CHANTELLE RYATT

Down under in Melbourne, Australia, Chantelle Ryatt enjoyed a warm holiday season with her wife, Jennadene, and their combined three children, ages 5, 7 and 8. Last year was one to celebrate as the two were married in a beautiful, beachside ceremony on September 21. Standing on a cliff face overlooking a surf beach with massive crashing waves below, the haze of clouds offered a gentle mist as they gathered with the celebrant and the two photographers. The day prior, Chantelle had told Jennadene nothing would make her happier than to have the confirmation they were doing the right thing and to have her mother there. The latter was a difficult order as Chantelle’s mom had passed in May 2020. Yet, as the two said their “I Do’s,” it was undeniable to all present – including their atheist photographer – that there was a special presence felt that no one could deny. As the sun peeked out from behind the clouds, Chantelle felt the presence of her mom, great grandmother, both her grandads and uncle rejoicing, so happy for this union. Chantelle says, “To my mom, family was everything. Knowing she was on the other side, knowing what eternal families look like and rejoicing, was a beautiful confirmation.” She continues, “My wife is the person my mom wanted me to be with to teach me what I needed to learn. To grow, to develop, and to feel loved—it’s been a journey.”

For both Chantelle and Jennadene, life certainly has weaved. Both experienced more traditional LDS domestic arrangements prior to meeting each other. Each grew up in the faith and Jennadene served a mission on Temple Square in SLC in 2014-2015. Each married men in the temple with whom they had children. While both her parents were converts, Chantelle’s homelife was very “church-centered,” and her father typically held leadership positions either as bishop or in stake presidencies. She says, “Our family was well known in the stake.” 

From a young age, Chantelle also knew that she was different from the other kids at church and that her life wouldn’t be as simple. She recalls feeling that, “Boys were cool, but girls were awesome.” The feeling of being out of place due to her attraction to girls, which she sensed at age four, became more prominent as she grew. She became terrified people would find out and she’d be shunned. Her very intuitive mother, however, sensed something was off, but didn’t know just how much struggle the conflicts of Chantelle’s sexuality and living the gospel created internally.  

As a young adult, Chantelle embraced opportunities to serve—first as a Young Women’s leader at age 18. She married at age 24 to a man she’d known since she was 14, and had further opportunities to serve in the ward Relief Society Presidency and ward Primary Presidency in her late 20s. Two years after the birth of her son, she was called to be the ward Young Women’s President. At the time, she loved her husband and was committed to him and the marriage, though she says the pairing wasn’t ideal due to factors outside of her orientation. “I thought with Heavenly Father, I could overcome my sexuality.” She had told her husband prior that she was queer, and eventually came out to her parents around age 26. True to form, her mother’s first reaction was of concern for Chantelle and included the words, “What are you doing about it?”, quickly followed by loving kindness. Chantelle explained how she had kept close to her Heavenly Father and relied on Him to guide her as to what she should do. The following Sunday, her mother told Chantelle, “I love you no matter what. Wherever you go, whatever you do, I’ll always support you.”

The year Chantelle’s son was born, motherhood, coupled with her “sexuality 
complications,” did not help her already troubled marriage. When she was 29, Chantelle’s mother passed away, which presented a shifting point. “My mum was my rock in a sense, who I turned to.” Chantelle experienced frequent bouts of depression about her sexuality which occurred about every three months, when fighting against who she was and what she desired became too much. She says, “My mum was so devout, her faith was so strong. She lived and breathed service and magnified all she did. I wanted to carry on her legacy, but could no longer lie to myself. I had to figure out what was going on. That year of grief on top of depression was not fun.”

Chantelle knew it was time to tell her husband she needed a separation to explore and see what her future would look like. He agreed, and what follows was, by Chantelle’s account, a very spiritual experience. Rather than setting out to date “just any woman,” she says she relied on the guidance of her Heavenly Father and her mother from beyond the veil to wait it out. After some time, she reignited her friendship with Jennadene, as the two had known each other since early YSA. Jennadene had recently come out as gay and had left her own marriage to a man. 

At first, they bonded over just having someone else to talk to who had experienced such a unique path in the church. They’d converse how there was no guidance for people like them in scripture, especially in the Book of Mormon. They each spent time pondering and praying about their future, and when Chantelle finally asked if this person she’d drawn close to was the person she should pursue, she received a very definitive “Yes!” 

They proceeded slowly, frequently checking in with each other to ensure they were both still feeling this was the right thing. Over their first year of dating, Chantelle says frequent spiritual experiences confirmed she was on the right path. Miracles ensued. As the financial dealings of her divorce became more complicated and it felt like she’d lost everything, she says, “Everything that was taken, Heavenly Father provided.” When she was forced to move out immediately, a family friend generously allowed Chantelle and her son to move in without paying rent until she found a job. Quickly she did, at a nearby primary school her son could attend, and she was soon able to pay rent. Money Chantelle was owed from years ago suddenly showed up and she was able to pay for food. She says blessings like these continued to appear, which she feels stemmed from continuing to pay tithing.

Every fortnight, when her son would visit his father, Chantelle would meet up with Jennadene, who’d been living in Adelaide 700 kilometers away. As the two began blending their families, they’d take their three kids to church in Chantelle’s home ward where members had watched her grow up, marry a man, experience a mental decline through her divorce and loss of her mother, and now, “To watch us two women go to church as a family unit… well, some took it well, and some not so much. But we’ve been able to weed out the people you don’t want around.”

The couple have appreciated the warm support of their bishop who meets with them often and welcomes their family unit in the ward family. He recently helped Chantelle seek the cancellation of her temple marriage to her ex, though her sealing to her son remains intact. With the help of her stake president, the cancellation was a process that only took a few weeks. All of this has occurred since Chantelle was disfellowshipped in 2022. When Chantelle was Young Women’s President in the ward and told she’d have to have a membership council for dating a woman, she expressed to the girls she served that she’d likely be released, and “lose everything she had.” She remembers telling the girls she’d loved watching grow up over the prior ten years the importance of building a relationship with their Heavenly Father so “He’s the one who’s guiding you.”

While they know there are some “fuddy duddies” who may not be comfortable with their presence at church, Chantelle and Jennadene say several more have made comments like “What a beautiful family” when they walk in. They often take opportunities to speak up in classes and share the examples of personal revelation they’ve experienced. Recently after sharing what it was like being the only queer members of the ward and the special presence of their wedding day “visitors,” they were touched when two older gentleman separately came up to them after to each offer a hug and words of gratitude that they had helped them feel the spirit and increased perspective that day. 

“The understanding I have gained has led to a relationship with Heavenly Father that has never been stronger,” says Chantelle. “Whenever someone’s faced with a unique path, whether it be addiction or not being a member or being homosexual, our very different experiences in the church mean we all receive inspiration that is personal to us. But the main message should be that it doesn’t matter whether queer members come to church or not, their life experiences are personal and it’s not our place to judge.” 

Chantelle credits her blended family as providing a loving environment for her son, step-son and step-daughter in which they are living the gospel, learning to pray, and to build their testimonies. “They wouldn’t have that environment if we weren’t a family unit… I know without a doubt, hand on my heart and I will swear to my grave, that I have been led on this path. I know Heavenly Father has guided me, and knowing how important eternal families are to my mom, I know she would not have guided me on this path only just to lead me astray.”

OAKLEY ROBERTS

“I have never expected God to actually answer the question I’ve been asking my whole life. I knew He could answer prayers, but this was something I thought was taboo for Him—a topic that was repulsive in the church. But He did.” These are the words that open a letter Oakley Roberts crafted to send to those who ask him about his experience as a gay member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 

Oakley, who is 21 and currently living in Payson, UT where he works as a caregiver, says he had sensed he was gay since 12 years old, but had spent his teen years living in denial. He grew up in a small town, going to church every week. But as each of his older three siblings drifted away from the church (with only one since returning), Oakley found it normal to ask questions and see things differently.

After his older brother moved out when he was just 10 years old, Oakley says he didn’t grow up around many men. His father was often busy with work and then moved out when his parents divorced when Oakley was 16. The guy friends he would make in school often seemed to move away or move on after a few months, so most of his friends in high school were girls. In his youth, Oakley always felt being gay was a punishment for something bad he’d done, and he hoped he’d be able to pray it away. But as he got older, he says his feelings only got stronger. He continued to try to convince himself he was bi and outwardly pass as straight; along the way, he dated a lot of girls. 

Reluctant to go on a mission for any other reason than to make his parents happy, Oakley figured he’d go to school first after high school graduation. He also wondered if it was time to start dating guys. But sitting in his room one night, he had a strong impression to serve a mission as soon as possible. The next day he told his mom of the prompting, and says it strengthened his resolve thereafter to believe in Christ.

Having grown up feeling uncomfortable around men, being around a bunch of elders felt awkward. Oakley always preferred to be around the sister missionaries, but while serving, he says the strongest relationship he grew was the one with his Savior. He never told anyone on his mission he was gay. In fact, in the Liberian (African) mission where he served, it was not acceptable to be gay, and LGBTQ+ citizens often suffered discrimination and received threats. However, Oakley enjoyed his mission and recalls only hearing a few homophobic comments. He says he never wrestled with God. During those two years, Oakley continued to convince himself he was bisexual and that when he returned, he would date lots of girls and hopefully marry one. But after returning and spending four months dating many “amazing women,” Oakley felt defeated. He gave up and decided to start dating men. 

Oakley says this initially felt like a wrong decision, that he’d be disappointing his family, himself and God. But then he met an amazing guy and kissed him and thought, “Holy crap.”  He continued to date guys, not because he was wanting to start a relationship but because he was more curious about what it was like to be “a gay, LDS person.” But instantly, he knew his feelings for men were so much stronger than any of his attempts to feel attracted toward girls. 

At this time, Oakley moved down to Southern Utah University to attend school, though reluctantly, with the distance he’d placed between himself and the one guy (he’d kissed) who seemed to understand what it felt like to be him. He says, “I struggled with the unknown. What should I do? Who am I? Why am I like this? Was it a mistake I made or a curse of sorts?” Oakley attempted to distract himself with friends, work, or school, but one night started to really worry as overwhelming thoughts took control. He says, “My mind couldn’t settle; I was feeling lost... I tried to call my friends, but they were busy and couldn’t hang out.” As Oakley started to go into a full-blown panic, he jumped into his car and drove up the canyon to distract himself. When it became hard to breathe, he pulled over. Oakley says, “I just sat there, mad at God. I yelled, ‘Why did you do this to me?! Can’t you just take this away’?!”

Suddenly, Oakley says it was as if God stopped his mind, and directed it toward his patriarchal blessing which spelled out the numerous attributes God gave him and how he was able to bless people around him by being empathetic, sensitive, and compassionate. He says, “I always felt a little different, but these feelings helped me to heal others.” Oakley says a question formed in his mind: “Do you want me to take all of these away?” Oakley thought, “My gifts? Never!” He says, “Then God connected everything. He was telling me that if I wanted Him to take away my attraction to men, I would then lose all those spiritual gifts; they were connected. These are what made me, me. I was filled with so much peace, knowing that I wasn’t a mistake; it wasn’t a sin I committed in the past or a curse. God made me in a way that I would be able to reach people around me that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to.”

Shortly after, Oakley came out for the first time to a trusted friend – a devout girl he was initially scared to confide in, unsure how she’d take it. But one day he got into the car and told her and loved how she was so affirming. Reassured that “even a religious friend would support (me),” Oakley called another close friend the next day, and that interaction also started with a buildup of stress but ended with relief. He then became comfortable telling all his friends, many of whom smoked, drank, had left the church and yet had always felt safe being around Oakley, as he tried to never exclude anyone. In return, he says it was easy for them to accept him for who he was. 

Oakley then felt ready to tell his parents. Previously, whenever his mom would text asking about his dating life, he’d typically blow it off by responding, “I’d tell you if I was.” But then he went home to meet his mom and stepdad for lunch and let them know, “I’m not really interested in women.” This was the first time he fully admitted that he was gay and not bi. Oakley then learned his mom already knew. When at first, she told him she knew of gay guys who married girls, this didn’t bother Oakley because he had told her of his intent to stay in the church. Meanwhile, his siblings immediately encouraged him to date and marry a man. A few months later when Oakley clarified he’d only be dating men, his mother’s response was, “I hope you know that whatever you decide, you feel you can bring anyone home and we’ll welcome then.” She continued that she trusted Oakley in his decision-making and only hoped for his happiness. This trust helped Oakley to feel more confident in his own ability to make good decisions. 

Later, Oakley told his stepmom he was gay and suggested she be the one to tell his dad. Since, he assumed his dad knows, although they have never discussed it. When Oakley came out to his ecclesiastical leader, he appreciated how the bishop expressed gratitude he’d trusted him with that information and encouraged him that wherever his path may lead, to just try to keep a close relationship with the Savior because “Christ will help you figure it out.”  Oakley has since had many positive experiences coming out to straight friends before meeting up with a recently returned missionary who introduced him to Gatherings. This led Oakley to a new community of LGBTQ+ friends. 

Oakley doesn’t believe that being gay is the most important thing about him, but that it is something with which God gifted him. He says, “I know that everyone has different experiences, answers, and beliefs. My answer might not be yours, but God is in control, and as we accept ourselves as His masterpieces rather than our mistakes, we can find peace and help others along their lives.” Oakley has continued to work on building his relationship with God while dating men. He says, “This might not make much sense to most people, but unless somewhere along the path I feel that this decision is distancing me from God, then I will continue.”

Oakley’s invitation to others to lean into journeys like his ends with these words he penned in his initial coming out story, “Thank you for reading. I hope this helps you get to know me a little better, and maybe it might help you find answers to your own questions. Ask God, and I know He will direct you to the truth.”

JULIE SPILSBURY

Mesa, AZ councilmember Julie Spilsbury recently endured a hostile city meeting in which she was ripped apart for supporting a necessary utility rate increase of an average of $5 a month. While some surrounding communities experienced a much more significant 30% rate increase, many in her city (including several from her church community) still took her to task, yelling and taunting until the mayor had to demand they stop. Julie came home, had a good cry, and woke up the next morning at 5:45am to regroup with a solid distraction—a live news spot at a Turkey Tuesday food distribution. It’s an event that provides turkeys to 2,000 families in need at the holidays and something Julie loves participating in every year for the United Food Bank. “I needed it that morning, to believe in humanity. In this job, I see the best and the worst of humanity.”

While last month’s council meeting was difficult for Julie, her most brutal public revolt took place in January of 2021, the first month of her tenure. After Julie, who identifies as a super-ally, was elected the prior August, the mayor forewarned Julie he’d be putting forth  a non-discrimination ordinance. The bill would bar discrimination for the LGBTQ+ community with housing, employment and public accommodations—meaning trans individuals could use the bathroom of their choice. It was a bill that angered the far right, and even the far left was upset, claiming its “religious protections” language still allowed “plenty of opportunities to discriminate.” Julie says that was an essential inclusion to achieve concession, and that, “When you know the far right and the far left are mad, you’re in a pretty good place of compromise.” 

While LDS church headquarters sent a letter of support for these AZ bills via the Area Seventy showing their support for the bill, the outcry against it among the LDS population was still significant and loud. From a city with a population of 520,000, Julie received over 900 angry emails—a far uptick from the 60 or so emails normally generated by a controversial issue. The letters quoted the Family Proclamation, scriptures, and included many accusations that various people—including Julie—would be “going to hell.” Again, Julie marveled at this result over something the LDS church specifically showed support for, much as they have more recently for the US Respect for Marriage Act. Three members of the council had already joined the mayor in supporting the bill, achieving a majority, so technically Julie’s vote wouldn’t sway things one way or another, but all eyes were on her—the religious conservative mother, new to the council. She says she has never regretted voting to support the bill, and was told her action made the most difference to the LGBTQ+ community. 

Julie is a paradox to many in her community. She says her large family is ”as Mormon as it gets,” with her husband having served as bishop and five of her kids having served missions. While she comes from a traditional, conservative background, in 2019, she says God started working on her family in regards to the LGBTQ+ experience, leading Julie, her husband Jeremy, and their kids to “listen to all the podcasts, read all the books, and open up to all things LGBTQ+.” During this time, Julie says, “My heart was broken open, giving me a greater capacity to love. Having my heart exposed to the LGBTQ+ community, I have not been the same person since, in all the best ways.” She just didn’t realize how this transformation, which ultimately softened her to all marginalized groups, would result in so much negativity from her church and city community. She says, “I love having people like me, and to have all these people think I’m evil is hard. I have a huge heart and I promise I really am nice. I’m the one who brings cinnamon rolls to city meetings!”

Julie says she grew up a “choir geek” with many LGBTQ+ friends. In hindsight, she claims she still believed many of the myths about gay people back then—but her tutelage, especially courtesy of Richard Ostler’s podcast and books, showed her she perhaps held some misconceptions. She says, “The LGBTQ space is so complicated, hard, and painful, and I also think it’s where Jesus is. That’s why I choose to be in this space—where I feel the most love and the most authentic to who I want to be as a person. There are few things I feel this compelled to be a part of.”

The Spilsbury brood included Lydia—18, Lauryn—21, Brigham—23 (who is married to Tess), Cambryn—24, Miranda—26 (married to Jacob, and an adopted daughter who’s lived with the Spilsburys since age 11), Maybree—26, and their “bonus daughter,” Michelle— (married to Abe). Several of the Spilsbury kids have also chosen advocacy fields, with Lauryn, who just returned from a mission to Spokane and who speaks Swahili, now working with African refugees. Cambryn is getting a Masters in Social Work in Chicago and Maybree is completing her Masters Degree in Conflict Transformation in Virginia. Julie’s husband Jeremy is a long-time arborist and recently sold their  tree company and went back to school himself to study Peace and Conflict, and now wants to create a Peace and Conflict curriculum  for high schoolers.

The Spilsburys are grateful their allyship is a shared family value, with Julie saying, “It’s been fun to have all my kids be like-minded together in this space. We’re definitely not perfect, but we do have massive love. And we do struggle with things—when General Conference is hard, I love how we can talk about it. Some of my kids struggle with the church, and yet the gospel is part of our cellular structure—not just a Sunday thing. I’m grateful we can talk about all the itchy things and keep open communication.” Julie says that more than anything, she’d prefer her kids be “deep human beings who care deeply about others with true intent than to be people who go to the temple every week but don’t do that.” 

After hearing so many stories of struggles faced by the LGBTQ+ community, Julie is now very intentional about her allyship. Of local friends like Michael Soto, Julie says, “They have changed my heart and soul. I have many trans friends, and it all started with this experience.” She joins an ally group on the first Sunday of every month, and has helped support a friend assemble a choir of queer participants who have left the LDS church, but who miss singing the hymns. She says, “I tend to say yes to anything I can in this space.” 

Julie wears a rainbow pin to church, and has a rainbow as her screensaver on her phone, saying, “I want my Young Women I work with to know I’m a safe space. Unless you say something, people don’t know. And it’s hard to assume anyone’s safe these days—too many times, these kids get burned and can’t trust anyone.” When her husband, Jeremy, was serving as bishop and they made it clear where they stood, many youth who had left the church because they identify as LGBTQ+ started coming over and coming out. Back in 2021, as they started receiving backlash, Jeremy said to Julie, “Oh my gosh, can you imagine what we’re feeling, and we don’t even have a gay child or are gay ourselves?” A former young woman Julie had worked with who later served a mission came out to Julie and Jeremy and opened up about her struggle deciding whether she should marry her best friend (a female who was living in another country) or stay in Arizona and continue working in the temple as she loved the church. Julie says, “I just got to be there and sit with her through it. I’ve said so many times, if for no other reason did I go through this experience  so that I could be there for that one person, it would be worth it. It was incredible to get to mourn with her, cry with her, and feel all the feelings.”

While the past month has been rough as Julie has joined the many struggling with very real emotions stemming from recent election results, especially amid “the bubble” where she lives and attends church, Julie is more motivated than ever to pursue and lead with goodness. She trusts, “Jesus will win in the end.” She joins a group of 20-30 Mesa-based women ready to activate and change individual lives in their community. She says, “We’re looking for ways to serve. I don’t want to be all doom and gloom, but it’s hard to feel it’s all going to be fine. But I don’t want everything to implode, because I care about our country.”

As she moves forward, serving in her various communities, Julie cleaves to a favorite quote from Sam Norton’s book, Come as You Are: “Love that doesn’t try to change you is what changes you.” Julie concurs, “If treating people with love and respect is what makes me evil, so be it. I’m not going to change. I feel all of this very deeply.”

THE BARNARD-CROSLAND FAMILY

This is the story of two “Mormon” girls who were raised in “typical Mormon families.” Rachel was born the youngest of five kids and church was a constant growing up, no matter where they lived. After residing in Texas, Virginia, and Hong Kong, her family moved to Provo when Rachel was in the tenth grade. Upon finishing high school, she attended the University of Utah where she earned a communications degree, excited about the prospect of working in marketing and advertising. She got married during her junior year of college to a man. Feeling pretty clear that the gospel checklist was her road to happiness, Rachel “pursued the path she was supposed to without questioning,” and now says her mind never let her think anything else was an option.

Rachel now reflects on how many of her experiences as a youth and adult would clearly be considered “SSA,” but as her thoughts continued, she continued to push them off as distractions from the path, or temptations happening to her and not authentic feelings within her. Rachel stayed busy with her career, often working a “ton of hours” while pursuing building a family. When her son came along, the reality of her feelings towards women became even more apparent. In her late 20s, as she began to listen to podcasts and others’ stories of navigating a similar road, Rachel says her sense of denial minimized and she could make more sense of her reality. At first, she rationalized she was bi and could continue to make her marriage work, keeping her family intact. She didn’t have plans to share this part of her with anyone but the tension of the secret she’d been keeping for a long time felt very big, too big—and her husband was the first person she pulled in to share what she was realizing. “He was thankfully receptive and helpful, kind, and gentle through the process,” she says.

As time, went on Rachel continued to wade her way out of denial, accepting that she was gay. With this understanding, she evaluated what her path would look like. She realized growth for herself, her husband, and her son was going to be severely limited and that trying to stick it out would progressively lead to an unhealthy family life for all involved. She came to the devastating realization that was not the life she wanted for herself nor those around her. 

Michelle grew up in Provo, UT as the oldest of four kids. From a young age, church felt very important to her. “I took church and the gospel very seriously and had a core testimony that Heavenly Father was real, really knew me, and loved me no matter what.” Michelle went to as many as EFYs as she could, served on the seminary council, dated a lot of boys in high school, and then went to college where she fell in love with a roommate—a girl. While the crush was not reciprocated, Michelle said her feelings felt like an explosion, her past feelings for boys paling in comparison. “I felt I had been colorblind, and then put on those special glasses and could finally see the color that everyone else could see.”

