July 18, 2024 • 43 mins
The cult is a secret to most people she knows. Her very identity is a secret to most people she knows. But at a certain point, Lauren needs to be herself. She needs to tell her story and corroborate it. She needs to set herself free.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
If you ask me where I'm from, I'll lie to you.
I'll tell you my parents are missionaries. I'll tell you
I'm from Boston. I'll tell you I'm from Texas. Those lies.
People believe I'm better at lying than I am at
telling the truth, because the lies don't make me nervous.
It's the truth, the thought of telling it the triggers
my awkward laugh, in my sweaty palms, makes me not
(00:26):
want to look you in the eye. I know I
won't like what I'll see.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
That's Lauren Huff, Austin based writer and author of the
essay collection Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing. Lauren's is a
story of courage, transformation, and one woman's will and spirit
to find a way out, to find a way through,
to find a path toward the most authentic version of herself.
(01:06):
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is Family Secrets. The secrets
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about
the landscape or landscapes of your childhood.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
I grew up everywhere. I mean, there are there are
places that I think affected me more than others and
that I remember more than others. I was born in Berlin, Germany,
and have no really early childhood memories of that. We
left when I was I think one or two, went
to Switzerland and then Argentina and Chile, and I don't
(01:51):
remember those much either. We came back to the States
for a while to Amrili, Texas, or my grandmother lived,
and then went to Japan Osaka for a couple of years,
and then back to Switzerland and Germany and then back
to Amillo, Texas.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
If you could pinpoint what your first memory was, what
do you see and sort of how old were you
when you see it?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
It's funny. I went back to Berlin, and because I
was born in a commune, the address of the commune
is on my birth certificate, so I was able to
find the flat where I was born, and I have
this very early memory of feeding little birds and sitting
on those green glass tiles in front of an apartment,
(02:35):
and the apartment still had those green glass tiles out
in front of it, So I remember something from when
I was maybe one and a half years old, But
that's the only memory I have, as those little birds.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Was that memory something that you had before you went
back and then it was confirmed or did it come
to you when you went back to Berlin as an adult.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
I was always asking where the green tiles were, just
trying to different memories somewhere, because I have two older
sisters and I'll ask them, you know, what was the
house with the goats in it? And they'll tell me
that it was in Mendoza in Argentina. Or I'll ask
them what was the house with the avocado tree and
they'll tell me that was Santiago, or the house with
the hay on the roof. You know, these things that
(03:15):
you see as a child that it's not the same
thing as the adults see. The birds in the green
titles were one of those questions I was asking, and
they didn't know where that was.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Lauren is one of four. She has two older sisters
and a little brother, Mikey. Together with their parents, they
are members of a commune, a cult called Children of God.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
It's one of those things where it doesn't seem real now,
but that was my reality and anything else seems unreal
that you know. We lived in sometimes small, sometimes very
large communes, sometimes in campgrounds, with a few other family
members in other campers. In Stuttgart, we lived on a
(04:02):
camper for a while and the cornfield that we used
to run through because it was a lot of adults,
and I don't really have many memories of the adults.
I have memories of kids everywhere all the time. And
when I was a kid, it seemed great. You always
had someone to play with. They weren't really strict about
childcare or schooling or anything else. We just played all day,
(04:25):
which was great for me. I have this picture of
my parents on my wall that I found a on
occult website and I framed it because I held a
lot of anger to them for a lot of my childhood.
You know, how could you possibly join a cult? But
no one joins the cult they you know, my fam
(04:47):
My mother was going to University of Texas and the
cult was heavily recruiting here, and they came over to
her and did what they do. Do you want to
hear a song about Jesus? They find depressed, isolated kids
and show them unconditional love and a cause and belonging
and they join. And they're joining a movement. They're joining,
(05:09):
you know, a community of people who take care of
one another. By the time you realize what you've done,
it's way too late. My father was he was trying
to dodge the draft. He was going to hitchhipe to
Mexico and he met them outside a library in Dallas.
And it's the classic don't follow the hippies to the
second location, because the second location was their commune in Texas.
(05:31):
They had a huge ranch outside of Dallas, which was
where they originally kind of kicked up right around seventy one.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
And so your parents met in the cult itself.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Yeah, they met in the cult. They were driving around
in a double decker bus in England and my father
was always the carpenter guy who could he still can,
he can build anything, and he had decked out the
bus with out a little kitchen and everything he needed
in it so they could travel around England and their
minds tell people about Jesus. And someone suggested that they
(06:03):
should have a mass wedding. It would be super revolutionary man,
and my dad thought my mom was pretty so he
asked her and that was said. They're completely ill suited
to one another. But uh, it lasted long enough for
them to have the four of us.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Every cult has a charismatic leader. In the case of
Children of God, that's a man named David Berg. Berg
grew up the son of a tent evangelist named Virginia Burg,
who had become famous during the Great Depression during tent
Revival meetings. As an adult, he wanted to start his
own thing and prayed on the hippies who hung out
(06:44):
on Huntington Beach in California. Berg and his kids would
sing songs and offer hippies day old doughnuts. You just
had to come hear about Jesus for a little while.
In the beginning, it was all peace and love, but
eventually this changed into an obsession with the end of
the world. The Antichrist was coming, the apocalypse was near.
(07:06):
The cult moved to a ranch in Texas, but media
attention was intense, and David Berg disappeared. He ran the
cult from a secret hiding place where he drank a
lot of sherry and made his pronouncements via something he
called Moe letters. One of these letters laid down the
law of Love, and Children of God became a sex cult.
(07:29):
When Lauren is six years old, she and her parents
leave the cult for a short while and return to
the States in a bid to save their marriage. When
their marriage falters the following year, Lauren's dad takes her
two older sisters back to Germany and they returned to
cult life. There, the family is split up. Mom takes
(07:49):
Lauren and her little brother, and the three of them
eventually also returned to the cult, first in Dallas, and
then when Lauren's ten, they're off to Osaka, Japan.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
We went from Amory a little to Dallas to rejoin.
They were doing a push to to find old members
who had left. I guess their numbers were down, and
they invited my mother to this meeting in Dallas, and
we almost immediately moved back into a family home and
went to Osaka. I mean, I wish I could tell
(08:21):
you the kids were all right. No, the kids were
not all right. The kids were I was protected from
some of it, just because we were in smaller homes
and not near central leadership where things were a little wilder.
But yeah, I have I have vague memories of things
(08:42):
the kids shouldn't have seen and shouldn't have been involved in. Yeah,
I mean I was sheltered a little bit, even by
my sisters. I remember my oldest sister waking us up
and carrying my little brother out of a room because
the adults were having an orgy and telling us not
to look. But we'd gone to some huge comment for
(09:03):
a party and we'd fallen asleep under a table because
it was going late into the night, and she woke
up and realized what was going on, and hearded us
out as there. But it depended on who your parents were,
depended on what homes you were in, what happened to you.
My brother and I lived under the assumption for most
of our lives that our dad just left and chose
(09:25):
our sisters and not us and didn't want anything to
do with us, and he never corrected the record. What
we now know happened is he he left. He went
to Germany. He was supposed to find a job and
an apartment, and once he did that, my mom was
going to come with us, and she sent him divorce
papers instead and told him to choose to But my
(09:49):
brother and I recently found out. I found out a
few years ago. My brother just found out I lived
in Austin and he lives in New England. He'd come
down here to pick up a part for his wife,
and we had a few drinks with my dad, and
my dad finally told him, and my brother and I
sat in my living room for the next day just
(10:11):
kind of looking at each other, going, so, so he wanted us. Yep,
all right, even at I'm forty seven, he's forty five.
