Did 34 Gay Mormon Kids Die by Suicide Because of the Mormon Church's LGBTQ Policy?

No one has ever verified it — and here's the part almost nobody knows: no one ever could. The number traces to one person, an LGBTQ advocate who collected secondhand reports between November 2015 and January 2016. When the Salt Lake Tribune checked against Utah's official death records, the state's count of all youth suicides in that window was roughly ten.

By Todd Noall · Mormonism Explained · July 2026 · 13 Minute Read

If you or someone you love is struggling

Call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, US) any time. The Church also provides suicide-prevention resources at churchofjesuschrist.org/get-help/suicide. You matter, and help is real.

KEY FACTS — THE SHORT ANSWER

The viral claim of 32+ gay Mormon youth suicides caused by the November 2015 policy was never substantiated. It originated as an informal tally of secondhand reports, never checked against any record.
When the Salt Lake Tribune checked it against Utah's official mortality data, the state's total count of all youth suicides in the window — every religion and orientation — was roughly ten.
The American Association of Suicidology confirms no data system in the country records suicide deaths by sexual orientation, meaning the claimed precision is impossible for anyone to possess.
Utah's youth suicide rise began around 2013 — two years before the policy — and in the policy's own window, deaths tracked that existing trend with no increase above trajectory.
The policy caused real anguish among LGBTQ members and families — documented, acknowledged, owned. The Church reversed it in April 2019. What was never established: the death count.

What the Policy Actually Said

On November 5, 2015, an update to the Church's Handbook of Instructions became public. It made two changes: adults in a same-sex marriage were classified as apostates subject to a mandatory Church disciplinary council, and children living in a household headed by a same-sex couple could not receive a name and blessing, be baptized, or serve missions until age eighteen — and then only after disavowing the practice of same-sex marriage and receiving First Presidency approval.

Church leaders explained the children's provision as protective in intent — meant to spare children a conflict between home and church during their growing-up years, parallel to a longstanding policy for children in polygamous households. That was the stated rationale; this page will not pretend the explanation ended the matter. The policy landed on LGBTQ members and their families as a wound. Resignations were organized. Vigils were held. Latter-day Saint parents of gay children described anguish in every register the language has. All of that is part of the record, and a fact check that omitted it would not be objective — it would be incomplete.

What this page examines is not whether the policy caused pain. It plainly did. The question is a specific, factual one: did it cause a documented wave of youth suicides — the claim that turned a policy controversy into a public-health accusation repeated to this day?

The Number: Where It Came From

Within weeks of the policy's publication, a specific figure began to circulate: 32 young gay Mormons — a tally that later rose to 34 — dead by suicide since the announcement. We traced the number to its source, and the source is one person.

Her name is Wendy Williams Montgomery: an LGBTQ advocate within the Latter-day Saint community, a leader in the support organization Affirmation, and by every account we can find, someone sincerely trying to bear witness to grief she believed was happening around her. Between November 6, 2015 and January 17, 2016, she collected reports — from families, from friends, from friends of friends.

Now look at what that list was, and what it wasn't. It was a grief log. Communities in pain count their losses; they always have, and we're not attacking the person who counted. But no names were published. No death records were matched. No dates, causes, or Church membership statuses were verified. There was no way to know whether reports were duplicated, whether the deaths fell in the claimed window, whether they were suicides at all, or whether the deceased were gay, or Mormon, or either.

None of that slowed the number down. Within days it was in national outlets and celebrity feeds, quoted like a census figure: the policy had killed. A grief log had become a statistic, sourced to itself. And a claim that specific — that many deaths, that population, that window — is checkable. Utah is a state. States keep death records. Somebody just had to walk the number over to the official record and compare. Somebody did. And it wasn't the Church. VERIFIED — REPORTING DOCUMENTED

The Corroboration Test

The Salt Lake Tribune has covered the Church's LGBTQ policies critically for decades; its religion desk is nobody's apologetics operation. Which is what makes its investigation of the 32-deaths claim the decisive document in this story. The Tribune took the circulating figure to the official source — the Utah Department of Health, which records every death in the state, with cause — and the official record could not support the claim. VERIFIED — TRIBUNE REPORTING

The state's count of youth suicides in the relevant window was a fraction of the number circulating: roughly ten deaths by suicide among Utah youth in the period for which the viral tally claimed twenty-six or more — and that official count includes all Utah youth, of every religion and every orientation, not only LGBTQ Latter-day Saints. For the viral figure to be accurate, the number of LGBTQ Latter-day Saint suicides would have had to exceed the state's total count of all youth suicides several times over. The arithmetic does not survive contact with the death records.