Michelle also felt very confused, working overtime to process, as she’d been taught that these kinds of feelings were wrong. Yet she says her feelings for the girl felt wholesome, right and good. Contemplating her life vision to have a temple marriage and eternal family, Michelle decided to push those feelings aside and likewise pursue the prescribed path. She went on a mission to Nicaragua and came home with a goal to date and get married in the temple. That she did, meeting a man with whom she got along well, who made a lot of sense, and who wanted to marry her. Her feelings for him were nothing like the feelings she had had for her roommate, but she rationalized that there were more important things in marriage. After marrying, they quickly had four kids in five and a half years, keeping Michelle so busy she could distract herself from “the romantic and emotional lack she felt in her marriage, that had been there from the start.”

“I trudged forward with faith, trusting it would be fine. I filled my life with the next best thing—hobbies, service, staying active in the church, being the best mom I could be. It was exhausting, and wasn’t producing the fruit I was looking for or expecting, but I had faith it would come.” Michelle says it got to a point where it was seriously affecting her mental health and she knew she was not on a sustainable path. After much prayer, wrestling to know what to do, she came to know that the Heavenly Father she loved and felt close to was not only ok with who she was, but truly wanted her to be happy and fulfilled.

Rachel and Michelle first met in a Lift & Love online support group for women. Neither was there to try to meet someone romantically, but rather to process their experiences with like-minded individuals. The two discovered they’d both gone to Timpview High School (at different times, with their five-year age gap). They struck up a conversation and became friends. A couple months later, friends from the support group met up to go hiking in Utah, and Rachel happened to be in the area for a family trip, having traveled in from San Diego where she was living at the time. She was still going through the difficult path reckoning what she wanted to do with her future. Rachel says, “I was in love with Michelle as soon as I met her” and Michelle’s feelings were quick to follow.  After both women were divorced, Rachel moved to Daybreak, UT and the two began dating. After eight months, they got married and blended their families. Their combined five kids now range in age from 5 to 11. Both of the children’s fathers live nearby as well, and “the moms,” as their kids dub them, share 50/50 custody and maintain a good working relationship with their co-parents/former partners.

Rachel admits there’s a lot of grief that’s come with the decisions they’ve had to navigate and live with—including letting go of the families they’d always envisioned and worked for and only having their kids half the time now, but Rachel says, “Despite all, the good overshadows the hard and we know we still made the right choice.” Michelle concurs, “We can’t really wish things were different, but if we had had the chance to date as teens and been given the opportunity to have developmentally normal experiences, there would not have been so much collateral damage. All the people who have had to go through such hard things—it sometimes feels heavy and makes us angry. But our journeys are what they are, and we are who we are for what we’ve been through. I just wish others understood better that pressuring people to choose a marriage that doesn’t fit their orientation or telling them to be single and celibate their whole life can be so damaging, and not just for the individual.”

The Barnard-Crosland household loves their puppy Jojo and loves to ski, having recently outfitted the entire household in gear for the season. They also love watching the Great British Baking Show, and enjoy music, with Michelle playing the piano, guitar, and singing, and Rachel discovering new artists whose music she introduces Michelle to. While Rachel works at Adobe, Michelle works as a health clerk at an elementary school in Provo, aligning her schedule with the kids’ school schedules. The kids each call their new mom by her first name, and Rachel and Michelle have observed how the five kids were all quick to embrace the change and love each other through it, which they surmise is likely a byproduct of blending families while they were still young.

The family takes their kids to church each Sunday, and enjoys doing “regular LDS family stuff” like reading scriptures and praying together. There are restrictions to their membership due to the nature of their relationship as they walk this tightrope. They are unable to have official callings, but they feel their ward is doing an incredible job of making them feel included. Michelle is often asked to play prelude music, and they were asked to help plan the ward Christmas party by the committee chair. Rachel says, “We feel called to be there and show up as ourselves and participate where we can. We feel we’re doing what the Lord would have us do to build the kingdom and serve God’s children wherever we can, and especially to strengthen others in the LGBTQ+ space.” Michelle adds, “By showing up, we challenge biases and perceptions that become hard to hold onto when people have to deal with the fact we’re here, our type of family exists, and we want to belong and be a part of the body of Christ. We don’t feel conflict in our family dynamic and way of living and being disciples—we are just waiting for the church to catch up.”

When Michelle was going through the heartbreaking process of deciding to get divorced, she says her bishop remained neutral. “While he wasn’t supportive, he was not condemning. Rather, he listened, which was really amazing. He encouraged me to stay close to Heavenly Father and follow His guidance.” Michelle recalls growing up and learning to discern the feelings of right and wrong and how the Spirit prompts her. She knows that “icky, dark feeling” of sin and says, “This doesn’t feel like that. It feels like light, joy, peace, and goodness.” She feels people get stuff wrong about homosexuality. “I wish people could see that we’re just like them. How fulfilling, beautiful, and normal this marriage is. How Christlike our love for each other is. Being married to Rachel, so many things make sense and work now that didn’t before. Now I have my color glasses on and can see all the beauty of a loving, fulfilling marriage, when before it was colorblindness.”

ANONYMOUS FAMILY

Content warning: suicidal ideation.  

“Sometimes being in the ‘Top Ten’ of a ward’s hierarchy can pay dividends,” surmises Molly*, the mother of a family for whom we’ll be honoring their request for privacy by using pseudonyms in this story because frankly, it’s a tough time for families of trans kids. It’s especially tough when you have two trans kids. Such is the case for today’s family of 7, with Peter* and Molly’s children ranging in age from 15-23. Molly laughs that, “We started with four girls and one boy, and we ended up with four girls and one boy.” But a lot has changed since their first child was born, shortly after the couple met and married while at BYU.

“I was always the perfect Molly Mormon, and he was Peter Priesthood. We were the ideal LDS unit, and we popped out cute babies like good LDS families do,” says Molly. By the time Peter graduated from law school, they already had two kids, and the family rolled straight into the Marine Corps, with Peter working as a lawyer and Molly managing the family as they moved every three years. “Every ward was excited when we moved in because we brought five kids and were active doers, solid pioneer stock. And we were super judgmental—anyone not pulling their weight? We didn’t want to deal with them. We were excited to be and work with doers.”

When their oldest was around 16, the family was stationed overseas.  Molly was sitting in the pew on Mother’s Day Sunday next to Child #1 (who was AMAB), and who leaned over and said, “I don’t want to go to church anymore; I don’t have a testimony. I’m quitting.” This pronounced dissatisfaction came out of the blue; Molly was shocked. She now admits she did not handle it very well. Peter was even less sympathetic. While Molly allowed herself to become the “kind of parent I never wanted to be who let their child wear ear buds all through church, I thought, ‘Well, at least they’re here’.” Eventually Molly realized their child had been struggling with both church and depression, and acknowledged it’s hard to feel the spirit when you’re depressed. Child #1 had also discovered anti-LDS literature and felt church was “horrible, wrong, and stupid.” Molly said her initial counter-argument was along the lines of “Well, you’re dumb for reading the wrong stuff.” When their oldest turned 18, she moved across the ocean to Cedar City to attend Southern Utah University.  The next summer, in the middle of Covid, the family moved from Japan to California and shortly after, child #1 sent her parents a text out of the blue saying, “I’m trans; I’m Sierra* now.”

This really threw Molly and Peter for a loop. This child had grown up “all boy, a Thomas the Tank Engine fan, a mild-mannered child which we thought was due to having four sisters. It took us a moment to realize this was not a punchline.” Yet this time, it was Peter who acted quickly, by calling Sierra just to say, “We love you. I don’t know anything about this, but I love you.” Having the physical distance was good for the family as each slowly got used to their new reality, and Molly said, “It was a time of ‘how do we deal with this?’ but admittedly, it wasn’t as hard as when she said she was vegan. That probably changed more for us. But it was that moment of ‘How does this fit into my view of the gospel and families and everything I believe?’ It also led to the realization of, 'Oh my gosh, my kids aren’t a reflection of me.’ I thought if I taught them all the right things, they’d grow into future prophets.” Molly also struggled with knowing what everyone else was probably thinking, because she owns that she was that person who formerly judged families like hers.

When Sierra came home for Christmas that year, she expressed an extreme amount of anger toward her parents for “ruining her life.”  She was angry at everything from her parents staying in the church to the fact they’d had to move around so much as kids, even though Molly thought that provided cool opportunities for the kids, like getting to live in Japan for six years. While Sierra’s anger hurt Molly, she realized it was best to validate that whatever Sierra was feeling was real to her, and that she could apologize for any pain they’d caused, which eventually helped Sierra to work through her anger. 

“I did not think this was how my life would turn out,” says Molly, a box checker who did all the FHE, Come Follow Me tasks she was supposed to in raising her kids, expecting certain results. “It was mind-blowing.” Molly and Peter also joke their family is the “alphabet mafia”—as most in their family have been diagnosed with either autism and/or mental health challenges, including OCD, ADHD, anxiety and depression. As things finally began to improve with Sierra, Child #4—John*, who was 13 at the time and assigned female at birth, suddenly wanted to cut their “glorious, blonde hair that fell to their waist into a short boy cut, like they had done to themselves when they were age four,” says Molly. Later, she took 15-year-old John to be tested for autism, and as they got on the elevator to the psychologist’s office, John put on a pin that said he/him. Molly says, “I was like, ‘What? We’re doing this right now’?”

After a “definite personality change” that kicked in at puberty, Molly learned from the counselor John had also suffered extreme depression, suicidal ideation, and self-harm that ultimately required stay at an outpatient program. Once John was able to overcome his fear of admitting to himself that he was trans and coming out to his parents, he immediately began to turn around and has been “awesome ever since. He’s the posterchild of the program he was in,” says Molly. Molly eventually found out at a parent’s night at school that the teachers had been honoring John’s chosen name for some time, and felt a little embarrassed thinking they probably assumed he didn’t have support at home. After finishing his treatment program, John was able to get a 504 and access to a gender-neutral bathroom. Availability was not what it should have been, and Molly had to fight with the school to keep the bathroom open, but the school was supportive, aside from that struggle” 

John has always willingly attended church, and the family was touched how local leaders in California honored his wish to attend Young Men’s once he started wearing a suit. Molly says that socially, it was somewhat seamless as his best friend was a “giant, hulking kid so no one messed with him.” After being gone for summer travels, Molly had already posted on the ward Facebook page about John's transition and new name with a request to be kind, “even if you don’t support this.” She knew one of her “super homophobic friends” would see the post, but no one said anything. She found it humorous when the same woman who removed her kids from the local public school, saying “there were too many gay people there” still called to invite one of Molly’s kids over to play with her child.

Molly believes all those years of being in the “top 10” families of doers built up a currency which paid off in that most handled it well in California. John's seminary teachers and Young Women's leaders met with them and asked how they could help him feel welcome and agreed to comply with his wish not to be called on by any name in class until he was out to the ward. Their stake president even organized an LGBTQ+ fireside, inviting in a psychologist to speak alongside him. In the stake president’s talk, he shared a story about a young man he'd watched at local baseball games who would always get up and help an elderly couple with season passes up to their seats as they returned from the snack bar. The stake president commented how the (LDS) young man never chided the couple for buying and drinking beer, or refused to carry it – he just saw a need and met it. The stake president challenged his stake’s congregants to just be the person who sees the need, and meets it, despite your feelings about it.

Back when the family was stationed in Japan in 2017, Sierra was given a patriarchal blessing after which the patriarch stayed for lunch and shared an impression he’d had during the blessing that this child would have a difficult life, but didn’t know how to say it in the blessing where it wouldn’t sound bad. During this summer (2024), the two youngest kids received patriarchal blessings from a family friend in which John's name and pronouns were honored and he was called a “son of God,” and told that God “knows who you are and is proud of you.” Molly and Peter found these blessings personal and meaningful. The whole family found it funny when a young man who was new to the ward asked John to pass the sacrament, not knowing he wasn’t able to have the priesthood. A sibling teased John, “You can pass but you can’t pass.” 

After Peter retired from the military earlier this year, a new job search forced the family to consider where they could safely move so their kids could maintain continuity of care. Sierra (now 23), who has been living in Utah, has plans to move somewhere safer with their (trans) partner. The rest of the family wanted to stay in California, but the promise of a job took them to another state. Because of the move, John had to fly back to California to get his Lupron shot, which is the only thing that stops his periods, and gender dysphoria.  As John also has some genetic anomalies, Lupron is the only drug that works for him. He started testosterone in February. Now 17, John has also consulted with a medical team about pursuing top surgery—something his mom supports as he can only wear a binder for eight hours a day and she wants him to be able to be confident and stand up straight and tall and proud. John also struggles with extremely painful periods without the Lupron, and would like to do a hysterectomy, but is not sure they’ll find a doctor to perform it.  The family’s military insurance covers gender-affirming care, but not surgery.

Now that they’ve moved away from their welcoming ward in California, things are not quite so friendly at church. With the handbook’s recent new policy that disallows trans individuals from entering bathrooms or attending gendered classes that don’t align with their gender assigned at birth, their new stake president has said John can either attend Young Women’s, or go home for second hour every other week.  If he wants to attend Young Men’s classes and activities, John will have to receive a waiver from the first presidency, and was told chances are grim. This stake president followed up with the instruction that gendered meetings are for those preparing to attend the temple, and since John is not allowed to do that, those classes are not for him. Hearing this, Molly sat next to John in shock at the realization that unlike others who have tried so hard to make them feel welcome, this new climate represented a new reality--this man genuinely did not want her son at church. “In California, John made the sacrament bread every Sunday, saying, ‘I can’t pass the bread, but I can make it.’ He currently wakes up every school morning and leaves the house at 5:30am to go to seminary. He wants to go to church. Why would you say no to someone who genuinely wants to be involved?” 

When Molly asked the bishop what John should do during second hour, he was much more affirming and wanted to find ways to help him stay and be involved--while walking the line of following the church’s position. While the bishop has seemed supportive, the stake president made them feel unwelcome. When Molly opened up to John’s friend’s mom about this, she replied, “I go every week and don’t feel welcome. You’re going to stop going when you feel unwelcome?” And thus, Molly says she stays because, “Someone needs to represent, and bring up the things no one wants to talk about. I don’t want to be that person with an agenda where everyone rolls their eyes when she begins to talk. I just want to offer different ways of looking at things that can be more inclusive.” She continues, “I stay because my mom taught me the gospel and the church are not the same thing—the gospel is pure, perfect. I’m all in. The church is not perfect because God has no one to call who is perfect. He's only working with imperfect people, but we also can’t get revelation for questions that haven’t been asked.” 

"My trans children have been a blessing in my life.  This has required me to examine my testimony and pare it down to my most basic beliefs and to build it back from there.  I know absolutely that God loves me. I know absolutely that He loves my children. And I know absolutely that He wants me to help the rest of His children feel loved. I may not know much else, but I know that."

The other children in the family have varying levels of activity. Their 21-year-old is at BYU Idaho, where she hosted waffle Saturdays and games in an apartment that always displays a Pride flag. Their 19-year-old struggles with anxiety and OCD, and has just been called to a service mission near home. John still attends church, but commented after the new church policy that he could have his records removed and would have more rights to the church than if he stayed a member. Molly’s 15-year-old still attends, but Molly anticipates they may eventually feel pushed out as well. 

Since the election, Molly feels some relief her trans children are both soon to be safely in their adulthood and live in states where they can continue gender-affirming care, but she feels for those in other states who are not afforded the same opportunities. “To them, I’d say get out, but sometimes you can’t.” When they moved, the family chose a home that could be a gathering space. They have a large basement and extra room, anticipating they’ll likely always house someone who needs a safe place to stay. While the election results worry them, Molly is trying to be optimistic and not live with fear. She says, “I just watched a Hallmark movie with a cute love story about a gay couple—if we are mass marketing Christmas movies like that, it must be mainstream enough where people must be ok, I hope? Although trans issues are a whole new thing.” For now, Molly is holding on to what she has, and for her, it’s, “I love my kids—they’re such neurotic little goofballs, they’re the best.” 

*names have been changed for privacy

The first piece of art shown below was painted by the grandmother of the kids in today’s story in 2006 and is beloved by the family as a representation of their family in 2006. The second piece of art (by artist Erin Nimmer @erinnimmerart) was purchased by Molly*, the mother of the family, at the Gather Conference, and she says she loves how the visual reflects the idea how she’s paving her covenant path with rainbow stones.

art credit: Erin Nimmer @erinnimmerart

LIV MENDOZA HAYNES

Liv Mendoza Haynes claims she fits the birth order stereotype. As the last of three kids, she was the much younger spoiled baby of the family who could convince her parents to cook an alternate meal if the initial wasn’t to her liking. But being raised in a Catholic home with high expectations, she adapted accordingly as she grew. Her mother was in and out of hospitals with illness, leaving Liv’s much older sister to care for her and her brother when they were not at Catholic school. Once Liv began to notice the family had financial struggles, she minimized her special requests.

Though Liv and her brother were born in America, they were raised in Tijuana, Mexico, where her father worked long shifts as a police officer, and her mother often left the kids to be babysat with a good friend who was a known drag queen. Liv remembers it being no big deal that the babysitter would have peers from his drag community stop by for wardrobe fittings while Liv was there. She was told it was no big deal for men to be gay, but her parents spoke negatively about women who were lesbian. Her father would also express distaste for women who joined the police force or who became “manly, lost their attractiveness, and didn’t know their place.” Liv was taught that one of the worst things she could do would be to be with a woman or to not be feminine.

 This presented a problem as, while Liv was extremely close to her mom and sister, she did not share their love for makeup, high heels, and feminine things. Liv preferred her daily jeans, t-shirt, and Converse. She developed her first technical crush on a boy in the first grade, but strategically chose a boy who was mean to her, knowing it would never work out although it would help disguise the way she felt about girls from an early age. As her mother’s health declined, Liv sensed she needed to not add to the family burden by disappointing them with her attractions. She shared her mother’s and sister’s strong personality and kept her friend group small, having the same small cluster of three or four friends throughout her school years.

In high school, Liv dated an LDS young man, but was his last girlfriend, and he is now married to a man. He would often joke with her about LDS myths. Around this same time, Liv’s ex’s brother decided to go on a mission[LM8] , and told Liv to keep an eye on his parents. While he was gone, he referred the missionaries to her door while she was baking a cake. One elder mentioned it was his companion’s birthday that Thursday and Liv said, “What do you want me to do about it? You can come back for food or water, but that’s it.” The elders left, and Liv followed a prompting to run after them and offer them cake at 2pm on Thursday—assuming they wouldn’t be able to come then. But they did, and Liv began taking lessons. One day, she invited a handful of missionaries over and made popcorn so they could all watch a Joseph Smith video, per her request. After they asked if she had any questions, and she asked why they hadn’t yet challenged her to be baptized? She sidestepped telling her parents until the following May, but was baptized that December. And yes, there was cake.

Throughout her teens and young adulthood, Liv noticed her feelings for women even more, and did have a relationship with a woman. When her mother felt it was time for her to have “the talk,” she handed Liv a VHS tape and told her if she had any questions, to ask her sister. But as the tape shared no tips about orientation, rather it was a childbirth video, Liv only walked away from that experience traumatized, thinking “I’m never going to have intimacy if it leads to that.” But it cemented the expectation in her mind that the expectation was for her to have a family. While in high school, Liv’s mom teased she had a “type” of guy she’d go on dates with (those into the arts and cooking who had more androgynous, scrawny body types). Around age 17, Liv started struggling with health conditions of her own, and found out she had a higher chance of getting cancer than becoming a mom. Doctors recommended she get a hysterectomy, with her unusual gynecological issues. Liv’s self-esteem plummeted, feeling a lack of worth as if she was “defective” if unable to have children. While always expected to achieve, the messaging she received was, “It doesn’t matter if you excel. At the end of the day, your expectation is to have a family. If you’re infertile, no guy will fall in love with you.”

These insecurities possibly propelled Liv into developing an unhealthy relationship with a man in Mexico City who “looked perfect on paper,” but over time revealed himself to be controlling (even ordering for her at restaurants) and ultimately, physically abusive. When he slapped her across the face at a party in front of their friends, Liv was stunned, and even more so that none of her friends they were with did or said anything about it. A casual friend nearby noticed it, and took Liv away from the scene to recover. Liv ended up going back to the boyfriend some time later, partly because of outside pressures she was receiving, including a man at church telling her no man would want her because she was broken goods. A few months later, the relationship turned even more physical, and after an especially violent attack, a friend thankfully found Liv in her apartment and took her to a hospital where she stayed for a couple days to recover. When she was released, her first thought was to go to the temple. While she felt less than worthy to go inside, she knew just being on the grounds might bring her peace. She felt like she couldn’t tell her parents about the abuse, thinking her father would cause harm to the guy and she didn’t want to bring them shame. Liv says, “Before that, I would have said, ‘I don’t know how strong, educated women let men do this.’ But then, I became the person I’d judged.”

On the temple grounds, Liv had a breakdown that led to a security guard helping her call a local bishop who led her to talk to a counselor from back home in Tijuana. She blurted out she needed to go on a mission, which she did at age 22—partly to get away from the abusive boyfriend and partly because she felt she had to serve (having been raised under the motto, “If you’re not living to serve, you don’t deserve to live.”) Ironically, Liv was called to serve her mission in Mexico City, near the temple where she had her breakdown as well as close to her ex, but she managed to avoid running into him. While her mission was healing, it also opened her eyes to just how much emotional and psychological support missionaries need.

Liv began to feel like two people—the Tijuana Liv, who was strong and powerful, and the Mexico City Liv—who wanted to date girls and was in some ways, more submissive. After completing her mission, Liv’s commitment level to the church was high, and she struggled for a couple years with whether sharing her feelings about girls would be best for her spiritual and emotional journey.

One night, Liv decided to confide in a friend with a trans brother, which turned out to be a good instinct. The friend knocked on Liv’s door with a Little Caesar pizza. When Liv opened it, she blurted out, “I’m attracted to women. I really like women a lot!” Without missing a beat, Liv’s friend replied, “Well, I like eating my pizza hot—can I come in?” Liv now says, “I don’t think people understand how comforting her response was. It was like, ‘Oh, I learned something about you—let’s talk.’ The best kind of reaction.” The two talked all night and Liv’s friend shared many resources. Liv says she wishes she could say “it was all bliss” after, but Liv spent the next nine years rediscovering herself and toggling with her identity. She finally settled on “queer,” as she was introduced to thousands on a well-known stage she shared with Sister Sharon Eubanks who asked her questions about her reality at BYU’s Women’s Conference several years ago. It was a moment that surprised many, and made Liv feel a sense of validation and acceptance after feeling like she’d grown up at constant intersections: “You’re not American enough, not Mexican enough, not a citizen, not feminine, you don’t like makeup.” 