It's still sort of instantly fixes a lot of things
that would have been nice to know.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, which is such a complicated idea, The idea like
that the narrative shifts and the narratives that you and
your brother had, as you know, this was the story
ends up not being the story, and it's a better story.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
It's an absolute tragedy, but it's a better story for
our the sense of who we are that you know,
our dad did want us.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
And yet you lived for all those years with that
other story, which probably you know dies a slow death
in a way because it was your story for so long.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Yeah, it's it took me. I found out a few years,
you know. I recently sort of reconnected with my father
when I moved down here and he lived here, and
I've just been angry at him for most of my
life because he left me, and he told me when
I moved down here one night on his piktack and
it shifted everything. But there's also, you know, those regrets
(11:30):
of really kind of wish someone had told me earlier.
But he didn't think it was his place. He didn't
want to take our mother from us too. And we're
at the age now or it doesn't affect the way
we feel about our mother. We know here she is,
We love her a lot. She is who she is.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
Did you wrestle with whether or not to tell your
brother during those years, or did you feel that it
was your father's story to tell.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
I thought about it. He's been our dad too for
a long time, and he's made allusions to you know,
it's just like this old man and he's probably knows
he's dying soon and wants to reconnect with me. And
I guess that's fine. And I wanted to tell him
so badly, but I didn't think he would hear it.
(12:18):
Covering from me.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
After her parents divorced, Lauren's mother had met a man
in Texas named Gabe. Gabe was a bartender, not part
(12:45):
of the Children of God when they met, but he
ended up joining. Of course, Lauren's mom didn't pitch it
to him as a cult. That word only came long after.
At the time, she considered herself to be a missionary
fighting the good fight, going overseas to teach people about Jesus.
Gabe was a religious man to begin with, so the
mission appealed to him and he joined the family on
(13:08):
their path. But after five years in Osaka, when Lauren
is fifteen, her mom decides it's time to leave again,
this time for good. She wakes up to the fact
that her children aren't getting any sort of real education
there and she can't protect them from abuse. She also
wants Lauren's sisters to leave the cult, and knows there's
(13:30):
a better chance of this happening if she leaves. Two
Lauren and Mikey go to live with their grandmother in Amarillo.
Lauren's sisters, however, stay in the cult for a little
while longer.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
That was hard on my mom too. We didn't know
if they would ever follow us out. Once you were
a teenager in the family, you could stay on your own.
You didn't have to leave with your parents. And part
of the reason they split people up so thoroughly put
a lot of kids didn't live with their in the
same homes with their parents. A lot of us were
(14:03):
split up, whether our parents were divorced or intact or not.
And they put kids in schools, not actual schools, they
were homes that were called schools. And then we'd learn
about Jesus and Me in time in the anti Christ
all day. But they split people up. Teenagers would go
to teen homes. There was no way she could get
them out. So when we left, she made it her
(14:25):
mission from that point on to get my sisters out.
They would come to visit, and she made them get
their gedes and driver's licenses so that they would have
something to fall back on should they leave. And yeah,
it was. It was a full court press. Every time
they did come to visit. My mom would gather. All right,
So we don't talk about it about the family. We
(14:47):
don't talk anything about you know, David Berg. We don't
discuss any of it. We're really proud of them, we're
happy they're doing what they're doing, because if we made
ourselves enemies of the cult, they wouldn't be allowed to
come visit.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
And to top that off, you're fifteen years old, write
smack dab in the middle of adolescents, and you have
no learned social skills of the kind that happen when
kids are growing up in an environment that isn't a bubble.
You're being quote unquote homeschooled, which basically it isn't school, right,
(15:25):
it isn't school at all.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
We signed up for a correspondence courses. Now they did
it pre internet. They would mail you books and materials.
I would read through the books for the year in
the first night, and then we would randomly have to
pass little tests that they would mail in and you
would get your grade. But no, my brother and I
spent most of the day watching TV. My mom was
(15:48):
cleaning houses. Gabe was off giving one of those how
to make a million dollars. He joined I think at
least four pyramid schemes, but he was not going to
work for a living. It's determined to not. But yeah,
they were gone during the day, so we would watch
(16:08):
TV and try to learn how to be human.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Lauren's grandmother was, in Lauren's words, Amarillo's soul liberal. She's
unusual in other ways as well. Even though outside of
family members aren't supposed to visit the commune. Lauren's grandmother
manages to do just that. She sits through sermons and
listens to them preach at her. She sings along with
(16:37):
all the songs she helps in the kitchen, anything to
keep her daughter and her grandchildren close.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
I didn't see it at the time, but I know
now it was calculated that the only way she was
going to maintain contact with her daughters if she remained,
you know, super friendly to the cult. And you know
I can't join myself, but I really support everything you
guys are doing. And this is terrisa. Take it now,
let's sing another song about Jesus.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Well, in a way, your mom replicated that a little
bit when your sisters would come to visit.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
She did. She learned from the best. May like kurrn Of,
there was a little bit subversive. She was always sending
me books, just whatever paperback she had laying around the house.
Clearly there would be a Danielle Steele, and there are
a Jackie Collins, arn't a copy of White Fang. But
then there would be a copy of The Handmaid's Tale.
And my mother would would let me keep the books,
(17:31):
which I would have to hide them under my mattress.
I got caught with them, I would be in trouble,
but most families didn't, didn't give their kids books. I
don't know many kids who did have access to books,
but I did because my grandmother made sure of it.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
Lauren's grandmother is providing a robust education for her, giving
her access to all sorts of reading material. And then,
when Lauren's in her senior year of high school, she
actually goes to high school, person her world widens. Suddenly
she's part of a whole new social landscape. Things aren't
going terrifically for her. Socially, she hasn't exactly had much experience,
(18:12):
but she's figuring it out. One day during her senior year,
she comes across a newspaper obituary for David Berg. She's
shocked to learn he's died, and she rips out the clipping,
folds it up, and stuffs it into her jeans pocket.
She hoards it away for later, knowing she needs to
(18:32):
study it, read it carefully, and look at the photograph
of a man she'd never seen before, but who impacted
her family's life so much. She shows the clipping to
Mikey and to her mom, both of whom encourage her
to never tell anyone she'd been part of a cult.
Her mother warns her to never speak of it again.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
It took me a really long time to let that
idea go because it sunk in and we were told
and when we were little kids, we lied to my
grandmother about where we were and what we were doing.
We lied to my cousins, we lied to everybody who
was not in the family. We were just Christian missionaries,
definitely not affiliated with those people anymore. We always changed
(19:18):
our names in the cult, and we always have to
practice when we would come back to visit to use
our legal names that people knew us by it, because
you know, you can't call your sister esther when that's
not her name, anything that could raise a question. We
were paranoid about it, and we were taught to be
paranoid about it. I understand where my mother was coming from,
(19:40):
and I understand her fears about it, but at the
same time, it created this this secret that was so
isolating because there was a huge part of my life
that I thought I could never tell anyone, and I
believed her and I believed you know. The little experience
I had with with people knowing about the cult is
(20:03):
that you know, they look at you strange, and they
look at you funny, and you know, they take people's
kids away, and there were homes rated where you know,
children were taken into foster care. But it seemed like
this huge secret that I had to keep, and I
didn't even know where. I didn't know how to explain
(20:24):
it to myself, much less how to explain it to
another person.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
And the cult wasn't the only secret Lauren was keeping.
