We Know

This story of an Evangelical Christian mom and her gay son is heart-breaking for all the reasons all the other far too many similar stories are heart-breaking.

What I find most poignant in this story, however, is the tragedy wrought by other people refusing to accept this young man's own testimony of his identity. 

"I am gay... I know I am... It's just the way I am and it's something I know," he wrote his devout Christian mom in a series of text messages.

His mother remonstrated, "We love you. We are so glad you are our son. But you are young, and your sexual orientation is still developing. The feelings you’ve had for other guys don’t make you gay. So please don’t tell anyone that you ARE gay. You don’t know who you are yet. Your identity is not that you are gay – it is that you are a child of God."

She and other family and friends and church youth leaders chose to disregard what he knew about himself, instead imposing on him identities and meanings that made them comfortable. They were pleased when he acquiesced in their interpretation of what he was feeling. They learned only too late how disastrous it was for him. 

The most poignant (heartbreaking!) part of her testimony was her admission that "we did not even give Ryan a chance to wrestle with God, to figure out what HE believed God was telling him through scripture about his sexuality. We had believed firmly in giving each of our four children the space to question Christianity, to decide for themselves if they wanted to follow Jesus, to truly OWN their own faith. But we were too afraid to give Ryan that room when it came to his sexuality, for fear that he’d make the wrong choice."

It takes courage to stand on what we know of ourselves, especially when those we most love, trust and admire (and who we know love us) don't understand. 

Only God knows us better than we know ourselves. Nobody else knows. And we have a right to stand on what we know, and what God teaches us of ourselves -- even when it makes others uncomfortable. 

Our lives and our eternal souls depend on our ability to find that courage. 

Flight From Self

Maybe it's too much to ask that we come to terms with our gayness calmly, rationally, and without fear. If we grew up gay and Mormon, we had pumped into us plenty of fear about sex and disobedience. And we learned to pursue exaltation and eternal family, is if they were trophies to be won. Without even really understanding what either exaltation or eternal family really meant.

How could we understand? Because exaltation is nothing less than to enter God's presence. But to enter God's presence, we must know him. And to know him we must be like him. And at the beginning of our life's journey, when we are taught that this is the goal, we can't even really begin to fathom it. We have no concept of it.

It's taken me almost five decades to begin to apprehend the plan in its simplicity and beauty. Love, hope, faith. Patience, long-suffering, kindness, non-compulsion. It's those Gospel basics that -- when we're young -- seem way too simple to be the answer. Yet, the pathway back to God is that simple. So simple a child could know it, if we could keep that child-like simplicity through the complexities and vagaries of adult experience and perception.

If we were lucky, we had a truly happy family. If we were lucky, we had parents who loved us totally and unconditionally. Unconditionally in the sense that there was nothing they wouldn't give for us. Unconditionally in the sense that they knew how important it was to teach us right from wrong. And if we were lucky, we loved and we felt loved. That would be the closest we could come to appreciating something like exaltation and eternal life in the presence of God.

But when we're still immature in the faith, concepts like exaltation are filtered through our experiences in a fallen world. We succumb to the temptation to make ourselves judge and jury -- of others and of ourselves. That's the thing with judgment; it's why Jesus warned, "For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again" (Matthew 7: 2). We can't judge others without, in some sense, our condemnation redounding back on us.

We also succumb to the temptation to think of exaltation in external terms; we compare it to rewards that we get in this world: acclaim, material goods, power. We think that because scripture describes our final reward as a "crown," or an "inheritance," that exaltation is something like becoming king of the world. But those words are just God trying to speak to us using the only metaphors available in a fallen culture.

Jesus came to show us what exaltation looks like. It is actually much more like giving up than acquiring; it is more like descending than rising; more like dying than dominating. Jesus said things like, "Whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all" (Mark 10: 44) and "So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen" (Matthew 20: 16). Jesus compared the Kingdom of Heaven to a field of labor in which some sweat and toil through the heat of the day, and others arrive to work only in the last hour, but the reward of all is the same. Not fair by our worldly way of reckoning! No, in our minds, we insist, we should be able to earn and seize what we want, like little power-hungry emperors in training.

