Wife here. Some examples of weird stuff.

When my grandfather (a Mason) died, a guy in a sash came to his funeral and rattled off a 15-minute-long memorized speech about honor and death and the Freemason’s of King Solomon’s temple and some shit I barely remember because it was 15 minutes long with no text to read. He had no papers to reference and did not stutter or pause at all the whole time. Wild stuff.

Additionally, my mother has noticed some tendencies from when my father (a Mason) travels. When he’s out and about there are times when he will ask things like “Do you travel often?” or similar things, and will have strange stilted conversations about the weather and directions depending on the response. It’s clearly some kind of coded language that neither my mother or me know.

At a point before my transition, I was considering joining up, since the way my father talked about the Freemasons made them sound pretty cool. I had some text to read up on that’s publicly available, and I gotta say the whole thing was strange as fuck. My dad has repeatedly stated “The freemasons are not a secret society. They’re a society with secrets.” and while that’s true, it sure gives off super culty vibes. There’s rank levels that have special names. Elders who have been there for a while have the ability to Blackball someone and basically kick them out from ever being considered to be a Mason, and they can do it anonymously. Huge Boy’s club stuff.

Also, there’s a whole separate organization for the wives of Masons. My mom is not a part of it, and the women aren’t allowed to be part of the Freemasons directly, but they can be in this supportive group, of which I forget the name. Apparently this group of wives does things like cleaning the temple, prepping it for events, but not being allowed to participate in the events, and generally just hyping up their men. Presumably it allows the women to all get together and gossip about everyone else in town whose husbands aren’t masons.