A Queer and Pleasant Danger, Kate Bornstein

A Queer and Pleasant Danger, Kate Bornstein.  Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.  247 pps on an e-reader

I first encountered Kate Bornstein via one of her other books called Gender Outlaw.  I liked it a lot and was thus pleasantly surprised to find A Queer and Pleasant Danger.  This latest book is a treasure.  Kate addresses her life in Scientology's Sea Org as a male, her transgenderism, family relationships, her ongoing bout of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (C.L.L.) and her gender identity with equal aplomb.


Kate was born in a male body and Jewish.  Kate found her way through childhood and adolescence in Jersey haphazardly.  In Denver she encountered some young Scientologists who had a message and pizza.  Being trans, Kate was sold on the idea that she was a thetan assuming a human identity.  Since thetans were also purported to be genderless, that solved Kate's gender dilemma for a bit.  She hung out at the Scientology org in Denver, took a few courses there, and then converted, went off to Sea Org where she lived on the large Scientology cruise ship, got promoted a few times and got married.  Once her first wife Molly got pregnant, they were commissioned to start an org in New York City.  The hotel where they had their offices was a dive and people kept flying past their offices on the way down to death on the sidewalk below.  The baby came and life went on that way for a couple of years.  Kate's first wife was ordered to the West Coast when their baby girl was two years old.  When their baby was four, she boarded a plane to visit with her mum [Kate's first wife] and never returned.  Mexican divorce papers came shortly after that.

Kate and wife number two found each other as both continued to work for Scientology.  Through a series of promotions, Kate found herself traveling all over.  There was a problem at a Swiss bank.  Kate was then ordered to return stateside where she faced officers from Scientology's financial police org in Clearwater Florida.  After hours upon hours on the e-meter, she was informed that she could opt for three years of hard labor or leave Scientology.  She had a neck problem by then which was painful so she chose to leave.  She was excommunicated and packed out.  Kate gave her second wife the car-- she was now considered an S.P., or suppressive person-- and went back to her childhood home with her parents.

Kate's dad who was a medical doctor promptly began treating Kate's neck problem  Kate slept a lot and after a bit got up and began to do life again.  Several months later, Kate was offered the opportunity to return to Scientology in good standing.  She was told that the financial police org was corrupt and was now a goner.  She declined and got on with life.  Kate read some decent science fiction [that is to say not any sci fi by L. Ron Hubbard which some percentage of us sci fi freaks consider to be garbage or at least substandard], got into acting, went through gender reassignment, mourned her daughter who she is not allowed to speak to, became an activist, wrote books, fell in love a few times with various women, got in touch with the idea that she prefers to be the masochist in the S & M lifestyle.  Today she identifies as a tranny rather than as male or female.  This of course irks bunches of people such as some trangenderists as well as bunches of lesbians and Pope Benedict.  Kate has decided to her credit that she is NOT inherently dangerous.

sapphoq reviews says: Anyone who does not care for reading about happy transgenderist folks probably should skip this book.  Folks who enjoyed Kate Bornstein's other books and/or who are fans of Pat Califa [that's a big yes from me on both counts] will like this different and fascinating take on life as a Scientologist and life as an ex-Scientologist.  Highly recommended.

Cult: A Love Story, Alexandra Amor

Cult, A Love Story (Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery), Alexandra Amor.  Smashwords, 2011.
511 pps on e-reader, including footnotes, a glossary of loaded words, resources, and appendix.


Author Alexandra Amor chose to tell her story of cult involvement by utilizing a changed name for the woman who is the leader.  In the book, the leader is referred to as Limori.  In early chapters, Limori appears as a benign but somewhat wigged out psychic teacher of meditation to a small circle of Vancouverites one night a week.  Limori channels.  The identity of the channeling spirit is at first the light of "God".  But something changes and Limori becomes the mouthpiece of "God".  Amor does not possess enough self-trust to identify Limori as a malevolent leader and so she stays on.  

The meditators get used to Limori's outlandish claims in varying degrees and begin to accept her as their guru-- chief human in charge of their spiritual development and as the one who is in tune with "God" and able to speak to what this "God's" will is.  The "God" that Limori claims to channel has many opinions, chiefly involving any wealth obtained by any of the group members and its redistribution to Limori but also including more mundane happenstance such as who shall sleep with who this week.  Limori and her followers eventually wind up at a fishing resort/meditation center left to one of her followers in a will, although of course "God" wants the will for the camp to be signed over to Limori's name.

Alexandra Amor doesn't like it when Limori singles her out for special negative attention.  [She is not real fond of some of Limori's special "rewarding" attention either].  Limori is given to chastising members in front of other members and punishing them in various ways. Still she remains as an unpaid staffer of Limori's camp, just like everyone else.  Amor leaves after Limori steals away her lover by divine commandment.  

sapphoq reviews says: Cult: A Love Story  was difficult to read because the author is very skilled at conveying her pain and distress during the ten years or so that she was involved with Limori and Limori's cult.  Amor is very knowledgeable about her subject matter and taught me how to tell the difference between a religion or organization that has symptoms of being cultish or cult like and one that doesn't.  She refers to The Guru Papers and also to books by Robert Lifton and by Steven Hassan.  Cult: A Love Story points up the danger of accepting another human being as one who has a special hot-line to the deity of choice without question, thus yielding to authoritarian rule.


