online chats — and
it was there that he suffered even
more anti-LGBTQ abuse, despite
telling people he was attracted to
girls. In those chats, Samuel once
said, “My church tore me down so
much to where it is a lot easier for
me to give up on the church.”
Those patterns continued. The
day before he died, Samuel wrote,
“Most of the Mormon youth treat
you like crap unless you read the
Scriptures every day and night,
pray every day and night, be like
them every day and night.”
The nature of Samuel’s online
CHILDFRIENDLYFAITH.ORG
chats and much of the bullying he
faced from his peers was not revealed
until after he died — that
due to the work of the private investigator
and discussions with
the dead boy’s peers who shed insight
on the specifi cs of the abuse
he suffered. Those revelations
became the catalyst that made
Samuel’s parents leave the Church
and begin their fi ght against its
homophobic nature.
“When you grow up Mormon,
you realize there is only one path
to salvation,” Brian told Gay City
News as he stressed the immense
power of Church leadership in controlling
the lives of Mormon believers.
“When you fi nd out that who
you are is not in line with Church
teachings, you can’t just get up and
leave and fi nd another Church.”
In his suicide note, Samuel directly
targeted the Church, saying,
“You ruined my life. I no longer believe
in the Church. You ruined me.
You forced me to do things. I am
called whicked sic for not singing
or saying a prayer.”
Since Brian started his campaign
to raise awareness about
anti-LGBTQ teachings in the Mormon
Church, he has heard from
numerous families who have endured
the same experience as the
Bresee family and from children
who have contemplated suicide.
Samuel’s story is not necessarily
unique. In Utah, which boasts
the largest Mormon population in
the US, the state reported a 141
percent increase in suicides from
2011 to 2015 among those between
the ages of 10 and 17. In the Bresee
family’s home state of Nevada —
which also has a signifi cant Mormon
population — state offi cials
noted that 27 youth suicides were
recorded in 2018 compared to 15
in 2017. But those statistics sometimes
fl y under the radar because
the issue is rarely discussed.
“Brian is one of the few dads who
has lost a child to suicide in the
Mormon Church and is willing to
talk about it,” said Janet Heimlich,
who founded the Child-Friendly
Faith Project . “You will not fi nd
many parents in the Church who
have gone through what Brian has
and is willing to say this is what
happened.”
The Mormon Church on April 4
announced that it would begin allowing
children of LGBTQ couples
to be baptized and that same-sex
couples would no longer be deemed
“apostates,” or someone who deviates
from Church teachings. But
the Mormon Church’s longstanding
opposition to LGBTQ rights
continues: it still maintains that
same-sex marriage is a “serious
transgression” and that sexual activity
between same-sex individuals
is sinful and “undermines” the
institution of the family.
Those teachings spilled into the
Bresee family. Brian recalled that
as a child he was taught that being
gay was a choice and “that homosexuals
were Sodomites whose
sins were so great God destroyed
their city.” After his son’s death, his
views on LGBTQ rights shifted for
the better — but the Church’s culture
of intolerance continues.
“Church policy is not changing,”
Brian said. “They’re still condemning
LGBTQ children. They’re still
being excommunicated.”
Brian noted that there is much
work to do in eradicating the culture
of homophobia in the Mormon
Church, but he summed up a simple
starting point: acceptance.
“That is the fi rst task,” he said. “I
want what happened to my son to
never happen again.”
August 15 - August 28, 2 14 019 | GayCityNews.com
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