Heather Gay coos at her cappuccino. She is is attending to it as if it was a puppy she was gifted on Christmas morning. She cradles the cup, in all of its precious warmth. The foam delights her; she’s positively tickled while raving about the foam.
A coffee order is conspicuous when you are a Mormon—or, in The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Gay’s case, an ex-Mormon.
“Bad Mormon” is, in fact, her self-given moniker. It’s the title of her bombshell 2023 memoir, in which she detailed her exit from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints following her divorce, her condemnation of policies she finds oppressive and bigoted, and the trauma she endured being exiled from her family, friends, and community.
“I had a whole coffee journey,” she tells me when we meet in New York City’s West Village, about her initial exposure to the forbidden vice: caffeine.
Heather Gay’s first foray was a single-pot Keurig that she got following her separation from husband Frank William “Billy” Gay after 11 years of marriage. (Their divorce was finalized in 2014.) She had her first cappuccino just six months ago, and still owns that Keurig machine.
“Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, you’re doing yourself dirty with that Keurig,’” she says, laughing. “I’m like, ‘I love my Keurig!’ It’s my first open statement of sin. So I embrace it.”
The ‘Bad Mormon’
On Bravo, where she became the breakout star of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City’s inaugural, utterly bats--t first season (complimentary!), Gay described herself as “a purebred, pedigreed, pioneer Mormon.”
Reality TV audiences were captivated by—salivating over, even—the show’s seemingly sacrilegious depiction of Salt Lake City women, all of whom had various ties to the typically buttoned-up Mormon community, yet were binge drinking, gossiping about sex, and screaming expletives like “grandpa-f---er” at each other.
Still, it was Gay’s candor about her decision to leave the church that proved most fascinating.
That was amplified with the release of Bad Mormon, in which Gay revealed her shame and guilt over being party to many of the tenets of the religion that she, now, morally disagrees with.
In essence, she became the public face of recovering Mormonism, a figurehead and hero for other former members, many of whom confiding in her abuse that they claim the institution concealed.
But if Bad Mormon was considered explosive in how it portrayed the church, that’s a tiny sparkler compared to the dynamite Gay detonates with her new docuseries Surviving Mormonism with Heather Gay, which premiered this week on Bravo.
The three-part series features devastating interviews with former church members who detail their experience of sexual and physical abuse by members of the church that were never reported to the police and, as the show alleges, actively covered up by the institution.
The underbelly of gay conversion therapy, already thought to be harrowing before one hears the excruciating anecdotes from the series, is exposed.
Church members’ harmful experiences with adoption services, their sexuality, patriarchal expectations, divorce, sexual assault, betrayal, racism, misogyny—these are all things that, Gay says, the community is trained to turn a blind eye to, refusing to validate the experiences of the victims.
Gay recognizes that Mormonism, particularly the mainstream’s almost zoological preoccupation with the community’s culture, is having a moment. It’s one that she’s benefitted from as a cast member on Real Housewives, and certainly sees with the popularity of Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and the rise of MomTok influencers.
“It’s intoxicating to watch, because it seems so simple and pure, and [these Mormon couples] seem so happy [in their videos],” Gays says in Surviving Mormonism. “It seems like this is what it was always meant to be, like watching an episode of Leave It to Beaver. That’s not how it really is. That’s not what’s really happening. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, because it’s exactly what the church is going for.”
This is an institution worth over $1 billion, she also reminds, run by the church’s 12 male apostles and the prophet. LDS is the fifth largest private landowner in the nation. Parishioners are required to give 10 percent of their income as tithing, which they are held accountable to at the end of each year by their local leader.
“I don’t want to detract at all from the joy and frivolity and novelty of Mormon Wives and Mormon women in Salt Lake City,” she tells me. “I mean, it makes Salt Lake City Housewives so popular, and it makes us all so, I think, complicated and fascinating. But I think it’d be ridiculous for anyone to assume an institution this large, this powerful, with this much money, and this much secrecy doesn’t have a shadow side.”
The Shadow Side
The three episodes of Surviving Mormonism are a powerful, but difficult watch.
Each entry is framed around a lengthy interview Gay conducts with someone who experienced past trauma from the church. Those discussions are peppered with anecdotes from other victims who suffered similar things, followed by an outline of the ways in which the church either failed them when they reached out for help—or actively worked to disappear unsavory allegations.
David Matheson, who is described as a pioneer of the gay conversion therapy movement and who, in what made shocking headlines around the country, later came out as gay himself, breaks down in tears discussing his shame: the shame he felt because of his sexuality when he was a part of the church, and the shame he feels now for being an architect of the pain caused to so many young men who were sent to conversion camps. He’s now about happily about to be married to his partner.
In another episode, Gay has a wrenching conversation with Ben, the partner of her best friend, Shane. Ben was sexually abused from ages 4 to 9, at one point bearing witness to the rape of a 12-year-old girl. He reported it, and was silenced. Until now.
Gay admits that when she first learned of Ben’s experience, she refused to engage with it or internalize it, a lingering byproduct of her upbringing in which Mormons are taught to dismiss and dissociate from any criticism of the church. Even how horrific the story was, and even how much she loved Shane and Ben together.