Recognizing it’s not the preferred term of generations past, the term “queer” still works best for Liv as she says, “It helps me feel happy, and also respectful of the person I’m sharing this journey of life with.” That person happens to be her husband, Matthew, who she met six years ago while playing Two Truths and a Lie on an app. Matthew had just moved to Utah from Montana and was looking to make friends. He handled her Harry Potter banter with humor, and their first date was eating brownies together that Matthew had made. They haven’t spent a day without talking since, and Liv says Matthew is in every sense her best friend. Her prior attempt at online dating had ended quickly after she told a guy with whom she had good chemistry about her attractions and he in turn shared his wife had just left him for her ministering sister. Liv quipped, “Well, at least you have a type.” They went on a couple more dates until his demeanor started to remind her of her ex. A therapist then told Liv just to focus on making friends, which is when Matthew appeared.

When people criticize Liv for being in a relationship with a man just to comply to the church standards, Liv says, “Honestly, that hurts because that person doesn’t know my whole story. My relationship with my husband, as public as it may be, is still our relationship. It’s hard when people have preconceptions. The reality is I fell in love with Matthew. The only way our dating happened is I stopped looking at marriage as something on a checklist and more of an opportunity to be with someone who knows and loves me. We respect each other, and he met me knowing I was open to dating men, women, and anything in between. It’s my reality, my experience, and what works for us. Every day, I choose him, and he chooses me.”

Liv laughs that no, Matthew does not get nervous when she goes away for a weekend with her lesbian friends. “I feel that if my husband didn’t trust me to be alone with someone of the same gender, we have a bigger problem. It’s about integrity, faithfulness, and values.” Matthew was not as familiar with the LGBTQ+ community before Liv, but she laughs he now has several lesbian friends of his own. Liv does not recommend a mixed orientation marriage for everyone, and says it took her years to figure out what works for her. “We’ve both grown a lot from being together… It’s a mixed relationship in many degrees – culture, orientation, language. I’m social sciences, he's exact sciences. We have enough in common to have a path together – but enough diversity to learn from each other every day – which is key to our marriage. Plus, I get to learn random dinosaur names.”

After undergoing three IVF treatments, the two share their son Lucian as well as an angel baby in heaven, and are expecting a new baby they will call Elijah, due November 25th. Throughout their prenatal care, they’ve become aware this baby will be born with challenges, and being open about that has helped Liv cope and “be human.” She says, “As Christ had outbursts, I’m allowed to have moments where I say, ‘This sucks’.”

If life’s taught Liv anything, it’s that she can take moments to have her cake and eat it, too. Shortly after exiting the relationship wherein she experienced domestic violence, it was Liv’s birthday, and a friend asked what she wanted. Liv requested a certain cake from a certain bakery because it was her favorite. The friend brought the cake Liv requested to a restaurant to celebrate with friends. After the wait staff brought out the cake and everyone sang to Liv, she instructed the server to wrap up the cake. Baffled, the group questioned her decision not to share it. Liv replied, “It might sound selfish, but this gift is my cake and I’m taking it home.” She continues, “It might sound silly but it’s symbolic—we are conditioned that if you’re not constantly happy and thankful for the trials you’re going through, you’re not a good person. But the reality is you need to know your boundaries. I had to work for years to learn to find power in my voice and use it. These boundaries are the only way I’ve been able to stay alive. You can’t show gratitude if you’re not here. Where’s the progress if you’re not truly loving yourself? I’m not willing to risk not being my full self.”

JAVIER AGUILAR

Tomorrow, Javier Aguilar turns 24. He’ll celebrate in Allen, Texas where he is currently working for a light installation company while taking a break from his studies at BYU Provo. He’s a long way from Mexico City, where he was born and raised, but not too far from his parents who moved the family to Texas while he was on a mission. While within their physical proximity, emotionally, family life is a struggle for Javier, whose parents would rather deny the fact that he identifies as bisexual, with his leanings more toward men.

The oldest of five kids, Javier grew up in a well-known, “pioneer” family in the LDS faith in Mexico. His grandfather was a patriarch, sealer, and principal of the LDS church-owned school in their region. As a child, Javier often felt the spotlight on him, with other parents in their congregation saying things to their kids like, “Why can’t you be like Javier? He’s so nice, so obedient.” Overhearing this, Javier would think, “If you only knew.” 

His orientation was not at the forefront of his mind quite yet, but Javier certainly knew he wasn’t perfect. He says he was on autopilot mode with church—attending every Sunday with his family, and promising he was reading his scriptures, whether he managed to or not. He tried to always do what would best please his parents and his ancestry who prioritized strict obedience, discipline, and manners—there were no elbows allowed on the table at the Aguilar house. As the oldest kid, Javier knew he was to be the example.

Music was a large part of Javier’s upbringing, and he played the piano and other instruments. He was also involved in theater and the drama club. While his parents always encourage him to play sports, he says he “sucked at basketball but liked it.” He also liked school and tried hard, but claims he wasn’t always a great student.

Javier didn’t realize he was attracted to guys until high school. Before, it was more of a curiosity in which he’d find himself paying attention to those he found attractive. But he didn’t dare talk to his parents about it, as they had once told him if he ever saw someone who was gay, to move in the opposite direction and “keep yourself as far away as possible from this.” Helping him with a Primary talk once, his father even likened homosexuality to one of Moses’ plagues. It wasn’t until he was older that he got to know people in the LGBTQ+ community. But even when he met his first bi person, he didn’t get too close.

The time came for Javier to serve a mission. In his house, his father only half-jokingly would say, “You have two options. You either go on a mission, or I send you on a mission.” So of course, Javier went. It took him a little bit to acclimate, but he did love his mission. Today, he says if he had gotten an answer whether to serve for himself, it might have gone better faster. He spent the first half in Brazil and the second half in Mexico, due to the pandemic. Like many, Javier believed if he did his best on his mission, his attraction to guys would go away. But when he returned, that wasn’t the case – in fact, he found his feelings had only increased. 

A couple months after his return, Javier started a long-distance relationship with a girlfriend back in Mexico, trying to please his parents in Texas. At the same time, he started talking to a male friend from the mission and realized he was developing feelings for him. Worried he might out himself or another person, Javier tentatively got in touch with a missionary he’d heard about in Mexico City who was gay, hoping he could ask some questions somewhere, to someone who might get it. Even though they’d never met, they had a productive conversation, though that alone made Javier feel very guilty for going against his parent’s wishes to turn away from all things LGBTQ+. The missionary was helpful and happy to help and directed Javier to the Questions from the Closet podcast, which converted Javier “into becoming a podcast guy.” Javier says, “It was great to finally listen to stories of people who are part of the church but also living out their sexuality. The podcast answered some of my questions.”

Javier had made a friend on the mission who had come out for the first time ever to Javier. In turn, Javier came out to this young man while communicating online, realizing he might even have a crush on him. In response, Javier says, “He lost his mind, he was super happy and called me. This was the first time I was actually starting to accept it.” Shortly after, Javier would occasionally whisper to himself, “I’m bi; I’m part of the LGBTQ community.” His internalized homophobia caused it to take some time to get used to, but gradually he became less afraid. TV shows about LGBTQ+ characters and the movie Love Victor helped Javier feel less isolated. His plan was to only tell two friends ever, but over time he realized he wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret for the rest of his life. 

Soon, Javier found himself at BYU Idaho where he found a “cool group of friends who adopted me. They were Latinos, too, so they understood. I was able to come out and they were so supportive, even with having Latino backgrounds where machismo was often still a thing.” In Rexburg, Javier says, “I didn’t break the commandments, but I took a break from church.” After two semesters, he came back home with a new sense of confidence about who he was. He sensed he should tell his parents, but wasn’t sure how. Javier consulted with a close friend in Texas named Ben who was going through similar things. Javier’s depression peaked, and even when he was hanging out with friends, he felt so alone. One night, Javier went to a park where he says he “bawled my eyes out.” He put on his Air pods and walked around, “wanting to scream, to cry; I wanted everything and nothing at the same time.” Javier texted Ben and begged him to join him, risking the embarrassment of having his friend see him in that state just so he didn’t have to be alone. After arriving, Ben convinced Javier that not coming out to people was only going to continue to hurt Javier. Javier agreed and told his friend a date he’d come out to his parents, for accountability.

Having selected a day he’d be meeting his parents at the temple, Javier listened to music to prepare. But when he arrived, there were other ward members there so Javier requested he and his parents go off alone so he could tell them something. His mom expressed excitement, thinking he might be getting engaged (even though he wasn’t dating anyone). When Javier instead told them he liked boys and girls the same way, he saw their faces contort with anger, sadness, and deception. He calls it “a face I’d never seen before. I stopped talking; they didn’t say anything. My hands were sweating, I was shaking. Fortunately, the bishop came up and said, ‘Let’s go inside’.” 

For Javier, the session was a blur and when he returned home, his parents called him into their room. He shared more and invited them to read up on LGBTQ+ from the church website. They replied they would not be doing that and told him he had a disease he needed to be cured of. Javier concurred that him telling them was a way of admitting he wanted to be cured, but that he was innocent and hadn’t done anything to cause this. He says, “I couldn’t say anything; the things I said were used against me. I felt destroyed.” He went to his room and texted Ben to share how badly it had gone.

The next morning, Javier begrudgingly went to church but felt “so broken and sad.” He sat next to Ben, who gave him a side-hug that meant the world in support. He says, “I wanted to cry; I just wanted that hug so badly from someone who was supportive of me.” As time passed at home, things were not great whenever the topic of LGBTQ+ came up. Javier returned to school where he participated in a research project wherein he realized how many students in Rexburg vitally needed support after facing discrimination. Javier and his friend Emily started a support group, mostly to combat racism, but also LGBTQ+ bigotry. 

The next time he went home, Javier decided to come out to one of his brothers. He was met with confusion and surprise, although his brother tried to be supportive. Javier says, “It was nice to have one more person in my family know about it, though my parents got mad when they found out, saying, ‘You told us you wouldn’t tell anyone, especially your siblings’.” Around that time, Javier’s dad suffered from facial paralysis due to stress, and his mother blamed a portion of it on Javier, claiming it was due to his father’s worry Javier would force their family to not achieve exaltation. Javier has tried not to internalize this. He says he knows his parents love him, and he loves them.

Soon after, Javier heard about the inaugural Gathering and went to Utah with his friend. There, he says he “felt amazing. It was so great to be with people who understood and shared my values, beliefs, and experiences. I came away crying with happiness because of the good experience.” After attending a couple smaller Gathering events, Javier decided to get more involved in Rexburg by helping organize support gatherings. He got to know the person who leads the PRIDE parade in Rexburg, and found himself being asked to lead the walk. He recalls, “It was my first time being out at BYU, and my first PRIDE parade. I was excited but scared.” As the day approached, his anxiety increased but listening to the song “This is Me” from The Greatest Showman, Javier harnessed the strength of the line, “I am brave, I am bruised, this is who I’m meant to be, this is me.”

Indeed, Javier felt every bit himself as he realized how many he’d helped by coming out and sharing his story as he marched in front of hundreds of people at the event. “It was a surreal moment; it felt so good.” Javier ended up transferring to BYU Provo, where he met a friend from Mexico who concurred they needed to start doing Gatherings in Spanish. “All of this journey has required me to step outside my comfort zone to do things I never expected… Now I’m trying to help others in Spanish-speaking countries.”

Javier says things are still rough with his parents, but “as long as we don’t talk about it, we’re fine.” He maintains hope things might improve after hearing Charlie Bird on share on his podcast how it took him 20ish years to understand all this, so he could give his dad some time. Javier likewise figures he can give his own parents more time. Meanwhile, he finds joy with his “chosen family,” which consists of many friends who support him where he’s at. Javier says, “Sharing in the Lift & Love family stories is very important to me even though it might not be what you’d expect. Even though my family doesn’t support or accept this part of me, my chosen family is always there for me. Through my depression, they even got me ice cream. They’re always there.”

In Mexico, Javier shares that a cultural tradition is to call good friends “cousins” once you achieve a certain level of closeness, as if you’ve become family. He says, “I now understand why we’re called an LGBTQ+ community—it’s because we’re never alone’

TEGAN (Z) BLANCHARD

Tegan Zelano Blanchard has lived a lot of life in just 21 years. Tegan, or “Z” as he’s called by friends, is majoring in National Security studies with his foremost interest being in international relations. He hopes to work for the state department and go into diplomacy. But in this hot political climate, he’s quick to state, “I care much less about who’s in charge or how our national political system works, and much more about how to get clean water into under-resourced regions of South America, or how to get sex-education to rural communities that need it. I want my career to be focused on improving others’ quality of life.” He claims if he didn’t need to make money, he’d likely work for an NGO.

Tegan’s global awareness was certainly influenced by his parents, who both work in international business/relations themselves. He was raised bilingual (English and Spanish), and is the youngest of four kids–with his three older sisters all now married. Tegan spent the first nine years of his life in Utah, then moved to Costa Rica for a year, then back to Utah, then to Chula Vista, CA at age 11. When all his sisters had moved out and Tegan was a sophomore in high school, his parents felt strongly they needed to move to Ecuador for business opportunities. Despite this inspiration, it wouldn’t be until the summer before his senior year of high school that this prompting would come to fruition. His father had served a mission there, and the Blanchards started a series of businesses in Ecuador selling everything from carpet cleaning to dragon fruit, and sourcing chocolate and flowers. Their impression for the move felt divine, and after two years in Ecuador, Tegan’s parents were called to serve as bishop and still serve in that capacity.

But their kids all now live in Utah, with Tegan attending UVU with one of his sisters. He loves taking a sculpting class with her, and recently enjoyed going clubbing in Salt Lake with all his siblings. Having just returned from his mission in Argentina three months ago, Tegan is full of life and eager to enter this next chapter. While there were dark periods in his life, he now exudes optimism and purpose.

Ever since a young age, Tegan said he felt “an inherent, extreme closeness to God in a way that isn’t entirely normal.” Now defining God as Them/his Heavenly Parents, Tegan remembers playing on his bed at age five and talking to God as if They were right there with him. He also felt very aware of himself and the way he’s built. With a high propensity to love others, Tegan always loved love—from romcom movies to having at least three different crushes on girls in elementary school, when that seemed to be the thing to do. 

As puberty ensued, Tegan began to notice he felt something much more profound for people of his same sex. At age 12, he told his bishop he was attracted to boys. The bishop responded that it was probably just hormones, that things would change and he’d be fine. Tegan says, “Even though that was not a helpful response, I’m not angry at him at all. I couldn’t have expected him to react in the best of ways given the lack of experience he probably had.” Tegan felt he needed to tell his parents, who he says were not homophobic, but not necessarily educated on the topic either. He still spent about five years having moments of pacing outside their room to drum up the courage. During that process, he’d stare into their large mirror and think about how they saw some of him, but not all of him. 

The Blanchards lived in California in 2016, when President Obama legalized same-sex marriage. Tegan remembers that time as a hot debate in which he felt his church community was against him, while his school community was for him. “I thought, they’re debating me—I’m the topic of the debate,” he recalls. But he also tried to remain in a state of outward denial. Tegan says most of his queer friends grew up hearing hard things from relatives, and while he loves that his middle name is his great-grandfather’s and loves his extended family, he recalls a close relative telling him that gay marriage was an attack on the family. As a young child, he interpreted that to mean he was Satan’s attack on the family. But all things considered, Tegan said he had a happy, idealistic childhood with a loving family.

Having never experienced depression before, 2020 wrecked Tegan. When the pandemic hit, he was in a “difficult but growing” relationship with a girl, especially because they were both struggling deeply with their mental health. They ended up cutting it off just before his depression began to take hold. “I remember this was the first time in my life I felt absolutely no hope, no light at the end of the tunnel. I felt God less than any other part of my life. Though looking back, I can see just how intimately They were involved.” The Blanchards moved around a lot during this period—to five different homes just during the pandemic. Politically, Tegan felt an intense connection to the pains of marginalized groups he saw online. Feeling the impact of George Floyd’s death, he became involved in BLM, and he started experiencing a faith crisis, questioning the history of racist policies in the church, as well as limitations against women and LGBTQ+. “Something within me cried out so desperately for the pleas of these people. I can’t compare the experiences side by side; each is distinct with its own challenges. But my heart bled so deeply for people struggling to find a place, because I too had felt that pain of feeling like there was no place for me.”

In 2021, when he was 17, Tegan’s parents sat him down to listen to a podcast about sex “to make the topic less taboo.” At that point, Tegan finally decided five years of carrying his stress alone was too much. He’d had some practice, having come out to three or four friends prior, which helped prepare him to face his parents at the end of the podcast and say, “I’m going to throw you a curveball at you right now… I think I’m bisexual.” He says his parents replied with a huge embrace, tears, and “so much unadulterated love.” He was then able to open up and share what it had been like. His parents advised him to focus on girls, but he says moving forward, that advice didn’t prove to be helpful and the topic didn’t come up much again. Tegan’s sisters and brothers-in-law also responded with full support on video calls in which he told each of them, one by one. He’s not sure if they found it a surprise, as he says his interests had always been more artistic, and he recalls his cousin overhearing his parents talking about him at age eight and wondering if he might be gay because he was “very effeminate” as a kid—something Tegan at times was bullied for. When his cousin told him that, Tegan remembers breaking down sobbing and then trying to act more masculine from then on out. Though now, he’s comfortable saying he believes he was born gay,

The day Tegan and his parents decided to move to Ecuador was the same day his friends in California called saying school was canceled due to the global pandemic. But it wasn’t until June of 2021 that they landed in their new home country. The Blanchard’s initial residence in Ecuador was in a dangerous area and his mom was robbed at knife point while going to the gym. After so much transition, and now continued isolation with COVID-19, Tegan says this was the most overwhelming time in his life, grappling with his faith crisis, sexuality and the uncertainty of his living situation mixed with extreme limitations on his ability to socialize with people of his age. Yet, he endured.

In Ecuador, Tegan’s faith crisis culminated with the figurative breaking of the shelf. Harboring internalized homophobia made the cognitive dissonance worse, and church became a difficult place in which he felt so “othered” that there were times he’d stay outside the chapel, sobbing. Yet, watching queer-affirmitive media like Love, Simon and Heartstopper, reading queer novels, and hanging out with queer friends, made Tegan begin to feel less “othered.” He remembers countless nights on his knees praying desperately, not angry at God, but “so worn out feeling so much pain and hurt in the silence.”

That Thanksgiving, Tegan’s sisters all came to visit and held an intervention. They were worried about Tegan’s mental health because to them, “the light had gone out of [his] eyes.” He confirmed he didn’t want to take his life, but felt he had been in darkness with no hope for so long, that he had nothing to live for. Looping in their parents, Tegan’s dad eagerly agreed to support him pursuing therapy, and Tegan says meeting with life coach Jill Freestone (online) made all the difference. Tegan loved how her approach is affirmative both toward the church and the queer community, and in his first session, she centered their work on a more expansive view of God and Heavenly Mother, with which Tegan identified deeply. Tegan now says, “Learning about the Divine Feminine kept me alive spiritually at that time.”

After finding some healing, Tegan went to visit his sisters in Utah and felt “free” for the first time in two years – free to drive, to go out at night, to see people. For the first time, he made out with a girl and “kept his standards,” but did “just about everything fun one could do that’s still legal.” This time, when he went back to Ecuador, his parents had moved to an incredible house with a pool in a safer area, and he was able to design his bedroom with posters and LED lights, just the way he wanted. They could now go outside without getting robbed. Continuing to work with Jill, Tegan moved forward with his mission papers which he says felt “batsh!t crazy” amid his faith crisis; but he felt a desire to proceed in a tentative but trusting mindset. A 2022 talk by Elder Dallin H. Oaks set him back and made him want to give up, but Tegan felt propelled by the wisdom in Jared Halverson’s words, “Don’t let a good faith crisis go to waste.” Following the hard talk, after more than a year of intense bitterness, Tegan hit the point of apathy and screamed at heaven, “I just don’t understand!” At that exact moment, his sister in another country texted him: “They love you.” Tegan screamed up again, “What am I supposed to do now?” He got another text from his sister: “So much.” Tegan says, “It was so precise and perfect in timing that I couldn’t see it as anything but divine. Although I didn’t receive a specific answer like I was hoping for, I felt that a knowledge of Their infinite love would be enough to keep moving forward.”

“Even in apathy, I thought, ‘If God loves me this much, I could go serve’,” says Tegan. His parents gave him autonomy to make his own choices, and supported him as he later was called to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Right before he left, Tegan again went to Utah for some fun with his sisters, and this time he kissed his first boy—which felt important to him, to affirm you can be queer and a faithful member. He says, “Part of it was a ‘take that’ to so many years of pain. I wanted to show I can be me and a disciple of Christ. A week later, I went through the temple and was endowed. There, I better was able to understand that God is much more expansive than we define Them to be. I still have so much left to learn.” 

Tegan says his experience in the Mexico MTC was brutal, but he loved every minute of his mission, where he grew close to his mission leaders and spent a lot of time serving in the office. As he prepared his farewell talk, he says he felt the first spark of the joy of the gospel in two years, something that he had deeply missed during the darkest moments of his depression and faith crisis. He realized he could focus on talking about Christ during his two year service. And that’s what he did. He says, “My faith crisis redefined my relationship with the Savior and got it to a place where I could really reach people… I learned how to more deeply love God, others, and myself and developed the divine gifts of empathy and charity. I recognize others have had hard experiences serving a mission and I weep with them and validate their pain. But for me, it was life-changing.”

Now having been home for three months, Tegan is “going on a ton of dates and learning so much about myself and how I was made, and more about God and the way I connect with Them.” Though he originally came out as bisexual, he is learning that attraction is more complicated than he anticipated and definitely leans towards men. Above all, however, he’s most interested in dating people willing to invest in a personal relationship with God, saying, “That has led me to my kind of people, those who are genuinely searching for a connection with the Divine. But if they’re in a potent faith crisis or on a different part of their faith journey than me, that’s still okay.” 

Tegan says he is wholeheartedly committed to “living the life and future God would have for [him], no matter what that is.” Though he doesn’t believe that necessarily means marriage to a woman in the temple is the only way. “If God says, ‘I want you to always stay close to me and marry a man that you love,’ or if God says, ‘Here’s the perfect woman for you’, so be it. I trust Them way more than I trust myself.” Tegan continues, “I had made certainty an idol of sorts; it had become my God as I sought after it looking for peace and comfort. It was only when it was taken away from me in those two years of intense darkness that I came to realize only God can give me lasting peace. It was God’s way of teaching me to make Them my God and idol. And I now know more than ever that my future is much brighter as I keep my Heavenly Parents as my focal point and closest confidants.”

