Know Thyself, Part II

One of the most important acts of self-knowing that I have achieved so far in my life had to do with coming to terms with being gay.

This started with the awareness -- beginning around age 11 -- of erotic fantasies about guys. I know it was age 11, because it was right around the time I was getting ready to be a deacon, and I was definitely aware of erotic feelings I had about some of the guys in my future deacons' quorum. The fantasies weren't anything really gross -- usually just me imagining some of the more good looking guys in the deacons' quorum making out with a girl friend (though the girlfriends were kind of invisible in my fantasies). I didn't deliberately fantasize about this... These were thoughts that usually came up unbidden, and that I usually actually tried to suppress when they did. At the time, my explanation for why I had such fantasies was that I wanted to be like these good-looking, popular guys.

The next stage in my awareness took place one night at the age of 14 during a sleepover at the home of my best friend in my teachers' quorum. We slept on a sofa bed together. He slept in his underwear, and so did I. Well, actually he slept, and I didn't sleep at all. Didn't get a wink all night. I was looking at him and feeling, well, very excited. Nothing happened. I never touched him. The next morning as the sun rose and after we got up, it literally dawned on me. I didn't want to be like him. I wanted him. It was in that moment that I literally thought the "h" word (homosexual) out loud in my mind. I must be one of those, I realized. I think my first activity upon returning home was to look the word up in the dictionary: "sexually attracted to people of one's own sex." Yup, that's what I was.

That was a mortifying discovery. So the next stage in my awareness took place as I began to pay attention to what people in Church were saying about this. At one point, someone recommended I read The Miracle of Forgiveness, which I did. I was relieved to learn that A) I hadn't committed any grievous sin yet and, B) I could be completely and totally cured of this! I remember shortly after I had finished reading the chapter on homosexuality, my dad recruited me to go do some manual labor on the stake welfare farm. I was excited to do that, because I think manly physical labor was one of the things Elder Kimball recommended as a means of banishing homosexual desire. Furthermore, I learned that total faithfulness would also help me in my quest to be free of these desires. So I began to be very conscious about actively seeking to do everything that Church leaders counseled: daily prayer, fasting, scripture study (I was a star seminary pupil), faithful Church attendance and fulfillment of callings, paying a full tithe, etc.

I always went the extra mile in my efforts to be faithful. At the age of 16, I read Stephen R. Covey's Spiritual Roots of Human Relations. The basic message I took away from this book was that the key to my success in life would be totally determined by my attitude, and by my willingness to develop a high standard of personal discipline. Among other things, as a result of reading that book, I incorporated a number of routines into my life that have more or less stuck with me ever since. Early to bed and early to rise; eating well and exercising daily; reading the scriptures daily, and so on. By disciplining myself, and establishing faithful routines as the bedrock for my life, I would be able to overcome every temptation that beset me, including homosexuality.

The efforts I made along these lines did make me a better, more successful person. They prepared me for a successful mission, for college and for graduate school, and for future success in my work and other endeavors. But they did not make me heterosexual.

So there were two moments I see as marking the fourth stage of self-knowledge in this regard. The first moment was my first day in the mission field. At the end of that day, my companion invited me to join him in scripture study and prayer before we retired for the night. He stripped down to his under garments, and I did the same. I could not focus much on scripture study, however, because sitting close to him, the two of us in our underwear, I was very aroused. I struggled to regain control of my mind and my body. That night, after he had retired, I got out of bed and knelt down in prayer and wept. I thought that surely the Lord would have freed me from these feelings before sending me into the mission field. Why hadn't he? How could I be a witness of Christ, and have these feelings, for my companion of all people? I felt utterly defeated. I did feel the Spirit's presence, essentially urging me to do the best I could under the circumstances, which I did.

The second moment came right after my mission. On my mission, I taught and baptized five souls, two of whom went on to serve missions of their own, in a mission where the average was one baptism. I was aware -- had been told by others -- that I was one of the most admired missionaries in the field. But I remember looking at the word "honorable" on my release papers and feeling like the biggest fraud in the mission. Here I was, still struggling with homosexuality. My feelings of failure and depression deepened when I started attending my BYU ward, and the first words out of my new bishop's mouth were, "Well, you've completed a mission, now your next task in life is to get married."

Wow. Lord, I could use some heterosexuality about now? Do you mind? I really need some of those blessings you promised me through President Kimball to kick in if I'm going to do what you expect me to do next. But, of course, nothing.