There was another kind of secret, the secret of her
very self.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
I know I wasn't interested in men or boys, but
I liked hanging out with them, and for the most part,
I got really lucky with guys. Like my high school
boyfriend was a rodeo cowboy and just a really sweet guy,
and I would go out to his ranch and ride horses,
and sometimes he would grind on me and try to
(21:00):
fill me up, but he was a good Christian boy
and that's as far as it went. So that was
just something I had to put up with in order
to ride horses or have a boyfriend and be normal
like everybody else. I assumed everybody was the same way
about men. It didn't occur to me that there were
girls who enjoyed having sex with boys. I was in
my thirties before I realized that there are girls who
(21:22):
enjoy giving blowjobs. I just, why would you? It didn't
occur to me, but I didn't realize I was listen.
I had feelings. There was the Freedom ninety video that
George Michael won and eventually start sitting against the wall
smoking a cigarette. I definitely had feelings about it, but
(21:42):
I didn't recognize those as homosexual feelings or that I
was gay. I couldn't possibly be, because they I had
always been a tomboy growing up, and they had always
had me praying against this homosexual spirit. And to admit
that I might be gay, they would be to admit
that they were right about me, and I couldn't. I
(22:03):
couldn't do it. I went into the Air Force right
after high school, and I realized it then pretty quickly.
But it's not something that, oh, here's a moment where
I suddenly understand I'm the lesbian. I'd always known. I
just didn't say it out loud, even to myself. I
told my older sister first. When I was in the
(22:24):
Air Force. I went out to visit her in Rhode Island.
I was deeply depressed and really not sure what to
do about it or anything else, and I needed to
tell someone. And she had just left the family. She
and her husband had her into a little apartment in
Rhode Island with their two little kids at the time,
(22:45):
and we were hanging out in her kitchen. We're painting
it and peeling wallpaper, and you know, I was trying
to help her with as much as I could while
I was there, and I just sort of blurred it
out of what if I'm a lesbian? And she started
cackling because she was right. I mean, the sister reaction
(23:07):
you get is, yeah, she was right, and so she
was thrilled with that because she's been right about me
all along, and it sort of softened it. She claims
she didn't tell my mother, but I'm pretty sure she did.
She's got a big balance. I could not have told her.
But the one joy more than being right is telling
on each other.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
So and I'm imagining that, realizing like that anyone within
children of God, that would have been just kind of
a massive, you know, like an unacceptable thing.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
But gad, Yeah, I mean, Berg was your typical douchebag
founder prophet whenever of the children of God. So male
homosexuality was completely outlawed. Female homosexual lady was allowed as
long as you were doing it for the benefit of men.
So you could have sex was a woman if you
(24:01):
are an adult or whatever you considered old enough to
have sex that year, but it had to be with
a man.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
We'll be right back. When Lauren joins the US military,
she has to tread even more carefully when it comes
to telling people about herself. Simple questions like where are
(24:33):
you from can lead down rabbit holes. If she starts
reeling off all the places she lived as a child,
that might be a flag. So she doesn't. She finds
the simplest things to say that will placate people, vague
answers that don't reveal much. This shields her and protects her,
but it also isolates her. It means she's not going
(24:55):
to be known, she's not going to be seen, she's
not going to be under stood.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Yeah, it's a strange thing to live most of your
life desperately trying to not be interesting. It was mostly shame.
But you don't want to spark anyone's interest. You don't
want to give them an answer that would lead to
a follow up questurn So you say, and my parents
were weird hippies. We're missionaries for a while, and that doesn't,
(25:24):
from my experience, doesn't lead to many follow up questions.
They'll say, oh, lots of astrology. Yeah, I can tell
you anything about being a pisces, and then everybody likes
to discuss astrology, so you're good. But I was lying
about everything to everyone and biomission sure, but also I
didn't know how to make friends anyway. But I didn't
(25:47):
know what to talk to them about, because you know,
part of making a friend is, you know, figuring out
what your shared history is. If you ever met someone
from the same hometown, you know you have something to
talk about you. It's those initial things. So I tried
to find other things. I became a baseball fan so
that I could talk about the Red Sox and then
(26:09):
people wouldn't ask me about anything else. I would get
really into music so that I could talk about music,
and I could detour any conversation about my past and
just bring up something silly. They would ask why my parents,
and I'd say, my mom washpy, oh, yeah, she saw
(26:30):
Janis Joplin live, and then we could talk about Janis
Joplin anything to derail a conversation from why I don't
know any pop culture references. I also lived under this
suption that a lot of people knew a lot more
than I did, that they'd learned all these things in
school that I didn't. And it turns out I think
I learned picked up most of it by reading, but
(26:53):
that was still really self conscious about not knowing about
a TV show from the eighties.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
It's such an interesting theme on this podcast has come
up so many times, family secrets and deflection, you know,
deflecting the curious, shutting down conversations in a really graceful way,
learning how to do that so that people won't even
know what hit them and suddenly they're talking about Janis
Joplin concerts or you know, astrology, and you know, it
(27:20):
just strikes me that it takes so much psychic energy
to do that, and yet it becomes sort of second
nature that this is what you have to do. And
then like during that period of time when you're in
the Air Force, there is this whole other layer of
secrecy because, as you said, you're enlisting and you're becoming
(27:41):
part of the Air Force kind of coincides with you're
coming out to yourself, and you're certainly not in an
environment where you can come out to the people around you,
and you're square solidly in the don't ask, don't tell
phase of the US military.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Yeah, for me, it was that complete isolation because I
was fighting in my past, but I was also hiding
who I was. It's you have to know when you
make a friend, whether or not you can trust who
they are when they're angry. There's a lot of people
(28:20):
get turned in by their exes or by you know,
someone's pissed at you. If you have someone money, if
you for whatever reason, at any point they could report
you and that could be the end of your career.
But I don't think I realized until I was getting
out how exhausting it was. Just every conversation, every interaction,
(28:43):
every Monday at the smoke pit, when everybody's talking about
their weekend, and I have to lie or at least
change the subject or ask about someone else's I can
never say where I was, what I was doing, who I.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Was with, And in fact it became actually dangerous for you.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Yeah, just like when I was a kid, I don't
hide it well that I'm a lesbian. I was a
little tomboy who wanted to play with boys and never
wanted to wear skirts, and never was interested in doing
my hair or makeup. And in the Air Force, I
got a little boulder and cut my hair short. And
(29:25):
I'm still I'm a butch lesbian and I look like it.
If I based my wardrobe on my little tony, I
would still, you know, be accosted in bathrooms because I
just I'm six feet told, I can't hide that I'm gay.
So people knew anyway, there were people I told there
(29:45):
were for the most part. You know, my generation at
the time, you know, the late nineties were raised on MTV,
so it was deeply uncool already to be a homophobe
or to be a bigot, But there were still, you know,
it just took one wrong person. So as I became
(30:07):
more comfortable with myself and became more comfortable with the
other airmen in my building, a few of them knew.
A few of them asked, and we're fine with it,
and most people didn't care. But someone did. I started
getting strange threats left on my car. It started. I
(30:29):
was stationed in South Carolina, but my unit had gone
to Egypt for an exercise and my boss gave me
his rental car when he left, and someone had written
die Dike on the back of it, and I thought,
I thought it was someone playing a prank who was
really bad at pranks, until I got back and there
(30:51):
were more of them, so it was clearly not a prank. Yeah,
my car got torched when I was babysitting for that
same boss. He was sitting his kid. He was gone
for the weekend, and my car went op smoking them
all of the night. So it's that all I wanted
was to love lose South Carolina, and I was about
to leave. I got orders for Greece, and I was
(31:13):
I'm excited to go to Greece. And then I think
it was a couple of weeks before I left, maybe
a month, my car got torched, and all I could
think about was, well, shit, what about Greece. They very
intentionally decided that the easiest way to deal with this
situation of someone is sending me death threats and torching
(31:35):
my car. The best resolution for this is to prove
that I torched my own car because I didn't want
to go to Greece was the motive they had in mind,
and made up the death threats even though people had
seen them, And so they investigated me for about a
year and then they court martialed me for it and
I was acquitted. But by then part of the investigation
(31:59):
was going around to single air on base and asking
them if they knew Airman Huff was gay and if
they'd ever seen Airman Huff being her assed. So everybody,
I'm very stale with gay. I couldn't do my job anymore.
