“Cowboys, Armageddon, and The Truth: How a Gay Child was Saved from Religion” by Scott Terry— Family and Religion

Amos ♦ September 10, 2012 ♦ 2 Comments

Terry, Scott. “Cowboys, Armageddon, and The Truth: How a Gay Child was Saved from Religion”, Lethe Press, 2012.

Family and Religion

Amos Lassen

I just want to let you know about an upcoming memoir from Lethe Press that is already getting people talking. Terry Scott writes about the pain he has suffered because of his family and his religion and how that religion has not only isolated him but other believers as well. This is a true story of human endurance and how generosity and kindness can help to heal that pain.

In 2007, Terry sent an excerpt from this then unpublished memoir to the San Francisco Chronicle and within the hour he received a contract and a request for more from the book and he was soon writing for the paper. He was an innocent boy who escaped an abusive childhood. Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, he seemed to always be in prayer for the advent of Armageddon as well as asking God to take away his homosexual thoughts. By the time he was an adult he had broken with the religion and with the idea of an oncoming apocalypse. He had not only abandoned religion, he became a cowboy riding in rodeos and living life as a gay man. Today he is an urban farmer, paints watercolors, and is an installation artist and a successful businessman in Northern California.

His memoir lets us see how his world of abuse, religious extremism and homophobia affected his life and how he managed to escape it all. Some thirty years ago while at bull-riding practice, Terry met a steer wrestler from Wyoming named Buck. As they moved around from rodeo to rodeo, Buck often tried to hit on Terry but he resisted because as he says, he was as homophobic as they come and religion and guilt were still a part of his life. He had secret homosexual desires but he didn’t want them and everything he learned about gay men he had learned from his father and it was not so “nice”.

Two years before he met Buck, he ran away from home and his religion but the intolerance of the religion stayed with him and he was convinced that all gay men dressed as women and even though he really did not much about gay men, he did know that he was one of them but there was no chance he would ever act n that. His religious guilt would not let him and he was sure that God hated homosexuals. Things are much different now and he really realized that when his prayers went unanswered. Now he is not sure if God even exists but he is sure that God doesn’t care about starvation and other terrible events in today’s world.

This is just a small part of the story and hopefully it has made you want to find out the rest. I have a very strong feeling that this is going to be one of the books of the year and I do not think you will want to miss it. Look for it in October.