Gay Latter-day Saints are blessed -- if we only knew how blessed! -- to have our worlds turned upside down. To have everything taken away from us. To find ourselves suddenly last in the spiritual rat race, when we thought we were well on the way to "earning" our "crown." If we're lucky, the change of scenery will give us something to think about, a perspective much needed in order to see things a bit more truly. To understand what the Kingdom of God, as revealed in Christ, is really made of.

But at first, the shock of coming to terms with our sexuality leaves us wrestling with very, very dark demons: demons of guilt, of shame, of fear. One common defense is to go into denial about human nature and sin.

I think one of the denial arguments is the argument from "need." I "need" love, I "need" a relationship. Or "I didn't choose to be gay." Both statements are true enough from a certain perspective. I think it is true enough to say that human beings require love, that they need it; all dimensions of it, including the love that is expressed in physical touch and physical intimacy, as well as the emotional and spiritual expressions of love. Little children die if they are not touched. I think this is true enough.

But that argument from need puts the cart before the horse in love. It's as if love is about what we get rather than what we give. To say love is about needing is to distort love as seriously as if we were to say that faith is about fearing judgment, or hope is a form of make believe.

It is truer, I think, to say that love is a human quality. That we express our humanity (and our divinity) by giving love (and receiving it). And perhaps in that light we can understand how true love becomes possible only when we cast away our fear about it. When we stop being preoccupied about how others will judge us for expressing it or for living into it. When we can begin to grow into that conception of love, homophobia can no longer touch us in any meaningful way whatsoever. Homophobia becomes irrelevant to who and what we are, just another worldly distraction whose end result would be to shut us up inside ourselves, to turn our fear of judgment into a prison.

When gay men and lesbians try to affirm themselves by denying faith, by denouncing religion as a sham or a delusion because we feel condemned by religion, that can be another trap. It may cut us off from the deepest affirmations of our humanity. If someone calls me a sinner, I don't elevate myself by denying the reality of sin. That kind of denial gives too much power to my would-be mortal judges. Remember, in the Kingdom of God, to go up we must descend. To rise, we bow ourselves down. To find ourselves, we must lose ourselves. The fundamental principles of eternal progression are faith and repentance.

I've spent a good portion of my life fleeing from faith, and thinking of loving in terms of needing. I thought I was finding myself; but I was actually fleeing my real self.

When a gay man or a lesbian comes out of the closet, at least a certain amount of existential terror is unavoidable. I hope that we can get better at being there for each other when that happens. We need to be better guides to one another. We need to calm others by staying calm. We need to give lots of hugs! We need to exchange phone numbers, and assure each other that a call at 2 o'clock in the morning is OK if you're suffering from night terrors. We need to remind each other that disorientation for a while is normal until we get our bearings. In the meanwhile, we need to help each other hold out hope for the best, rather than settling for something unworthy. We need to make real love tangible, so we can start to avoid the pitfalls of myriad pseudo-loves waiting to entrap us.

Claiming the Words to Describe Ourselves

On our last night in Finland, my husband Göran and I went on a romantic date. Glen stayed with my mom and dad at their hotel, while Göran and I roamed the streets of Helsinki looking for a nice restaurant. We finally decided on Zetor, with its hearty portions of traditional Finnish fare and over-the-top rural Finnish themed decor. (They use tractors for furniture, stuffed cows and reindeer for decorations, they play tacky Finnicized versions of American and Eastern European pop music, and serve the food in sauna buckets with wooden utensils. Even the restrooms are designed to look like outhouses. Whether you appreciate the off-kilter humor or not, the food is fantastic!)