They had me working in the gym handing out towels
because my security clearance was either revoked or suspended until
(32:21):
the outcome of the investigation. But it was just done.
I knew I couldn't stay in the Air Force.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
So you left the Air Force and you were honorably discharged.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
You did tell Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Over the next decade or so, Lauren continues to live
her life, always longing for connection. She works a number
of jobs as a bartender and a self described cable guy,
for example, all the while hiding the history of her upbringing.
Her shame keeps her quiet. With the exception of her siblings,
(32:57):
she has nobody to corroborate her childhood, nobody with whom
to remember or to face the shame. Sometimes She wonders
that the cult was even real, if anything is real,
But then she discovers a website with message boards for
former cult members, particularly cult babies who grew up in
(33:18):
Children of God. When Lauren is on one of the
message boards, she encounters a girl she'd known in Osaka,
a real girl. In turn, this makes Lauren realize something
she hasn't ever fully realized before. She's real too. Seeing
and being seen on this message board makes her realize
(33:40):
that it all happened and that she exists.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
You know, if the narrative is you can't tell anyone
because they'll never understand, because they'll reject you, then that secret,
no matter what it is, becomes shame. It's just how
that works your mind. If this is something horrific that
I can never tell anyone, then it's something that's wrong
(34:05):
with me that I could never tell anyone, And it
becomes something I did when I didn't control where I
was born or where I was. But finding the others,
I stayed up so many nights just talking to them.
The funniest thing about it, I think is that we
(34:25):
were having fun. I think what I would imagine of,
you know, us talking about some of the more horrific
stuff that happened, and you know, fact checking our memories
of the abuses and the neglect or any of that is.
We were having fun and making jokes about three sheets
(34:47):
of toilet paper because that was a rule, you could
only use three sheets of toilet paper, and intentionally planting
those shitty little songs in each other's ears, someone like
type four lines that everybody yell at them with, ow
dare you? It was what I'd been missing that whole
time that everyone else gets where they you know, they
(35:08):
meet someone who was into the same TV show, or
everybody remembers, you know, slip and slides. We didn't have
slip and slides. We had those songs and those videos
and you know, dance night and bunk beds, and yet
we were having fun. We still do. And so while
(35:28):
I don't hang out there as much anymore. They moved
on to Facebook, but every once in a while, I'll
still check in with people who remember. I don't know
where I would be with that if I hadn't found
that of you know, these are people who who I
can fact check my own memories with because I don't
(35:49):
know what's real. Sometimes it seems like a movie I watched.
It's so different, so bizarre, that it doesn't make sense
in my current reality.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
But Lauren wants to feel real offline too. The message
board has been life changing, but she's looking for ways
to bring that sense of reality into her life in
real time as she's living it. She thinks back on
a conversation she once had with Mikey about what they
wanted to be when they grew up. Mikey had said,
I want to be a painter, and Lauren had said,
(36:26):
I want to be a writer. To this, mike Equipped,
who are we kidding? We'll both end up tending bar.
Of course, Lauren did end up tending bar, but now
she's ready to pursue something else, something she's always been
drawn to do. Her brother feels the same, and they
both do it. He becomes a painter and she becomes
(36:47):
a writer.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
I think bartending is great training for writers. Really. You
get to watch conversations all the time, You get to
watch how people interact.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
I tell my students a lot of the time. You know,
if you want to be writer, don't get a job
in publishing. Go ten bar.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
Truly, Yeah, you're you're the person everyone talks to because
you have to talk to them. If I go into
a bar, that's who I talked to, was the bartender.
They've got great stories. But yeah, the idea I could
be a writer that came from I would read everything,
and it never occurred to me that what I was
writing could be published. That was something other people did.
(37:25):
I don't know why I didn't put those two things together.
I just didn't. I don't know if it's because I
didn't think much about what it was going to be
when I grew up. I don't know if it's because
I didn't truly understand that I would grow up, although
I don't know who does. But it was in one
of those cul baby groups a trend of mine. Taylor
Stevens sent me a book that she had written, and
(37:48):
she said she was going to try to get it published,
and I thought that sounded ridiculous, but I was happy
to read it for her, and I did, and I
gave her a couple crappy notes. I didn't know what
I was doing. And then her book was in bookstores.
I was like, great, we can do this how And
(38:08):
I guess the importance of seeing a role model do it.
But I also didn't know. I tried to write thrillers
for a while. I'm terrible at them. I just couldn't
write one. There all sounded exactly like whoever I read last.
I just couldn't sound like me at all. But there
were all these stories that I kept writing, and I
(38:30):
kept just posting them in call baby forums for other members,
but I was too terrified to do it publicly. Until
I think I didn't really have a choice if I
was either going to write this or I was going
to give up on the idea of being a writer.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
For a while, Lauren struggled with how to tell her story. First,
she wrote a manuscript that was more of a tell
all about children of God, because that's what she thought
people wanted to hear. That book didn't sell, but then
she wrote a quirky, powerful essay about being the cable guy,
and that essay went viral, giving her another chance to
(39:15):
tell her story her way.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
I think writing for me people will ask you if
it's therapy, and I don't think it is. I think
it's the opposite of it. But rewriting and writing over
and over, I think you cut down to what's actually
important and what story you want to tell, and I
was lucky that I got to do the story that
I wanted to tell, which is that I don't think
we're all that different. I don't think we all have
(39:41):
these secrets that we think are horrific and can never
be shared. And the second do you share them, someone goes, oh,
me too, And it happens every time. I think it's
the clearest indication for me that I did okay with
the book is that my siblings were understandably pretty nervous
about me writing it. And when I hit the best
(40:03):
seller list, my brother's wife went around telling all the
neighbors because she's Italian from Norse Providence, and the neighbors
have to know is that her sister in law is
the best seller New York Time is the bestseller. My
brother was like, oh man, they're not going to let
her kid come over and play. They're not gonna let
kids go over to her house. And he was terrified
about it. And she started rattling off every neighbor's dirt
(40:28):
through the old neighborhood, yelling and I won't do the
accident and the yelling, but shouting about that guy down
there is alcoholic, that guy down there has been to prison.
She's like, so you're a grow up in it. Nobody cares, James,
because nobody cares.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Here's Lauren reading one last passage from leaving. Isn't the
hardest thing?
Speaker 2 (40:57):
For years, I kept the secret even if I wanted
to someone. There's no handbook to announce that sort of thing.
I thought sometimes, back when I thought of it at all,
that I should make a poster like the ones we
used to hand out, maybe a picture of me on
the front, like a lost kid poster. My name is
Lauren and I was in the family. It's a cult. Nope,
not that one. No kool aid, just an old guy.
(41:18):
As i'd attack to God. But what can I really
tell you to explain my life. I know it's fascinating
because it's so different, but it's so fucking different, and
no matter what I say, it'll still be foreign to you.
I can't tell you what it feels like to live
in a constant state of alert unless you've lived it.
We watch horror movies because they're fun. There's tension, the
(41:38):
dark room, the building music, the ominous threat. Then release
A cat jumps out of the cupboard. There's no one
behind the shower, curtain, but in a cult, just like
any abusive relationship, there's no release. It's constant threat. This
sort of prolonged terror leaves a mark. But the problem
with any sort of fucked up childhood, just like any
(41:59):
abusive relationship, show, you can't talk about it because it's
a secret.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacur is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
(42:42):
find me on Instagram at Danny Rider. And if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(43:21):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
If you ask me where I'm from, I'll lie to you.