The claim against the record — counts, not rates

Claimed by the viral tally

Utah’s official count, all youth suicides

~10

Deaths in the claimed window

0 10 20 30 40

The tally claimed 34 LGBTQ Latter-day Saint deaths. Utah’s official count for the same window — every religion and orientation — was roughly ten. Salt Lake Tribune / Utah Department of Health.

Then the deeper problem, stated by the field's own authority. The American Association of Suicidology — the professional body for suicide research in the United States — confirmed that no data system in the country records suicide deaths by sexual orientation. VERIFIED — AAS OFFICIAL STATEMENT Death certificates do not capture it. State mortality databases do not capture it. No registry anywhere links a completed suicide to the deceased's orientation and religion together. This is not a technicality; it is the whole case. It means the viral number was not merely unverified — it was unverifiable in principle. There is no source from which a count of "LGBTQ Latter-day Saint suicides since the policy" could ever have been assembled, by anyone, on any side. A claim bearing that precision was asserting data that does not exist.

And the same limit binds this page: no one can prove the policy caused zero deaths either, and this fact check makes no such claim. What can be said — all that can be said, and it is enough — is that the specific, viral, quantified accusation failed the only official test available, and could never have passed it, because the data it claimed to summarize has never been collected by anyone.

The Timing Test

A causal claim has to fit the timeline it accuses, and this one does not. Utah's rise in youth suicide is real and it is heartbreaking — an increase of 136.2% between 2011 and 2015 — but its inflection began around 2013, two full years before the November 2015 policy existed. Whatever set the curve climbing was already at work while the policy was still unwritten. VERIFIED — UTAH DEPT. OF HEALTH DATA

The same test embarrasses the earlier version of this accusation: after California's Proposition 8 campaign in 2008, in which the Church was prominently involved, critics predicted — and later claimed — a suicide surge among LGBTQ Latter-day Saints. The state data shows no corresponding inflection in 2008–2009 either. Both of the events most blamed for Utah's crisis fail to line up with the crisis's actual shape: the rise starts before one and shows no signature at the other.

Researchers studying the national picture note that youth suicide rose sharply across the United States in the same window — a rise implicating factors from smartphones and social media to opioids and economic dislocation, none of which respect state or denominational lines. A tragedy that tracks a national curve, begins before the accused policy, and shows no break at the accused campaign is not a fingerprint. It is a crisis being borrowed for an argument.

The claim's own window makes the point sharper. Across 2011–2015, 150 Utah youth aged 10–17 died by suicide, and 2015–2016 were the peak years of the rise — so at that point the pre-existing trend alone would predict roughly eight or nine youth suicides statewide in any ten-week span, of every cause and orientation. The official count for the weeks the viral tally covered was about ten: essentially what the trajectory already predicted, and a fraction of the 26-plus the claim asserted. From November 2015 into early 2016, youth suicides tracked precisely what the existing trend had been producing for years. There was no increase above trajectory — no spike, no break in the line at the policy. A wave of policy-driven deaths would have left exactly that mark; the record shows none.

That is not proof the policy touched no one — no dataset could establish that, in either direction — but the measurable signal the accusation requires simply is not in the data.

Utah in Context

The final version of the accusation drops the death count and keeps the geography: Utah has one of the nation's worst youth suicide rates, Utah is the Church's home, therefore the Church. But Utah sits inside the Mountain West "suicide belt" — a band of states with persistently elevated suicide rates that researchers attribute to altitude, rurality, firearm prevalence, and thin mental-health infrastructure — and Utah's neighbors in that belt share the elevated rates without sharing the religion.

Worse for the argument, the pattern inside Utah runs backwards: analyses of Utah counties find that areas with the strongest Latter-day Saint presence show lower suicide rates, not higher, and Latter-day Saint youth report suicidality at well below the rate of non-member peers. A cause should be strongest where it is most concentrated. This one is weakest there. VERIFIED — COUNTY-LEVEL ANALYSES

And on the specific population the accusation invokes — LGBTQ Latter-day Saint youth — the best representative data that exists finds them reporting the lowest suicide-attempt rate of any religious group measured: roughly 10%, versus 23% among LGBTQ peers of no religion, a finding independently replicated by non-Latter-day Saint researchers. That evidence is the subject of its own full study on this site; here it need only do one job. A claim that the Church drives its LGBTQ youth to death has to explain why the youth closest to the Church show the least of what the claim predicts. VERIFIED — PEER-REVIEWED DATA