After dinner we set off in an unfamiliar direction, exploring a section of the city we hadn't seen yet. We found a particularly quaint side street with a variety of small shops and cafes. Young people were still out on the streets, or sitting at tables drinking beer. As we reached the end of the street, we heard the thump and grind rhythm of a popular Madonna hit. The music emanated from a club sporting an over-sized rainbow flag. A buff, shirtless Finn wearing tight khakis was taking down the outdoor chairs and tables, while a beefy-looking bouncer collected a 5-Euro cover charge and stamped the hands of entering patrons. We realized we had found a Finnish gay bar.

We hesitated for a moment. I was trying to decide if I really wanted to go into a bar, and Göran was trying to decide if he was ready to interact socially in a language definitely not his own. Ultimately, our curiosity overruled our caution and we forked over the ten Euros, got each of our hands stamped with a purple flower, and meandered in.

The experience of walking into a Finnish gay bar -- or at least this Finnish gay bar -- seemed culturally analogous to walking into a Finnish Mormon Church. (My parents and I did attend the local LDS ward in Joensuu, Finland together!) The language and the inhabitants were Finnish, but you felt like you had discovered an outpost of American civilization, with all the norms and points of orientation identical to what you find in the American counterpart.

Perhaps a more Zetor-like Finnish gay bar would have folks sitting on wooden benches, trading fishing stories and slugging back vodka, and would be equipped with a sauna. And maybe it would feel less... superficial? Here, the same designer drinks were served to the same cast of characters occupying the same decor. Here, you found the same cliques and the same social politics. There were the plaid and leather and lipstick lesbians. There were the gesticulating gay boys in tight blue jeans and ethereal, fay shirts. There was the tight-lipped muscle shirt crowd, wearing an expression that said Don't Even Think of Talking to Me Unless You're as Attractive as I Am. There were the bears. (In this bar, four burly looking guys were actually wearing little teddy-bear hats with ears. It was adorable.) There was the usual peppering of drag queens and overweight, straight women friends of gay men (popularly referred to in the American parlance as "fag hags"). And then there were the misfits and outcasts. The solitary, young, slightly homely, slightly awkward guy who danced with no rhythm and who hadn't figured out yet that no one hot was going to approach him. There were the old, flabby desperate-looking men on the prowl for someone less old, less flabby, and less desperate-looking than them.

Almost everybody (except me and Göran) was getting inebriated to varying degrees. A sign at the entrance announced that tonight was the "Madonna Juhla" (Madonna Party). We had missed the "Foam Party" earlier in the week. (Darn.) Around the dance floor, you could observe the odd, familiar dance/mating rituals whose end goal was to get laid tonight. But that obviously wasn't the only form of social interaction. In the antipodes of the bar, you found other, more sensible folks gathered in groups of four to six, chatting, joking, having fun. And then there were the folks like me and Göran -- the handful of same-sex couples who had arrived so they could enjoy each other's company on a date surrounded by an explicitly gay ambiance.

There was a bold sign in the window of the bar that posed the question: "Sinäkin olet homo?" ("You're gay?") followed by the declaration, "No, me olemme myöskin" ("Well, we are too.") I found that sign comforting. That, I thought, was exactly why places like this needed to exist -- whatever their flaws and foibles. But as I read the smaller print further down in the poster, I discovered that it was nothing more than an advertisement for a cell-phone plan. Using "gay pride" to sell stuff. Sigh.

I had hoped it might be fun to see what a Finnish gay bar was like, but we both left feeling irritated and sullen. Göran had wanted to dance, but I had pooped out early, largely because I couldn't seem to get past my anxieties about once being that solitary, awkward, slightly homely guy with no rhythm. I had so wanted a Finnish gay bar to be different. I wanted to find out that in a foreign country it was possible to be gay in a different way than being gay in America. Instead I left with the disquieting feeling that Stonewall's legacy had been co-opted by American capitalism, packaged, mass-produced, and mass-marketed to the world literally as a kind of booze-infused tonic. And so even on the edges of Siberia and Lapland, was that really the only mode of gayness you could find? Was the only authentically Finnish alternative The Closet?

