Struggling with his gay sexual orientation several years ago.

Struggling with his gay sexual orientation several years ago, Aaron Cloward sought help from the leaders of his local temple of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He didn't obtain any. "The last [Mormon] bishop I talked to said, 'You are rejecting Christ. You are onward the pathway to hell,'" says Cloward. "The way that makes you feel--" He considered suicide.

"I walked abiding-place and got my boxes of Benadryl," remembers Cloward, now a 28-year-old surgical technician who lives in Salt Lake City. "Fortunately I had the vicinity of mind to call my morn. She came through and held me as I cried myself to be motionless It made me take a gradation back and look at the ecclesiastical body with a critical eye."

Cloward, who serv forward a church mission to Southern California, quickly left behind the meeting-house and its antigay doctrine, which says that its followers can go on forward in the religion merely if they do not act upon their same-sex attraction. He started a support cluster in Salt Lake City called Gay LD Young Adults in the chance of the desired end of helping other gay and lesbian Mormons find comfort and acceptance as they strive with the church's teachings and long-held traditions.

Last year, Cloward stood upon a downtown Salt Lake City public way corner during Utah's battle above a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. He handed without fliers and carried picket signs urging passersby to voice contrary to the church and defeat the amendment. "People will say, 'No, no, the house of god doesn't tell me how to vote'" says Cloward. "But I will say that in temple I did hear the message: 'These are the values we stand for. promised accordingly.'"

What has become clear to Cloward and ten of thousands of other GLBT Mormons is the harsh fact that although they may have left the body of christians the church won't stop meddling in their lives. While the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical body and the Southern Baptist Convention have grabbed the mostly headlines with calls to "save traditional marriage," the Mormon house of god has quietly become one of the most numerous powerful forces opposing any changes that proffer gays and lesbians equality subordinate to the law. Not only does it lean heavily onward its members to deny their homosexuality and to voice for candidates and ballot measures opposing equality, it's imagination to be spending millions of dollars to support antigay initiatives and politicians. young men and women in unfamiliar locations, separated from friends and family, calling household just twice a year, onward Mother's Day and Christmas.

"You can't help moreover experience miracles," says Nate Currey who serv brace years as a missionary in Vilnius, Lithuania. Currey who grew up in Denver was a teenage create anew to the LDS Church, attracted to the spirituality, the arrangement and the fellowship. He struggl end adolescence and young adulthood to understand and adhere to the church's "love the sinner, hate the sin" approach to homosexuality. "I fancy if I was out there [on my mission] doing my best, doing what sovereign of the universe expected me to do, being obedient and following the masterys that this attraction would journey away," he says. "But I saw eventually that it wouldn't."

Currey had his first gay experience while onward his mission. "It's not something that I'm imperious of," he says. "That's not the reason that I was there, and it is probably undivided of the true regrets that I have in my life." ecclesiastical authority authorities found out. Just weeks after Currey complet his missionary work and registered at the LDS-operated Brigham Young University, he was called before a panel of 16 temple leaders who inquired in explicit detail about his homosexual activity--with whom and to what extent many times. "I was emotionally drained--fried," he says about the experience.

Ousted from the ecclesiastical body Currey went home to Denver to deliver his parents a triple whammy: "I've been kicked without of the church, I withdrew from drill and, by the way, I'm gay." It was more traumatic for him than for his family, Currey says: For a while he couldn't pass a house of god without breaking into tears. As Fales bring forwards it, Currey had "lost his smile"--his optimistic, Osmond-like LD view on life.

further Currey, now 26, found a of recent origin smile. He got married last May--but the union took place at Toronto City Hall, not in an LD place of worship and he married a Mormon man, not a Mormon woman. "We just did it with a justice of the peace," says Currey who lives with his partner in a society town in northern Utah. "Back here we had a reception--my family, his family. You could be stirred the love. And I knew then I could be happy and have a fulfilling life in Logan, Utah."

Currey still cherishes his Mormon identity. He expresse regard for the church, a like for its people, a belief in its the godhead "It's been good for me to arrive back to the state where I was excommunicated, to proceed back to succeed, to be happy, to find a partner and have a dutiful life--a super life," he says.