TRENT CLARKSON

“If you’ve ever had a debate with the spirit, you know you can’t win.” That was Trent Clarkson’s experience while sitting in a car late one night with a friend at age 17. The difficulties of his life had come to a head. School and the social scene were not going the way he wanted, which had wrecked his mental health. Looking to escape, he asked a friend to go to a movie and out for a drive. While navigating the dark roads, Trent felt a strong impression he needed to tell his friend what was really going on, including the things he’d been pushing down and trying not to consciously recognize himself. He started slowly, at first only sharing the depths of his severe depression. But it kept coming to his mind—the “it” he’d never told anyone about yet. “Saying those words felt physically impossible,” says Trent, “but I turned to him and said I need to tell you something else—I’m gay. It was the first time I’d actually acknowledged that part of my life, the first time I accepted it.”

Looking back now, Trent calls that night lifechanging. He says owning this part of him “set me on track to figure out what was really going on in my life.” Life didn’t immediately become easier; in fact, things got worse. Trent remembers being alone in his bedroom grappling with intense confusion. Since his childhood growing up in a “lovely little town called Kanab, UT” near Cedar City, one of six children in a devout family who practiced daily prayer and scripture study and weekly LDS church attendance, Trent had felt an instilled knowledge of not only who God was but that He loved him and wanted to communicate with him from a very young age. “I knew He was there and would talk to me if necessary, which set me up well for later in life when things went awry.”

Yet one Sunday at age 17, Trent battled darkness and gloom while sitting on a pew in church with his family thinking about “existential things”—who he was, what was his purpose, why this was happening to him and that if this was his reality, what else might be different than all he had learned since childhood? “I wondered if there was a God, where was He, and why He wouldn’t talk to me anymore.” Trent says an indescribable feeling washed over him and he felt an immense sense of peace, love and comfort. Words came into his mind: “I know you, I see you, I love you.” Trent says it took all that he had to not sob on that pew. “I like to reflect on that experience. It only answered three of my 1,000 questions but it confirmed God is there, God knows me, and God does care about what’s happening to me.” It also taught Trent that it’s ok to have unanswered questions, and that some questions are more important than others.  

Over the next year, Trent was able to open up to more people—a few close friends, a trusted therapist. He accepted he was gay and came to the mindset that he didn’t have a problem with it because God didn’t have a problem with it. His senior year of high school was a little better, and soon it became time to put in his mission papers, something that had been impressed on his mind years before. But it took him a year to get the papers out, and his call to Independence, Missouri. A major history buff, Trent was thrilled to walk and talk through all the church history sites, but an upset occurred. In February 2020, Trent entered the Provo MTC where he stayed for three weeks and watched as the world crumbled with the pandemic. His second week in, they stopped admitting new missionaries and every day his MTC teachers would give updates that seemed unfathomable: “No NBA playoffs; no in person general Conference.” Trent was still headed to Missouri but the Frontrunner train he took to the airport suddenly stopped in Draper at 8am. There had been a huge earthquake (the one in which the SLC temple’s Moroni dropped his trumpet). Trent didn’t feel it on the train, but had to reroute to the MTC. Swept up in all the speculation at the time, he thought, “We’re going to the land of Zion, and with all the prophecies about earthquakes, plagues, locusts in Africa, I just wanted to get to Independence to be the first to meet Jesus.” The next day, he was given the all clear to go out. Five days later, lockdowns shut down most of the world. As a missionary, Trent wasn’t allowed to leave his apartment for the next four months besides P-day grocery runs, but he says, “I’m grateful for how it worked out. I’m a huge believer in the Lord’s timing.”

While Trent had reconciled being gay, he wasn’t quite sure how he’d navigate shelving it for two years. He was able to circumvent certain conversations and “pretend it’s not a thing,” but eventually realized, “God had other plans.” Two or three weeks in with his first trainer, an incredible person Trent learned a lot from, Trent felt an assurance from the spirit that he should tell his companion he was gay. He sat on it for a few days, then got the confirmation from above that the Lord would be ok, and the companion would be ok if he shared. Visibly shaking, Trent said, “I’m gay. I hope that’s not an issue.” Trent says the companion responded “as well as I could have hoped. I think it was a good experience for both of us.”

Throughout his mission, Trent would occasionally feel similar nudges that it would be ok to tell certain trusted people, and every time he did, he said it opened up some of the best experiences on his mission as he felt closer to those around him and better about himself as “the irreconcilable parts came together.” He emailed his mission president to let him know, and in return got the response, “If you need to talk to me, I’ve available, but I have no worries.” As missions are small communities, word spread, and Trent learned he wasn’t alone, estimating that about 10-15 other LGBTQ+ missionaries opened up in his zone over the next two years. Trent especially loved coming out to people who had little experience with the LGBTQ+ community. One day while doing their work on social media, a district leader next to Trent made a comment about a gay couple on a Facebook profile. Trent stopped and looked at him and said, “Elder, have you ever worked with LGBTQ individuals before?” The DL said, “I haven’t; have you?” Trent replied, “Yeah, I deal with that quite frequently. I’m gay.” The district leader immediately and profusely apologized. Trent replied, “Don’t worry, Elder, it’s understandable—not having worked with LGBTQ individuals before. Mind if we can talk about it?” Trent then shared his story and explained what life was like for him. He loved sharing that, “Even though I experience same sex attraction, I love the church and am on a mission.” Trent says he grew to treasure the connections that came from learning of others’ experiences with God and life as they exchanged stories.

Trent worried about returning home after his mission. He’d liked having his life put on pause, focusing instead on others’ lives. He knew when he returned, he’d have to deal with tough questions. Still, he filled out a “My Plan,” a tool missionaries are given to map out their return plan to follow. He saw how a good part of that deals with “how I will stay active in the church and marry in the temple,” something he knew might not fit in God’s plan for him. “While much of the plan was helpful, it wasn’t specific for my needs, and I had to figure out a lot on my own—something I’ve learned to become comfortable with.” Trent didn’t feel like he could try to date women, but also felt, “If by some act of God some amazing young lady comes up, I’ll put nothing outside of God’s power.” Trent says he loves the framework the church gives, although since he’s returned from his mission, he says, “I haven’t been the most active. I don’t know where I’m going or doing, but I know that God lives and that Jesus Christ is the son of God. I have immense faith in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior… That gives me light when there’s no path. If nothing else, I know that’s true.” Trent says he also loves the Bible and Book of Mormon and has felt a lot less alone listening to the Questions from the Closet podcast over the years. He says he’s fine sitting in ambiguity.

At his first Thanksgiving back from his mission, Trent sent a coming out text on his family group chat, and everyone was supportive. “My younger siblings were a little confused at first, but they figured it out and moved on. Things have gone great ever since.” Of the pretty seamless transition, Trent says most of them had already known, though he says he’s a “pretty straight-passing gay guy; the straightest gay person I know.” A mechanical engineering student at Southern Utah University, Trent hopes to work with robotics, possibly in aerospace, a shared passion with his brother with whom he’d love to go into business. Trent currently does 3D printing and loves fishing, cooking, reading, and again, all things history—whether it be church history or American history. He works at a historical museum outside of Kanab where he loves to exchange stories with patrons all day. “It’s amazing to see what inspires people to be people.”

While he doesn’t consider himself a social person, claiming “I like to maybe have ten people in my vicinity,” Trent braved up and went to the first Gather conference last year—an experience that he loved and that inspired him to go back this year and to also start a Gather group at his college campus. He says SUU can be a difficult place to be as it’s “more traditional than Provo. Finding connection there with the church isn’t hard, finding connection with LGBTQ+ people is harder. Finding connection with both is almost impossible.” Trent felt “immensely grateful” when the Gather curriculum was released. Though only about five people currently gather in his group, Trent is excited to be part of the influence where people can strand in a room comfortably and hold both identities—as a person of faith and LGBTQ+.

“Doing this work that I feel called to do—I feel it as strongly as I felt called to go on a mission. I love knowing this is a work the Lord is very interested in doing. It’s encouraging to know progress is being made. As hard as things get sometimes, I think things are only getting better. We’re on the right track; we’re headed where God wants us to be.”

THOMAS AUSEUGA

content warning - suicide ideation

Thomas Auseuga was born and raised in Australia and currently lives in Brisbane; however, having spent the last three months in Utah has made him consider a permanent move to the states. “I think I’ve met more LGBTQ+ people in one month here than I have in five years in Australia.” Thomas brought a trademark jar of Vegemite with him to share with new friends, and it must have worked, as he bonded with many at September’s Gather conference in Provo. Thomas loved Gather, but said going to church the following Sunday, even in Utah, felt like a harsh reality that things aren’t quite where he wishes they were just yet. However, Thomas feels called to the space he’s in at the moment—being an openly gay, outspoken advocate for the LGBTQ+ community within the LDS church. But that doesn’t always make it easy.

Thomas grew up with his twin brother smack dab in the middle of eight children raised in a Polynesian/Australian family who was “very into the church.” Both of Thomas’ parents served missions, as did his mother’s second husband and grandma. “The gospel was the epicenter of our home,” says Thomas, despite religion and church attendance not being a popular choice for many of Thomas’ peers in Melbourne, and later Adelaide, after his mom moved the family there. Thomas was the smallest of his siblings and was picked on quite a bit at home. At school, he was teased for having an “effeminate, higher pitched voice” and was called “church boy,” which he says was “supposed to be a derogatory slur, I guess?” Thomas says at times he had a rough childhood in which he often felt isolated and lonely, but knew he had a family who loved him and was grateful they had the resources to get by. Thomas also recalls being called gay before he ever knew what the term meant.

Around age 11, Thomas began to feel “a connection to one of my mates. I wanted to be around him—a lot. Now, as an adult, I see that as my first crush.” But because the dialogue surrounding gay people in the early 2000s was so negative, Thomas internalized that all things gay were bad, and besides, he went to church every Sunday so, “Of course I couldn’t be gay.” Thomas’ shame around this plagued him to the extent he’d cry himself to sleep every night, “praying for Heavenly Father to take this away, or I’d prefer not to wake up in the morning. That was my habitual prayer. I definitely experienced suicidal ideation growing up.” But at the same time, Thomas would pray he’d be blessed with protection. Heeding a prompting, Thomas says he felt God’s hand in helping him reframe negative thoughts he battled at the time. When he was 15, he felt directed to tell his mom the feelings he’d been battling alone for three years.

“She told me she loved me, but my mom’s experience was limited with this, so she said, ‘You’re not gay, you just think you are because everyone calls you that’.” Thomas explains that a lot of her fears stemmed from her perspective on AIDS and the mistreatment of gay people, fearing discrimination and rejection. Offering her grace, Thomas says, “She tried her best with the knowledge she had.” Thomas also told his bishop at the time, who offered him a pamphlet, but didn’t say much to unpack the coming out discussion.

Four years later, at age 19, Thomas finally came out to his best friend. “He handled it pretty well, but needed a couple days to process. When he came back, he said, ‘I love you anyways, you’re my best friend; it doesn’t matter’.”  That opened a dialogue that taught Thomas that when he opened up to people and was authentically himself, it deepened their connection. By age 21, he’d come out to his three best friends and every bishop he’d had up until that point. He remembers feeling, “It was surreal that I could tell people, and they wouldn’t hate me or try to fix or change me. I could be myself with them and talk about it on a regular basis.”

At the time, Thomas was feeling stagnate living in Melbourne, in a dead-end part-time retail job and a YSA environment that left him feeling belittled and beaten down. After two years of this, he began to feel depressed, stuck, with no upward trajectory. Thomas had convinced himself he wasn’t smart enough to serve a mission like his siblings had. He was active in the church then, but “mostly just for the social scene and food after.” He began to see a therapist his bishop had recommended, after referring to his being gay as “an addiction.” Luckily, the therapist was more experienced and created a beneficial, affirming environment for Thomas in which he could steer his own path whichever way he chose.

“At this point in time, I feel like I had hit rock bottom,” says Thomas. He wasn’t fully invested in the church but felt a constant pressure to date girls, and to serve a mission before that. “Finally, I said, Heavenly Father I don’t want to serve, but since you’re giving me promptings, I will. And from there, my desire to serve grew.” It took Thomas a year to get his papers submitted, and despite his plea bargain with God to not be called to the Philippines (after being told by his two siblings how hot and sweaty it was, along with a side order of food poisoning and other sicknesses they experienced), Thomas was called to the Philippines. “I lost 40 pounds, though, so I guess it was… a blessing?”

In reality, Thomas loved his mission and felt it changed his life. There, he grew the confidence in studying both the scriptures and a foreign language to the point of fluency. He helped support companions and other missionaries as their pseudo-therapist, and Thomas’ mission president likewise affirmed he should go into social work or therapy of some sort, a second witness to the spiritual nudge Thomas himself had been feeling. Covid-19 cut Thomas’ mission 12 weeks short. He came home in March of 2020, and got into his social work course six weeks later. He’s now in the second to last semester of his degree.

His mission helped Thomas to “understand how important the gospel is to me. I always want it to be a part of my life.” When he came home, at age 26, that meant trying to date girls to prepare for a temple marriage. Thomas drove 24 hours north from his family’s hometown of Adelaide to move to Brisbane to expand the dating pool, but began to see a trend that the more dates with women he went on, the more his mental health declined. “They were all lovely, nice, cute girls. I just wasn’t attracted to them.” One girl asked him out a couple times, and each time he’d drive over to pick her up, Thomas would find himself crying and on the verge of a panic attack. At the same time, he had a bisexual friend he’d developed feelings for, so he says, “I knew what attraction and romantic feelings felt like. So in contrast feeling nothing on dates with girls would just lead to a depression spiral afterward.” Thomas’ bisexual friend ended up marrying a woman, so this gave him the added confidence to do the same, and Thomas tried hard to make it work with one young lady. Three dates in, she friend zoned him. After two days of sadness over the effort he’d put in to try to make it work, Thomas finally prayed surmising he was now off the hook, he’d tried his best. The answer he got in return was that it was time to come out publicly.

Not wanting to be the victim of a hate crime, Thomas resisted this impression. But finally realizing it was best for his mental health to do so, Thomas prayed that the decision was right and wouldn’t be detrimental to him. One Sunday afternoon, he sat next to his best friend while he pressed post on Facebook, sharing words it took him 28 years to say out loud, to all. “After that, a weight lifted, and my life changed in a really good way.”

Thomas began to speak up about LGBTQ+ issues in his ward and circle of influence. At first, he had friends confess they’d never met a gay person before. He himself only knows a handful of openly gay, LDS Australians. Thomas says, “It’s been two years of helping to educate others. I feel very called to the work right now in this space.” Thomas described an experience at a recent YSA Q&A in which people could submit anonymous questions. Naturally, Thomas submitted questions focusing on LGBTQ+ inclusion. One person asked, “Why do we have to include gay people?” Thomas was impressed as others jumped in for him and said, “Why wouldn’t we? It’s Jesus’s church, and all are part of the family.” Thomas has also proposed to his stake president that they do an LGBTQ+-themed devotional across the board, not just for the YSA.

Thomas feels peace going to the temple and to church and feels lucky to have a support network in which he can be himself. He says, “I didn’t really lose friends when I came out. Those who don’t talk to me now—it’s more a reflection of them than me.” While he says he could decide to get offended or not talk about it around certain people, he prefers to share his personal experiences with love in hopes it educates and changes someone’s attitude towards the LGBTQ+ experience. “When you’re one of the only openly gay people in this space, that’s kind of the attitude you have to have.”

Although Thomas thought he’d be single forever, over the last few months, he’s opened up more to the idea of dating men. “After the Gather conference, I realized being single and celibate for the rest of my life could make me jaded and bitter toward God and the church. Instead, I could find someone to have a committed, loving relationship with. I could still go to church and be as active as I can with limitations. In terms of progression, I would become more Christlike by serving someone in a relationship – that’s where I’m at. I think God would be ok with that, too. My discipleship might look different than someone who is heterosexual, but my idea of God and my perception of Him has changed through an evolution of thoughts. He’s all loving, all merciful to all his children and especially those who are– he understands.”

Before coming out in 2022, Thomas experienced weekly rough spells at church in which he’d presume it would be his last week there. But now, he says he’s “striving to still have a relationship with God, staying close to the spirit while navigating being gay in the church. If there’s going to be a change in the church, it will be through the influence of LGBTQ+ people helping move it along. If I’m not talking about it, who will? I feel inclined to show up for the next generation, so the next 12-year-old experiencing same sex attraction isn’t crying himself to sleep at night, wishing he was dead.”

Thomas sees God in the details of it all and believes the gathering of Israel includes all God’s children, “especially those who feel oppressed and marginalized. I’ve heard it said that, ‘All of God’s children have a place at the table with Christ, and LGBTQ+ children have a special seat with their name reserved’.”

DR. LISA DIAMOND

When Dr. Lisa Diamond first moved to Utah 25 years ago, she had never heard the term “LDS.” Likewise new to Utah, her wife, Judi Hilman, bought a Book of Mormon to try to understand the culture better, but may have only made it through a few pages. The two recently celebrated their 30th anniversary, and marvel how 25 of those 30 years have been spent living in the same house in Salt Lake City. As outsiders to the state’s predominant faith, Lisa finds it amazing that “Our whole marriage is planted in the soil of Utah. I never would have predicted we’d find such a sense of meaning and purpose and community here.”

Lisa and Judi each grew up in California, and met in Ithaca, NY while graduate students at Cornell, at the very beginning of both of their careers.  Now, Lisa is a world-renowned researcher and author in the psychology of gender and sexuality, who once appeared as a guest on Oprah--which she described as a positive experience, despite the hair and make-up team tamping down her trademark spunky hair into a mainstream “female politician” look. An expert in health policy reform, Judi is currently a professor of Community Health and Leadership at Salt Lake Community college, and was the founder and executive director of the Utah health policy project--a think and do tank for health policy in Utah. The two initially chose Salt Lake City because the job Lisa was offered at the University of Utah was the only offer she received!  Her work was unconventional, integrating psychology with gender studies, and that was precisely the job opening available at the University.  Now a Distinguished Professor at the U and past President of the International Academy for Sex Research, Lisa could not have known, when she arrived in Utah in 1999, how it would change her and her research.

Lisa’s interest in studying queer development started after her own coming out in the 90s, a time when it was hard to find representations of queer women in the media, and hard to find places to meet other queer people, especially if you were too young to go to bars. “If you were young and queer, you were stuck; you pretty much waited for the Pride parade to roll through town. There was no internet.” Although she came out in Chicago, during her college years, she had grown up in Los Angeles, where her exposure to spirituality was decidedly eclectic: Her father was an atheist (after having set aside his Greek Orthodox upbringing) and her mother was a Southern Baptist, but they sent Lisa and her sister to an Episcopalian elementary school, and all of the family’s best friends’ were Jewish.  So Lisa never experienced religion as a monolith. Rather, moving through multiple faith communities became an everyday experience (as was religious conflict – when Lisa’s mom decided to have her baptized in the local Episcopal church, her atheist father originally refused to attend, and had to be talked into going). But the faith tradition to which Lisa felt closest was Judaism, due to those years and years of gathering with her parents’ friends for Passover and Hanukah, singing Jewish songs and making latkes and attending bar and bat mitzvahs.  So perhaps it was fate that the woman she eventually married was Jewish, and that they celebrate the sabbath every Friday (with Lisa’s homemade challah), and had a Jewish wedding.  For Lisa, religion was always about the people around you, not the doctrine.

Like many young people, Lisa was afraid to tell her parents she was gay, but “didn’t feel the threat that an entire community that might turn away from me,” a phenomenon of fear she has since often witnessed and studied in Utah.  She came out while earning her bachelor’s degree in psychology at the University of Chicago, and remembers hanging out in the gay and lesbian section of bookstores and reading classifieds in the newspaper to find gay social gatherings, for which she usually had to take three forms of transportation to attend. But she didn’t mind; as she now says, “It was worth it for the connections.” There wasn’t much awareness or discussion of queer youth at that time – most research on sexual identity focused on adults.  But while she was at the University of Chicago, one of her professors published a groundbreaking book on queer teenagers in Chicago, called Children of Horizons. She read the whole book while standing up in the aisles of the 57th street bookstore in Hyde Park, and found it perplexing that everything written about queer youth seemed to be about boys.  Where were the women like her?  She had been trying to decide whether to go to graduate school or to become an activist, and it now struck her that bringing women’s experiences into the study of sexual identity development was both a scientific and a political act. “As a feminist, it seemed like a rather low hanging fruit, to just put women in the studies.” The reason women were underrepresented was that they didn’t socialize in gay bars and community centers as frequently as men, and tended to be less open. Lisa finds this mind-boggling now, given that there are now many more queer women than men among Gen Z, along with greater acceptance of bisexual and plural identities.  As she observes, “Now, far more women identify as bi or pan than exclusively lesbian, but bisexuality was not a fully validated identity in the past – bi and pan individuals had less community; it was often underground.”

When it came time to pursue her doctorate, Lisa sought out a program and mentor who could train her to study queer youths’ development, but there were only two academic psychologists doing so: Gilbert Herdt at the University of Chicago and Ritch Savin-Williams at Cornell, and she decided to go to Cornell. Her timing was spot on– Savin-Williams was on the verge of leaving the university because graduate students had stopped applying to work with him once he started studying queer youth.  It was demoralizing, and he was ready to transition to clinical practice when Lisa’s application came through the door.  He figured he’d give it one last try, and ended up staying at Cornell and mentoring scores of other queer researchers before retiring a few years ago.  Lisa says, “I often joke with him that I extended his career 20 years!” During her tutelage, Lisa says she felt isolated from all the other grad students, who were studying conventional topics like cognitive development, or doing research in large teams. Ritch and Lisa were a tiny team unto themselves: As Lisa remembers, “It felt like him and me against the world.”  Ritch didn’t have any research funds, but Lisa needed a Master’s project, so she bought a 1989 used Toyota Corolla for $4,900, and set off each weekend to collect data, driving around New York state to interview as many young queer women as she could about their own identity development. Some of her participants were lesbian, some bisexual, some not quite sure—and Lisa found these stories the most fascinating.

