Author David Allen Cox will share his memoir I Felt The End Before It Came: Memoirs of a Queer Ex-Jehovah's Witness as part of the Owen Sound Memoir Series.
The latest instalment of the Owen Sound Memoir Series comes from a man who was taught by his religious upbringing that he didn’t belong.
Daniel Allen Cox is a queer man from Montreal who grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness.
Cox has been touring and sharing his book, I Felt The End Before It Came: Memoirs of a Queer Ex-Jehovah’s Witness for over a year, and will be at the Owen Sound & North Grey Union Public Library on May 24 and 25th.
He says that although nowadays life is good, it took a long time for him to get to that point.
“There are of course ongoing effects of this indoctrination that actually lived inside me a long time after I left, and so it was a long process of coming to terms with those long-term entanglements that have led to me trying to tackle them in the written form.”
Cox writes about when he was young, he was taught that being a part of the 2SLGBTQ+ community would mean eternal consequences.
“This happens in multiple environments. [My] identity as a young queer person was not recognized whatsoever. In fact, I was told that it would lead to death at this world-ending cataclysm called Armageddon that we were told not only to expect, but be happy for, because it would lead to a literal physical paradise on earth,” he explained in an interview with Bayshore News. “It was extremely alienating to know that I don’t have a place in that new world unless I change something that can’t change. What happens in that situation is [that] you start to build a double life, and you start to conceal things and then you even conceal things from yourself… it leads to a pretty severe case of cognitive dissonance.”
Growing up, he turned to music, and played in a band with his friends, who were also part of the JW community.
“I was in a band with my other congregation friends and it was allowed as long as we kept our lyrics and music relatively free of sex and drugs, which is funny because we actually had neither at the time, so we kept it wholesome. That’s why we were able to play as a group in different garages of our friend’s parents’ homes. I think it was through exploring a lot of our musical influences. Many of which would not be condoned according to the group due to the values that they abide by or, in that case, don’t abide by. And I think being able to write music for us at the time was a very powerful thing to me, because it was making contact, even very briefly, with a world outside the group, and I knew it was a very exciting world. I knew that when one made art, it was a way of channelling something pure and something authentic.”
He was also told that other differences – in his case, a stutter – was also something that had to be “cured”. “I’m a person who stutters and I was told a few messages about that in the Kingdom Halls, which is another word for our centres of worship. And I was told that it was something that would be cured in Paradise, which is a very terrible message about disability that they had across the board. So it was something I had to wait to be cured of, even though as far as I was concerned, there was nothing wrong with stuttering. And also we were told that we had to be eloquent, smooth-speaking preachers, and if we weren’t and didn’t deliver our message fluently, it would cast bad light onto the message that we were bringing to people’s doors.”
When Cox was 18, he left the JW ways, and found that he wanted to be his authentic self, with his authentic voice, and decided to stop the speech therapy sessions that he was doing at the Montreal Children’s Hospital.
Now that he’s been able to express his authentic self, he says that the reception for his memoir has been beyond what he expected.
He’s been able to meet and speak with people from similar backgrounds and experiences who he’s been able to connect with.
“I didn’t realize that people would read my book or listen to it on the day it came out… but with it being consumed on the same day and then getting texts or DMs with sometimes very heartbreaking stories in return, it’s been great to connect with people on this level,” Cox says. “I underestimated the power of non-fiction to draw things out. I suppose it’s just this project of authenticity. We all need each other and each other’s perspective. It’s not just Jehovah’s Witnesses, it was also Mormons, Catholics, cults I’ve never heard of…The community aspect was actually very important.”
His memoir was named a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal in 2023.
Cox will be reading part of I Felt The End Before It Came on Friday, May 24th in the library auditorium from 7-8 p.m. He will be conducting a writing workshop on Saturday the 25th from 1-2 p.m.
Tickets are available here.