I'll tell you my parents are missionaries. I'll tell you
I'm from Boston. I'll tell you I'm from Texas. Those lies.
People believe I'm better at lying than I am at
telling the truth, because the lies don't make me nervous.
It's the truth, the thought of telling it the triggers
my awkward laugh, in my sweaty palms, makes me not
(00:26):
want to look you in the eye. I know I
won't like what I'll see.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
That's Lauren Huff, Austin based writer and author of the
essay collection Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing. Lauren's is a
story of courage, transformation, and one woman's will and spirit
to find a way out, to find a way through,
to find a path toward the most authentic version of herself.
(01:06):
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is Family Secrets. The secrets
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about
the landscape or landscapes of your childhood.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
I grew up everywhere. I mean, there are there are
places that I think affected me more than others and
that I remember more than others. I was born in Berlin, Germany,
and have no really early childhood memories of that. We
left when I was I think one or two, went
to Switzerland and then Argentina and Chile, and I don't
(01:51):
remember those much either. We came back to the States
for a while to Amrili, Texas, or my grandmother lived,
and then went to Japan Osaka for a couple of years,
and then back to Switzerland and Germany and then back
to Amillo, Texas.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
If you could pinpoint what your first memory was, what
do you see and sort of how old were you
when you see it?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
It's funny. I went back to Berlin, and because I
was born in a commune, the address of the commune
is on my birth certificate, so I was able to
find the flat where I was born, and I have
this very early memory of feeding little birds and sitting
on those green glass tiles in front of an apartment,
(02:35):
and the apartment still had those green glass tiles out
in front of it, So I remember something from when
I was maybe one and a half years old, But
that's the only memory I have, as those little birds.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Was that memory something that you had before you went
back and then it was confirmed or did it come
to you when you went back to Berlin as an adult.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
I was always asking where the green tiles were, just
trying to different memories somewhere, because I have two older
sisters and I'll ask them, you know, what was the
house with the goats in it? And they'll tell me
that it was in Mendoza in Argentina. Or I'll ask
them what was the house with the avocado tree and
they'll tell me that was Santiago, or the house with
the hay on the roof. You know, these things that
(03:15):
you see as a child that it's not the same
thing as the adults see. The birds in the green
titles were one of those questions I was asking, and
they didn't know where that was.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Lauren is one of four. She has two older sisters
and a little brother, Mikey. Together with their parents, they
are members of a commune, a cult called Children of God.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
It's one of those things where it doesn't seem real now,
but that was my reality and anything else seems unreal
that you know. We lived in sometimes small, sometimes very
large communes, sometimes in campgrounds, with a few other family
members in other campers. In Stuttgart, we lived on a
(04:02):
camper for a while and the cornfield that we used
to run through because it was a lot of adults,
and I don't really have many memories of the adults.
I have memories of kids everywhere all the time. And
when I was a kid, it seemed great. You always
had someone to play with. They weren't really strict about
childcare or schooling or anything else. We just played all day,
(04:25):
which was great for me. I have this picture of
my parents on my wall that I found a on
occult website and I framed it because I held a
lot of anger to them for a lot of my childhood.
You know, how could you possibly join a cult? But
no one joins the cult they you know, my fam
(04:47):
My mother was going to University of Texas and the
cult was heavily recruiting here, and they came over to
her and did what they do. Do you want to
hear a song about Jesus? They find depressed, isolated kids
and show them unconditional love and a cause and belonging
and they join. And they're joining a movement. They're joining,
(05:09):
you know, a community of people who take care of
one another. By the time you realize what you've done,
it's way too late. My father was he was trying
to dodge the draft. He was going to hitchhipe to
Mexico and he met them outside a library in Dallas.
And it's the classic don't follow the hippies to the
second location, because the second location was their commune in Texas.
(05:31):
They had a huge ranch outside of Dallas, which was
where they originally kind of kicked up right around seventy one.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
And so your parents met in the cult itself.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Yeah, they met in the cult. They were driving around
in a double decker bus in England and my father
was always the carpenter guy who could he still can,
he can build anything, and he had decked out the
bus with out a little kitchen and everything he needed
in it so they could travel around England and their
minds tell people about Jesus. And someone suggested that they
(06:03):
should have a mass wedding. It would be super revolutionary man,
and my dad thought my mom was pretty so he
asked her and that was said. They're completely ill suited
to one another. But uh, it lasted long enough for
them to have the four of us.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Every cult has a charismatic leader. In the case of
Children of God, that's a man named David Berg. Berg
grew up the son of a tent evangelist named Virginia Burg,
who had become famous during the Great Depression during tent
Revival meetings. As an adult, he wanted to start his
own thing and prayed on the hippies who hung out
(06:44):
on Huntington Beach in California. Berg and his kids would
sing songs and offer hippies day old doughnuts. You just
had to come hear about Jesus for a little while.
In the beginning, it was all peace and love, but
eventually this changed into an obsession with the end of
the world. The Antichrist was coming, the apocalypse was near.
(07:06):
The cult moved to a ranch in Texas, but media
attention was intense, and David Berg disappeared. He ran the
cult from a secret hiding place where he drank a
lot of sherry and made his pronouncements via something he
called Moe letters. One of these letters laid down the
law of Love, and Children of God became a sex cult.
(07:29):
When Lauren is six years old, she and her parents
leave the cult for a short while and return to
the States in a bid to save their marriage. When
their marriage falters the following year, Lauren's dad takes her
two older sisters back to Germany and they returned to
cult life. There, the family is split up. Mom takes
(07:49):
Lauren and her little brother, and the three of them
eventually also returned to the cult, first in Dallas, and
then when Lauren's ten, they're off to Osaka, Japan.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
We went from Amory a little to Dallas to rejoin.
They were doing a push to to find old members
who had left. I guess their numbers were down, and
they invited my mother to this meeting in Dallas, and
we almost immediately moved back into a family home and
went to Osaka. I mean, I wish I could tell
(08:21):
you the kids were all right. No, the kids were
not all right. The kids were I was protected from
some of it, just because we were in smaller homes
and not near central leadership where things were a little wilder.
But yeah, I have I have vague memories of things
(08:42):
the kids shouldn't have seen and shouldn't have been involved in. Yeah,
I mean I was sheltered a little bit, even by
my sisters. I remember my oldest sister waking us up
and carrying my little brother out of a room because
the adults were having an orgy and telling us not
to look. But we'd gone to some huge comment for
(09:03):
a party and we'd fallen asleep under a table because
it was going late into the night, and she woke
up and realized what was going on, and hearded us
out as there. But it depended on who your parents were,
depended on what homes you were in, what happened to you.
My brother and I lived under the assumption for most
of our lives that our dad just left and chose
(09:25):
our sisters and not us and didn't want anything to
do with us, and he never corrected the record. What
we now know happened is he he left. He went
to Germany. He was supposed to find a job and
an apartment, and once he did that, my mom was
going to come with us, and she sent him divorce
papers instead and told him to choose to But my
(09:49):
brother and I recently found out. I found out a
few years ago. My brother just found out I lived
in Austin and he lives in New England. He'd come
down here to pick up a part for his wife,
and we had a few drinks with my dad, and
my dad finally told him, and my brother and I
sat in my living room for the next day just
(10:11):
kind of looking at each other, going, so, so he wanted us. Yep,
all right, even at I'm forty seven, he's forty five.