The Reversal, Handled Honestly

In April 2019, the Church reversed the policy. Children of same-sex couples may now be blessed and baptized; same-sex marriage, while still counted a serious transgression, no longer carries the apostasy classification and its mandatory discipline. President Dallin H. Oaks framed the change as guided by continuing revelation and by a desire to reduce the hate and contention such matters generate, and to help affected families. VERIFIED

A fact check owes this chapter the same precision as the others, and precision here cuts in more than one direction. It would be dishonest to present the reversal as an admission that the policy killed — the Church said no such thing, and as this page has shown, no data could show it. It would be equally dishonest to pretend the reversal says nothing: institutions do not ordinarily reverse policies that are working as hoped, and members who spent those years grieving the policy were not imagining its weight.

Both things are true. The policy was real, its pain was real, its reversal was real — and the death count attached to it was never established. Holding those together is not a rhetorical balancing act; it is simply what the record contains. What the record does not contain — anywhere — is a body of evidence connecting the policy to a quantified wave of deaths. The people who repeat that connection today are not citing a finding. They are citing a rumor that a newspaper checked and could not confirm, nine years ago.

So — Did the Policy Cause a Wave of Suicides?

The claim is unverified, uncorroborated, and unverifiable in principle. The "32 deaths" figure was an informal tally of secondhand reports, never checked against any record. When the Salt Lake Tribune checked it against Utah's official mortality data, the state's total count of youth suicides in the window — all religions, all orientations — was a fraction of the figure claimed. The American Association of Suicidology confirms that no dataset anywhere records suicide deaths by sexual orientation, so the claimed precision could never have existed. The timing fails: Utah's rise began around 2013, before the policy, and in the policy's own window deaths tracked that trend — no increase above trajectory. And the best representative data on the population in question finds LGBTQ Latter-day Saint youth reporting the lowest suicide-attempt rate of any religious group — the opposite of what the accusation predicts.

The pain the policy caused was real, and the Church itself ended the policy in 2019. But a real grief does not license an invented number. The one-sentence version: the deaths were never documented, the data to document them does not exist, and the evidence that does exist points the other way.

The pain was real. The policy is gone. And the number — the thing everyone repeated — was never real at all. That's the record. Check it yourself; every source is on the next page.

THE VERDICT

The viral claim that the Church's 2015 LGBTQ policy caused 32 or more youth suicides is never verified, contradicted by official records, and unverifiable in principle. The informal tally that circulated was checked by a newspaper critical of the policy against the state's death records and failed. No dataset exists that could verify a per-orientation death count. The timing doesn't fit the accusation. And the representative data on LGBTQ Latter-day Saint youth shows the opposite of what the claim predicts. The policy caused real pain. The number did not cause anything — because no one ever documented it.

The Claim Ledger

Each claim in circulation, what the record shows, and the verdict this page can defend. Nothing below rests on Church sources; the checks run through the Salt Lake Tribune, the Utah Department of Health, the American Association of Suicidology, and the peer-reviewed literature.

Claim in Circulation

"The Nov. 2015 policy caused 32+ LGBTQ youth suicides."

What the Record Shows

Informal secondhand tally (Nov 6 2015–Jan 17 2016, later 34); no verification; official DoH count of ALL youth suicides in the window was ~10 — a fraction of the claim.

Verdict

UNVERIFIED CAUSAL CLAIM

Claim in Circulation

"The deaths are documented."

What the Record Shows

No names, records, or matches were ever published; the Tribune could not corroborate; AAS confirms no dataset records suicide deaths by orientation.

Verdict

UNVERIFIABLE IN PRINCIPLE

Claim in Circulation

"The Church caused Utah's youth suicide crisis."

What the Record Shows

Rise began ~2013 (pre-policy); in the policy's window deaths tracked the trend — no increase above trajectory; strongest-LDS counties show lower rates.

Verdict

CONTESTED FRAME — DATA OPPOSITE

Claim in Circulation

"The policy caused real anguish in LGBTQ members and families."

What the Record Shows

Extensively documented — resignations, vigils, first-person accounts; acknowledged on this page without qualification.

Verdict

TRUE — OWNED

Claim in Circulation

"The Church reversed the policy."

What the Record Shows

April 2019: children of same-sex couples may be blessed and baptized; apostasy classification removed.

Verdict

TRUE

Claim in Circulation

"LGBTQ Latter-day Saint youth are at greater risk than LGBTQ youth outside the Church."

