Secret Ceremonies: A Mormon Woman's Intimate Diary of Marriage and Beyond
(Laake, a former member of The Church of Jesus Christ of L...)
Laake, a former member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), chronicles her experiences with Mormonism and the various rituals performed in their temples. Laake recounts her studies at Brigham Young University, her loveless first marriage at nineteen, her subsequent divorce and the problems she encountered with the Mormon authorities and her relatives due to her practice of masturbation. She claims these things caused her to be ostracized and eventually hospitalized in a mental institution because of the pressures and sexual repression exerted by the church.
Deborah Laake was a columnist at the Dallas Morning News in the 1980s and later a staff writer, columnist, editor, and executive at the Phoenix New Times.
Background
Deborah Laake was born in 1953 in the United States. The youngest of four children and the only daughter of a wealthy insurance salesman and his wife, Ms. Laake grew up pampered in Florida, never doubting that God would send her a husband who, in the Mormon tradition, would eventually allow them to enter the highest level of heaven.
Education
It is known that Deborah Laake received her education at Brigham Young University.
Deborah Laake was raised as a member of the LDS Church. Since its inception in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has been surrounded by controversy. While its methods of worship and most of its doctrines vary only slightly from those of other Christian faiths, it is reported that some adherents still practice polygamy and there are secret church ceremonies that members are foresworn not to reveal.
Former Mormon Deborah Laake broke that rule in her 1993 book, Secret Ceremonies: A Mormon Woman's Intimate Diary of Marriage and Beyond. Laake wrote of her marriage at the age of nineteen and the reasons she and other Mormon women often feel pressured into such early unions. She was critical of the official Mormon attitude toward marriage and women, and her outspokenness combined with the revelation about the ceremony earned her an excommunication. According to doctrine, a woman can only achieve real salvation through her husband no matter how scrupulously she has lived her life; wedded couples are conferred with a highly exalted status and are believed to go on to heaven from which they will continually produce a family of spiritual beings destined to populate the world.
In Secret Ceremonies, Laake chronicled her doubts about those and other Mormon tenets that the temple rite was designed to symbolize. Taking place at the time of her first marriage, the ritual in which Laake and her new husband participated included secret names and handshakes, special white undergarments, and a viewing of a religious drama in which other church members enacted the roles of God, Jesus, and the devil. Laake’s book was the first to expose the ceremony to the public on such a widespread scale, but more significant is its account of a young woman’s growing disillusionment with the Mormon church’s plan for her life.
Afterward, Laake was dismayed to learn that her husband still retained full religious privileges while she was stripped of hers. A second marriage to another Mormon also ended disastrously, and that, in Laake’s opinion, led to her emotional breakdown. Laake chronicled the long journey to self-discovery she undertook to recover, a path that was often stymied by inner conflicts stemming from her strict upbringing in the faith. The controversy surrounding the revelations in Secret Ceremonies helped earn the book a spot on the New York Times bestseller list in 1993.
Laake was excommunicated for apostasy because of her criticisms and also for her "detailed revelation of top-secret Mormon temple ceremonies" shortly after the book's publication. In 1994, Laake was diagnosed with breast cancer. In 2000, she committed suicide by "ingesting an overdose of pills" in Charleston, South Carolina. At the time of her death; Laake was being actively treated for depression.
(Laake, a former member of The Church of Jesus Christ of L...)
1993
Religion
Deborah was a member of the community of Jack, a group of lapsed Mormons. Later she stopped practicing the religion.
Views
Wide-eyed, with all the innocence that this three-times-divorced career woman could muster, Ms. Laake kept tossing her mane of red hair and saying that a childhood of Mormon indoctrination had kept her from enjoying sex in her marriages, turned her into an "obsessive masturbator" and eventually landed her in a mental hospital.
Quotations:
"I never imagined that I'd become famous for my ability to orgasm easily."
Connections
Deborah Laake was married to Monty Brown but the couple divorced. After that she had two more divorces.