And sexual relations between consenting gay adults could prompt disfellowshipment or excommunication — as well as a red flag on their membership records in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The annotation instructs local lay leaders who see the membership records to call church headquarters in Salt Lake City.
Many of these local leaders also have interpreted this note on a membership document as a reason to ban gays from interactions with children or teens — as if they were pedophiles — even though the flagged activity was consensual and with adults.
This mark could follow members throughout their lives. Think of it as a kind of Latter-day Saint sex-offender registry — without any illegal offending.
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That was “standard practice,” Gustav-Wrathall says. “It is possible that there are bishops who don’t know that or ignore it. For the most part, though, once your record is annotated, you can never be involved with youth.”
That is based on an “antiquated stereotype that homosexuals are more likely to be predators, which is not true,” he says. “And the church has never revisited the issue since the 1960s.”
Researcher Gregory Prince, who is writing a book about the history of LGBTQ members and the church, has documented several cases in which the annotation was nearly impossible to blot out.
When introducing himself to his bishop in Portland about 12 years ago, Jon Hastings recalls saying, “I’m not sure what you know about me.”
The bishop replied, “Well, all I know is that you can’t work with children. There’s something on your record, and I called church headquarters to find out what it meant.”
At first, Hastings was “confused,” he says, “then devastated.”
He had been disfellowshipped for intimacy with men some years before but had been “re-fellowshipped.”
The assumption that he was a threat to children “had been tacked onto me,” Hastings says. “It wasn’t right or true.”
When he told his bishop he had kissed a boy, the lay leader said that any homosexual involvement — no matter how little — would delay him three years.
That was the first time Ibarra felt inhibited about being gay.
“I had been going on temple trips, taking the sacrament, and doing everything everyone else could do,” he says. “This felt disproportionate and unfair.”
He fell into a deep depression, dropping out of school and returning to Ohio, where he wound up in a psychiatric hospital, contemplating suicide.
“I should just kill myself now without having sinned and go to the Celestial Kingdom,” he reasoned, “or I could live until I am 40 and will definitely sin.”