What the Record Shows

Best representative data (86,346 Utah students; independently replicated): lowest attempt rate of any religious group, ~10% vs 23% no-religion peers.

Verdict

CONTRADICTED BY THE DATA

A fact check is not a defense brief. Two of the claims above are true, and this page says so plainly. But the claim that made this story national — the death count — was never substantiated, contradicted by the official record, and impossible in principle. Repeating it is not advocacy for LGBTQ youth. It is the recycling of a number that failed its only audit.

Quick Answers

Frequently Asked Questions

Did the Mormon Church's LGBTQ policy cause suicides?

The specific viral claim — 32 or more LGBTQ youth suicides caused by the November 2015 policy — was never substantiated. It originated as an informal tally of secondhand reports; the Salt Lake Tribune could not corroborate it against Utah's official mortality data, which counted far fewer youth suicides in the window across all religions and orientations combined; and the American Association of Suicidology confirms that no dataset records suicide deaths by sexual orientation, making the claimed precision impossible for anyone to possess. The policy's emotional toll on LGBTQ members was real; the quantified death claim was not established.

What happened to the November 2015 policy?

The Church reversed it in April 2019. Children of same-sex couples may be blessed and baptized, and same-sex marriage no longer carries the apostasy classification. The Church described the change as guided by continuing revelation and a desire to reduce contention and help affected families.

Where did the "32 deaths" number come from?

From reports collected informally by advocate Wendy Williams Montgomery, associated with the LGBTQ support organization Affirmation, between November 6, 2015 and January 17, 2016 — later revised to 34. The reports were secondhand, unverified, and never matched to death records. Grief made the tally understandable; nothing made it data.

Is Utah's youth suicide problem the Church's fault?

Utah's crisis is real, but it began rising around 2013 — before the policy — tracks a national surge, and sits within the Mountain West "suicide belt" that researchers attribute to altitude, rurality, firearm access, and care shortages. Within Utah, the counties with the strongest Latter-day Saint presence show lower suicide rates, and in the best representative data, LGBTQ Latter-day Saint youth report the lowest suicide-attempt rate of any religious group.

The Harder Questions, Answered

"So you're saying the deaths didn't happen? Tell that to the families."

Verdict: Real deaths occurred in Utah in those months — what was never established is the count, the causes, and the causal story attached to them.

No. Utah lost young people to suicide in that window — roughly ten, by the official record — and every one of them was an irreplaceable child whose family carries a grief no article can touch. This page disputes none of that and honors all of it. What it disputes is a specific number (32+), a specific attribution (the policy), and a specific precision (LGBTQ Latter-day Saints) that no record supports and no dataset could support. The families of Utah's actual dead deserve better than to have their children conscripted, uncounted and unnamed, into an argument. Precision about the dead is not disrespect. It is the only respect a fact check can offer.

"The Tribune count only catches reported suicides — the real number is always higher."

Verdict: Undercounting is real, but it cannot rescue a claim that exceeds the official total several times over — and it cuts against every death count equally, including the viral one.

Suicide undercounting exists; medical examiners misclassify some deaths everywhere. But the viral claim didn't exceed the official count by a margin undercounting could explain — it claimed more LGBTQ Latter-day Saint deaths alone than the state recorded for all youth of every description, several times over. And if official records undercount, informal secondhand tallies — with no records at all — do not become more reliable; they become uncheckable. An argument that dissolves the only official data dissolves its own number first.

"Even if the number was wrong, spreading it saved lives by forcing attention to LGBTQ youth."

Verdict: Suicide-prevention experts say the opposite — sensationalized death counts violate safe-messaging standards and can increase contagion risk.

The intention is understandable; the method is the one thing every suicide-prevention body warns against. Safe-messaging guidelines exist because publicizing suicide as a wave — especially as the predictable result of belonging to an identifiable group — is associated with contagion among vulnerable youth. Telling a struggling LGBTQ Latter-day Saint teenager, falsely, that dozens just like them have died because of who they are is not protection. The attention LGBTQ youth need is the kind the actual data prescribes: connected families, reduced conflict, real access to help. That message saves lives, and it has the advantage of being true.

If this page raised anything for you: call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, US), any time. Church resources: churchofjesuschrist.org/get-help/suicide. Help is real, and reaching for it is strength.

Sources

Corrections policy: Mormonism Explained corrects errors of fact promptly and visibly. If any death referenced in the circulated tally is ever documented and matched to the record, this page will be updated to say so — that is what it means to follow the evidence.

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