It's still sort of instantly fixes a lot of things
that would have been nice to know.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, which is such a complicated idea, The idea like
that the narrative shifts and the narratives that you and
your brother had, as you know, this was the story
ends up not being the story, and it's a better story.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
It's an absolute tragedy, but it's a better story for
our the sense of who we are that you know,
our dad did want us.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
And yet you lived for all those years with that
other story, which probably you know dies a slow death
in a way because it was your story for so long.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Yeah, it's it took me. I found out a few years,
you know. I recently sort of reconnected with my father
when I moved down here and he lived here, and
I've just been angry at him for most of my
life because he left me, and he told me when
I moved down here one night on his piktack and
it shifted everything. But there's also, you know, those regrets
(11:30):
of really kind of wish someone had told me earlier.
But he didn't think it was his place. He didn't
want to take our mother from us too. And we're
at the age now or it doesn't affect the way
we feel about our mother. We know here she is,
We love her a lot. She is who she is.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
Did you wrestle with whether or not to tell your
brother during those years, or did you feel that it
was your father's story to tell.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
I thought about it. He's been our dad too for
a long time, and he's made allusions to you know,
it's just like this old man and he's probably knows
he's dying soon and wants to reconnect with me. And
I guess that's fine. And I wanted to tell him
so badly, but I didn't think he would hear it.
(12:18):
Covering from me.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
After her parents divorced, Lauren's mother had met a man
in Texas named Gabe. Gabe was a bartender, not part
(12:45):
of the Children of God when they met, but he
ended up joining. Of course, Lauren's mom didn't pitch it
to him as a cult. That word only came long after.
At the time, she considered herself to be a missionary
fighting the good fight, going overseas to teach people about Jesus.
Gabe was a religious man to begin with, so the
mission appealed to him and he joined the family on
(13:08):
their path. But after five years in Osaka, when Lauren
is fifteen, her mom decides it's time to leave again,
this time for good. She wakes up to the fact
that her children aren't getting any sort of real education
there and she can't protect them from abuse. She also
wants Lauren's sisters to leave the cult, and knows there's
(13:30):
a better chance of this happening if she leaves. Two
Lauren and Mikey go to live with their grandmother in Amarillo.
Lauren's sisters, however, stay in the cult for a little
while longer.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
That was hard on my mom too. We didn't know
if they would ever follow us out. Once you were
a teenager in the family, you could stay on your own.
You didn't have to leave with your parents. And part
of the reason they split people up so thoroughly put
a lot of kids didn't live with their in the
same homes with their parents. A lot of us were
(14:03):
split up, whether our parents were divorced or intact or not.
And they put kids in schools, not actual schools, they
were homes that were called schools. And then we'd learn
about Jesus and Me in time in the anti Christ
all day. But they split people up. Teenagers would go
to teen homes. There was no way she could get
them out. So when we left, she made it her
(14:25):
mission from that point on to get my sisters out.
They would come to visit, and she made them get
their gedes and driver's licenses so that they would have
something to fall back on should they leave. And yeah,
it was. It was a full court press. Every time
they did come to visit. My mom would gather. All right,
So we don't talk about it about the family. We
(14:47):
don't talk anything about you know, David Berg. We don't
discuss any of it. We're really proud of them, we're
happy they're doing what they're doing, because if we made
ourselves enemies of the cult, they wouldn't be allowed to
come visit.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
And to top that off, you're fifteen years old, write
smack dab in the middle of adolescents, and you have
no learned social skills of the kind that happen when
kids are growing up in an environment that isn't a bubble.
You're being quote unquote homeschooled, which basically it isn't school, right,
(15:25):
it isn't school at all.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
We signed up for a correspondence courses. Now they did
it pre internet. They would mail you books and materials.
I would read through the books for the year in
the first night, and then we would randomly have to
pass little tests that they would mail in and you
would get your grade. But no, my brother and I
spent most of the day watching TV. My mom was
(15:48):
cleaning houses. Gabe was off giving one of those how
to make a million dollars. He joined I think at
least four pyramid schemes, but he was not going to
work for a living. It's determined to not. But yeah,
they were gone during the day, so we would watch
(16:08):
TV and try to learn how to be human.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Lauren's grandmother was, in Lauren's words, Amarillo's soul liberal. She's
unusual in other ways as well. Even though outside of
family members aren't supposed to visit the commune. Lauren's grandmother
manages to do just that. She sits through sermons and
listens to them preach at her. She sings along with
(16:37):
all the songs she helps in the kitchen, anything to
keep her daughter and her grandchildren close.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
I didn't see it at the time, but I know
now it was calculated that the only way she was
going to maintain contact with her daughters if she remained,
you know, super friendly to the cult. And you know
I can't join myself, but I really support everything you
guys are doing. And this is terrisa. Take it now,
let's sing another song about Jesus.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Well, in a way, your mom replicated that a little
bit when your sisters would come to visit.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
She did. She learned from the best. May like kurrn Of,
there was a little bit subversive. She was always sending
me books, just whatever paperback she had laying around the house.
Clearly there would be a Danielle Steele, and there are
a Jackie Collins, arn't a copy of White Fang. But
then there would be a copy of The Handmaid's Tale.
And my mother would would let me keep the books,
(17:31):
which I would have to hide them under my mattress.
I got caught with them, I would be in trouble,
but most families didn't, didn't give their kids books. I
don't know many kids who did have access to books,
but I did because my grandmother made sure of it.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
Lauren's grandmother is providing a robust education for her, giving
her access to all sorts of reading material. And then,
when Lauren's in her senior year of high school, she
actually goes to high school, person her world widens. Suddenly
she's part of a whole new social landscape. Things aren't
going terrifically for her. Socially, she hasn't exactly had much experience,
(18:12):
but she's figuring it out. One day during her senior year,
she comes across a newspaper obituary for David Berg. She's
shocked to learn he's died, and she rips out the clipping,
folds it up, and stuffs it into her jeans pocket.
She hoards it away for later, knowing she needs to
(18:32):
study it, read it carefully, and look at the photograph
of a man she'd never seen before, but who impacted
her family's life so much. She shows the clipping to
Mikey and to her mom, both of whom encourage her
to never tell anyone she'd been part of a cult.
Her mother warns her to never speak of it again.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
It took me a really long time to let that
idea go because it sunk in and we were told
and when we were little kids, we lied to my
grandmother about where we were and what we were doing.
We lied to my cousins, we lied to everybody who
was not in the family. We were just Christian missionaries,
definitely not affiliated with those people anymore. We always changed
(19:18):
our names in the cult, and we always have to
practice when we would come back to visit to use
our legal names that people knew us by it, because
you know, you can't call your sister esther when that's
not her name, anything that could raise a question. We
were paranoid about it, and we were taught to be
paranoid about it. I understand where my mother was coming from,
(19:40):
and I understand her fears about it, but at the
same time, it created this this secret that was so
isolating because there was a huge part of my life
that I thought I could never tell anyone, and I
believed her and I believed you know. The little experience
I had with with people knowing about the cult is
(20:03):
that you know, they look at you strange, and they
look at you funny, and you know, they take people's
kids away, and there were homes rated where you know,
children were taken into foster care. But it seemed like
this huge secret that I had to keep, and I
didn't even know where. I didn't know how to explain
(20:24):
it to myself, much less how to explain it to
another person.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
And the cult wasn't the only secret Lauren was keeping.
There was another kind of secret, the secret of her
very self.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
I know I wasn't interested in men or boys, but
I liked hanging out with them, and for the most part,
I got really lucky with guys. Like my high school
boyfriend was a rodeo cowboy and just a really sweet guy,
and I would go out to his ranch and ride horses,
and sometimes he would grind on me and try to
(21:00):
fill me up, but he was a good Christian boy
and that's as far as it went. So that was
just something I had to put up with in order
to ride horses or have a boyfriend and be normal
like everybody else. I assumed everybody was the same way
about men. It didn't occur to me that there were
girls who enjoyed having sex with boys. I was in
my thirties before I realized that there are girls who
(21:22):
enjoy giving blowjobs. I just, why would you? It didn't
occur to me, but I didn't realize I was listen.
