Heather Gay is getting candid about her past.
The 51-year-old Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star recently appeared on SiriusXM’s The Julia Cunningham Show.
During the interview, Heather shared that as a minor, a bishop confronted her with personal and inappropriate questions about her body and discussed how it impacted her relationship with herself and her faith.
Keep reading to find out more…
“At one point, your father’s best friend, who I believe was a bishop in the ward, had come to you, brought you in for a one-on-one meeting saying that he had sort of had a vision that you may have been masturbating,” the host asked.
“It was multiple sessions. Multiple sessions. They’d tell your parents like, ‘Heather needs to come in for a bishop’s interview,’ and he would say to me, ‘You know, the Lord, I am impressed to ask you if you’ve been touching yourself,’ and to be fair, I didn’t really even know what touching myself meant. I knew that it was sexual, but I thought it was just something that like guys did. I was young, you know, and I remember being like, ‘I touch myself all the time,’” she explained.
“Then it changed the way I viewed myself, but I chose to think he must really love me and must really be looking out for me and Satan must want to pull me down and I’m special in the eyes of the Lord and the bishop because he’s got all these people safeguarding my purity and that’s the way my mind did the mental gymnastics to make it work, so when I meet with someone like David Matheson and he talks me through how he did the, ‘Hey, I get it.’ I’ve done it myself in smaller, different ways in order to align myself with what the leaders of the church were telling me I needed to do and be.”
“It was as if that was normal. You had quarterly bishop interviews to check on your purity, your spiritual growth, your morality, and he just really keyed in on the masturbation, which made me feel like, you know, very worried that I was giving off a vibe,” she continued.
She also talked about co-star Bronwyn Newport and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives star Taylor Frankie Paul.
“Bronwyn‘s experience just pierces my heart. I didn’t know a lot of girls that went through it, but I know her story is, the way that it was handled is quite common, and Muzzy is a Mormon mother, and you see it in Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. You see Taylor Frankie Paul‘s mom. You see the way that Mormon moms approach purity and women’s roles and it makes more sense and it does and that’s also, I have such affinity for Britani because Britani is a product of this environment and grooming and conditioning and culture. We all are, and I think that might be what’s the special sauce about Salt Lake City is even if we’re not deeply, personally affected by it, we’re all raised in the shadow of it and existing in the shadow of it and the culture is so big. It casts a huge, huge shadow.”
