On Growing Up Gay, Mormon, and Loved
The words I left unsaid
My religion hurt me, deeply and fundamentally.
I dodged this for a long while, but it’s the truth.
I dodged it because I loved my childhood and loved my family and loved my culture—and I was right to love them. That makes it hard to understand the pain, because I chose it, I was the primary author of it, I hid it, and it manifested to those who loved me as an inexplicable deep-running melancholy that, uniformly and without fail, they worked to help me with.
It’s not like every bit of love was well-considered. My bishop, when I left and burdened him with my unanswerable questions about the myth I learned as history that proved I was right to leave, saw me as demon-haunted and tried to cast the demon out. He was an older man, with a simpler approach to faith. But he gave me books and he opened his home to me and he extended invitations to me and he loved me in the way he knew how, and now he has passed away and gone to whichever fate awaits a devout Mormon. And it says something, you know, when I have to reach for something like that to find carelessness in love.
My mission president and his wife—they loved me, fully, unreservedly, and truly. It was hard for them when I left, but they listened to me and wept with me and always, always made more time for me than I deserved in a brutal schedule. What more can you ask than for an older couple that could have simply retired and lived the good life than to spend their time nurturing and caring for and listening to adrift and pained young spiritual wanderers who are trying, and failing, and trying again in the way young people are wont to do?
And my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles and my siblings—they loved me when I was small, unreservedly and loudly and passionately, and they loved me as I aged into a prickly and unknowable teen, and they loved me when I came back from my mission transformed and when I left their church and their home, and they loved me and they loved my husband and they lent their time and resources to our wedding. Even at my loneliest, when I thought myself incapable of loving and of being loved, I was always, always surrounded by unconditional love.
Even my prophets and apostles loved me inasmuch as they knew me. They inherited a structure that served them well, they sacrificed their lives out of duty to that structure, they preserved it as best they could. Gordon Hinckley loved the whole world. Dieter Uchtdorf stared directly into my soul when he told me the church respected all who earnestly search for truth. I loved my leaders, I respected them, I learned from them. Not all of them—but “bureaucratic and business-school-y and unwilling to take risks and corporate” was usually the worst I could say about any of them, and I could choose to doze off through what Quentin Cook had to say or to grit my teeth when leaders blasphemed by saying “key indicators” over the pulpit. But on the whole, I loved them, and I trusted them when they told me nobody was born “that way” and taught me it was virtue to resist the physical part of me.
And Orson Scott Card—he did not know me, does not know me, but I loved him. I loved his fiction, which spoke directly to my soul. I adopted it as my own thought, passionately and unreservedly—took it as my title, as my vocation, as the shape of my place in the world. And I loved his nonfiction, loved as a teenager watching him preach about mind over matter and lament the hypocrites of homosexuality, turned to him for comfort and reassurance when people called me a bigot for defending the religion that had brought me up in a world full of love, echoed his arguments and made them my own.
None of them—none of them!—knew their love was handing me a knife with which I would stab out my soul. Well, Orson did, on some level—because he had wielded the same knife against himself, because his fiction drips with the question of how to love when you have killed something precious, how to love when your heart and soul have broken, how to love a God you cannot feel and to look up at the end of tracing the woodgrain and ask your mother and father if you’ve done it right. Orson felt, on some level, the cost of his love, but having paid the price himself and called it good, he was equipped to hand young men self-annihilation and call it love. He did so, repeatedly, with fury and force and beauty in his pen.
But the others—they never had the slightest clue, because I kept myself from knowing the core and I was ashamed of the rest. My parents saw me go from happy and engaged with the world to sullen and withdrawn—but that’s just how teenagers are. They saw me go from listing every birthday present with glee to morosely listing the inadequacies of each new birthday—saw me start sneaking and hiding, saw me claw and shove and wrestle my way out of family activities and computer-use restrictions—but some kids are difficult, and they dutifully got me wolves when I taught myself to love wolves because I could not love men.
My mission president saw me weep and struggle through my mission, as no new environment or companion seemed to soothe a bruised mind—and so he tried, repeatedly and earnestly, to find the right people and the right places. I told him that it was about testimony and “self-abuse,” because as far as I knew that’s what it was, and he gave me advice for both and made me a leader anyway. And my parents at that point were more than preoccupied with their dying daughter—my sister, who blessedly came back to life because the hospitals could imprison her body but not her faith—and they needed to hear and so I needed to provide an account of a young man finding and falling in love with God through service, even as my journals filled up with so much pain I grew scared to even write in them lest I had to spend time with my mind.
And the wrenching, crushing, overwhelming agony of my mission—how could I hate that when it saved me, forced me into my body and into the world, bouncing and crashing against other real people with real consequences instead of doing as my adolescence had taught and staying safe and quiet within my fortress, my mind? How could I hate the place that let me spend three months learning how it felt to be seen by a man I loved, even if it taught me to call that love inspired companionship and then transferred him away?
What is anyone to do, when a young person’s pain is so diffuse and hidden so deeply that he cannot admit the root of it even to himself? How are they to know that he felt a desire he learned was monstrous in his core, to know that he hid the knowledge of that desire from himself, to know that every time an earnest if slightly quiet young man looked into their eyes and explained with pained precision what he was struggling with that they were speaking not to his heart but to his defense lawyer?
