Aaron Cloward, coordinator of Gay LDS Young Adults

August 2001

A new Utah group has recently been launched to meet the social needs of gay Mormons ages 18 to 30. The group, called Gay LDS Youth, was created last March by Aaron Cloward, a returned missionary living and working in Salt Lake City. The group has a website (www.glya.com) and a mailing list that reaches 270 subscribers.

Gay LDS Youth meets on a weekly basis for social purposes and upholds LDS standards during the meetings. Activity attendance averages 20 people. Even though the events are attended mostly by young men, the group is opened also to lesbian and transgendered youth. Cloward estimates that 30 to 40 percent of the group is active or semi-active in the LDS Church.

"One of the main points of the Gay LDS Youth group is to be able to have a place where people can go and not get involved with alcohol, tobacco, and things like that," says Cloward. "After we started this group a lot of my friends were very happy about that. They said, 'It's so nice to meet somebody and they are not drunk, or they are not high on drugs, and to be able to socialize in a setting like that.'"