I particularly despised that word in the window: "Homo." How could I use that word to describe myself with pride? It wasn't even a Finnish word. I wanted Finnish gay men and lesbians to have a word that resonated with their unique language and culture, that told their Finnish family and friends what it meant to be different, to love differently and yet the same, in an idiom that could facilitate openness and understanding. But all they had was this bastardized foreign, Greco-Latin medical term, coined by some Hungarian doctor in the nineteenth century.

Yet the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the problem of words, of language, is at the heart of the gay dilemma everywhere, not just in Finland but in America too. And finding -- or creating -- the right words a key to our salvation -- both figuratively and literally.

I considered how even in America, that supposed bastion of gay pride, we wrestle with words. The "gay" community perhaps more than any other community. Are we gay? Are we queer? Are we homosexual? Are we same-sex attracted? Are we lesbian? How do we fit bi and transgender into the mix? I realized that one of the first things any person who is "same-sex attracted" must wrestle with is finding the right word to describe themselves to family and friends. How many coming out stories have we heard where one of the first observations was "I had heard the word 'gay' or 'homosexual,' but I just couldn't apply it to myself."

A central problem has always been to wrest words from a culture that despises and denigrates us, and stake our own claims to those words, attach new meanings to those words. That's what gay pride is all about. Standing up and saying, "OK, this is who I am. I am gay. I am queer. I am a fag. I am a homo. That's what you call me. And you think that is a bad thing, but I am not bad. I am good, and my love is good. So call me what you want. I am what I am, and I have a right to love and a right to happiness. And I will fight for them." It takes courage to claim our own space, stand on our own ground, to make words our own and in the process transform the meanings of words into something that is workable for us and that connects to the people we are trying to connect with: our family, our friends, our co-workers, our churches.

I think in some sense I had come to this Finnish gay bar wanting an easy way forward. I had hoped that in Finland I wouldn't have to work as hard as I've had to work in America to create safe spaces and meaningful language. But I should have known from studying the Finnish language that language is always difficult. We always wrestle to transform rules of grammar and vocabularies into something that works for us. So I just have to give up on the idea that this will ever be easy. But I may hold on to the hope that it will be rewarding.

I still want Finns to find their own way to be gay. Maybe they will. Maybe they already have, and I just haven't found it yet. But even if the only way to be gay in Finland right now is to buy rainbow-colored cellphone plans and get drunk at Madonna Parties, I have to trust that eventually they will find their own way forward. Maybe they'll do what I did one day: wake up from the previous night's hangover and realize that there's more to life than this. But if we want to find it, we have to get out there and work for it.

Coming Out in Our Wards

Since posting about my experience a few Sundays ago bearing testimony in my ward, I've had a number of people comment or email me expressing amazement at what a unique and loving and supportive ward I must have. I will not deny that my ward is an amazing, very loving, very reverent and caring group of people. Nor will I deny the fact that my ward may be different from many other wards by virtue of the fact that it is located in a demographically diverse, urban area. This probably predisposes them to be a little bit less uncomfortable with racial or ethnic diversity, or shocked by diversity in sexual orientation. Still, having grown up in the Church and having experienced a number of different wards both in and out of Utah, I will say that my ward is also a very conventional ward in many ways, and more similar to most other U.S. wards than it is different. Furthermore, I believe that due to recent national events and heightened discussion by Church leaders about sexual-orientation-related issues, the membership of the Church as a whole is becoming better equipped to come to terms in a more positive way with the visible presence of gay and lesbian members. I believe that if we give members of the Church the chance, by being willing to be vulnerable and trusting them, they can rise to the occasion of individual members "coming out," and can both minister to us and allow us to minister to them.

