To Be Gay and Mormon

As an aside before I post: I know two intense blogs in one day and I am sorry if I feel like I am spamming :( I just felt the need to get all these things out lately and I hope I am not annoying anyone with "spamming" or seeming needy. 

Also, this one is depressing and personal, just to give for warning....I promise, I will not post for a few days and my next entry will be happy and bouncy.... 

My family had been searching for quite sometime to find a new church for our family. Originally, we were Southern Baptist because my father’s family was Southern Baptist. But my mother, who had come from a staunchly Liberal family, detested the conservative undertones in each sermon. My family life at the time, and truthfully for a large portion of my childhood, was falling apart. I think my parents, my mother in particular, wanted to find something to unite the family; Something that would help us heal.

I remember trying several different churches, being too young to truly understand what was being said in each. I only knew that during some services I was bored to tears and that it was important that I stay quiet and pay attention. Finally, we stumbled across the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I find it ironic, looking back now, that we chose this church to explore when it is fairly well known for holding quite conservative views. The very first meeting we walked into, my parents ran into my father’s old friend and his wife. This felt like divine intervention. They had not seen each other for years and here this family was, after searching for so long for familiarity, for belonging, they were here even before the service had begun. We listened to the sermon, or Talks, as they are called in the faith. I do not remember what the discussion was on, only that I thought it was cool that I got to eat my own little piece of bread and my own little cup. I felt special. I felt like I belonged already. I was an awkward child to say the least. Rarely, except when I was amongst my family, did I feel like I belonged anywhere. This felt nice to me.

My mother loved the emphasis on family. Her childhood was a very difficult one. She so longed for the feeling of true family, of truly belonging together, of truly being happy as a single working unit. The Mormon faith promised to provide this for her. I think she was able to look over the beliefs they had on women (she had proven, through her ability to overcome time and time again that women were not weak, they were not the subservient sex).

My father enjoyed that fact that the family could fit in and pretend to be perfect. He grew up in a family where pretending to be perfect, where pretending problems did not exist was the ultimate goal. You do talk about your problems. You do not dwell on feelings, you do not show weakness or emotion. You must be perfect and happy and smile for the neighbors. In essence, the Mormon culture was exactly what he craved.

After the service, two Mormon missionaries offered to come to our house and teach us about the One True Church. I remember asking the most questions out of siblings. They were the usual childlike questions about God. “Which comes first, space or heaven?” “Do animals go to heaven as well?” “Does it hurt if you fall from a cloud?” The missionaries were patient with me, they answered my questions as best as they could. Shortly there after, my family converted to the Mormon faith. I was eight years old at the time, old enough to be baptized. I remember being told that this was very important, that now I could go heaven. That scared me slightly. If I didn’t go into that pool, I couldn’t go to heaven? I would be left in the Outer Darkness, a place where I would be scared and alone? I was already so lonely as a child, unable to relate to other children my age, I didn’t want to be alone anymore, so I stepped into that pool willingly, hoping that I was guaranteeing that I could be in heaven with my family.

My family continued to fall apart at the seams; we just learned to hide it better. We smiled; we went to church, went to primary, relief society and learned about the priesthood. But still, there was constant chaos. Unless you have grown up around chaos, it is hard to comprehend how fatiguing it can be. There is the constant fear to bring others over. The unstable environment is so potent and overwhelming that you feel as if everyone you meet can tell just be looking at you. I spent a great deal of my time living inside my head, imagining great and fantastical worlds far away from my life and myself. While on the one hand I felt the constant stress of the chaos, I had also felt like it was normal; it was the only life I had ever known.

During this time in my life, I began to learn what it meant to be different. I had always known that I was different from the other children, for several reasons. I was strange and awkward and could not understand my peers and they could not understand me. But I hadn’t really cared. True, I had been lonely, but I didn’t think that it was because I was different necessarily. I had never been taught that being different was bad. I had been raised to believe that it was okay to be different, so long as you were happy and true to yourself. It was okay that I was strange and read Edgar Allen Poe at such a young age. It was okay that I told jokes that others didn’t understand. It was okay that I analyzed and explored everything in my life. It was okay that I didn’t really understand the interest that the other girls in my class were beginning to have in boys, that I wasn’t. The Church of Latter Days Saints, however, teaches that it is not okay to be different. That being different in a bad thing; a very bad thing. I began to feel shame. I began to dislike myself because I was different, because I weird and bad and not like the other girls. It was bad that I didn’t find make up or boys interesting.

I began to try and change. I couldn’t suppress all my strangeness. As I stated, I am a very strange and awkward person. But, there was one thing, a new budding thing, that I could suppress, that I could try and change. So I ignored those rushing feelings I had when a pretty girl walked into the room. I wrote them off as merely admiring them, as wanting to be their friend. I began to fake crushes, willing myself to be normal. Perhaps if I said I had a crush on this boy, I may grow to like him….whenever I liked a boy in a friendship way, I immediately assumed that I must like him more, that my plan was working! I see now that I had only ever liked them as friends, but at the time, they were nice to me. They made me feel comfortable and okay, not like most of the other boys in my grade. Most boys and men            (and this is occasionally still true but it is getting better) made me feel anxious and scared. I do not know why this is. As I got older, this became harder and harder to fake. So, I tried harder and harder to fake it. I couldn’t bear to feel that crushing loneliness again. It was already unbearable to be Different. I didn’t want to be alone and be different.

