I experience being gay and Mormon.
Getting married is inheriting the thousands of years of this institution.
Growing up I was very, very strict and very, very devout to my Mormon ideals and so, I
didn't allow myself to really integrate fully into my identity as a gay man until my late 20s.
I had this growing awareness of my homosexuality and so any time that those experiences would
pop up for me, the reaction was to just go deeper and deeper and deeper into the closet.
Shove it harder and harder and harder and further and further and further away.
Utah is nothing but queer from it's very beginning with
my Mormon ancestors bringing here a non-monogamous
marital system and fighting for it and saying: "No, we have the right to make, to live the
life that we want, to structure relationships the way that we want and the government needs
to leave us alone."
I remember thinking that after we got married that my polygamist great-great-grandparents
would have been very proud of me for fighting for the rights of people to create the kinds
of relationships that work for them.
I went through years of conversion therapy, also called reparative therapy and the intention
is to take a person who is fundamentally homosexual and reorient them toward being fundamentally
heterosexual.
On these weekend retreats one of the approaches is to recreate moments of trauma, whether
it was through some strange relationship with your father or whether it was through something,
like, directly traumatic like sexual abuse or molestation and really all that you're
doing is just bringing up the very worst from a person's life.
I was having lots of thoughts of hurting myself, jumping in front of subway trains and they
were so normal for me that I truly thought: "Oh, this is just a part of life", people
just fantasise about throwing their body in front of moving vehicles.
And I went down to the river to pray Studying about that good ol' way
And who shall wear the starry crown?
Love is a process and a true deep desire for another person's success.
Let's go down, come on down Good lord, show me the way
Woohoo!
Michael's a scientist ha ha and a good one and I'm in the humanities and I... you know,
the world pays scientists and not humanities people so I told him a long time ago: "I know
that we'll follow your career," which in a way - and this sounds derogatory when I don't
mean it that way - that makes me the wife. Like, I will be the one who follows you.
When I was growing up, the formula was really straight forward: you get married to a woman
and you have kids and that's how you coast through life as a happy individual.
The world is evolving so quickly right now though to realise that it's, like: "Oh my
gosh! I can have it all! There's no reason for me not to."