She continued to follow her 100 interview subjects over the phone, every 2-3 years, and ended up publishing the first 10 years of findings in her book, Sexual Fluidity:  Understanding Women’s Love and Desire (Harvard University Press, 2008) which was awarded the Distinguished Book Award from the American Psychological Association. The book argues that while sexual orientation is not chosen, some women show unexpected and unbidden shifts in their sexual orientation identity over time. Lisa points out that in her research, younger women are usually a bit more focused on their identity labels than older women. As one of her participants stated, “These days, I care more about my 401k than my orientation.” Lisa’s work showed that change over time is a widespread phenomenon in women’s sexual patterns, but carefully pointed out that these changes are not under women’s control. But, she says, changes that individuals force on themselves, like conversion therapy, are totally different – they are unhealthy and ineffective. 

When Lisa first started to get to know queer students with a background in the LDS church, she started to observe that the struggles they faced seemed different from the struggles she was used to seeing in young queer people –there was more of a sense of utter despair and loss.  The contradiction between their sexuality and their faith seemed to go beyond just doctrine, it involved their entire sense of self and community and kinship.  For LDS individuals raised in Utah, she came to appreciate that church membership was more than simply a matter of belief, it involved one’s entire sense of social selfhood.  To leave the church meant being cut off from one’s entire community.  Lisa had never lived in a religious community like Utah, in which one’s entire social environment was interbraided with the church, and she remembers her amazement when paging through the Salt Lake City White Pages in the early 2000s, seeing pages and pages and pages of entries for different wards, and realizing the degree to which church membership was literally embedded into each member’s physical environments as well as their psychological world.  There was no way for queer young people to escape the eyes of their neighbors and ward members, the immersion was total – which meant that rejection was a more all-encompassing and devastating prospect than for other faith traditions.  Being queer “could cut you off from not only your religious community but also from your neighborhood and potentially your family; that can result in a fundamental existential loss.” Lisa continues, “It shows that with as much progress as we’ve made, there are a lot of people who’d rather kill a part of them off to stay in the group. It shows how deeply social humans are… We live and die by social connections to people. When they cut us off for something we have no control over – that’s terror.” Over the years, she became increasingly fascinated with the unique experiences of queer Mormons, listening to their autobiographies on “Mormon Stories” and following “the devastating excommunications of figures like Kate Kelley, John Dehlin, Natasha Helfer, and Sam Young, simply for speaking out against the church’s views of sexuality.” 

But it wasn’t until the pandemic that her observations about queer Mormons started to intersect with other aspects of her academic work.  She had been doing a deep dive on the neurobiology of rejection and abandonment, and started to realize that the conventional view of anti-queer stigma as a form of “stress” was incomplete.  Those models presumed that the mental health challenges of being queer stemmed from the stress of discrimination and victimization.  Yet the newer neurobiological work suggested that a far more important threat to stigmatized people is the loss of social safety – the sense of unconditional connection, protection, and belonging that all humans rely on.  As a social species, humans cannot survive alone, and our brains evolved to prioritize staying in the group above almost all else.  Lisa was accustomed to hearing people describe queer people as “oversensitive to rejection,” but the newer neurobiological work suggested that there was no such thing, since the human social brain is literally a “rejection-detecting machine.”  For a social species, social shame and rejection feels like a mortal threat, because isolation and abandonment was a mortal threat in our ancestral environment.  She learned that our entire immune system has evolved to “turn on” under conditions of social threat, preparing the body for wounding and damage. “When humans are rejected, and their social safety is withdrawn, the brain and immune systems start amping up, fear coursing to the same place. That’s the type of loss my queer Mormon students were experiencing. They weren’t exaggerating. They were on fire with abandonment and a sense of real threat.” She saw this especially in the context of “ecclesiastical roulette,” in which youth never know for sure whether their Bishop will strictly enforce church doctrine on sexuality, or will allow queer youth to stay in the fold. On top of that uncertainty and doubt was the ever present possibility of new changes in church policy, such as the devastating “November policy” about the children of same-sex couples, and the more recent “trans ‘clarification’ that has solidified the church’s exclusion of trans individuals.”

 Lisa realized that the toll of this uncertainty was just as significant as the toll of explicit discrimination, but had never been fully appreciated by previous research on queer mental health.  As she says, “Nothing is more stressful for the human brain than unpredictable stress. Studies show that when mice can predict shock, they can handle it better. If they can’t predict it, they develop a state of learned helplessness. If you can’t predict where danger is, you’re in a protective stance at all times. The world becomes threatening, even terrifying.” Looking at the current mental health crisis, Lisa says it’s not daily threats, but sporadic ones that are the most harmful. “You’ll have six months of feeling good, then something terrible happens at church. And so then, you don’t know that the ground beneath you is stable. Unpredictable danger leaves everyone hypervigilant.” Lisa explains that this cycle of constant, chronic watchfulness and the stress preparation of looking around the corner, unsure of what’s to come, produces damaging long-term effects, especially on the immune system.

The solution? Lisa proposes young people without supportive home environments find at least one safe social setting where they can regularly connect with friends or people who they can trust will “come running if they fall.” While online networks can suffice, Lisa recommends in-person connection as the ideal, and shares that her work shows that close friends are often the most important source of social safety and inclusion for both youth and adults. In Utah, Lisa often refers young people to Encircle and SLC’s Sky Hop, which provides free media arts courses, to find joy and connection and community.  Although it’s important to offer emotional support to LGBTQ+ youth, Lisa emphasizes that they also need fun, joy, laughter, and play, experienced in a safe setting with people they authentically enjoy.

In her conversations with LGBTQ+ youth who are struggling with non-accepting parents, Lisa encourages mutual empathy and patience. “I’ve seen some remarkable growth journeys. I tell young people, ‘Your parent may have it the capacity to become a huge ally, but it’s usually not overnight’.” Lisa explains that because the time course of parents’ and kids’ journey are often not in sync, it can create a lot of pain and disharmony. She explains, “Some kids initially lose the warm embrace of their protector, which can be terrifying to any person. But I say, ‘Don’t write them off just yet. And in the meantime, surround yourself with other people who do care, protect, and affirm.”

Speaking at the recent Gather conference, Lisa compared social networks to a dew-covered spiderweb, with life-giving drops of water clinging to the spots where the silken threads connect. “Some of have dense webs with a lot of threads and people. For others, there aren’t that many. But even on a sparse web, we find those drops of water, in human connection. That’s essentially what people are to one another– every relationship is a potential drop of water that offers a bit of connection and safety and support.” She expounds that often, we only focus on the drops closest to us (family, closest friends), but in our broader webs, there are so many more, and they are all important: “the people we regularly see at our book club, at the gym, at work, at our kids’ basketball games.  All of these individuals are part of our social fabric, as well, and we can make active choices to strengthen those ties – each of us has the potential to be a life-giving drop of water for someone we know.”

Lisa advises parents to tap into the “wonderful sense of community the LDS faith provides” and find their own support network when their kids come out. “Meeting another parent whose kid has come out will do more than any website or pamphlet.” She also encourages parents to find their own way to show their allyship. “Some parents may not want to go to a protest, and that’s perfectly understandable. But they can choose other ways to show their love, for example having their kids’ friends over for pizza, and giving them the safety and space to nourish their own webs of connection. Make every step a step forward. For one parent, it can be going to a protest; for another, it can be a quiet conversation with bishop. There are a million ways to show up for one’s kid. And it might even be different between mom and dad – there’s no single way, and it’s important for us not to judge one another, but to keep moving forward together, step by step.” Lisa says that missteps and hurt feelings and poorly chosen words are inevitable, and that we should actually look forward to these moments because they are opportunities for real growth. “Those moments of rupture are the perfect opportunity to come together and ask for a redo and repair. Those are the opportunities where we can model what apology and forgiveness look like.” Lisa says parents need not relinquish their responsibilities as parents to support LGBTQ+ young people – and they need not even agree with or understand their child’s views.  “But their first job, as parents, is to create a safe, protected environment in the home where kids know they are always welcome, and where they can let down their guard.  They can do that just by showing their affection – it need not be a big emotional display, it’s a simple as spending time together doing the things you both enjoy, like watching movies together, feet intertwined, feeling that calm connection.”  Those moments remind both parents and children that their essential bond will never change, and that they don’t have to agree with one another to fiercely love one another, she explains. “Loving in spite of disagreement is, in some ways, the most challenging but important form of love in a family.”

As the tension of election season escalates, especially in a sector in which so many rights are on the line, Lisa advises us to focus our attention on our social ties, instead of distant political debates.  She says that if you really want to make a difference, then “pick one connection in your life, one person who you think could really use some more security in their life.  Invest a little more.  Go for a walk.  Text them more often. Make sure they know that they can call you, anytime.  It’s the fastest way to make a transformative effect on this world. How often do we hear stories that culminate with ‘and then I met this one coach’?”  Lisa has seen this operate in her own family.  Her mom grew up in Lakeland, FL, and dreamed of going to college, but there was no money.  Her piano teacher was determined to help her find a music scholarship, and even helped her created an audition tape (in 1960, this required getting hold of reel-to-reel recording equipment).  It worked – she went to college, and it changed the whole direction of her life.  She met Lisa’s dad, they moved to Los Angeles, and eventually she became a piano teacher, too.  And now both Lisa and her sister Nicole are teachers (Nicole teaches second grade in Burbank, California).  They all link it back to Mrs. Raymond C. Smith, their mother’s dogged protector.  She was that drop of water.  Lisa thinks that all of us have the capacity to do that for those around us; to reknit our social fabric one relationship at a time. And that’s the change she’s now trying to foster in her adopted and beloved home of Utah.

JESSIE + JETT

Newlyweds since June, Jett & Jessie are what one might call “unruly gays,” and they have no regrets. It’s a term they’ve coined on their IG site: @headedtonineveh, and a concept that still makes them laugh. Their summer wedding at the White Shanty in Provo (coincidentally aka the setting for the infamous party scene in “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives”) sealed the deal--in an (unruly) sense. No longer were they “Saint Gays—the kind who put other LDS at ease as faithful members with full membership willing to be single and celibate, forgoing any relationships.” Jett and Jessie claim that, “While saint gays are sometimes weaponized against unruly gays, they are not to be confused with the straight, single LDS folk who are encouraged to pursue marriage and pray to fall in love. Saint gays pray not to fall in love.”

For them, it's a sad reality that once resonated. But Jett and Jessie were deeply touched when their entire bishopric and much of their Eagle Mountain, UT ward came out to celebrate at their reception. They acknowledge “leadership roulette” is currently serving them well, and they’ve felt embraced by their current congregation. Jett taught Gospel Doctrine up until the week before the two married. Upon addressing the elephant in the room and likening her situation to the end of Mosiah in which the Lord addressed “the wayward members,” Jett became emotional as she announced she knew she’d be released as she was doing something contrary to church doctrine. After the class, she was moved by the line of people who came up to hug and thank her for her lessons.

Teaching the gospel is something that always came natural to Jett, a returned missionary who Jessie describes as “way more orthodox than me”—ironic, as Jett was married to another woman before Jessie, while Jessie followed a more prescribed path, having married a man at age 20 with whom she was married to for nearly 15 years and had three children with. Since their divorce, Jessie’s former husband maintains a friendly co-parenting relationship with both Jessie and Jett and is supportive of their relationship. Although, it was about seven years ago that Jessie first began to wonder if she might also be attracted to women.

It happened during a slice-of-life production for an A&E documentary Jessie was recruited to be in, though her segments never saw the light of day. However, on set at Jessie’s house, while nursing a newborn and wrangling a toddler, Jessie found herself fascinated by two of the female crew members who presented as more masculine and were “most definitely gay.” At the time the information didn’t startle Jessie nor her husband—merely she just observed the feelings, and watched as life marched on—as a wife, mother, and dance choreographer who taught at BYU off and on for six years. Explaining that perhaps it’s because she’s a millennial, Jessie recognizes many her age (36) didn’t inherit as much of the cultural shame others do, she says, “For me it wasn’t a big traumatic thing… my takeaway was ‘it’s fine. You’re fine.’ I see it as a gift, as part of my divine nature.”

At this, Jett laughs and says, “I find it interesting that it wasn’t hard for her, that it wasn’t traumatic.” Just entering her 50s, Gen X Jett hates having to explain how there’s nothing more annoying than errantly being called a boomer, but acknowledges she grew up in the generation where everyone was required to read The Miracle of Forgiveness and beat themselves up. “There was no gay representation anywhere. I now love watching old movies where you can see the gay-coded characters of the time; it’s a lot of fun.” Jett never felt like a “traditional girl.” She says, “I liked boy things and boy characters on Halloween, like the Lone Ranger. I wanted to be anything but the princess. I’d rather be the knight who fought and rescued her. I was clearly a queer little girl.”

When Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted, Jett found herself fascinated by the head of security character Tasha Yar, and told her mom she wanted a “short, boy hair cut like her.” Jessie jokes about Jett’s Xena warrior princess phase, which included her wearing hightops and a leather vest everywhere. Jett admits what started as a “this show is so ridiculous” evolved into Jett joining the internet explosion of the 90s and became a creator of a wildly popular Xena fan fiction comic strip. Her work took off to the extent she became known “by the Xena gays” and even the head writers of the show took notice of her strip. Her comic strip was successful enough to pay for her room and board at school. “I would kill for that now,” Jett laughs. She learned most of her fan mail came from “gay women assuming I’m gay, too. I’d laugh and say, ‘No I’m not,’ but I acknowledged Xena and her ‘friend’ likely were.” 

This wasn’t the last time Jett garnered fans, as the current go-to cartoonist for Sunstone, and as a past contestant on America’s Got Talent as part of the performance group Aurora Light Painters. She also attended art school at Sheridan College in Canada, which is where, during her first year, she allowed herself the concrete thought and then to say aloud that she might be gay. “It was momentous to allow the thought enough cohesion that I spoke it into the world.” And then, “like a Mormon gay ladder, I went through the stages of gay Mormon grief and panic. 1- Don’t tell anyone, remain single and celibate. 2 – Only tell close friends and family and stay in the church and ‘Saint Gay’ our way through.”

At school, Jett was exposed to other gay women for the first time, though she laughs they were “crass and a bit shocking to me, a good Mormon girl from Farmington, UT. But I liked them.” There, she met a woman at, of all places—a Xena party, who she fell for. She taught her all the missionary discussions, still fresh in her mind. Jett’s dad baptized the woman, and ultimately Jett realized the woman would go on to marry a man, which she did. Jett then migrated her way through singles wards, and eventually met and married a woman she lived with in San Francisco for over ten years. While she’s never said the words “I’m gay” to her parents, Jett says they talked around it and she remembers her mom once hugging her and saying, “Oh Jeanettie, your life is so hard,” back when she was going to church as a “Saint Gay.” That made Jett realize that, “A lot of Mormons love to cast their gay loved ones as tragic figures. We love the tragedies, the Romeo and Juliet stories. But we don’t want to be tragedies; we all want to be in romcoms. I realized I had to rewrite the narrative I had going for myself in my head.”

Jett’s San Francisco ward was always welcoming, which she chalks up to both a kind bishop who announced his desire for LGBTQ+ to feel welcome from the pulpit as well as the apparent desperation for anyone to come as numbers were sparse. But when Jett did go, he invited her to take the sacrament and gave her callings. She never banged on the door for a temple recommend, but always felt loved and welcomed. When the 2015 exclusion policy was announced, Jessie says, “Being labeled an apostate hurt Jett profoundly. She had served a mission and meant it.” Jett stopped going for a while. After her marriage ended in 2020, Jett jests she decided to further complicate a pandemic year by moving back to Utah and decided to “come back into full church activity.” When she told this to a friend, he said, “What are they going to make of you?” Jett replied, “They’re going to love me!” She smiles, “And they have.”

Jett decided not to be closeted when she moved into the ward. When the Relief Society came over to help her unpack, she told them she’d just broken up with her partner. Jett says, “They saw me in pain, heartache, divorce. I bristle when people say ‘Oh, those Utah Mormons.’ They have struggles, too—I’ve been truly welcomed in.” Jett decided to give dating men a “good college try” and while she found one nice man with whom she shared much in common, when she realized it just wasn’t going to work out, she says she felt Heavenly Father figuratively flick her on the forehead and say, “Jeanette, my dear daughter, you know why.” She says, “It was the first time, in my mid to late 40s, that I really truly understood and felt comfortable enough in my own skin to accept and tolerate…and celebrate this aspect of myself, as part of my divine nature. The first time Jessie said that, I rolled my eyes, but then I thought—no, she’s right. It is.”

Having already lived in the boundaries at the time, Jessie agrees, “Jett was the belle of the ball when she moved in—the cool, gay lady in the ward.” This year, there have been humorous moments when people realized their relationship had evolved. A new friend said, “I knew you were friends, but I didn’t know you were kissy friends” when she got their wedding invite. Their officiant was a good friend from the ward, and Jessie’s former co-chorister in Primary. Jessie’s 11-year-old son walked her down the aisle, her four-year-old was the flower girl, and seven-year old the ring bearer. “The kids adore Jett; they think she’s the best thing since sliced bread. Having her be a part of their lives has been a tremendous blessing. They’re so lucky to have a Jett,” says Jessie. Jett agrees, “I’ve lived in a lot of cool places and had a lot of cool jobs (as an animator) but I didn’t think I’d ever have kids. It’s stretched me in ways I could never be while single. It can be challenging, hard, exasperating—I’ve learned if you love anything, don’t put it on display. But it’s so rewarding and fun. There’s nothing else I’d rather do the rest of my life than be with Jessie, helping her raise her kids. I’m finally living the whole measure of my creation.”

As they’re still welcomed in their ward, Jett and Jessie still attend, and say, “It’s gone as well as possible.” They admit that over several conversations they had to explain quite a few things to their bishopric, who were new to the LGBTQ-LDS intersection, yet willing to listen to the podcasts and read the things Jessie and Jett recommended. Jett and Jessie explained how it can be hard for someone at the top of the figurative food chain in the church (white, male, straight) to understand what they were going through. It also helped having Jessie’s brother (who served in a bishopric) send over a 5th Sunday lesson and beautiful talk he had written about LGBTQ+ inclusion. In the last meeting before they married, when a leader held out his tablet and asked Jett to read President Nelson’s “Think Celestial” talk, she explained she would not be reading from it, that she had listened live as it was delivered and reread it since and each time, it put her in tears. Jett said, “I understand why it speaks to many, it’s the refrigerator magnet talk. But in real time, I knew it would be used as a cudgel for people like me, and my parents and others will look at me and my wedding and think, ‘If you’re really thinking celestial, this is what you should be doing’—without taking into account my ability to honor personal revelation and have a life partner who loves and gets me.” Once she explained all this, the leader agreed, “Yeah, I guess you don’t need to read that…”. Jett’s parents had indeed made it “abundantly clear” they would not be at Jessie and Jett’s wedding, but hundreds of friends from their lives were, including Jett’s high school principal.

With the gentle prodding of Jessie, Jett has begun sharing their story at the Instagram site @headedtonineveh, which they find symbolic as Jonah also didn’t want to go to Nineveh—"the place where you have to go say hard things to an audience who won’t like it, and who may or may not be receptive.” But Jessie says, “You still have to say it and create more order in the world.” Jett agrees how the first time she was courageous enough to say she was gay to herself out loud changed the world for her. And now, she’s saying, “I grew up in the church, I did the things. Not only does Heavenly Father not care if I’m gay, but this is how I was made and now I’m married to the great, crashing love of my life—and raising kids.” Jessie concurs, “This is not counterfeit. We have as much right as anyone else to claim our divine doctrine and live it. This is my Eve moment. As matriarch of my family, I have special rights to divine revelation. This has absolutely been the right thing. I love my life. We’re not sorry.”

THE PRATT FAMILY

Dan and Terri Pratt of Peoria, AZ experienced their first “what if” trajectory after their oldest of six children entered high school. As Brigham began to struggle emotionally to the extent he battled suicidal ideation and received a misdiagnosis of borderline personality disorder, the Pratts began to question it all. The worry of “What if he doesn’t go on a mission?” took a backseat to “What if he tries to take his own life?”

 This was not a path they had anticipated. After serving missions before meeting and marrying, Dan and Terri had raised their oldest kids “doing all the things” – daily scripture study, weekly church, and serving every way they could. While they read all the parenting books and tried to check all the boxes that their own Arizona-based, LDS families of origin had, the techniques with which they’d been raised just didn’t seem to result in what they’d been promised. Rather, their houseful of kids, Brigham (now 25), Ammon (24), Sonia (22), Amelia (19), Benjamin (15), and Echo (14) seemed contentious in their youth, and Terri says, “No matter how hard we tried, we didn’t fit.” Since those early days, all six of the Pratt kids have been diagnosed as neurodivergent, five of whom specifically are on the autism spectrum. “The autism now makes more sense of why things didn’t go according to plan.”

Their initial “what if” questioning did prepare Dan and Terri to work with God through prayer on how to love their kids unconditionally, and that no matter what happened, they trusted their kids would be received with open arms by loving heavenly parents whenever that time came. This has brought new comfort as they’ve been thrown more curve balls. A few years ago, their oldest daughter, Sonia, approached Terri and said, “What would you do if you had a gay or bisexual child?” Wanting to be honest, Terri replied, “Well, I think it would be really hard, but I know I would love them.” This started the Pratts on a new quandary that resulted in Terri feeling drawn to read all she could get her hands on to understand the LGBTQ+ community. She read Ben Schilaty’s book, A Walk in My Shoes, then Tom Christofferson’s That We May Be One, and then listened to and read as many stories as she could on Richard Ostler’s Listen, Learn and Love podcast and at Lift and Love. Eventually they realized Sonia’s question had been prompted by her younger sibling Amelia, (preferred pronouns she/her/they/them), who at age 15, had confided in Sonia that she was bi. When Amelia was finally ready to have that conversation with her parents, after they had seen some text messages revealing it was true, Terri says, “We were ready. We wanted to be on the journey with them – and told them we would, wherever it takes them. We told them, ‘We love you and are here to support you in whatever you discover about yourself’.”

A couple years later, their youngest child Echo (12 at the time, they/them) came out through a letter, letting their parents know they were a lesbian and hoped their parents could still love them. Terri showed the letter to Dan, who called Echo in. Both Terri and Dan thanked Echo for sharing that information. Since, Echo has told them they’re nonbinary, gender fluid and wanted a name change, though they don’t bristle when often still referred to by their name at birth, Evie. Sonia has also since come out as bisexual. 

The frequent overlap of the neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ community has been something Terri has discovered to be quite common in her current masters’ studies to be a counselor. During Covid, she felt impressed to finish her bachelor’s degree, and now her graduate studies have led to an internship over the past several months with a practice in town called Neurodiverse Counseling. She says, “It’s been great to embrace more of that community. One’s heart opens to individual’s strengths and uniqueness, learning how a brain functions, and the beauty that comes with it. I’ve adopted an affirming rather than deficit-based perspective. It’s really helped me to love people.” After raising so many kids who struggled to find the therapists and support structures they needed, and seeing there’s not a lot out there in this space of overlap, Terri is eager to now become part of the solution.

