I've been asked not to reveal the identity of the author:

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Subject: A Short Story Of My Scientology "Career"
To: ahl@xenu.net

I was in my mid-twenties when I first came in contact with Dianetics and Scientology in California. I was attracted by how happy everyone seemed. I was a closet gay, but had struggled with being so for my whole life. Maybe I could be happy, too.

I could not afford to buy my way up Scientology's "Bridge", and so I became staff.

The pay was very low, with the bulk of my initial income coming from selling the Dianetics book door-to-door. The book was $3 and we could keep $2 off the sale. And for the record, selling 50 books a week was considered very "upstat". You get the picture there. The lifestyle was that we had off from Saturday after 6p and through Sunday. Sometimes however, if "stats were down", we worked either the rest of Saturday or all day Sunday or both.

There was no health insurance. No pension plan. There was no way to save money because you didn't have enough to live, frequently living in low income-type housing arrangements with several other staff members. I lost my dog because I was never home and the poor animal ran away after years of neglect. Any car I bought was a throw-away, and I never had any insurance. As time went on, I sold most of my physical items (stereo, etc) for money to live on. There was a period of time when I worked at an "org" (organization) that I didn't have a day off for nearly three years. I continually "borrowed" money from relatives and former friends that I could never pay back. And of course if I ever got sick, I couldn't take any medicines. You just suffered through it, took vitamins if you could afford them (I couldn't), and of course NEVER took aspirin or pain relievers of any kind.

And what do you do if / when you leave staff? You have no money saved, are trained for nearly nothing else, have absolutely nothing except clothes, no health insurance coverage, and basically have to start you life completely over. So after years and years on staff, that's what I did.

In retrospect on the auditing side of things, if I'd spent half the time understanding and coping with being gay that I'd spent trying to eradicate it, I'd be a hell of a lot better off today. But it wasn't accepted / believed in / tolerated. I even married 3 times to try to "be straight", which of course didn't work and was a disaster each time. The funny part was, Hubbard's youngest son was gay, by all accounts. I knew people who'd worked with Quentin. One particular woman I worked with him had trained and worked with him in Florida. She said he was a wonderful person, sweet, congenial, etc. It made me want to meet him, know him, but within a few short months of my being staff, he died. He was trying to escape Scientology, and made it out by either suicide or being murdered. My GOD what does that say in itself?! What was his crime? Being gay? Wanting to be a pilot? Only whispers of what happened to Quentin were circulated, and no one was allowed to speak about it at all, much less openly. His death, as well as some of the others chronicled on several websites, are tragedies of a severe magnitude.

Of course, true to form Scn Management gave us a shore story that we would swallow. Right along with flowery accounts of LRH's death at the Palladium in L.A. nearly a decade later. And about L. Ron Hubbard, Jr's leaving Scientgology. And then Lisa McPherson's death. Paulette Cooper & her claims. The indictment against Mary Sue Hubbard, et al. Revisions to "LRH Tech" after he died. Ad infinitum. And we could NEVER E-V-E-R question anything. The few times I tried, it was a nightmare.

I continually had to disconnect from any former friends who had disagreements with Scientology or Dianetics, so when I finally left staff, I had no money, no outside life and no friends, nothing. Just the clothes on my back and in my suitcase. It was as though I had been shipped off to another planet, was arriving back to Earth after 20 years with nothing to show for it, and was told lies about the real world.

And as I read the accounts by, for instance, David Mayo about the horrendous situations he and his wife found themselves in, I am appalled beyond belief. Something I was taught by LRH policy, I believe, holds true here (not being one to throw the baby out with the bath water...): if you end up with a scenario where two datums or stories oppose each other, one or both are false (obviously both can't be true). I was always pummeled into believing that only Scientology's story was true, and was not allowed to question that, EVER.

But I knew I was being lied to about Quentin, knew there were holes in the story about LRH's death, etc, at the time. It isn't until you get out of the forest that you begin to see where it is in relation to other things.

Yes, there were good things I learned from Scientology, but I also learned how to brake better after a couple car wrecks, too. Overall, what I lost were 17 years of my life.

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