So stage four essentially involved sinking into a big depression that focussed on the belief that something must be terribly wrong with me. I must be sinning in some way, conscious or unconscious, that is preventing the Lord from blessing me. So, to make a long, melodramatic story short, that depressive spiral continued till the end of my junior year when I began planning my own suicide.

Stage five of my self awareness in relation to my sexuality involved revelation. Again, to skip a long, melodramatic story about how I ended up not committing suicide, at some point in August 1986 I found myself on my knees alone in a student apartment in Helsinki, Finland, thanking God for helping me to survive. I also laid open my heart to him about the anguish I still felt about my homosexuality. And for the first time, I received a clear and powerful answer to my prayers about this issue, after all these long years of wrestling and praying. The Lord essentially told me first of all that he loved me completely and totally. Second, he knew all about my homosexuality because he had created me this way. He had woven me together in my mother's womb, and knew me from my inmost parts. He knew all about my homosexuality and it did not matter to him. There was nothing wrong with me in this regard.

Stage five of my self-awareness was deepened when I prayerfully sought guidance about what to do with my homosexuality. I fasted and prayed for three days in the winter of 1988. I had come to accept that this was a part of me that simply was not going to change, that it was a fundamental part of how I was created, that the Lord knew about it and accepted me as I was, and that it was not bad. But I wanted to know how to proceed. Should I still try to marry a woman in spite of these feelings? Should I live a life of celibacy? (Those were the only options in my mind at that time.) So my fasting and prayer was to get some sense of how I should move forward, and whether seeking marriage with a woman would be the right thing to do. I received an answer to my prayers, but not the one I expected. The answer was "Be open to all the options." Later that day, I met my first openly gay friend, and began to learn that there was still an option I had not considered.

The following year (1989), I spent the summer in a monastery in France (in my former mission) prayerfully exploring celibacy as a life option, but also prayerfully considering whether I should open myself to the possibility of a same-sex relationship. By the end of that summer, I knew that the right thing for me to do was the latter.

At the time, once I finally came to the point of coming out publicly to my friends and family and accepting my gayness as a good and integral part of myself, I thought that I had achieved all the self-knowledge I needed in that regard. But now, with the hindsight of more than twenty years -- almost eighteen of which have been spent in my relationship with Göran -- I realize that the journey of self-knowledge had only just begun. In the process of dating and courting and finding a relationship, and then entering into a relationship, and then nurturing and building that relationship, I learned important lessons about the nature of the bond between body and spirit, between sexuality and spirituality. Some of those lessons I learned the hard way. As I have discussed elsewhere, I made mistakes -- some painful. But I learned a lot about how my homosexuality is not "just" a physical thing. It is interwoven with my emotionality and my spirituality and my sociality in subtle and powerful ways.

The seventh (and current) stage of my understanding has come in recent years, since I have renewed my association with the Church. I'd say there are two major aspects of the current learning process. One has to do with the fact that by acknowledging my testimony of the Church, which includes faith in its leaders, I have had to wrestle with some of the things my life journey has taught me that seem to be out of harmony with the official teachings of the Church. My life learning process involved gathering information, pondering (OH! the pondering!), wrestling, prayer, fasting, and receiving revelation. It involved putting my learnings to the test in real life, and finding out what the consequences of certain kinds of choices were. So I was pretty confident in the results of what I had learned. But still, my testimony of the Church is extremely powerful, and so I found myself going through a process of reconsidering what I had learned, and in the process receiving some of the most powerful and dramatic spiritual confirmations that I have yet.

The second major aspect of this current stage is considering my relationship with my husband and the nature of my sexuality in light of eternity. To put it bluntly, what will become of us when we die? I cannot imagine a Heaven where I could possibly be happy without him -- especially after all we've gone through together in this life! After everything we are going through right now as parents, and what I anticipate going through with him as we age and prepare to meet our Maker. The official teaching of the Church is not encouraging to us in this regard. But I have received powerful affirmations from the Spirit that I need have no fear on this account, that all will be well, far better than I am capable of imagining. I'm not sure what that means, but the Spirit has not failed me yet, so I am willing to rest on that, and in the meantime continue the learning process, and continue loving my husband and caring for him and helping him to become the best that he can be.

I won't say that his seventh stage of learning about my sexuality is the last, because I don't know what's ahead. I suspect there will be more stages in this process of learning, maybe even more surprising than what's come already.