Dan and Terri are long time owners of Pratt’s Pet Stores, owning several shops in their area. Dan also spent many years teaching early morning seminary. At the time, he was already undergoing a faith expansion journey, and as he’d read the assigned lessons, he often felt like a school teacher with a pen, mentally drawing red lines that he felt were too fear-based or not as loving as they should be for his young class. “There wasn’t the Jesus in it I’d hope for.” He adopted a class motto, “Haters gonna hate, but we ain't haters.” While he hadn’t yet become aware of his call as a father of LGBTQ+ kids, he was already struggling with a lesson on the Family Proclamation, one he was later glad he had softened, as a girl from his class later came out. Along with her family, she has attended the ally group, Love Without Asterisks, that Terri and Dan started with two other couples in their area.

 This group formed after a particularly painful fifth Sunday school lesson on LGBTQ+ in their ward that seemed to focus more on maintaining the comfort of the general membership rather than the inclusion of the LGBTQ+ community. A local career seminary teacher, Clare Dalton, was invited in to be the special guest speaker but only was given a few minutes to speak about being a gay woman before the rest of the class shifted tones. It became so hurtful that Terri and her youngest child left early, but they had invited Clare to join them at their home afterward for lunch. Comforting them, Clare said, “Let’s have our own meeting.” Clare returned the next month to join the Pratts and a few close friends, and that began their monthly ally nights, which the Pratts say have been “such a blessing.”

The Pratts have had to carve out safe spaces for their children, and maintain boundaries. They have prioritized their spiritual focus on teachings that allow people to truly love and care for others. Terri says, “It’s beautiful to build a place where you can be whoever you are, wherever you are, and share that with others. It’s different than Sunday School, where you have to edit yourself to fit in. Our ally nights are a beautiful example of Zion, of expanding the tent to see how we can all fit. And it’s positive for our children to see that they can keep spirituality and God in their life, no matter what their relationship to the church might be. They’re each on individual journeys with that.”

 After the recent transgender and nonbinary policy changes, Terri got a call from a good friend who was devastated. She said, “How do you stay and manage all of this?” Terri explained how their primary engagement is no longer serving the church as it used to be. While they attend sacrament meetings, Dan and Terri do not often participate in second hour nor currently hold callings. Instead, they focus on hosting their ally nights, and most recently found much joy and community in being on the committee for the youth program at Gather. The Pratts also love hosting many neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ friends of Amelia and Echo (who are gender fluid) at their house. They’ve witnessed how one of her AMAB friends is only able to express her gender identity in their home through dress and using she/her pronouns. Witnessing this young adult’s joy has expanded Terri’s. She says, “We are able to engage in different ways that feed our soul rather than suck it, which has been vital to our growth.” When the new policy came out, the Pratts had a moment of reckoning in which they realized, “They’re talking about our children, whatever wording they choose.” Terri laments, “I’m so glad they don’t attend church. It’s kinda sad, but that’s how I feel. Dan and I have to empower ourselves to 'stay in' in a way that’s healthy for us.”

Dan says, “In our home, I feel so much more love and acceptance for all my children as I redefine what’s an expectation versus acceptance. I’m always in awe when we get together now about how awesome it is as a father to not have to feel, ‘Are they on the right track?’ – always worried about how to fit in the box, and make corrections, but rather to let go of a lot of that and find out who they are and what they’re interested in or what makes them tick. I can see how glorious each of them are as they go through their journeys. And when they do ask questions about life, it’s all so authentically real in the way it happens.”  Terri agrees that where they are now is so different than a decade ago in their relationships with their kids. She says, “They know we love and respect their journey as their own, and it doesn’t have to look like ours.” She explains that a lot of her children have been through hard things, “which may be seen as ‘hard choices,’ but they know they’re allowed to make mistakes and learn from them.” 

Dan appreciates how he wouldn’t be where he is if “I was worried about empty chairs – or are we all going to make it to the celestial kingdom with its checkboxes and expectations? I’m not worried about a future of being ‘eternally happy.’ We have the present acceptance and love to bind us and help us through.”

THE CASE FAMILY

“We both love live music, the Utah Symphony, college sports, and theater. That’s one of the joys of the relationship we have—she doesn’t drag me to ballet and I don’t drag her to football,” says Jeff Case of Pleasant Grove, UT, sharing that loving going to these things together is just one of the perks of their mixed orientation marriage. Both Jeff and his wife Sarah are classically trained musicians, owning that, “Music is a gigantic part of our lives.” It’s a passion they’ve passed down to their three kids, Andrew—25, Danae—22, and Moth—18, though the younger ones may gravitate toward different genres. “We don’t always get what they listen to, but it seems like that’s just par for the parenting course,” says Jeff.

After staying at home with their kids for 15 years, for the past seven, Sarah has been teaching junior high. She teaches family consumer science which includes sewing, interior design, and behavioral health. Jeff, who leads the Lift & Love mixed-orientation marriage group for men, had originally joined the National Guard as a musician in ’95 before being sponsored by the Army to do his doctoral work in psychology at BYU. He was then commissioned as a psychologist in the Army for eight years. He is a veteran of the war in Iraq. Since getting out of the Army, he continues to work with veterans and their families as the director of the Provo Vet Center (a nationwide organization with 300 centers around the country).

Raised LDS on military bases while his dad served in the Air Force, the culture and era in which Jeff grew up did not feel conducive to coming out, though he knew he was gay by the end of high school. He was one of six kids who had to pay out of pocket for his own college and rely on military scholarships so it felt safest not to rock the boat. He went to BYU freshman year, then served a mission where he finally came out to himself after feeling “tightly boxed up and unsure what to do.” Jeff laughs, “God sent me on a mission to South Beach, Miami, which was a gay mecca in 1993. Two contrasting lifestyles were in my face—the BYU/LDS path, or South Beach gay life of the early 90s. I had a strong testimony, and still do—though it’s evolved over the years. I decided to come back to BYU.”

Jeff met Sarah the first day of class that year. Both music ed majors, she sat behind him, and they quickly became best friends. Jeff knew he wanted to get married and have kids—and his patriarchal blessing said as much. After a couple years of their friendship, Sarah was preparing to go on a mission herself. But suddenly they went from being best friends to getting married, without really dating. Sarah laughs, “I didn’t want to be one of those BYU couples who got engaged after four minutes, but essentially we got in the car one day and decided to date, and got out of the car engaged.”

Sarah had told Jeff first she had feelings, actually having fallen in love with him a year prior. At first, Jeff felt panicky—unsure of how to be a boyfriend, and he didn’t want to ruin the friendship, but says, “A lot of things happened that led to me falling in love with her.” He found her beautiful, and when she started completing her mission papers, he started having romantic inklings. “I had a series of small miracles happen that showed me we could get married,” says Jeff. He told Sarah he loved her but didn’t want to stop her from going on her mission. Sarah replied, “What mission?”

After meeting in 1995, they were married in 1997. While Jeff served in the Army, they lived in Washington, Germany, and Texas, before moving to Utah, where their kids completed high school. His military service was during the peak of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” and Jeff had become accustomed to not telling. In fact, he did not even tell Sarah about his attractions to men until after they’d been married for six months. He says, “I thought it might have just been a phase and would go away, that I just needed to take a leap like Indiana Jones stepping out into the chasm. But it didn’t go away (with getting married).” And a lot was on the line—at that time, one could get kicked out of BYU just for being gay. He could lose his scholarships and get kicked out of the military. And he really didn’t want to lose Sarah. But as things “were bubbling and that tight box called ‘Jeff’s sexuality’ opened and spilled out,” Jeff finally broke down and said, “Sarah, I need to tell you this—I’m attracted to guys.” Sarah asked, “So what’s the plan, are you leaving? Will we work this out?” They decided to see where it would go, just the two of them. They navigated it quietly for a couple years, with no additional support.

After their first son was born, they each confided in their best friends, and started to talk to their friends in the music department—many of them who understood themselves. “There wasn’t really a way for gay people to connect back then; all of us were afraid to speak openly.” Talking seemed to help, and over the years, they opened up to their parents and siblings. When Jeff got out of the army in 2014, they felt it was time to speak openly about their story. “We experienced a number of moments in the temple and felt sharing our story could be a gift back to God who’d shown us how to live in this world,” he says. In 2014, Jeff published an essay for North Star’s Voices of Hope website. Then they made a video together. (Jeff now spends most of his volunteer time working with Emmaus and Lift & Love.)

After their bishop attended a North Star conference with them in 2017, the bishop asked Jeff what the temperature was in their ward about LGBTQ+ topics. Jeff replied, “There is no narrative. The only comment I’ve ever heard at church was that, ‘Modern day Korihors are the gays and feminists’.” The bishop asked the Cases to facilitate a fifth Sunday lesson on LGBTQ+ latter-day saints in 2017, saying a number of ward members had grandkids coming out and he wanted people to be willing to talk. Jeff says, “That got a narrative going, and our ward has been accepting, loving, never hostile to our faces.” As there has been some turnover since Covid, they’re unsure if everyone knows, but Jeff does talk about LGBTQ+ issues in priesthood and Sunday School lessons from time to time.

 When Jeff’s essay was about to come out, Jeff and Sarah told their oldest kids (then 14 and 12) that he was gay, feeling it might still be too complex of a topic for their 8-year-old. Their 12-year-old replied, “I thought you loved mom.” Jeff confirmed that that was the case and made sure it was clear nothing in their family dynamic would be changing.

Many years later, it was their youngest, Moth (his preferred name), who chose to come out at age 15—first as pansexual, then lesbian, then nonbinary attracted to women, then as trans male. The Cases found an affirming therapist whom Moth adores, which Sarah says is “an important step to Moth being able to work through their transition in a safe environment.” Sarah continues, “Moth is interesting—he’d like to be seen as a fem boy. He likes makeup and dying hair, wearing skirts. He’s very fun.” Moth’s parents have been supportive during the medical process, which they did have to pause a few years ago when Utah passed a law that wouldn’t allow trans-affirming medical care for minors. Sarah says, “We’re trying to be present and supportive wherever Moth is at.” Their middle child, Danae, has also come out as bisexual, though doesn’t love labels.

The two younger Case children no longer attend church, and Jeff and Sarah have made it clear to them and others that, “Being gay and in a mixed-orientation marriage and active in the church is our path. You figure out your path, what works for you.” Jeff likes to view the long game, and has seen that the church offers value for him, but that their adult children need to find their own values related to spirituality. “That’s fine,” he says, “I don’t want to drive them away. I want them to still be around and look to us. They only get that if they sense we love them where and how they are.” The Cases asked all their kids to join them at church one year for Christmas Sunday, and one child had a near panic attack. Jeff now reflects, “Why’d we do that? Are we trying to punish them? I now say, ‘Come if you want. I want to know where and how you see yourself on a spiritual level and just be present with you wherever you’re at’.” As to what advice he’d give other parents, he quotes his friend Bennett Borden who says, “You only have influence on people you have access to.”  Jeff also advises parents to remember the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and to not panic if their kids come out—”Parents who panic often drive their kids away.” 

Jeff says, “Being in the closet as long as I was, I never heard the bad types of advice from well-meaning parents and leaders (that was common during those years). We want to show up for our kids, but let them do the work.” Their parenting approach has been to focus on teaching their kids to be good people and to move themselves as parents into more of a consultant role. He values how Elder Neal A. Maxwell spoke of the need for individualized curriculum.  “We’re not too worried about the box-checking outcomes; we don’t need our kids to be like the Israelites who checked so many boxes but didn’t recognize Christ when He came. Just because they don’t believe in our same religion doesn’t mean they can’t be spiritual or have a relationship with Deity—they just have to figure out what that means for them.”

As to how she experiences being in a mixed orientation marriage, Sarah says, “It comes with its own set of trials and obstacles, but every marriage has something others don’t have to deal with. I believe you choose your trial by who you marry; you choose your tough parts. We decided these are worth it. I also believe if he wasn’t gay, that might take away parts of him that are really important and lead him to being a sensitive person, considerate, kind. I love who he is and wouldn’t take that part away. Him being gay is an important part of Jeff.” On the other hand, Sarah and Jeff are quick to say it’s really important that people know they would never prescribe their path for others. Sarah says, “It works for us, but I’d never suggest it should work for anyone else. It’s not going to work for everyone.”

The Cases love to travel, and Sarah and Jeff just completed a 3,400-mile road trip during which Jeff visited his 50th state right before turning 50. It was a long and winding road (or roads) that not everyone may experience, much like their journey together, but it’s one they’ve decided to keep navigating together.

LINKS:

Jeff’s presentation at Gather Conference 2023

Jeff and Sarah’s “Voices of Hope” video

DR. TYLER LEFEVOR

Dr. Tyler Lefevor has learned how to transform his pain into results. His trauma into a way to reframe and evaluate. His research into a love letter to his former self. After completing his doctorate in psychology from the University of Miami and a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford, Tyler now conducts his research from a lab at Utah State University, where he works as a professor, while also operating a small private practice. Four years deep in a ten year research study on the longitudinal happiness and religious affiliation trends of LGBTQ+ people raised in the LDS faith, some of Tyler’s findings thus far are surprising, and some on par with common presuppositions: 

• LDS, LGBTQ+ people who stay in the church are not necessarily less happy than those who leave. (While this finding “gobsmacked” Tyler, he finds it empowering that people find ways to happiness regardless of their status.)

• Four years after coming out, queer and trans LDS members are overwhelmingly less religious than they were prior, and every three years, most queer LDS members reevaluate and step away in some form.

• Younger members of the church leave much faster than those in their 50s-60s+ who often were raised with different dogma and as a result are more likely to be in mixed orientation marriages with children, and to have built a life around the church.

• People who religiously de-identify typically suffer psychologically for it during the process as they seek to find their personal coherence and community, though they are not worse off at the end of the day.

• Parents who prioritize openness, communication, and love during their children’s coming out process rather than overemphasizing their political and ideological identities enjoy stronger relationships and more connectivity with their children.

• While it is typical for queer kids to leave, and leaving proves to be a hard process, most in the study who left the church find ways to create meaningful, beautiful lives that “just look differently.”

Finding a diverse survey pool was of course a challenge for Dr. Lefevor’s study. He had to work much harder to recruit more conservative LGBTQ+ folks to participate. Not surprisingly, of the 1,000 LDS bishops his team cold called to request participation, they found it was bishops who had more personal proximity to an LGBTQ+ loved one who were more open to participating.

Proximity to Tyler grants a peek into a life that finds him waking up religiously at 5am every day, a dedicated pattern not surprising of PhD level scholar types. Tyler loves the gym and working out and has run four marathons and one Spartan race. He and his husband Brock frequently hike together, and love to spend time in the kitchen cooking. They have a fun, robust group of friends who recently joined them for Brock’s drag-themed birthday party where each of their friends dressed up as one of the drag names Brock has playfully created for himself.

In his current private practice, Tyler mostly treats patients identifying as queer, trans and nonbinary, and their families. As Tyler identifies as a cis-het queer man and has stepped away from the institutional LDS church, the recent clarification in the handbook regarding LDS trans members didn’t personally affect his day to day. Yet in his office and beyond, he sees a vast community who is hurting.

Recently interviewed by CNN about the policy shifts, Tyler said the updated policies are “really unfortunate” as they reduce the liberties local church leaders take in their interpretation of church policies.

“This is kind of the church’s way of saying, ‘No, this is how we want you all to do it’,” said Tyler. “The greatest harm is in the implication for trans members of the church just saying, ‘We really don’t want you here, please leave, (and) if you’re going to be here, you have to conform to these really high level of expectations on how you present yourself. I think that’s the damaging part of these new (updates).”

That being said, Tyler has taken concerted steps in his own life to not be defined by other’s actions. “I don’t want to see myself as a victim of how people treat me. I’d rather draw appropriate boundaries and work toward being who I want to be.” Tyler has learned to exude patience in his dealings with others and give those close to him space when they need more time to wrap their heads around new information. This has meant anticipating and accepting the fear and confusion some in his family of origin showcase every time he takes a new step away from the “anticipated LDS path,” which for Tyler has included not attending church anymore and marrying his husband, Brock, three years ago. “‘These steps have brought on moments of pause, reflection, and ultimately an attempt by all for understanding and growth.”

Working to create change that will make the world better for future generations, Tyler posits it’s “the systems of power in an institution perpetuating the cis-het normative” that direct him where to point his rage. “It’s not my family. If I can channel it at the right source, I can try to bring love to my family rather than forcibly changing their way of thinking.” He recognizes his own desire to have married likely stemmed from his family-centric upbringing. In reference to the LDS faith’s lack of support for marriages like Tyler’s and Brock’s, he says, “On the other side, I hold the power systems of it all accountable. It’s not fair and shouldn’t be like this. We shouldn’t have to experience such a burden to come out; we have to accept people’s experiences as their own. How can we make a world where this can happen?”

After months of scribbling, “I’m going to tell him tonight” in his journal, 15-year-old Tyler stood outside his dad’s office door when he first told him he liked men’s bodies. His dad asked if he wanted to work out more. Tyler replied, “Yes, that’s it. I want to work out more.” Tyler continues, “And then we left it there for a decade.” Soon after, he told a bishop, who asked, “Are you acting on these feelings?” Tyler replied no. The bishop said, “Good.” Tyler says, “It was awkward, shameful. No one outwardly threatened rejection; they were just people upholding the heteronormative world view. And they collectively whisked away my queer identity for a decade.” 

After being born in Salt Lake City, Tyler says he experienced joy growing up between Los Angeles County, Colorado Springs, and West Jordan, Utah. He was raised in the LDS faith with four siblings, and “grew up the perfect golden child who loved my family and the church environment.” He went to BYU, had a great time on his mission, served as Elders’ Quorum president for three years, and for a year-and-a-half, dated a woman (who remains one of his best friends and who performed the marriage for Tyler and his husband). She was the first individual in Tyler’s life to whom he confessed he had “same-sex attraction,” later figuring and assuring his family he would just handle it the way much talked about LDS gay men like Josh Weed and Ty Mansfield did in mixed orientation marriages. There were times in their relationship that Tyler’s girlfriend would ask why Tyler didn’t cuddle with her during a movie. Tyler’s reply: “I didn’t know you wanted that.”

He continues, “It took me a couple years to see attraction is supposed to provide the glue between people wanting to build a relationship and connection.” Fraught with his lack of physical feelings, the two ended up breaking up, and it took some time for Tyler to vocalize what he was experiencing. As he became more open and filmed a “Voices of Hope” video, the ripples complicated his parents’ lives as more of their friends started to know. 

Tyler now deeply appreciates the core level of his family dynamic, which he credits the LDS church for instilling. “My family’s commitment to our connection has kept me from rejecting the church entirely.” He’s clear to state that for him, “Mormonism is a cultural connection, not my religion. I’ve reclaimed the word in a sense regarding my identity because my family has stayed engaged in this interpersonally—a process that’s made it impossible for me to fully say the church or Mormons are bad because the church has worked so deeply well for my family and their spouses. I had to reconcile that it can work so well for others while not working so well for me.” While he’s observed the fear-driven thought train that guides many, Tyler concludes, “Who am I to say you need to dissemble your whole world view when your world views give so much? Maybe it’s better to say, how can you adjust your world view?”

When he was trying to figure out his own life, Tyler sensed immense purpose and meaning in studying how LDS-raised LGBTQ+ understood their orientation and faith, thus launching his study. He found there was no comparable research out there to the decade-long study he has now since begun, filled with questions and data “26-year-old Tyler was dying to know.”  

With the many queer and trans LDS clients Tyler works with, he’s seen it also takes them time to address their entire world view and make changes. “It’s the same for cis-het individuals meaningfully trying to grapple with this. To completely confirm and accept someone—some aren’t ready for it; it’s too much. Too devastating. It’s a more realistic and better way to hope they might sit with you and hear you and spend time in discomfort in a way that in the long run leads to change.” A wise and patient answer from a man who is accustomed to waiting for results.

CAYSEN CRUM

Content warning: suicidal ideation 

He was the quarterback of his high school’s football team. The homecoming king and the prom king. He served in student government, did a musical, learned several instruments, played five sports, earned his associates degree while still in high school, and quickly advanced to Assistant to the President status on his LDS mission. Never wanting to draw attention to himself for anything unbecoming, Caysen Crum earned his nickname, “Mr. Perfect.” He felt, “If I did everything exactly right, no one would suspect otherwise.”

 Along the way, Caysen dated girls—a lot of them. But the majority of his dates were with girls from out of town, where it was easier to limit physical contact. He only kissed one girl in high school, often presenting the excuse he was preparing to serve a mission. On his mission, Caysen promised God he would be exactly obedient if God would make him straight. But like so many who have tried before, Caysen learned that perfect obedience does not undo what he’d known about himself since 12-years-old. 

As a tween, Caysen discovered that his attractions leaned toward males, but he convinced himself boys were just admirable and he wanted to be like them—buff, handsome, tall. He brought it to his parents’ attention at this young age, telling them he wasn’t sure if this meant he was gay. Caysen feels his parents “did the best they could,” but remembers his mom saying the day of that revelation was one of the hardest of her life. Witnessing his parents’ reaction, Caysen determined he never wanted to cause another person to feel that way, so “Mr. Perfect” was born—a young man who tried everything to not be gay.

In the plea bargain phase of his mission to New Hampshire (French speaking), Caysen only told three companions about his orientation. While respectful, they each responded with more of an apologetic, “Oh, I’m sorry.” While he didn’t struggle with morality issues on his mission, he would wake up after having dreams that brought on shame as well as the constant reminder he would need to address this. Caysen had already developed a love for Jesus Christ prior to his mission, but says on his mission was where he gained a relationship with God and learned to really follow spiritual promptings.

About three weeks before he returned from New Hampshire, Caysen asked his mom to pray for him because he knew he’d really struggle coming home. But he kept the reason discreet. When he arrived, he found himself feeling jealous and bitter of his family’s adoration for his younger sister’s boyfriend turned fiancée as they celebrated his birthday and their engagement. Observing how easy it came for his family to do that, he wasn’t sure he’d ever get the same thing in return, which would often put him in dark moods.

Thus, Caysen threw himself onto Mutual (the app), trying to date girls. He had his first girlfriend in college who he says was “an angel.” After four and a half months of dating, she told him she felt like she was a checkbox item on his to do list. He couldn’t argue that and thanked her for her patience as he’d told her he had some things to work through. He wasn’t ready to admit to more quite yet—even to himself. (She is now happily married and the two remain friends.)