Amor does not leave the reader with a few words about how she got out of the cult.  Instead, she gives information from experts in the field of freeing people from thought control.  She also indicates that she has herself done the work required to free herself as suggested in the following paragraph which I quote from her book:


          pp.406-407    "Time alone heals nothing.  Let's be
          clear about that right up front.  Walking away from
          any sort of traumatic experience, including being in
          a cult, and pretending that it didn't happen will leave
          your wounds festering and weeping forever...healing
          is work and we have to work at it and if we don't, no
         matter how many years pass, it will be as if the trauma                       happened yesterday."

I highly recommend this book without hesitation to anyone who has been caught in a cult, large or small, as well as to students of psychology and those who have a personal stake (such as family members belonging to a malignant group) in the subject matter.

Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres

Jesus Land (A Memoir) , Julia Scheeres.  Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2005. e-book, 274 pps.

Julia Scheeres is from a white fundamentalist Christian family.  They lived in Indiana, mother, father, a coupla kids.  Dad made a good living as a surgeon.  Her mom and dad wanted to adopt a kid, but the agency said the kid they wanted was already taken.  The agency pointed out that there was a bunch of black kids in need of a home.  Being Christians and all, mom and dad felt like they could not refuse to adopt a kid on the basis of his skin tone.  First they adopted David, a child a year younger than Julia.  Then they adopted an older black boy so David would have someone else in the family who was black.

Prejudice runs deep even in religious places.  David and his brother attracted their share of nasty comments from the other school kids.  Julia and David stuck up for each other and were fairly inseparable.  Eventually there were several falling outs and the Scheeres adults decided to dump David at a fundamentalist Christian school called Escuela Caribe in the Dominican Republic.  This school was run with the assumption that all of the teens attending there were messed up and evil and had done stuff like having premarital sex and thus deserved to be there.  Julia was astonished to find her mother clearing out David's room one day.  That was the day that Julia learned that David was being x'ed out of her parents' lives on a permanent basis, good Christians that they were.

After a bit, Julia's parents discovered that she had premarital sex with a boy.  She wound up being dumped off at Escuela Caribe as well.  The school sucked.  There was abuse there, just as there had been at Julia's home in Indiana.  Julia and David both got out after a time.  Julia found that she was no longer a Christian.  I won't tell you what happened with David.

sapphoq reviews says: Jesus Land is an outstanding memoir.  It illustrates what happens when religious dogma becomes more important than loving others.  Highly recommended.

Escaping Cult Entrapment by Gabriella Gallo

Escaping Cult Entrapment: (Our Journey to Victory), Gabriella Gallo.  Bloomington, IN.:WestBow Press: 2012.    e-book, 190 pps.

Escaping Cult Entrapment is about one cult: The Children of God which later changed its' name to The Family or The Family International.  This book is a testament to the author's mother.  The author's parents (the Santinos) were young and poor with a couple of kids and one on the way.  A commune ran by The Children of God took them in.  Sometimes the mom wanted to stay in the cult and sometimes the dad did.  The dad was into flirty fishing and sharing partners.  Mom wasn't.  They lived in a few C.O.G. communes and in a bus and at times in a car.  There were some more kids born and the Santino family became COG missionaries in Mexico.  Dad dumped Mom with all of the kids and took off for parts unknown.  After a couple of false starts, Mom and all nine kids settled in Texas in their own rickety trailer.  They were firmly out of the cult by then and a local non-cultish Christian church helped them fix up their trailer.  The author and her brothers and sisters grew up.  Through the actions of a younger now adult sister, their dad was found to be living in another country with a new wife and nine more kids and still in The Children of God cult.

Throughout all of the bad stuff and the poverty, the author's mother remained committed to her children and did the best she knew how with them.

sapphoq reviews says: Gabriella Gallo says she is not a professional writer.  She more than succeeded at communicating her experiences growing up as a child in a cult and later a child out of a cult.  Highly recommended to any former members of The Children of God and anyone else interested in reading about cults.

Saving the Schizo Kid, Waln K. Brown

Saving the Schizo Kid: (Reflections on Divorce, Mental Health, and Recovery), Waln K. Brown.  Tallahassee: William Gladden Foundation Press, 2011.  approx. 1 mg on an e-reader.

Waln K. Brown is the founder and C.E.O. of the Willian Gladden Foundation located in Tallahassee Florida and on the web at

http://www.williamgladdenfoundation.org  .

Harrisburg State Hospital is still in operation.  Several years ago, on our way to the Pennsylvania Mental Health Consumers Conference, some friends and I met there to wait for the next chartered bus.  One friend had spent several years there once, and then another almost-year some time later after going off of her psych meds.  [N.B. the Citizens Conmission on Human Rights with its' vigorous anti-shrink and anti-psych meds stance is an organization which is run by Scientology].  She pointed out various buildings to the rest of us.  We studied what patients we could see, the carefully manicured lawns, the unappetizing smells belching from some kitchen window.  At the conference we did a skit about a cockroach funeral on the ward.  Only it wasn't a fiction.  It happened.  My friend had lived it.


Waln K. Brown had also been there, to Harrisburg State Hospital.  He was escorted there by the police.  Harrisburg State Hospital had been vetted to Brown's divorcing parents as a place where their troubled son could get the help that he needed with his temper.  And so the decision was made.

sapphoq reviews says: Saving the Schizo Kid was all the more real to me because my friend had also been there as a patient.  I never got the chance to ask her if she knew Waln K. Brown-- she is dead now.  Waln K. Brown's authentic voice rings clearly throughout the pages of this book.  Highly recommended to those with an interest in personal mental health stories.