As Ben explains the ways in which his attempts to seek help and justice from church leaders and family were stonewalled, Gay atones for being so, as she says, “brainwashed” by her past in the faith that she was unable to lend the compassion he deserved.
The original goal of the series, Gay tells me, was to create something similar to Leah Remini’s award-winning Scientology and the Aftermath, exposing how the corruption and the abuse of her church was protected by the people who had the most power.
But once she started the process of filming, she says, “it became very clear both to me and the production company that I was deconstructing still.”
“I wasn’t clean of the remnants of the indoctrination and the mind control,” she continues. “And it feels strong to say mind control, because it’s so culty. But every day I’m getting better at being more articulate about what it really is, and less afraid of these charged words like ‘cult’ and ‘mind control.’ How else do you explain that?”
She remembers recently seeing a woman in Salt Lake City wearing a dress that exposed her shoulders:
“Like, I can’t see a woman with her shoulders showing and not think, ‘She’s not wearing her garments, she’s slipping away from the church. She’s not Mormon.’ That’s mind control. That’s not my personality.”
The ‘Good Time Girl’
Gay’s personality is, understandably, what contributed to her rocket-launch to the echelon of top-tier Real Housewives.
She embraced a nickname once lobbed at her by a fellow cast member as a dig: “Good Time Girl.”
She’s frequently the party leader on the show, relishing her freedom as a single woman and empty nester. But she’s always been a voice of reason, and exemplified why series like Real Housewives matter so much to fans: Real issues are tackled with painful honesty, as Gay exhibited while discussing her exit from Mormonism.
A Bravo viewer, then, would have experienced somewhat of a tonal whiplash in recent weeks watching Gay on the network.
In a stretch of Real Housewives episodes taking place on a yacht these last few weeks, Gay can be seen gleefully inebriated in the water on the back of the boat’s captain—who she has an unabashed crush on—and, in her words, “riding him like a bronco.”
A subsequent conversation in the same episode combusted into a shouting match when it was alleged that a cast mate’s husband was having an affair while farting.
Then, in Surviving Mormonism, a viewer would see Gay weeping as she bears witness to the atrocities of the community she grew up in, coming to terms with her own role in perpetuating its greatest sins.
“I never really had permission to be who I was born to be, when I grew up with this cult of personality and just this structure that was so defined of what was good, what was bad, who were you, who you were to be,” Gay says.
“I had this full circle moment when I was watching these [Surviving Mormonism] episodes this week, and I also have my whole time on the show, with the espresso martinis in the sprinter van and riding Captain Jason,” she continues. “All these ways that I’ve given voice to my darkest, craziest, deepest personality traits. It’s almost like the show gave me permission that the church never did.”
I was worried that I was being patronizing or maybe even offensive when I asked my next question: Was she ever afraid that people wouldn’t take her seriously on Surviving Mormonism?
Real Housewives has a reputation, after all.
But Gay actually uncoiled and exhaled, a huge physical reaction that telegraphed catharsis.
“Yes!” she says. “And I’m still afraid. Part of being a Housewife is a little bit of tongue in cheek and self-deprecating, like being court jesters. We’re out there. We know what the reputation of a Housewife is. I really commend the participants that we’re willing to share their stories with me. I mean, if you heard, we’re gonna have a Real Housewife of Salt Lake City come in to interview you about your darkest, most painful trauma? They took a leap of faith to trust me with that. I felt the gravity of it, and I wanted to be worthy.”
With each interview Gay did for Surviving Mormonism, she says she learned how to push further away the instincts that were ingrained in her to reject any criticism of the church—even now, after all this time.
It’s the Mormon way to “circle the wagons,” she says, and close the walls to the community so that attacks on the institution or its members don’t reach the followers—and, if they do, the followers are trained to not listen.
When I ask her what she thinks Mormons will take more of an issue with, her moral-flouting behavior on Housewives or exposing the church in Surviving Mormonism, she doesn’t skip a beat: “Oh, the debauchery on Housewives for sure.” The church, she predicts, will pretend the new series doesn’t exist.
“Institutions have problems, and why has the Mormon church been immune to criticisms?” she says. “We have looked under the covers of everything in our society and deconstructed a lot of systemic abuse and problems. The Mormon church is not immune to that, and there’s nothing wrong with allowing people who have been victims or survived that to have their time to express it. It doesn’t take away from the joy it may bring you, but don’t you want to know the truth of what you’ve dedicated your life to?”
That’s been the existential crux of Gay’s odyssey: understanding who she is in the context of her lifetime as a Mormon, her time now on the other side, and how her interactions with the victims she speaks to in Surviving Mormonism have changed her.
She loved being a Mormon growing up.
“I loved God. I loved being Mormon. I was good at being Mormon.,” she says. “If the Mormon church wasn’t so f---ed up, I would’ve stayed.”
There’s something universal to that frustration, for people of many faiths, and to that pain. Over these last years, she’s found a new community, a new sense of self, and a new purpose. But wounds don’t heal immediately, and scars don’t fade permanently away.
“I have a lot of survivor’s guilt, and I feel like I’ve got to go back and help these people,” she says. “Because you don’t usually get dropped from a cliff and then swooped up in a better, wonderful, more supportive, more inclusive world. I have, and I want them all to feel that support too.”