 A short while later, Caysen met a fellow runner who he presumed was gay. He would try to coax it out of him on long runs, with questions like, “So… who are you dating?” One day, Caysen felt ready to tell him he was (also) attracted to men. Their short, simple friendship eventually blossomed into a relationship. Caysen says, “I remember kissing him and finally being able to understand why people want to date.”

Caysen battled complex feelings internally over the next year-and-a-half as he experienced both pain and growth. Passionate about humanitarian work and travel, in the summer of 2022, Caysen returned from being an HXP counselor in Hawaii. He had a heartfelt, bitter conversation with God the whole 40 minutes home, crying “What do you want from me?” Caysen needed an outlet but had told no one besides his bishop about the relationship with the runner. Caysen was called in to meet with a stake presidency member, and was sure he was getting excommunicated. Instead, the leadership shared they wanted YSA to serve on their high council and were considering Caysen to be ordained to a High Priest so he could serve in that capacity.

Struggling with the second part of the second great commandment, to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” Caysen’s self-loathing had soared. Yet he felt seen as the stake shared that the other person they had just called to the high council happened to be his favorite former mission trainer, who had always emanated a Christlike love for Caysen. While Caysen considered the call, he ultimately didn’t feel right accepting it due to the crippling shame he was battling. At the time, he considered how the Savior had possibly died of a broken heart. While he figured his own heart wasn’t broken in quite the same way as the Savior’s, he felt it had “cracked a lot.”

One Sunday, Caysen gathered with his family to witness his younger brother be set apart for his mission. Several family members asked about his new presumed stake calling. Caysen wasn’t willing to share it wasn’t happening. Instead, that night, he had made a plan to take his life as his bereft loneliness took its toll. His plan was to leave the family event to attend the viewing of a friend’s father who had passed, and while in transit, drive his car so fast, he could roll it and “pray it kills me.” As he walked out his parents’ door, Caysen looked back at them and had the thought that he’d hope they’d be ok. He was unsure if any of them had any idea of the pain he was enduring trying to be their perfect son.

 As he pulled out of the driveway in his car, Caysen heard his grandma’s voice say, “Caysen Marc, I’m coming with you.” While this was always the name his father’s mom had called him, she was deceased, and it was actually his maternal grandmother now stopping him in his tracks. She was barefoot and without her purse and still insisted on going to the viewing of a man she didn’t know with Caysen at that moment. And she wouldn’t take no for an answer. In reflection, Caysen knows she had help from beyond to keep him here. While standing in line at the viewing for an hour and a half, Caysen contemplated what his plan would have done to those around him, and decided “today is not the day.” His mom called the next day and suggested he should go to therapy.

Caysen spent eight months working with a therapist whose only agenda was for Caysen to find happiness. He went in saying, “I’m so hellbent on being straight, I’ll do whatever you want me to do.” Over time, he realized there were things he couldn’t change, including the attitudes of people around him. But he decided to live with grace and patience, recognizing, “It took me 21 years to wrap my head around this, so I’m willing to give others the time to get to the acceptance phase.”

Last summer, after serving as an HXP counselor in Africa, Caysen was housesitting at his parents’ Minersville, UT (near Beaver) home. While on the back porch one night contemplating, the dust settled and a weight lifted as Caysen allowed it to sink in that every detail of his life was crafted by God who had made him intentionally. Caysen realized, “He knew I was gay. I knew I was gay, and I knew God was at peace with that because He created me.” Caysen called his therapist to share the experience. The therapist replied, “I knew you’d get there.” They laughed and had a good conversation, then Caysen called his bishop who confirmed that was the path Caysen had been on all along.

 Having only told his sister at that point, Caysen then decided to come out to each of his family members, one by one—first his parents, then his brother and other younger sister, then extended family--an exhausting process with mixed results. While a student at Southern Utah University later that fall, Caysen boldly decided to honor the tradition to gather in front of the Old Sorrel horse statue and kiss someone to “become a true T-bird.” The person Caysen kissed this time was a man. His friends filmed the experience, and it was posted on Be Real. Caysen says, “You would have thought a bomb dropped, so many people came up to me and said, ‘Was that for real? Wait, you’re gay!?’ It was a shotgun way to be done with it and come out.” The news spread like wildfire in Beaver, and Caysen’s not sure his family appreciated that so much. But he figured, “What better way to say who I am than to kiss a boy?”

 Caysen marked last year as a year of miracles, with his Africa trip, college graduation, coming out and starting to date according to his attractions, finishing therapy, and finally understanding how God and the Savior really feel about him. He’s since had one serious relationship with a man and is now enjoying the dating scene while working as an exercise therapist at UVU and an American Fork hospital, helping patients recover from cardiac-based events, while he prepares to apply for med school. He also works as an onboarding specialist for an orthodontics company. Caysen’s ultimate dream is to pursue expedition medicine. As his patients are often much older than him, when he helps them get up to walk down the halls, shuffling their feet, Caysen often reflects how this is much like how the Savior helps us along.

Caysen’s often asked by coworkers how he navigates being LDS and gay. They prod, “If there was a button you could press that would turn you straight, would you?” Caysen has realized he prefers to “keep my Gethsemane,” this part of him that he has learned to love. Caysen believes in the idea that “the Savior kept his scars. That’s who he became.” He continues, “I believe in the Resurrection and that the Savior has the power to heal and fix every affirmity. If I get to the other side and this is taken away, who will I be? Who will I have come to love? I really don’t know what my future holds nor what my life will look like, day by day. But where I’m at now is where I need to be—a place where I have come to love myself, which has allowed me to more fully love and serve others.”

MICHAEL SOTO

In light of the recent publication of the new church handbook rules regarding transgender individuals, we wanted to re-share Michael Soto's story.  Michael was kind enough to include some words of encouragement to our trans members and their loved ones…

"To my transgender sisters, brothers, and siblings, our families, friends, and community members:

Every trans person has so much to offer this world, society, and the church. I know this feels like a rejection and loss for us right now, but the truth is, it is loss for the church community – because, without us, the church community is not complete, is not reflective of the full glory and diversity of God’s love and plan – because we are a part of that plan and fully live within God’s love.

These handbook changes tell me one very clear thing: the church is still learning how to care for and love transgender people as members.  But the good news is that this is our opportunity as trans people and our families and friends, to teach about trans people so that someday the Church can minister to and love us.  We can show the church through our actions what truly loving trans people looks like. Let’s put our shoulder to wheel and do everything we can to help our faith community grow and learn more about God’s love for all human beings."

-Michael Soto

Michael Soto’s is a name widely known and respected in the LGBTQ+ equality space. As the former director and now President of Equality Arizona, and as a political consultant for over 25 years intrinsically involved in the LGBTQ+ movement, Michael has watched the ebb and flow and now crux of policy change. After the Marriage Equality Act passed in 2015, Michael felt the pendulum swing personally as, in response, a new cultural war specifically targeting trans people has ignited across red states, with recently proposed and passed legislation causing increased polarization. As such, Michael is eager to tackle his newest endeavor—later this year, he'll be helping launch the Equality Campaign which will work with other equality groups at a national level to increase conversation, civil respect, and equality. 

With his generous, hearty laugh and impressive grasp of legislative history, Michael feels uniquely qualified to reach across the aisle and have these tough conversations. It doesn’t hurt that he himself identifies as a trans man and queer individual who knows what it’s like to have grown up in a conservative regional and religious environment before the internet, when the right terminology to describe how he had been feeling since he could walk was not within reach.

Born and raised in Mesa, Arizona, Michael’s parents were converts to the LDS faith. Growing up in suburban Mesa in the 80s and 90s, Michael recalls the word “gay” was only used in a bad way or when bullying. Michael didn’t hear the word “transgender” until he was an adult, but he always knew he was different. Sunday mornings were a fight as his house as his parents tried to force him into a dress for church. He’d wail, “This is horrible! I hate this,” knowing he was a boy. He now laughs that his parents found it “cute as a boy, less cute when I got older.” School was rough, as gender divisions were part of daily life. He resisted having to step into the “girl line,” next to the boy line to walk to lunch or recess. “Girl things” were of no interest to him. When Michael’s mom bought him a Barbie dream house for Christmas, he remodeled it, installing tile floors and painting the walls; but after that, he was done with it. For as long as he can remember, Michael knew he wasn’t a girl and vocalized it in word and attire. He recalls how the women in his family would say, “Someday, you’ll grow up, fall in love with a man, have babies, and be a wife and mother,” to which he’d reply, “Heck no!” And they’d retort that he would change his mind. Now, he jokes with them, “I didn’t change my mind, did I?” 

After graduating from Red Mountain High School in 1998, Michael took his hard-earned scholarship money to ASU. He’s now working on his third degree--a PhD in justice studies, which was also the focus of his master’s program. In his fourth year of his PhD program, Michael plans to analyze what’s happening in extreme movements with the current right wing authoritarian culture wars targeting trans people for his dissertation. “It’s so important to have a playbook for this stuff. Whether it’s the trans movement, or Jews in Nazi Germany, or immigrants, we know how to beat discrimination—we just need to rally the forces and educate people. I see a better path forward.”

Michael had once planned to study medicine, but at ASU, was the first trans person he knew of, and he observed how the campus was not a safe place for people like him. He was harassed in classes, where professors refused to call him anything other than his birth name and otherwise belittled him. “It was not fun,” he says. Searching for a place where he might not be attacked, he decided to major in women and gender studies, which turned out to be a great fit. As Michael had navigated what he calls his “drag years” of junior high school through his freshman year of college and observed the cultural punishment and penalties for trying to be who he was, he now started to notice gay couples on campus holding hands He says, “I thought it was really interesting and terrifying, watching from around the corner—I thought, who are these people?” Eventually, Michael found there were other LGBTQ+ people like him on campus. He went to a social group where the woman leading the meeting was “very tall.” At 5 feet tall, Michael says most people are tall to him, but he watched as this woman came out as trans to the group and defined something entirely foreign to Michael until that point. “As soon as I met a trans person in this world, I knew that’s who I am. It was exciting.” 

But even in the LGBTQ+ space, Michael observed that trans was not a popular way to identify. He experienced backlash from some of his new gay friends who would tell him to “just be a butch woman.” Michael says, “It was not a convenient choice to come out and be who I am—I sacrificed a lot to be authentic and dealt with a lot of rejection from my university and friends, except my best friend, Brie, who always supported me (and is pictured in this post with Michael at her wedding). I had to pave my own path, and trust my own instincts and vision for my life. It has served me well to live a happy and authentic life. The best decision I’ve made was to pursue that medically and live authentically.”

While his family members initially struggled for years to understand Michael’s transition, he says, “They all get it now; it’s congruent and makes sense.” Michael’s mother (who he now lives with and helps care for) says she wishes she had had more resources back then so that Michael could have had a happier childhood without so much interior struggle. Michael says his mom is “so sweet and now can’t refer to me as anything but her son in childhood.” He credits his mom’s teachings and example of dedication, undying love, and hard work to making him the man he is today. He says, “I want to make a world where everyone can be respected for who they are; all should have the same protections under law. The same right to freedom. The things that make this country incredible in the course of human events include being able to be true to who you are and live life according to the dictates of your own conscience.” 

As a member of the LDS church, Michael also believes, “All should worship the way they see fit, and at the same time enjoy the same rights to live their lives as fully realized humans. I’m working to get us closer to the ideas that all deserve freedom and equal protections under the law. Those things make us stronger.” While he enjoys his work, Michael says it’s hard, especially in seasons like this one. “My own experience has served me well in that I know most Americans just want others to live their lives, go about their business, contribute to society, and be people. We don’t need to demonize each other because we look differently. Our various faiths, genders, who we love, our race--all makes us stronger as a community.”

Michael struggled to connect to the LDS faith as a youth as so many of the gender-segregated practices and goals taught didn’t connect for him. He says, “I knew my future wasn’t as a woman, and I’m not good at faking things.” But as a pre-transitioned 19-year-old, Michael faced a turning point. He says, “I needed answers, I needed to see my life for itself, and I just couldn’t envision a future at that time. It felt so wrong, like such a lie.” While in Italy at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, while praying near the St. Peter statue, Michael felt God’s love for the first time after asking what God wanted for his life. He felt God say, “I made you to be exactly who you are.” Michael says, “That was such a powerful moment for me, not to just be who I am but to also find my faith…I feel really lucky to be trans. It’s opened every door that’s led to my happiness—my career, being seen for who I am and loved by my family and community, by God—all of that came through being a trans person.” While Michael doesn’t talk a lot about the church as he works politically with religious organizations and feels his call to focus on governmental change will hopefully trickle down, Michael values how the church instilled leadership qualities and the importance of having a moral compass as a person of worth and character. 

He also says it’s fueled his fire for social justice work. Michael says, “I love the church, and I know it’s flawed. I also love our country, and also, it’s deeply flawed. People ask, ‘How can you affiliate with a church that’s not as affirming with its policies?’, and I say, ‘It’s about the journey.’ I also work in policy, and primarily with institutions who need to know LGBTQ+ people more specifically, so governments, churches, and universities can see our full humanity and incorporate kindness into making love more tangible.” Michael recognizes that local church leadership can largely determine the experience a queer member has, and is always hopeful the church will prioritize the commandments to love God and love others first. He says, “So many trans and LGBTQ people have so much offer this institution. It’s always my prayer and hope they’ll continue to honor our differences and appreciate the common ground… I have a lot of faith at the end of the day that God’s going to open the path to let LGBTQ+ people feel fully loved and valued as individuals.”

Michael identifies as queer and dates people “of any gender, race, faith, or walk of life in general.” He has been blessed to have had several loving partners who he says made him a better person, in the past, and says he’d love to find someone who shares his beliefs, and most of all, “knows themselves and is passionate about something in life.” In the meantime, Michael enjoys time with his pit bulls, FDR and Teddy (named after you guessed it), and his mom’s chihuahua, Tucker, who at 11 pounds is the boss of everyone at home. He also has close relationships with his two half-brothers’ and step-brother’s families, which include a niece and two nephews who he adores. “I have lots of wonderful family and family of choice who’ve become family.”

In his field, Michael’s studied that after society “bought into” the idea that gay marriages actually don’t weaken or devalue heterosexual marriages, the far right conducted some intentional messaging testing which revealed only about 23% of society knew they knew a trans person. “This created an opening for some of these groups like Alliance for Freedom and Moms for Freedom and Eagle Forum to organize together to chip away some of the legal advances the LGBTQ+ movement was making, and roll back and prevent future.” Michael quotes Brene Brown’s, “It’s hard to hate up close” when speaking of these fear-based agendas that often start with bathroom bills. “All these bills use the same language…they are part of an effort to roll back rights based on fears. Fear is a powerful motivator. But the best way to get rid of the fears is to open up. My life is an open book—it’s really boring actually. I work a lot, go to school a lot, spend time with my dogs and family. It’s not too exciting, but I find it great. Most of us, when you look at our lives—we’re just putting on our pants one leg at a time and making dinner for our families.”

Since 2019, Michael’s observed a trend of “we win one, lose two, then lose two, win one. The medical bans around trans youth and kids, the ‘don’t say gay’ bills… they’re kind of crazy. And they don’t stand up judicially, and are typically reversed for violating personal liberty, like the ‘Don’t say gay’ Florida bill was recently. But even when repealed, just seeing them pass is hard for a lot of people to cope with. LGBTQ+ people just want to live our lives; there is nothing harmful about our goals. We’ll get through it in a positive way, but we have to do the work.” And for those who are still living in fear, Michael affirms, “I don’t want anyone to be trans who isn’t trans. I just want trans people to be able to be safe, own a home, and have a job. These laws are trying to unnecessarily harm and it’s cruel in a fair civil society. It’s a scary moment, but we’ll beat this moment.”

THE GUSTAV-WRATHALL FAMILY

Many know John as the former president and first full-time executive director of Affirmation. With Erica Munson, he recently cofounded Emmaus, a non-profit that focuses on promoting better ministry to and alongside LGBTQ individuals and their families in and adjacent to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Church leaders everywhere from SLC headquarters to his home stake in Minneapolis, MN have consulted John as he freely shares with them the realities faced by his peers likewise walking the LDS-LGBTQ path.

Imagine visiting your parents and agreeing to attend their ward in Springville, Utah. There, people know things about your family, about you – including the fact that you’re gay and have been married to your partner for over a decade. Imagine sitting in Sunday School while a man we’ll call Bob rises to declare that the gay rights movement was inspired by Satan and “wo unto those who call evil good and good evil!” You want to leave -- of course you do, but somehow you stay through the rest of the lesson with your parents. Your white-knuckled mother suggests she can leave with you if you need to, but you have tapped into that inner voice -- that familiar presence in your life who has continually beseeched you and brought you yet again to this point. In fact, the Spirit has clocked you again this time as you received yet another prompting like the many, many before that have kept you coming back. The Spirit tells you: “Bob doesn’t know you. They don’t know you. But I know you and I am proud of you. You’re where you’re supposed to be.”

This is what it feels like to be John Gustav-Wrathall, a man who humbly endures the quagmire of knowing what it feels like to be LGBTQ in an LDS tribe, and vice versa. He’s endured many experiences like this over his 58 years and he fully acknowledges that the church is not always the healthiest or safest place for people like him. John first recognized his attractions in the fifth grade. At 14, he looked up the word “homosexual” in the dictionary and knew it applied to him. He quietly tried to process this. It was the 1970s, so he turned to Spencer W. Kimball’s book, The Miracle of Forgiveness, in an attempt to “overcome his sexuality” – a hope that lasted for many years, and ultimately proved harmful, when he realized he couldn’t actually change this part of him. John came out for the first time to God through prayer at the age of 23, where in a divine experience, he felt perfect love, understanding, and acceptance and was told there was nothing he needed to change or overcome. Shortly after, he came out to his parents. Their initial reaction sent him back into the closet with them. Then in 1988, at age 25, John committed to a life of complete integrity and came out publicly. Sharing who he was with all who mattered was “a profoundly spiritual experience” that helped drive him to write editorials in Minneapolis-based papers, and to become an activist at the University of Minnesota where he helped organize and run the campus association of LGBTQ+ student organizations. John researched and wrote monographs on LGBTQ history that analyzed historical sources on the gay experience, one of which was published in the Journal of American History. His book, Take the Young Stranger by the Hand, a study of the gay male experience in the 150-year history of the YMCA, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1998. John laughs, “So you could say that from my late 20s, I was pretty much out to the whole world.”

In 1986, John was ex-communicated from the LDS church; but in 2005, he had a powerful spiritual experience in which he felt the Lord calling him back. By this time, he had been married to his partner Göran for 14 years. Together the two, who both work in the legal field, fostered a gay son from the age of 15 who was placed with them by a foster care agency that hoped they could be positive role models for him. It was actually Goran (who is not LDS) who encouraged John to follow the promptings that led him to a place of greater integrity in relation to his testimony of the gospel. John recalls he had an “argument with the Lord that lasted about a month as he tried to explain to the Lord why he couldn’t come back;” but ultimately, he gave in. Göran did worry about John’s mental health, as he had been suicidal during his last year of prior activity in the church... Göran also worried the church might try to drive a wedge between them. But John was embraced by his bishop, who welcomed him back while also maintaining full respect for John’s family situation. He let John know he was there to support him in his growth as a child of God and disciple of Christ and “he encouraged me to live as much of the gospel as I could within the constraints placed upon me,” John recalls. John is not able to partake of the sacrament nor have an official calling, but otherwise has been quite active in his ward, as all his bishops and stake presidents since have likewise encouraged. While Göran might not be the biggest fan of the church or organized religion in general, he loves John’s ward members, who have embraced them both.

“I struggle because I totally understand why people feel the need to leave – I’ve heard so many really awful stories of how people have been treated. There are different ways you can be in a relationship with the church. My way works for me. None of my bishops have seen me as any less.” In fact, several high-ranking church leaders have invited him (and Göran) to their offices on multiple occasions to inquire about the realities he and others in the LGBTQ community face as they try to pursue their spiritual paths. And John tells them: “This is why people leave… this is where the pain is… why people just can’t do it.” John says, “I don’t tell them how to do their job, but I try to provide as much information as I can. They genuinely want to know. I think sometimes it falls on us to do the work, and this is one way things in the church might change.” John recognizes the unique strength it takes to fill his role and has worked to make his a ministry that helps all along their path, wherever it may lead.

John says, “For me, being out of the closet as a believing Latter-day Saint is every bit as much a matter of integrity as being out of the closet as a gay man. Göran understands that and nothing brings out the papa bear in him more than when members of the LGBTQ community have attacked me or criticized me because of my engagement with the church…” While it hasn’t always been easy, John recognizes how each of his life experiences has led him to this point. Including that encounter many years ago with Bob. John did stay in that Sunday School class, and went to priesthood meeting after with his dad. He is grateful he did as he says Bob himself actually delivered a priesthood lesson that changed John’s life: “Bob said, ‘It takes a half hour to perform all the saving ordinances available in the restored gospel, but it takes a lifetime to truly become Christlike.' That lesson became a road map for my life. I realized that even if I could not receive the ordinances now, I could work to become more Christlike. The Lord kept me there for that lesson. And I learned it from someone who I thought hated me, and didn’t understand me. The Lord told him to teach this to me.” After church that day, John’s father said he was going to have a talk with Bob. John agreed that might be a good idea, but to “make sure you tell Bob how grateful I am for his lesson…” Fast forward two years. John again visited his parents’ ward, and again, who’s the teacher? Bob. But this time Bob’s message was different. With tears in his eyes, Bob taught, “We as a church have failed our LGBTQ members. We have a lot of work to do. We need to listen to and understand them, and we need to let them know they belong.” John recognizes that kind of change in perspective happens from a number of life experiences and interactions over a long period of time. Perhaps the conversation his dad initiated had something to do with it. Perhaps Bob had a moment when he recognized that many people like John stopped coming altogether -- or that a few people like John kept coming back to imperfect congregations so that they might also tap into the feeling of perfect love as embodied by the Savior - a love that is equally theirs. John recognizes it’s extremely difficult to tolerate the (former) Bobs of the world, and also, that it takes a lot of work to consistently tune into the communication channel with God so that hurtful comments don’t drive you out. But he knows that he belongs in the Lord's Church, that he needs to be there for the same reasons as everyone else.

 John Gustav-Wrathall will never forget the day he came home from school at age 15 and his mom greeted him at the door with tearful words: “President Kimball has received a revelation.” It was 1978, and even now when John re-reads the Official Declaration 2 of the LDS church that finally removed all restrictions regarding race, what most resonates with him is its acknowledgment of the impact of the faithfulness of Black members like John’s friend and mentor Darius Gray, who helped organize the Genesis Group, an official outreach of the Church that supported black members of the Church both before and since the 1978 revelation on priesthood.

