Coming Out; or, There's Always Been a Rainbow Hanging over Your Head

This year has been one of major milestones in my life: I started my (second) internship at the Church History Department, I finished my master's degree, and I had corrective eye surgery. So I'm going to continue the milestones with a major announcement:

I am gay!

My cubicle in the Church History Library

Being Gay

Being gay means that I simply am not attracted to women. There are all kinds of societal and cultural cues reminding me that I should find women attractive, but I just don't. Mud-flap girls do nothing for me. I am not interested in conversations about bikinis. (For the record, I think women should wear two-piece swimsuits just to make it easier to use the bathroom.) And the jealous-girlfriend meme has never resonated with me.

Wait, you mean guys actually check out girls like that?

Being gay also means that I am attracted to men. I will often take a second look at the shirtless guy running down the sidewalk. Once I found myself enamored with a handsome, blond bank teller. Why do I want to know this guy better when he's a total stranger? And once I couldn't stop looking at the muscular guy in short shorts at Trader Joe's. (In that case, I did feel like the man in the meme!)

But orientation is about more than physical attraction. There is intellectual attraction, emotional attraction, romantic attraction, spiritual attraction, and so forth. Every straight couple should know this. I am attracted to men in these ways as well.

And being gay is also more than who I'm attracted to. It affects who I am and how I view the world. I suppose it might be part of why I don't like traditionally manly things like sports, cars, action movies, and guns. And I suppose it's why I like happy (the original meaning of "gay") things like holidays, wildflowers, camp, kitties, bright colors, and girly pop music. (Of course, that's not to say you're gay or straight if you like or dislike those things.)

All my life, I really, really did not want to be gay. I spent several months this year trying to convince myself I was asexual (ace for short), since my gay dial isn't cranked all the way to ten. But as long as I was pretending not to be gay, I felt shame, distress, and sometimes even despair whenever something would remind me I was gay. So imagine, if you will, what it is like to feel shame, distress, and/or despair when the following things happen:

• You find someone attractive
• Someone else finds someone attractive, but you don't
• Someone gets married
• Someone gets engaged
• Someone has a baby
• A couple holds hands
• Someone asks you about your dating life

By acknowledging that I am gay, I hope to minimize or eliminate these negative feelings.

I know that many people in the LGBTQIA+ community have been suicidal or at least wanted to die. Fortunately, that has not been my experience. But I have felt despair, so I can understand why others would want to die (by suicide or otherwise).

I feel really horrible about all the homophobia I learned, internalized, thought, and said over the years—even though it was about me all along!

My Story

Looking back, I can see indicators that I was gay as young as five years old. (So that's why I kept kissing that boy in kindergarten!) But it wasn't until junior high that I began to suspect I might be gay.

And in those early-to-mid-2000s, being gay simply wasn't an option. Gay people were punchlines and perverts. I couldn't be gay! In ninth-grade seminary, we learned all about Sodom and Gomorrah and the evils of homosexuality. (Never mind that "Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy" [Ezekiel 16:49].) I thought if I was gay, then I was inherently sinful. 

In the summer of 2004, I was fifteen years old and was praying to know if I was gay. I had a bishop's interview for a patriarchal blessing, and I said something along the lines of, "I am as bad as Sodom and Gomorrah." The bishop said, "Does that mean you have those attractions?" and I said yes. So that might be considered my first coming-out. But I didn't think I was coming out. I thought I was confessing my sins—even though I hadn't sinned. In fact, I was probably more righteous than most boys my age. 

Well, I believed I received an answer to my prayers, and the answer was that I wasn't gay. So I told my mom I had wondered if I was gay but I prayed and learned I wasn't.

August 18, 2004. My handwriting has improved since then.

Now, I don't know whether I made that answer up, or whether I simply misinterpreted the answer. Maybe the answer was actually "You're still young, don't worry about it." (Indeed, it would have been difficult to grapple with being gay along with all the other insecurities a fat, nerdy, socially awkward teenager faced—to say nothing of the less accepting environment of the time.)

In any case, I became convinced that I was just immature, that I didn't like girls yet, but one day I would. So I kept waiting...and waiting...and waiting.

