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A girl has been stopped from telling her Mormon church that she's gay.

Savannah, who was 12 at the time but has now turned 13, made her speech to the congregation at Eagle Mountain in Utah.

"No part of me is a mistake," she says. "I do not choose to be this way, and it is not a fad."

But the footage, recorded in January, shows her microphone being cut off before finishing and the church leader telling her to return to her seat.

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The Mormon church teaches that gay and lesbian people are "loved" by God and welcome to follow the faith.

However, a page on states that a sexual relationship with someone of the same sex is "wrong".

"Sexual relations between [...] between people of the same sex, violate one of our Father in Heaven's most important laws and get in the way of our eternal progress," it says.

Savannah made her speech during a testimony meeting, during which anyone from the congregation can speak about their relationship to God.

She explained what had happened in an interview with the blog, I Like to Look for Rainbows.

"I only had a couple more sentences of a paragraph to read out loud, and I got cut off by my microphone being turned off by the stake president," she told interviewer Jerilyn Pool.

"I was sad because I wanted to finish it, and I felt like what I was saying should've been heard by everybody else," said the now 13-year-old.

She says she received messages of support from other members of the congregation - including from the daughter of a church leader who said she "didn't agree with his decision".

Footage of her speech has been viewed tens of thousands of times online.

Her mother said she had been asking for months to identify herself as a lesbian at one of these gatherings, the .

She also asked that Savannah's last name not be identified to protect her privacy.

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