The decision to come out of the closet in one's ward is a very personal one. My general perception, however, is that sexual orientation is not an inconsequential aspect of who we are, and that trying to keep this absolutely secret can become a heavy and unhealthy burden for individual gay or lesbian members to bear. If one of the purposes of the Church is for its members to "bear one another's burdens," then I would argue that a culture which stifles gay and lesbian members and keeps them "in the closet" is actually a failure to minister in the way that Christ intends. So I think that in general it is good for people to be out in their wards. I think that as the Church continues to evolve in a healthy direction -- it's already begun evolving in this direction -- it will be easier and more natural for gay and lesbian individuals to come out in appropriate ways and find the support they need.

In the meantime, we should weigh our decisions related to coming out carefully. I do not believe it is ever appropriate to come out in a way that is disruptive or that focuses undue attention on ourselves. Rather, when we come out, it should be for the purpose of strengthening our wards and the mission of the Church within the ward, and enabling others to understand us better so they can minister to us and be ministered to by us in appropriate ways.

My coming out process in my ward first involved coming out to a relatively small number of people -- mostly priesthood leaders who needed this information in order to know how best to counsel me. I was careful to respect whatever restrictions priesthood leaders felt were appropriate, based on my membership status. (Thus, asking my bishop's permission before bearing my testimony.) I gave my bishops explicit permission to let others in the ward know that I was gay -- especially priesthood leaders -- if they felt that was appropriate.

I also came out to close friends in the ward who had shown a personal interest in me and wanted to get to know me better. I always approached this with an ethic of never lying or attempting to give anybody a false impression. I am a gay man living in a long-term committed relationship with a man, and together we are caring for a foster son. Anyone who gets to know me beyond surface formalities will learn this.

I once assumed that by coming out to priesthood leaders and close friends, I would soon automatically be out to pretty much everyone in the ward. Perhaps my ward is remarkably immune to gossip, because that did not happen. Miraculously (and appropriately, I suppose!) information that I shared with other individuals seems pretty much to have stayed with those individuals. There were many members of the ward who "wondered" about me or were "curious" about me, but miraculously (and appropriately, I suppose!) they did not pry or snoop into my personal life. (With one notable exception, that more or less proved the rule!)

There have been, in the almost four years I've been attending my ward, moments when I wanted to share a comment or a thought in Priesthood Meeting or in Sunday School, when to do so would have required me to come out or discuss my relationship with Göran or my membership status. In those situations I chose to keep quiet, because I was afraid that it might be distracting to the class and draw attention to myself in a way I felt was inappropriate. There have actually been moments when I wanted to bear my testimony in such settings, but couldn't because to do so would have "outed" me, and I wasn't ready to deal with that. I recently discussed this with my Elder's Quorum president, and he has strongly encouraged me to always bear my testimony, and never to feel reticent about sharing, especially when to do so can strengthen us as a quorum.

My decision to bear testimony in my ward two Sundays ago was in response to a remarkably strong and undeniable prompting of the Spirit. The prompting was very specific, and included instruction to approach and get permission from my bishop before bearing testimony. It also involved discouraging me from preparing some grandiose "coming out speech," or in any way trying to prepare beforehand what I was going to say. The Spirit led me to share key elements of my story so individuals would know where I was coming from, but not to editorialize on those elements of my story. Then the Spirit led me to affirm what I know: that the Church of Jesus Christ has been restored, that Joseph Smith was a prophet, that the Book of Mormon is true, and that Christ lives. My purpose in bearing testimony, I realized, was no different from the purpose of anybody else bearing testimony; to strengthen the faith of others and to obey the Spirit and foster its work among us. Had my goal in going up been to "educate" people about homosexuality, or challenge official Church teaching in any way, I feel it would have been extremely inappropriate, and (though all things are possible) I can't imagine the Spirit having prompted me to do such a thing.

