Mormonism Explained
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: Wendy Williams Montgomery, an LGBTQ advocate in the Latter-day Saint community who, between November 2015 and January 2016, collected secondhand reports of deaths she believed were connected to the Church’s new policy. A tally that began circulating at 32 and rose to 34. No names published. No death records matched. Nothing verified.
The Short Answer
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: Wendy Williams Montgomery, an LGBTQ advocate in the Latter-day Saint community who, between November 2015 and January 2016, collected secondhand reports of deaths she believed were connected to the Church’s new policy. A tally that began circulating at 32 and rose to 34. No names published. No death records matched. Nothing verified. When the Salt Lake Tribune — no defender of the policy — checked the claim against Utah’s official mortality data, the state’s count of all youth suicides in that window, every religion and orientation combined, was roughly ten. And the American Association of Suicidology confirms that no data system anywhere records suicide deaths by sexual orientation — meaning a count of gay Mormon suicides is a number nobody can produce. The timing fails too: Utah’s tragic rise began around 2013, years before the policy, and in the policy’s own window deaths tracked the existing trend with no increase above trajectory. What’s true: the 2015 policy caused real anguish, and the Church reversed it in 2019. What was never true: the number.
Verdict: never verified, contradicted by the official record, and unverifiable in principle.
If you or someone you love is struggling
Key Takeaways
- An informal tally of secondhand reports, never verified, contradicted by official mortality data, asserting a per-orientation precision no dataset records.
- A state-level inference that fails the timing test, ignores the regional suicide belt, and is contradicted by the individual-level data within Utah itself.
- The grief is real. The claims are checkable. This page checks them.
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.
- Circulated claim — LGBTQ Latter-day Saint youthAn informal tally of secondhand reports; never substantiated.32+
- State record — all Utah youth, every religion and orientationUtah Department of Health. Suicide records do not code sexual orientation or religion.~10
Sources: Utah Department of Health youth suicide statistics; American Association of Suicidology. The comparison is between a claim about one group and the recorded total for all youth — the claim exceeds the whole.
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. 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.
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. 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
Schematic of the documented pattern: +136.2% (2011–2015), inflection ~2013 — before the policy; no 2008–09 signature. Not to scale.
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. 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. 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.
- LGBTQ Latter-day Saint youthLowest attempt rate of any religious group measured.~10%
- LGBTQ peers of no religion23%
Source: Dyer, Goodman & Wood, BYU Studies Quarterly 61 (2022); McGraw et al. (2021), APA.
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. 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 last page.
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
What the record shows
Verdict
Claim in circulation
What the record shows
Verdict
Claim in circulation
What the record shows
Verdict
Claim in circulation
What the record shows
Verdict
Claim in circulation
What the record shows
Verdict
Claim in circulation
What the record shows
Verdict
Claim in circulation
What the record shows
Verdict
Claim in circulation
What the record shows
Verdict
The point: 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
Did 32 LGBTQ Mormon youth die by suicide after the 2015 policy?
The figure was an informal, secondhand tally that was never verified. Utah’s official count of ALL youth suicides in the window was a fraction of the claim, and no dataset records suicide deaths by orientation.
Unverified — failed the official check
What was the November 2015 policy?
A Handbook update classifying members in same-sex marriages as apostates subject to discipline, and restricting blessing/baptism for children in same-sex-couple households until age 18.
Real — and reversed in 2019
Who checked the death-count claim?
The Salt Lake Tribune — a paper long critical of the Church’s LGBTQ policies — checked it against Utah Department of Health mortality data and could not corroborate it.
Checked by a critic, not the Church
Could a correct LGBTQ death count exist?
No. The American Association of Suicidology confirms no data system records suicide deaths by sexual orientation. Any death count, from any side, asserts data that doesn’t exist.
Unverifiable in principle
Did the policy cause Utah’s youth suicide rise?
The rise began around 2013 — two years before the policy — climbing 136.2% from 2011–2015. In the policy’s own window, deaths tracked that trend: no increase above trajectory. The curve predates the accused cause.
Timing fails
Did the policy hurt people?
Yes — the anguish among LGBTQ members and families was real and extensively documented, and this page states it without qualification. The Church reversed the policy in April 2019.
True — owned plainly
Frequently Asked Questions
Did the Mormon Church’s LGBTQ policy cause suicides?
What happened to the November 2015 policy?
Where did the “32 deaths” number come from?
Is Utah’s youth suicide problem the Church’s fault?
From the DMs · Tough Questions, Straight Answers
“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 raised anything for you
Sources
- Church Handbook policy update (November 2015) and First Presidency clarification letter — the policy text and stated rationale.
- Salt Lake Tribune reporting on the circulated suicide figure vs. Utah Department of Health mortality data — the corroboration test.
- American Association of Suicidology — statement that no U.S. data system records suicide deaths by sexual orientation.
- Utah Department of Health youth suicide statistics, 2011–2015 (150 youth 10–17; inflection ~2013; 2015–16 peak; CDC Epi-Aid); CDC national youth suicide trend data.
- April 2019 policy reversal — Church announcement and President Dallin H. Oaks’s explanation.
- Mountain West “suicide belt” literature — altitude, rurality, firearm access, care availability; Utah county-level analyses of Latter-day-Saint presence and suicide rates.
- Dyer, Goodman & Wood, BYU Studies Quarterly 61 (2022); McGraw et al. (2021), APA — the comparative youth data engaged in the sections above.
- Companion studies available on this site: LGBTQ Mormons and Suicide · Can You Be Gay and Mormon · Doctrine Test.
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.
Crisis resources: call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, US) · Church suicide-prevention resources: churchofjesuschrist.org/get-help/suicide. Help is real.
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