Now seeking to minister to and with LGBTQ individuals and their families over four decades later, John draws inspiration from the opening words of the aforementioned declaration: The Book of Mormon teaches that “all are alike unto God,” including “black and white, bond and free, male and female” (2 Nephi 26:33). John feels the only way for him to do this work is by “going in through the front door.” Though he has frequently met with Church leaders — including bishops, stake presidents, seventies and even an apostle — to discuss with them the realities faced by LGBTQ members of the Church, John doesn’t lobby church leaders to change doctrine. Rather, he believes that if change is to come about, it will come as he and other LGBTQ Church members exercise faith, and gather and serve with their fellow Saints.

Emmaus, the ministry he founded a little over a year ago with Erika Munson, was inspired by the story found in Luke 24 in which two disciples are joined by a man along their walk to Emmaus, as they mourn the loss of Jesus after the crucifixion. They invite the man to dine with them, whereupon they recognize him as the resurrected Savior. “We see our ministry as a journey in which gradually our eyes are opened, and we see the Savior in our midst,” says John. Emmaus focuses on fostering better ministry in the church with a two-part mission: 1 – to support individuals in exercising faith and living the gospel to the best of their ability; and 2 – to work with church leaders and members to foster the best possible ministry to and with LGBTQ individuals and their families in and adjacent to the Church. This means helping people to understand the harsh realities faced by LGBTQ members, including why most leave as well as why some choose to stay. He says he’s never met a church leader not interested in having that conversation.

Far too often, Church members, intentionally or unintentionally, ostracize LGBTQ members. But John feels every ward can and should be a safe and welcoming place for LGBTQ individuals, whether in or out of a relationship, whether or not they’ve transitioned. When John began attending his ward in Minneapolis, his bishop took the approach that his responsibility was to help John live a more spiritual life, to become more Christlike, regardless of his relationship or membership status. His bishop didn’t see his role being to tell John what to do or what decisions to make, but to be a friend and a resource to John in his efforts to be a better disciple.

“It is so crucial to be fully supportive of LGBTQ people wherever they are,” says John. “I understand why many choose to step away from the church. I did myself for almost two decades.” But at this point in his life, while still living with his husband of 30 years and also showing up each week at his local LDS congregation, whose members he says fully embrace him, John says, “I believe the way things change in relation to LGBTQ stuff is that those of us who are LGBTQ Saints live our faith to the best of our ability, stay close to the Church, and share our light, doing the best we can within the constraints placed upon us.”

A new development John has observed in the past year has been how many leaders at all levels are showing greater interest in the problem of faith crises in general. John has studied the science of faith development, with a particular interest in how the challenges of faith development play out in the lives of LGBTQ individuals as they become aware of their sexuality or gender identity and then as they make sense of and incorporate it into their identity and social relationships. 

“LGBTQ youth are raised in the same world, but their experience will be different than those in a hetero-cisgender society,” says John. Referring to James Fowler’s classic study, Stages of Faith John explains, “Both LGBTQ and heterosexual individuals initially express faith in the ‘authoritarian conforming stage' by trying to conform their life and belief system to what authority tells you. Many live comfortably in this stage of faith development for the rest of their lives. But for a variety of reasons, many people reach a point where this doesn’t work for them, and they begin to consider the ways that their beliefs might be different from their peers. They question authority. This ‘individuation’ stage is critical to developing a mature faith, because it’s the stage where you really make your testimony your own. After that, there is an ‘integration’ stage, where we take all the things we’ve learned on our own, as free thinkers, and integrate them back into the community. We see the value of our individual experience and we also see the value of Church doctrine. With that awareness, our desire is to serve the community and strengthen the whole.”

John continues, “In the church, we do really well with the ‘authoritarian conforming’ stage. When individuals then enter the ‘individuation’ stage, there’s a tendency to assume people are losing their faith. But really, they are deepening their faith. They are strengthening it. It’s in questioning that faith becomes tried and true. We tend to ostracize folks in this stage, because we see it as rejection of the faith. If you’re LGBTQ or a family member of an LGBTQ individual, this individuation ‘faith crisis’ often coincides with the coming out process. That intensifies it and creates even harsher disconnects with the community. But this stage of faith development doesn’t need to become a crisis. We don’t need to lose people at this stage. Really, this is the stage where faith gets really interesting My hope is we can figure out ways to nurture people through those phases without having to cut ties from the church. A faith crisis shouldn’t have to by synonymous with people leaving the church.”

What are the best tools for LGBTQ members to stay? Affirmation did a 2016 study under John’s direction in which they surveyed 1400 people identifying as LGBTQ or as a family member of an LGBTQ member. They found that before the 2015 policy, about 50% of the people they surveyed were active in the church. Of those who were active before the policy, about 50% more left after the policy. A month after the policy, John met with his bishop who estimated that 60% of his ward were struggling as a result of the policy. In looking at the data gathered in the survey, while John understood why many were leaving the Church over this, he wondered why did those who stay, stay? John said, “In the study, if we looked at those who had stayed, we found that about half of them expressed some level of mistrust in church leaders. But 100% of this group characterized their relationship with God as ‘very strong’.” John’s takeaway was that if you have a relationship with God, it gives you a kind of resilience in dealing with Church. Leaders can be imperfect and lose our trust, but it won’t be a decisive thing for you to leave.

He also found that individuals who trusted themselves, who believed in their own goodness and in their ability to make good decisions in their lives were also more likely to stay in the Church. “It can’t be the Church vs. Me, and the church wins out, and I suppress who I am. If we do that, we can’t have a healthy relationship with the Church. You have to affirm yourself and believe in your own goodness. You have to believe God is there and have patience. I have a mental practice where if I pray about something and don’t get an answer, I teach myself to wait. Be still my soul. Hang in there. Eventually I get my answer. But I have to maintain that connection…” John says, “So often over the years, I’ve observed people come out. They and their families do a painful dance with church, hoping for more love or support, hoping for change. And then, a year or two later, they leave. I don’t know if it’s possible for people to stay. But if there was any way for them to do that, and to do it with faith and patience and hope, those individuals and families become sources of light for everyone. The good news is it doesn’t take many of us. 9 out of 10 could leave; but if 1 in 10 stay and follow principles of loving self and loving God – if it inspired them to love their neighbors even when they’re unkind, even when they lack understanding, then that 1 in 10 could make a real difference.

 “What if we could give LGBTQ people the right kind of support, so instead of experiencing trauma as they enter that stage of individuation and questioning, they could experience growth as valued members of the community?” John asks. “I don’t know what the future holds. I don’t know exactly how God is going to work all of this stuff out. But I know that it will work out, and I want to be there when it happens. And we all deserve to be here. Actually, the Church can’t be everything that it is supposed to be without us.”

SHANE CARPENTER

Content warning: suicidal ideation, depression

On social media, Shane Carpenter radiates a bright smile, a generous heart, and buoyant enthusiasm. His posts are vulnerable, poetic, wide-reaching. One even went viral within 30 minutes as on March 23, 2019, on his IG @iamnotashaned, he was the first person he knew of to come out as gay online while actively serving as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was an impression he felt inspired to follow—to offer others hope. 

In contrast, Shane Carpenter’s high school journal collection reads like a depressing anthology. The notebooks were his means to survival. The one place he could deposit his constant self-loathing just enough to take the edge off in order to keep going. When he revisits those pages today, Shane’s quick to close the books. He almost doesn’t recognize or even remember the person he used to be. It’s painful.

As a member of a family with a robust history of neurodivergence and mental health struggles, including extreme ADHD, Shane has to work hard to retrieve memories of a time before the depression invaded the driver’s seat. He recalls recognizing at age 8 or 9 that he felt a unique attraction to a childhood male friend of his and his twin brother. “He was beautiful; even as a child I recognized something I was drawn to. I was not particularly drawn to other kids, especially girls.” For Shane, there was no aha moment in his youth where he determined he was gay; he says he “just always knew.”  

Heading into high school, Shane and his twin brother were friends with the other LDS youth in their Texas town. But he knew better to vocalize the attractions that only increased as he observed the friends around him becoming more entrenched in dating culture and asking girls to dances. Shane says, “There was little to no appeal for me in going other than having a good time with friends. I also never considered the idea of wanting to have an experience that would validate my feelings, because I didn’t see any reflections in my social life or on TV and media that showed me the feelings I was having could be real.” Shane adds there was no Disney romance or character in which he saw himself; at the time, he didn’t even know any members of the LGBTQ+ community. 

As he got older, Shane became more entrenched in a depressive cycle, feeling unworthy of others’ care and in general, unsuccessful in life compared to other kids. His mom (who has shared her story in this forum before) says this is the time she lost her son because Shane was “more or less a different person.” He became very secluded and antisocial, and more than once considered how taking his life seemed very appealing. But that just made his guilt worse as he’d realize, “I didn’t have abusive parents or anything. I had such good family and friends, and my ward and charter school were fine for the most part as I had no clear bullies.” The fact his life seemed pretty good on paper made Shane even more depressed, as he'd think, “Why do I hate myself when there’s not a good reason to? Why do I want to die when there are so many reasons to live?” But he felt blinded by his self-loathing as to what exactly those reasons were. Shane now says he has tens if not hundreds of journal entries from that time he calls a depression manifest. It feels like a blur.

During his senior year, Shane’s dad lost his job which required the family to move to Utah to be closer to family and new tech opportunities. While he knew he’d miss his childhood home, Shane appreciated the chance to start fresh among a sea of people who didn’t know the Shane he loathed in the world he left behind. He met one friend that year, the one girl besides his mom he was able to open up to. She replied that she absolutely already knew he was gay and that and it didn’t make one bit of a difference to her. Shane felt a relief that he could now take up more space as himself, as he said he had tried for so many years to remain secluded and quiet because he felt he was “always kind of flamboyant, even if I didn’t want to be.”

When Shane graduated from high school, his depression followed him to college, where at BYU Idaho, during his second semester, Shane decided to come out of the closet. His mental health had plummeted even worse as he was no longer venting in his journals and expunging some of the darkness that pervaded him. The suicidal thoughts increased. But he now had a new friend and support system. In his first semester of college, Shane had walked into his new apartment and met one of his five roommates who had a quality that felt familiar. “Munchy” was sitting on the couch and during their first interaction said, “Hey, don’t take this the wrong way but you remind me so much of Sam Smith.” Shane definitely took that as a compliment and immediately knew he’d be able to be himself around Munchy. The two shared a love for Mario Cart, anime, books, and their shared religion, and ultimately, the two came out to each other. Both admitted neither was surprised. Shane says, “Neither of us was into each other; there was no romance present, but we both now had a friend who, despite having very different life experiences, could relate in this one life-changing way.”  

Shane considered a mission, as those at BYU Idaho do. Drawing from his undeniable faith in God’s love for him that he’d acquired over the three years he saved money to go to EFY, Shane knew he wanted to share that love with others. It was at EFY that Shane gained a weeklong witness that he was known for who he was and not a mistake but was intentional and that God was real and loved him,. But he knew he only wanted to serve as “all of me.” All the experiences Shane had had in the closet were miserable, except for his time at EFY. After relishing being able to be himself with his high school female friend and Munchy, he knew he didn’t want to go back into hiding. He drove home one weekend to Lehi to ponder on this and while listening to Demi Lovato’s cover of “Let It Go,” Shane had a powerful experience in which he knew it was time to shed his self-hatred. He felt and consumed the words, “You can be who I know you can be. You’ve always been that person; it’s just a matter of loving that person.”

After four hours of crafting a post he absolutely did not intend or want to share, Shane followed the prompting to come out publicly, knowing deep down that while it made him uncomfortable to do so, someone out there needed him to say it. He says, “Me coming out was not a surprise to anyone. But it was cool to get quite a few messages from people I knew who said my post made them feel seen and gain the confidence to love themselves or come out, if they felt they needed to.” 
When he met with his bishop to start his papers, he was touched how neither his bishop nor stake president viewed his orientation as a road block to serving. He recognizes many experience negative interactions with leaders lacking that proximity, but when Shane asked his bishop whether he should serve as an openly gay missionary, the bishop’s response was, “Why should we consider the idea of you not serving? It makes no sense. You want to increase your relationship with Jesus Christ and help others; I don’t need to think too much about this.”

It took six months for Shane’s paperwork to process, which turned out to be another blessing as the new mission president and his wife of Shane’s Anaheim, CA mission were the parents of a gay son themselves who’d been mistreated on his mission, causing them to commit to doing everything in their power to support, love and lift any LGBTQ+ missionaries in their field. All of Shane’s companions except two were supportive and kind about his orientation, and Shane was given numerous opportunities to help other missionaries around the world who reached out wanting advice for how best to communicate with LGBTQ+ friends wanting to hear more about the church. 

One day during their scripture study, Shane’s companion, who was his second trainer, felt impressed that they should pray to ask Heavenly Father to inspire them with the ideas and resources they’d need that day. Shortly after, Shane had an impression he needed to make a video about his experiences. He pushed this aside immediately, but the prompting lingered a second day, and his companion concurred if it was a prompting, he should follow it That was the day of Shane’s January 10, 2021 Facebook post that went viral within 30 minutes in which he introduced himself as an openly gay missionary. Within an hour, after thousands of views, Shane’s mission president called and said he had no problem with the video, but to give them a heads up so they could make sure to protect Shane if his safety became threatened.

“That post provided me the most incredible experience of my life to this day,” says Shane, who subsequently received messages from places including Japan, Canada, Brazil, Germany, and Thailand, from people who wanted to solicit his help in teaching their LGBTQ+ contacts, as well as closeted and/or prospective missionaries who were able to use Shane’s post as motivation to either come out themselves or to have the conversation with a church leader that they were indeed allowed to serve despite identifying as LGBTQ+. “Those first six months, I had more virtual meetings with LGBTQ+ individuals around the world than I did with the people I was teaching in person in California. That was everything to me.”

Two years post-mission, Shane is living with his family in Colorado, working as a wedding photographer and trying to save money for a place of his own. He serves in his YSA ward as an EQ teacher where he has on occasion shared relevant stories about being gay now and then. He also speaks at Northstar events and is always open to connecting with anyone who may be seeking a listening ear. Unsure of what his future holds, Shane maintains the faith that one day eternal blessings will make sense for him, though they don’t right now. He also feels that, “If the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is meant to be for everyone, it really needs to have a pew for everyone… I’m of the opinion that attending church is not just about my personal relationship with the Savior; but me attending and being vocal is maybe one small contribution to the church being able to grow and improve in regard to inclusivity. If everyone (like me) up and left, church would be pretty boring and dull. There’s a value to be found in LGBTQ+ individuals showing up on Sunday mornings and loving those around them, and showing we are meant to be there. Because Christ wants every single one of us to be there with Him. For me right now, that’s enough reason to go.”

THE MCCLELLAN FAMILY

Marion and David McClellan were initiated into the camp of parents who just go with it with their firstborn. Their oldest child, Anna, stomped around in moonboots and Yu-Gi-Oh t-shirts playing Pokemon and that’s just how things were, so they let her be her. Marion says, “The minute I wasn’t dressing her in floofy pink dresses anymore, she was instantly in basketball shorts and graphic t’s.” The McClellans operated off the assumption, “We just thought kids are however they came out.” So nine years later when their young son Ford was wearing Wicked Witch of the West costumes and aqua glitter butterfly flip flops or ruby red slippers, Marion says, “We just went with it.” Little did they know that decades later, Anna would discover the word “nonbinary” best described her gender identity, which immediately made complete sense to her husband, parents, and everyone else who has known and loved her over her 32 years. Anna being Anna paved the way for Ford’s journey when he later came out as gay in 2018, at age 16.

It happened one night while sitting on the couch listening to his mom’s playful prodding about the importance of getting his Duty to God award plan in place. Ford—typically the “most compliant and sweet kid in the universe who showed up a half an hour early every week to prep the sacrament”—snippily turned to his mom and said, “Mom, I’m gay and I don’t want to be Mormon anymore!” Marion says “stunned” and “shocked” are not strong enough words to describe the feeling that coursed through her body. Her first coherent thought was, “We couldn’t have a gay kid! We have FHE every week!” Marion had believed everything she was taught about gay people—that it was a choice. But somehow, she was able to harness these emotions with a force “that must have been from God.” Gentle words informed her reply: “We love you. We’ll walk with you on whatever path you choose. Your dad loves you. Do you need anything else because I need to go whip the cream for this party we’re having in 5 minutes?” Ford later confirmed that he premeditated the timing of his delivery, knowing his mom couldn’t completely lose it with company coming over.

Ford ran downstairs “like a cockroach” to be by himself, and Marion went into the kitchen to whip the cream (while bawling hysterically) for the party of people now approaching in four minutes. Somehow, she kept it together and later that night, approached her son to check on him and ask if he wanted to tell his dad or if he wanted her to do it.  Ford gave her permission to tell his dad. 

That night, David walked into their room to find Marion staring at the wall like a zombie. She blurted out, “Ford is gay and doesn’t want to be Mormon anymore,” the latter part of this sentence holding the more troubling truth for her. David replied, “Are you serious?” The look she returned confirmed it. David’s facial reaction made Marion glad Ford wasn’t in the room with them. But that night, David went through the entire grieving process, while Marion took an Ambien and went to sleep. They both woke up with the same conclusion—that they had a lot of work to do to become the parents Ford needed them to be. 

While David tends to be a “thoughtful, slow processor,” Marion says she’s never been considered an “underwhelming” figure and prefers the firehose approach to life. Thus, she jumped right in the deep end with resources, the next day consulting with a trusted friend who was already a Mama Dragon and mother of two queer kids. She came home with a link to the Mackintosh Family’s story on the LDS church’s website, and The Family Acceptance Project. David and Marion met with Richard Ostler in her first week of learning and soon after found Encircle. As she shared these resources with David, they both came to the same conclusion that their sweet Ford, “as close to perfect as you could get,” did not choose this and had not been “swept up in lascivious lies.” 

Marion jokes that the church’s fatal flaw was teaching her that she could talk to God and God would talk back. An extremely devout member of the LDS faith who had served in “all the callings,” Marion says, “The same voice that gave me counselors names for presidencies and had been talking to me all my life said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with your son, he is exactly as I created him.” While this was somewhat of a relief, it put Marion—and her husband who had the same impression—in a really tricky spot with their belief system. She now says, “It’s interesting that most of the parents in the support groups we’ve been a part of heard the same thing about their kids.” 

The McClellans still live in the cozy gingerbread house in which they raised their six kids in Payson, Utah. It was the home David’s grandparents had built and lived in, and Marion loved the Brady Bunch-esque idea of living in the same home forever, so after David’s grandmother died, they bought it. After the whiplash of an immediately onset faith crisis, this home became their enclave, as church—once their second home—quickly became tricky territory to navigate. Marion began to hear all the messages the way her child must have—as a10-year-old in Primary singing songs about eternal families, and realizing none of that was for him. As a young man being taught that homosexual behavior is a serious sin. “But at age 12, breathing and washing dishes are human behaviors.” Marion now reflects that a tween isn’t able to differentiate exactly what “behavior” indicates, leading to self-loathing and shame. She says, “Fortunately, he didn’t absorb much of that; he knew he didn’t choose this, so it couldn’t be a sin. And we are very lucky because a majority of parents in our community find out their child is queer AFTER a suicide attempt. Fortunately for us, he wasn’t in that category.”

But still, Ford was not yet ready for others outside his family to know he was gay, so his mom encouraged him to keep attending church to avoid suspicions. She now says, “I don’t regret many things in my life because if I could have done better, I would have. But I regret that I didn’t have him stop attending church immediately and stay home with him. I wish I knew how dangerous it was for him to continue attending, even with his resilience.” Marion says most of the parents in this space she’s befriended share that regret. As she continued to see the harm in policies—especially as she had to explain the 2015 exclusion policy to her perfect child, Marion’s world unraveled. Church became a minefield, as she fearfully anticipated what people might say each week. She started bringing a second set of keys and there were only two Sundays that whole year she didn’t leave early, crying. After going to church, it took Marion nearly an entire week to recover before the Saturday dread and Sunday trauma would return again. But at this difficult time, Marion still felt fortunate to work in the temple with David. That first year after Ford came out, they were in the temple weekly, and for Marion, often daily, as there, she could quiet her mind and seek clarity. 

In the temple, she remembers being fascinated by Eve, and how she was “exactly correct.” Marion continues, “In the church I grew up in, there were only ‘Adams’ allowed. We were expected to be obedient with exactness, not to look at a commandment and choose something differently.” In the temple, she heard words come to her clear as day that said, “You were never meant to be an Adam. It’s time you start acting like the Eve you were always meant to be.”

But after a lifetime of daily scripture reading and memorizing handbooks, embracing a nuanced mindset was virtually impossible. It took half of her six kids deciding to stop attending church, some painful therapy sessions with David, and a silent meditation retreat for Marion to examine her personal integrity before she experienced the clarity she was seeking. She says she came to a realization that she would never associate with any organization that taught what her church taught about queer people; so was it the right place for her to remain? For Marion, the decision was no. She knew this decision would not be popular in their heavily LDS, Payson, UT community, but she had also watched how her straight kids had concurrently been so warmly embraced by the LGBTQ+ community they had begun to interact with at family events at Encircle and the Augenstein family’s frequent ally events. Marion knew they could still find community; it might just look a little different. 

One day she asked one of her straight sons if he was ok “going to all the gay stuff with us.” He replied, “Yeah, the gays are a lot more fun than the straights.” While at Encircle, Marion also sadly observed how many LGBTQ+ people had lost their families after coming out and weren’t even allowed to be around their younger siblings anymore. She saw how quick they were to embrace her family. While her faith deconstruction had proven to be the most painful thing she’d ever experienced, Marion says, “When people say the lazy learner thing about people like us who have gone through this, I want to punch them in the face. There’s nothing lazy about what we’ve gone through.”

The McClellans have deeply felt the agony that comes when you step away from a faith community that’s not exactly trained to know what to do with you. After having been in the same neighborhood where they served their ward and stake families diligently for 30 years, Marion says there is a painful void.

All that being said, Marion feels, “Having a gay kid is the greatest blessing I never knew I wanted. I would never change any of it, even with the pain and strangeness. Our lives needed to change… But I would never change him. I love him and his partner.”

Ford, 23, now lives with his partner in Midvale and works as an engineer for a soil tech firm at Hill Air Force Base. Marion loves observing his happiness. She reflects how once upon a time, she put qualifiers on parental success based on whether her kids were “on the covenant path,” but now she’s grateful to observe them from a vantage point where she can just step back and appreciate how all six of her kids are “the most amazing humans. They are such good people – so compassionate, so thoughtful, they love our family. Before, I just had a limited ability to see.”