I Felt the End Before It Came: Memoirs of a Queer Ex-Jehovah's Witness

"An unbeliever writes his way out of a "doomsday cult," one chapter at a time. As an adolescent, Daniel Allen Cox was a dutiful Jehovah's Witness, preaching door to door even before his baptism marked a formal dedication to the movement. Then, at eighteen, whispers of his sexual orientation made their way to his congregation's presiding elder and catalyzed his disassociation from the group. But the difference between "in" and "out" is never that simple. His mother's dangerous refusal to get a blood transfusion and his stepfather's distrust of education and literacy left indelible imprints. The bonds of affection survived with some family members, while others stopped looking him in the eye. There are friends who stayed in "the truth," others who drifted, and "worldly" ones who introduced him to philosophers and birthday cake. Shunning and growing apart are sometimes indistinguishable. And not all doctrine is easily unlearned. How does one so inured to visions of Armageddon face legitmate disasters like the climate crisis? Redefining the language that held him back is sometimes the only way forward. Can Paradise be a bathhouse, a concert hall, or a room full of books? An intimate and nuanced memoir-in-essays, I Felt the End Before It Came interrogates the lifelong act of disentangling from a cult-like past and, in turn, produces a blueprint for getting out--and starting over."--