Falling Into Life: A Gay Exmormon’s Journey

Chapter One – They Looked At Each Other and They Fell

During the night of September 11th, 2001 I watched the television late into the night and I began to fall apart…

I saw the only broadcast ever to show the falling of humans out of the World Trade Center towers, I’ve never seen it again, nor do I believe it was broadcast again after that night, but it had a lifelong impact on me. As they fell to their deaths, I started my fall into life.

They broadcast late that night every person who chose to jump and fall instead of going down with those burning buildings from that camera’s vantage point. I often wonder how the cameramen were able to capture those images and what impact it had on them. I can tell you what impact it had on me, it changed everything.

Up until then most of my life had meaning and order. The Mormon Church firmly affixed and welded onto my brain. I had a solid belief that homosexuality was the enemy of God, even though I am gay as the day is long. I did not waver in my knowledge that Joseph Smith was a Prophet of God who restored the gospel to this earth. I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was the only true church and it contained the everlasting gospel that would bring salvation to all who would heed its message.

I was a pretty good missionary, the combination of my character, charm, and strong belief were amazing to some people, even to myself. And I was always in missionary mode; I baptized my Ex wife, two people in Spain, and influenced many more. But as I got older and many areas of the church became difficult to understand, the typical patented responses did not assuage my confusion; no one had anything new to say, it was becoming tremendously old, outdated and boring. I came from deep-seated solid Mormon stock, too. My given name is Steven Hamblin Lee, Hamblin after Jacob Hamblin and the Lee after John Doyle Lee. If you are Mormon, this will mean something to you, if you are not Mormon, it probably means absolutely nothing to you, thank gawd.

But as I watched those people jump from those windows, I experienced something like a heart explosion. As each person fell, all of my beliefs were crumbling down, too. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing, but it was true, it was happening in front of my eyes, and I began to challenge everything that I believed. Sitting there on my couch I felt as if everything I knew was crushing and imploding into dust without really understanding what was happening. Most Mormons when they see such atrocities receive an affirmation of their beliefs, these images were destroying mine.

There was one camera shot where two people had their legs out the windows; they were leaning far outward so they could breathe from the black smoke billowing out behind them, it almost obscured them entirely. They were looking at each other and speaking to each other, one man and one woman. They kept glancing back in, only to return back to each other’s faces. They were making a decision together, a decision not to die alone. They slowly reached out to each other, but the angles of their perches prevented both hands from reaching, so each reached one hand to the other. At the moment those hands touched their decent began.

As soon as they started to slip out of the windows, they quickly whipped their other hands out to the open hand waiting, and they grasped each others hands tightly and they looked right into the other’s face. As they held each other’s hands they began to pick up speed, it was not obvious to me how high they were, but it turns out they were very high towards the top. At first they fell straight downward, but as each floor whizzed by, they began to spin in the air. The faster they fell the faster they spun. By the time they fell out of site, which I assume was just before they hit the ground; they were spinning gracefully and looking intently at each other with fixed gazes, their hands refusing to let go.

The woman’s hair was whipping upwards in a blur and their hair and clothes were the only indications they were rushing downwards with tremendous speed due to the way the camera shot was tracking their fall. The looks on their faces were almost serene and neither were panicking it seemed. They just held on to each other and fell.

This image will never leave me. I’ve never seen such a combination of horrific images ending with a few people deciding that they would not go out alone. What was their last conversation like? Did they know each other at all? Were they just strangers to each other, or had they suffered through many boring meetings together previously in corporate America never knowing their last meeting would be like that? But there they were, able to make that last decision together, to fall and die together in a situation so beyond their control without any more time to be angry about it, to lament about it, to cry about their misfortune. All of those people fell in front of my eyes to their deaths in those terrible moments.

Did they die happy? Did they die balanced? Did they wish they had done more? Did they wish they had done it differently? I knew one thing in that moment, I was really messed up and I was really, really unhappy. The confusion was becoming visceral. It was becoming impossible to breathe. I had to start paying attention. I had to challenge what was hurting me, what was stopping me, what was making me unhappy.

Their lives were not lost on me, as a matter of fact, I wish I knew how to reach out to the surviving family members and somehow let them know of the impact their tragic endings had on my life. Most people watched it and felt horror. I watched it and my entire life paradigm shifted monumentally to the left. It began my own falling, of sorts. A falling into life.

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