My church had plenty of good in it, plenty of love. But when I was thirteen years old, beginning to feel things that terrified me, every single trusted authority in my life joined their voices together, pooled their resources, took up their swords, and told every young person like me that we were evil at our core and that the only way to redeem ourselves was a lifetime of self-denial. They taught me that “same-sex attraction” was an isolated burden that I could and should carve out of myself. They did not know—but perhaps they could have known, if they listened to those who had grown up at odd angles to reality—they did not know that in teaching me to kill the part of my soul that saw beauty in men, they were teaching me to kill the part of my soul that saw beauty in God.
They loved me, and they taught me that the two great commandments were to love God and to love my fellow man, and then they taught me loudly, repeatedly, aggressively, cruelly, without a shred of understanding of what they were doing, that my capacity to love my fellow man was the blackest of black marks on my soul—that the path to Godliness was cleanliness, or erasing the black mark, or erasing myself.
I learned viscerally, unspoken, that desire itself was the root of evil. I learned that the only safe place to stand was ten feet behind myself, monitoring and watching and suppressing the body of Jack lest it desire wrongly, and that the only safe thing to be was a disembodied mind with a traitorous and walled-off body that continued to want.
And I was a good student, and I was loved and I loved back, and so for a decade straight—until I could no longer tolerate the bleakness and the emptiness that had consumed me, until I had to tell everyone who loved me that I was leaving the institution they loved—I worked with force and vigor to crush my soul and love the world with my mind instead.
Yes, I was hurt. Everyone who loved me earnestly and wholeheartedly loved the boy I was and loved the boy I told them I was, and every one of them loved and built their whole lives within an institution that made it impossible for me to know myself and impossible for me to love myself.
Something was wrong with me, and I knew something was wrong, and I searched and looked and poked around and used every tool my faith gave me. And if I had listened to my church, which told me every answer must be “yes” or “wait” when I asked if I should stay the course, I would never have known what it was. But instead I listened to its scripture, which told me to follow that which brought forth good fruit, that which brought me joy, and so I left my church and I married a man, tasting the fruit they told me was bitter and learning that the fruit that had been good for them had a poisoned core with which I would have killed my soul forever, with reassurances the whole way through that it was good because they handed it to me with love.
That’s the thing, you know? I never stopped following their advice, not really—and suddenly it all worked. I prayed in silent agony for years, then told myself I had thought my way out when really I just needed to feel again. I kept tracing the woodgrains even while I lived in a world where God was dead. And the fog slowly lifted and I built a happy life and then suddenly just now at thirty I looked up and heard the answer to my long-silent prayers and realized I was gay all along, four years after marrying the man I love, because finally the knowledge would not kill me. All it cost was trust in the mind I thought was my only reliable weapon.
Now I can’t even tell anyone to fuck off for calling me a fucked-up fag because the only person calling me that was myself: first when I wrote in my journal that queer people were freaks because that was the strongest word I could use, then with slaps and pinches and silent screams every time I fucked myself because I couldn’t love myself. They taught me I was profane and didn’t so much as leave me the language that would let me hate myself right. I could not feel again until I betrayed the boy who clung to not using bad-guy words, the boy who needed one way to be good, and in betraying him admit that he knew at his core he was evil. But how the fuck was I supposed to love when I knew it was fucked-up to love the red-haired, sharp-jawed boy playing angelic piano music in church?
Thank you for your testimony, brother.
I think stories like this one demonstrate why honestly trying to have a accurate understanding of the world is one of our most important moral obligations. There's an enormous amount of pressure in society to adopt beliefs for social reasons- not just in religion, but in politics and everyday status competitions. We're often made to feel that thinking honestly about whether these beliefs are accurate is a deep betrayal and the act of a bad person. But an inaccurate model of the world produces inaccurate predictions, and so by giving up on accuracy, we also give up our ability to predict the effects our actions will have on other people, including those we love.
If this case, your people inaccurately believed that homosexuality was an unnatural, externally imposed desire that would lead to eternal torment. So, out of love, they taught you to hate it, not realizing that they were teaching you to hate yourself. In other cases, neglecting truth leads to wars and atrocities. The followers of Stalin chose to believe they were building a communist paradise, despite evidence to the contrary, because they lived in a culture that told them you had to believe that in order to be a good person. Likewise, the modern MAGA movement genuinely believes they're improving the lives of Americans; in that subculture, a good-faith effort to find out if that's true or not is a kind of betrayal. Many on the American left arrive at beliefs similarly.
When we arrive at a belief in bad faith, I think we're morally culpable when that belief causes harm. The most extreme mandate of that principle- that people should abandon religion and political identity entirely- is most likely morally supererogatory. However, I think the more modest charge of holding our beliefs lightly enough that we notice when they would cause harm should they turn out to be false is actually a moral obligation.
For that reason, I don't think your congregation should be entirely absolved of responsibility for the pain they've caused. Taking on that responsibility yourself by pointing out their love and your own self-recrimination is a respectable act of kindness, but I think sometimes an element of moral condemnation is also needed to incentivize change.