I have been blessed, I think, because of my willingness to wait for the right time and the right way to come out to the ward as a whole. Those blessings include:

* knowing that it was the right thing to do, because it was prompted by the Spirit, and because the Spirit's prompting was validated by my Bishop;

* now feeling a sense of comfort and acceptance from members of my ward, who trust me and trust that I am there for the same reasons they are (to learn and grow and be edified by the Spirit);

* now no longer feeling that I need to censor myself in situations where to share would require me to be "out" in some way.

In order to do this, we need to be open and be prepared to handle a variety of responses from members of our wards, including some negative ones, and some that are well-meaning but clueless. If we seek guidance of the Spirit and remain humble and open, those situations will not be overly burdensome to us. We also need to make sure that before coming out to members of our ward we are in a space of being able to trust ourselves and trust our experience. In other words, we need to have come to terms with our own sexuality and be relatively confident enough in our journeys and in our relationship with God not to be mortally wounded if we encounter negativity.

I think the most important thing is to recognize that this is a journey. It requires patience. It requires the acknowledgment that different people are in different places on the journey, and we can only take the step that is immediately ahead of us, not the step that is a mile down the road from where we stand. We should never feel that the need to stay in the closet represents some kind of failure. Rather, it represents being in a space where more growth is required before greater openness is possible. It also can represent trust that God can move us to where we need to be, when we need to be there.

Should I Turn in my Eagle Scout Badge?

Yesterday I got a little postcard in the mail that stirred up surprising emotions for me.

It was a postcard from the National Eagle Scout Association. At the top of the card it said, "Dear Eagle Scout John D. Wrathall," my old name. My pre-marriage name. (Göran and I gave each other the name "Gustav-Wrathall" at our wedding ceremony in 1995.)

The card informed me that the NESA was compiling an "Eagle Scout Roll of Honor," and I should call a certain 800 number to ensure the accuracy of my record.

Of course, the Boy Scouts of America has a policy that excludes "avowed homosexuals" from its ranks -- both leaders and scouts.

At the time that I was coming to terms with my gayness, it occasionally occurred to me that my being gay might be considered incompatible with my being an Eagle Scout. But at the time, I had other things to do than sort all that out. I guess in practice I've lived a sort of "Don't ask, don't tell" policy with the scouts. I sort of figured if somebody in the scouting organization knew that I was gay, they might strip me of my rank. But I didn't feel the need to draw attention to the fact.

There was a time when I felt great anger about the BSA policy. But I no longer harbor any ill feelings against the BSA. In my ward, when I've been asked if I would contribute financially to scouting, I have gladly opened my wallet. I am proud of the fact that I achieved the rank of Eagle Scout. I am grateful for the skills I learned through scouting, the most important of which, I think, was learning to relate to other young men and boys in a mature, nurturing way. Becoming an Eagle Scout was a kind of rite of passage for me. It was also closely identified in my mind with family and Church -- both of which have assumed increasing importance to me the older I get.

It is not with any pleasure that I consider the possibility of severing ties with the Boy Scouts. In a way, scouting helped impress upon me the importance of virtues like honesty, integrity, and respect for sexuality, all of which were key values in my coming out process, and in my decision to enter into a committed relationship and to seek to honor that relationship.

Nevertheless, by means of this little postcard, I am being asked to stand up and be counted. I'm not sure I ought to live with "Don't ask, don't tell" any more.

In typical fashion, the postcard asks us to respond within seven days. You're either an Eagle Scout, and proud of that fact, or you're not.

I feel I ought to write a letter to the Boy Scouts of America, telling them what scouting means to me, and what a struggle it was to come to terms with being gay, and what it has meant to me to accept my sexuality, and to seek to build a positive life based on love and commitment to my partner. I also feel I ought, in light of the BSA's current policy on gays, to resign and turn in my badge. But I feel a great sadness about that.

But is it a grandiose and meaningless gesture? Will anyone care? Or is taking care of this piece of unfinished business the best way that I can live the scout law to be "trustworthy" and honest?