I had feelings. There was the Freedom ninety video that
George Michael won and eventually start sitting against the wall
smoking a cigarette. I definitely had feelings about it, but
(21:42):
I didn't recognize those as homosexual feelings or that I
was gay. I couldn't possibly be, because they I had
always been a tomboy growing up, and they had always
had me praying against this homosexual spirit. And to admit
that I might be gay, they would be to admit
that they were right about me, and I couldn't. I
(22:03):
couldn't do it. I went into the Air Force right
after high school, and I realized it then pretty quickly.
But it's not something that, oh, here's a moment where
I suddenly understand I'm the lesbian. I'd always known. I
just didn't say it out loud, even to myself. I
told my older sister first. When I was in the
(22:24):
Air Force. I went out to visit her in Rhode Island.
I was deeply depressed and really not sure what to
do about it or anything else, and I needed to
tell someone. And she had just left the family. She
and her husband had her into a little apartment in
Rhode Island with their two little kids at the time,
(22:45):
and we were hanging out in her kitchen. We're painting
it and peeling wallpaper, and you know, I was trying
to help her with as much as I could while
I was there, and I just sort of blurred it
out of what if I'm a lesbian? And she started
cackling because she was right. I mean, the sister reaction
(23:07):
you get is, yeah, she was right, and so she
was thrilled with that because she's been right about me
all along, and it sort of softened it. She claims
she didn't tell my mother, but I'm pretty sure she did.
She's got a big balance. I could not have told her.
But the one joy more than being right is telling
on each other.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
So and I'm imagining that, realizing like that anyone within
children of God, that would have been just kind of
a massive, you know, like an unacceptable thing.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
But gad, Yeah, I mean, Berg was your typical douchebag
founder prophet whenever of the children of God. So male
homosexuality was completely outlawed. Female homosexual lady was allowed as
long as you were doing it for the benefit of men.
So you could have sex was a woman if you
(24:01):
are an adult or whatever you considered old enough to
have sex that year, but it had to be with
a man.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
We'll be right back. When Lauren joins the US military,
she has to tread even more carefully when it comes
to telling people about herself. Simple questions like where are
(24:33):
you from can lead down rabbit holes. If she starts
reeling off all the places she lived as a child,
that might be a flag. So she doesn't. She finds
the simplest things to say that will placate people, vague
answers that don't reveal much. This shields her and protects her,
but it also isolates her. It means she's not going
(24:55):
to be known, she's not going to be seen, she's
not going to be under stood.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Yeah, it's a strange thing to live most of your
life desperately trying to not be interesting. It was mostly shame.
But you don't want to spark anyone's interest. You don't
want to give them an answer that would lead to
a follow up questurn So you say, and my parents
were weird hippies. We're missionaries for a while, and that doesn't,
(25:24):
from my experience, doesn't lead to many follow up questions.
They'll say, oh, lots of astrology. Yeah, I can tell
you anything about being a pisces, and then everybody likes
to discuss astrology, so you're good. But I was lying
about everything to everyone and biomission sure, but also I
didn't know how to make friends anyway. But I didn't
(25:47):
know what to talk to them about, because you know,
part of making a friend is, you know, figuring out
what your shared history is. If you ever met someone
from the same hometown, you know you have something to
talk about you. It's those initial things. So I tried
to find other things. I became a baseball fan so
that I could talk about the Red Sox and then
(26:09):
people wouldn't ask me about anything else. I would get
really into music so that I could talk about music,
and I could detour any conversation about my past and
just bring up something silly. They would ask why my parents,
and I'd say, my mom washpy, oh, yeah, she saw
(26:30):
Janis Joplin live, and then we could talk about Janis
Joplin anything to derail a conversation from why I don't
know any pop culture references. I also lived under this
suption that a lot of people knew a lot more
than I did, that they'd learned all these things in
school that I didn't. And it turns out I think
I learned picked up most of it by reading, but
(26:53):
that was still really self conscious about not knowing about
a TV show from the eighties.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
It's such an interesting theme on this podcast has come
up so many times, family secrets and deflection, you know,
deflecting the curious, shutting down conversations in a really graceful way,
learning how to do that so that people won't even
know what hit them and suddenly they're talking about Janis
Joplin concerts or you know, astrology, and you know, it
(27:20):
just strikes me that it takes so much psychic energy
to do that, and yet it becomes sort of second
nature that this is what you have to do. And
then like during that period of time when you're in
the Air Force, there is this whole other layer of
secrecy because, as you said, you're enlisting and you're becoming
(27:41):
part of the Air Force kind of coincides with you're
coming out to yourself, and you're certainly not in an
environment where you can come out to the people around you,
and you're square solidly in the don't ask, don't tell
phase of the US military.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Yeah, for me, it was that complete isolation because I
was fighting in my past, but I was also hiding
who I was. It's you have to know when you
make a friend, whether or not you can trust who
they are when they're angry. There's a lot of people
(28:20):
get turned in by their exes or by you know,
someone's pissed at you. If you have someone money, if
you for whatever reason, at any point they could report
you and that could be the end of your career.
But I don't think I realized until I was getting
out how exhausting it was. Just every conversation, every interaction,
(28:43):
every Monday at the smoke pit, when everybody's talking about
their weekend, and I have to lie or at least
change the subject or ask about someone else's I can
never say where I was, what I was doing, who I.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Was with, And in fact it became actually dangerous for you.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Yeah, just like when I was a kid, I don't
hide it well that I'm a lesbian. I was a
little tomboy who wanted to play with boys and never
wanted to wear skirts, and never was interested in doing
my hair or makeup. And in the Air Force, I
got a little boulder and cut my hair short. And
(29:25):
I'm still I'm a butch lesbian and I look like it.
If I based my wardrobe on my little tony, I
would still, you know, be accosted in bathrooms because I
just I'm six feet told, I can't hide that I'm gay.
So people knew anyway, there were people I told there
(29:45):
were for the most part. You know, my generation at
the time, you know, the late nineties were raised on MTV,
so it was deeply uncool already to be a homophobe
or to be a bigot, But there were still, you know,
it just took one wrong person. So as I became
(30:07):
more comfortable with myself and became more comfortable with the
other airmen in my building, a few of them knew.
A few of them asked, and we're fine with it,
and most people didn't care. But someone did. I started
getting strange threats left on my car. It started. I
(30:29):
was stationed in South Carolina, but my unit had gone
to Egypt for an exercise and my boss gave me
his rental car when he left, and someone had written
die Dike on the back of it, and I thought,
I thought it was someone playing a prank who was
really bad at pranks, until I got back and there
(30:51):
were more of them, so it was clearly not a prank. Yeah,
my car got torched when I was babysitting for that
same boss. He was sitting his kid. He was gone
for the weekend, and my car went op smoking them
all of the night. So it's that all I wanted
was to love lose South Carolina, and I was about
to leave. I got orders for Greece, and I was
(31:13):
I'm excited to go to Greece. And then I think
it was a couple of weeks before I left, maybe
a month, my car got torched, and all I could
think about was, well, shit, what about Greece. They very
intentionally decided that the easiest way to deal with this
situation of someone is sending me death threats and torching
(31:35):
my car. The best resolution for this is to prove
that I torched my own car because I didn't want
to go to Greece was the motive they had in mind,
and made up the death threats even though people had
seen them, And so they investigated me for about a
year and then they court martialed me for it and
I was acquitted. But by then part of the investigation
(31:59):
was going around to single air on base and asking
them if they knew Airman Huff was gay and if
they'd ever seen Airman Huff being her assed. So everybody,
I'm very stale with gay. I couldn't do my job anymore.