Meanwhile, my home life began to fall farther and farther downhill. My father had begun isolating himself from the family, closing himself off emotionally. My mother was trying to emotionally support my sisters and I, along with her increasingly emotionally abusive husband, to make sure we did not get damaged as she did. She did this while working twelve hour days with no breaks only to find out that my father was cheating on her. He wanted a divorce. The happy family façade was officially shattered.

When the Church learned of my parents potential divorce, the Bishop of the Church took my older sister, who was still a fairly young teen at this time, into his office and asked her about the state of my parents marriage. He let her know that divorce was not okay. That my parents should not get divorced and if they did, they may be damning the whole family to Outer Darkness. I do not know if these were the words he actually said, but I do know that this was the impression she was supposed to take from the meeting.

We left the church shortly after this. However, one never truly is able to leave the church. They do not let you leave easily. We were hounded for months about coming back to the church. We children were constantly bombarded by our church friends to come back, to come back to the True Church. It was not okay to leave.

Inside, I was beginning to become aware that I was gay. I first admitted it to myself my sophomore year of high school, roughly a year or so after we had tried to leave the church. My normally good memory is fuzzy here. I cannot for the life of me remember what year that we actually left the church. The Mormons had weaved their way so deeply into our lives, into my life, that I cannot remember the difference in time between when we stopped going to church and when we stopped being Mormons. I know there was a long gap in between these times, when the faith finally let us go, but I cannot remember.

My partner, who I consequently met my sophomore year of high school, was a major reason why I came out to myself. From the moment I met her, I knew. I knew in my heart. I did not know at the time what I knew but I knew something on a deep subconscious level. This woman, this beautiful human being, was going to be important to my life. I remember, during one our first meetings, we were talking casually about gay people and she smiled at me, while pointing to the rainbow bracelet she was wearing said, “Well, in case you didn’t know….” And she shook my hand. In that handshake was electricity. The electricity my straight friends had been describing that I never understood. Here was this girl, and she was different and it was okay. She was proud of her difference. My eyes were opened.

However, I hesitated coming out. I was still afraid of being alone. I didn’t want lose my friends or my family. I had recently lost my Faith, and was slowly losing my spirituality as well, and I did not want to lose more. I felt like I was losing more and more each day and I didn’t want to lose what little I had left.

My parents officially divorced my junior year. Three and a half years after they originally were going to. Once again, my mother wanted to keep us protected and together and my father wanted to fit in so they delayed the eminent and necessary separation for as long as they could.

My mother and younger sister left for Pennsylvania, our home state. My older sister had, emotionally speaking, been gone for years. She had been too scarred from the first divorce threat, from the abusive relationship she had gotten into shortly there afterwards. This is not to say she did not love us. My older sister loves fiercely and she loves her family with all of her heart. But it was too painful for her to be close to us. She had to distance herself from us, to save her already so wounded heart.

My younger sister carries her scars from my parent’s official divorce. She left the only home she had really known (she was quite young when we moved to Colorado) and lost what she was still young enough to believe she couldn’t ever lose, her family as she knew it. My father emotionally abandoned my younger sister from that point forwards and it is for that, above all things, which I cannot forgive him for.

My father became a pseudo father for me from then on out. Although he and I technically lived together, I would go weeks without seeing him, instead having to rely on myself for food and parenting. I grew strong from this, I learned how to be myself. I came out at the end of my junior year.

My coming out story is a painful one for me as it involves me getting my heartbroken by the person that I love today. Now that I am able to look back with mature eyes, I can see just how toxic and abusive the relationship she was in at the time was. All that I knew, though, was that this woman, who I had fallen in love with, who said that she loved me, who I had come out to my friends and school for, would not leave this man she was with. I was confused because she said that she was indeed a lesbian, not bisexual and that she did not find this man attractive but she had to stay. I so wish I had had the strength to get her out of that situation when I first learned of some of the events that went on. But I did not. I still did not like myself and I was so scarred and damaged from everything that had been happening in my life, that I just didn’t have the strength.

Coming out was an emotional process in and of itself. While most friends were supportive from the beginning, one of my oldest and dearest friends called me to say that he did not want to know me anymore. Because I was gay, I was no longer worth knowing as a person. I started to sob over the phone, unable to take anymore heart break. He immediately took it back and we have grown closer since but I still have that memory with me and always will. I hold no ill will against him. Often, when we do not understand something or have had no previous experience with something, it scares us. As humans, we tend to run from and reject what scares us. He was young and was scared.

The Mormon church stopped asking me to come back to the church. They stopped talking to me entirely. I was no longer worth knowing. This began to fuel an anger in me, a resentment that I have developed, and am working on ‘undeveloping’ for all Christians. How could they judge me without truly knowing me? Without knowing my thoughts, feelings, or opinions? I turned away from the belief in God. As of right now, I do not truly know what I believe. I want so badly to believe that there is a Higher Power and that there is purpose to pain, that there is a design to the chaos. I want to believe we are not alone. But sometimes I do not know. Instead, I choose to believe in humanity. That humans, for the most part, are essentially good That we are capable of surviving amazing amounts of heartbreak. Humans are survivors, we are learners, we are teachers, we help, we comfort, we are simultaneously children and adults, giving and taking. Some humans do some very terrible things but the majority of us love and care about each other. That is what I believe. That is what I need to believe.