They had me working in the gym handing out towels
because my security clearance was either revoked or suspended until
(32:21):
the outcome of the investigation. But it was just done.
I knew I couldn't stay in the Air Force.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
So you left the Air Force and you were honorably discharged.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
You did tell Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Over the next decade or so, Lauren continues to live
her life, always longing for connection. She works a number
of jobs as a bartender and a self described cable guy,
for example, all the while hiding the history of her upbringing.
Her shame keeps her quiet. With the exception of her siblings,
(32:57):
she has nobody to corroborate her childhood, nobody with whom
to remember or to face the shame. Sometimes She wonders
that the cult was even real, if anything is real,
But then she discovers a website with message boards for
former cult members, particularly cult babies who grew up in
(33:18):
Children of God. When Lauren is on one of the
message boards, she encounters a girl she'd known in Osaka,
a real girl. In turn, this makes Lauren realize something
she hasn't ever fully realized before. She's real too. Seeing
and being seen on this message board makes her realize
(33:40):
that it all happened and that she exists.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
You know, if the narrative is you can't tell anyone
because they'll never understand, because they'll reject you, then that secret,
no matter what it is, becomes shame. It's just how
that works your mind. If this is something horrific that
I can never tell anyone, then it's something that's wrong
(34:05):
with me that I could never tell anyone, And it
becomes something I did when I didn't control where I
was born or where I was. But finding the others,
I stayed up so many nights just talking to them.
The funniest thing about it, I think is that we
(34:25):
were having fun. I think what I would imagine of,
you know, us talking about some of the more horrific
stuff that happened, and you know, fact checking our memories
of the abuses and the neglect or any of that is.
We were having fun and making jokes about three sheets
(34:47):
of toilet paper because that was a rule, you could
only use three sheets of toilet paper, and intentionally planting
those shitty little songs in each other's ears, someone like
type four lines that everybody yell at them with, ow
dare you? It was what I'd been missing that whole
time that everyone else gets where they you know, they
(35:08):
meet someone who was into the same TV show, or
everybody remembers, you know, slip and slides. We didn't have
slip and slides. We had those songs and those videos
and you know, dance night and bunk beds, and yet
we were having fun. We still do. And so while
(35:28):
I don't hang out there as much anymore. They moved
on to Facebook, but every once in a while, I'll
still check in with people who remember. I don't know
where I would be with that if I hadn't found
that of you know, these are people who who I
can fact check my own memories with because I don't
(35:49):
know what's real. Sometimes it seems like a movie I watched.
It's so different, so bizarre, that it doesn't make sense
in my current reality.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
But Lauren wants to feel real offline too. The message
board has been life changing, but she's looking for ways
to bring that sense of reality into her life in
real time as she's living it. She thinks back on
a conversation she once had with Mikey about what they
wanted to be when they grew up. Mikey had said,
I want to be a painter, and Lauren had said,
(36:26):
I want to be a writer. To this, mike Equipped,
who are we kidding? We'll both end up tending bar.
Of course, Lauren did end up tending bar, but now
she's ready to pursue something else, something she's always been
drawn to do. Her brother feels the same, and they
both do it. He becomes a painter and she becomes
(36:47):
a writer.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
I think bartending is great training for writers. Really. You
get to watch conversations all the time, You get to
watch how people interact.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
I tell my students a lot of the time. You know,
if you want to be writer, don't get a job
in publishing. Go ten bar.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
Truly, Yeah, you're you're the person everyone talks to because
you have to talk to them. If I go into
a bar, that's who I talked to, was the bartender.
They've got great stories. But yeah, the idea I could
be a writer that came from I would read everything,
and it never occurred to me that what I was
writing could be published. That was something other people did.
(37:25):
I don't know why I didn't put those two things together.
I just didn't. I don't know if it's because I
didn't think much about what it was going to be
when I grew up. I don't know if it's because
I didn't truly understand that I would grow up, although
I don't know who does. But it was in one
of those cul baby groups a trend of mine. Taylor
Stevens sent me a book that she had written, and
(37:48):
she said she was going to try to get it published,
and I thought that sounded ridiculous, but I was happy
to read it for her, and I did, and I
gave her a couple crappy notes. I didn't know what
I was doing. And then her book was in bookstores.
I was like, great, we can do this how And
(38:08):
I guess the importance of seeing a role model do it.
But I also didn't know. I tried to write thrillers
for a while. I'm terrible at them. I just couldn't
write one. There all sounded exactly like whoever I read last.
I just couldn't sound like me at all. But there
were all these stories that I kept writing, and I
(38:30):
kept just posting them in call baby forums for other members,
but I was too terrified to do it publicly. Until
I think I didn't really have a choice if I
was either going to write this or I was going
to give up on the idea of being a writer.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
For a while, Lauren struggled with how to tell her story. First,
she wrote a manuscript that was more of a tell
all about children of God, because that's what she thought
people wanted to hear. That book didn't sell, but then
she wrote a quirky, powerful essay about being the cable guy,
and that essay went viral, giving her another chance to
(39:15):
tell her story her way.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
I think writing for me people will ask you if
it's therapy, and I don't think it is. I think
it's the opposite of it. But rewriting and writing over
and over, I think you cut down to what's actually
important and what story you want to tell, and I
was lucky that I got to do the story that
I wanted to tell, which is that I don't think
we're all that different. I don't think we all have
(39:41):
these secrets that we think are horrific and can never
be shared. And the second do you share them, someone goes, oh,
me too, And it happens every time. I think it's
the clearest indication for me that I did okay with
the book is that my siblings were understandably pretty nervous
about me writing it. And when I hit the best
(40:03):
seller list, my brother's wife went around telling all the
neighbors because she's Italian from Norse Providence, and the neighbors
have to know is that her sister in law is
the best seller New York Time is the bestseller. My
brother was like, oh man, they're not going to let
her kid come over and play. They're not gonna let
kids go over to her house. And he was terrified
about it. And she started rattling off every neighbor's dirt
(40:28):
through the old neighborhood, yelling and I won't do the
accident and the yelling, but shouting about that guy down
there is alcoholic, that guy down there has been to prison.
She's like, so you're a grow up in it. Nobody cares, James,
because nobody cares.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Here's Lauren reading one last passage from leaving. Isn't the
hardest thing?
Speaker 2 (40:57):
For years, I kept the secret even if I wanted
to someone. There's no handbook to announce that sort of thing.
I thought sometimes, back when I thought of it at all,
that I should make a poster like the ones we
used to hand out, maybe a picture of me on
the front, like a lost kid poster. My name is
Lauren and I was in the family. It's a cult. Nope,
not that one. No kool aid, just an old guy.
(41:18):
As i'd attack to God. But what can I really
tell you to explain my life. I know it's fascinating
because it's so different, but it's so fucking different, and
no matter what I say, it'll still be foreign to you.
I can't tell you what it feels like to live
in a constant state of alert unless you've lived it.
We watch horror movies because they're fun. There's tension, the
(41:38):
dark room, the building music, the ominous threat. Then release
A cat jumps out of the cupboard. There's no one
behind the shower, curtain, but in a cult, just like
any abusive relationship, there's no release. It's constant threat. This
sort of prolonged terror leaves a mark. But the problem
with any sort of fucked up childhood, just like any
(41:59):
abusive relationship, show, you can't talk about it because it's
a secret.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacur is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
(42:42):
find me on Instagram at Danny Rider. And if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(43:21):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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