By the time I was in my early twenties, I began to realize that I probably wasn't going to be attracted to women. But I still wanted to marry one and have children. I wanted to be a husband and a father. What else would I be?

In August 2012, I was visiting my brother's family in California, and we were swimming in the bay. My brother and cousin were discussing gay issues, and my brother said that some studies show that younger brothers are more likely to be gay. I remember thinking, "Yes, that's me! I'm the gay younger brother!"

When I got home from vacation, I said to my mom, "Can I talk to you about something?" I don't remember how I started the conversation, but I explained that I simply wasn't attracted to women. She sounded noticeably disappointed and asked, "And are you attracted to men?" to which I reluctantly said yes. I don't remember a lot about the conversation, but I know she expressed her unconditional love for me. She was crying, and I said, "I wouldn't have told you if I knew you were going to cry." She said, "I always cry when my children go through hard things." (It's true, she's a crier.) She also said she wondered if I was gay, since on our vacation, I was wearing some jeans that didn't fit me well. I thought, "That's dumb, if I were gay, my jeans would fit me perfectly."

My life didn't change much after that, and I retreated into the closet. I continued to date women, planning on a mixed-orientation marriage. I didn't date a ton, but a lot of that was my own shyness, awkwardness, and insecurities. (I'm very good at convincing myself that people don't like me.)

Dating was an overwhelmingly negative experience for me. I was always so nervous to ask a girl on a date. If she said no (which was rare), I felt dumb for asking. If she said yes, then I was nervous (not excited) for the date. On the date, I was worried about making a good impression. Then after the date, if she was not interested, then that was an ego blow, even if I wasn't interested either. If she was interested but I was not, then I felt guilty. And if we were both interested, then the cycle started all over again.

Being gay added a whole 'nother level of difficulty. Sometimes it was OK, but sometimes I felt great anguish. All I wanted was to find one woman I liked well enough to marry, but I didn't know if she existed. And if she did exist, then I would have to tell her this thing about me, and then would she want to marry me?

I met many wonderful women, but I never felt a deep connection with any of them. Sometimes I would think, "This girl is amazing. She deserves someone who can love her in a way that I cannot." If you are a woman I dated and now you feel like I was leading you along, I apologize. I was still figuring things out.

At the beginning of this year, I still planned to find a wife. I thought once I was done with grad school, then I needed to seriously get back into dating. But then I began an intense, painful period of soul-searching and self-reflection. (It's still ongoing.) I finally realized that I really don't want to marry a woman. If I did marry a woman, it would only be to make other people happy. 

I have spent some time mourning the children I will probably never have. It seems so unfair to me that there are absolute morons having multiple children, when a responsible, intelligent person like me doesn't have any. Why couldn't the dumb people have been the queer ones? But even though I like the idea of having children of my own, I'm glad I don't have to deal with the realities of sleepless nights, potty training, and temper tantrums in public. 

Even when I came to terms with not marrying a woman, I couldn't bear the thought of being gay. I said I was ace, but then I realized I was too attracted to men for that to be accurate. So then I said I was gray ace, but that wasn't right either. Finally, I had to tell myself, "You know, maybe being gay isn't so bad. Maybe I am gay." And then, for the first time in my life, I found myself disappointed to think I might not be gay.

So yes, I am gay. And now that I'm acknowledging that, all my life experiences make sense. That's why I don't understand love songs. That's why I never saw what the other boys saw. That's why I felt nothing when the girl held my hand. That's why I dreamed those things.

I have been sporadically coming out to people over the last few months. And now you know!

My Future

I really don't know what my future holds. Since I've been in denial for eighteen-plus years, this is still a new space for me.

However, I feel relieved that I no longer plan to marry a woman. As long as that was the plan, I felt like time was running out, and I was sad to get older. I felt like I hadn't done anything with my life because I was still single. And it was hard for me to be happy when other people got married or had babies, since it hadn't happened to me.

Now, however, I don't think time is running out, and I'm not so sad to get older. I think I've done plenty with my life. And I can be happy for other people when they start a family, knowing it's just not the path for me.

I don't really feel a need for a relationship right now. That's part of why I thought I was ace for a while. But maybe one day I'll decide I want a boyfriend or a husband—hopefully at a time when such a decision would be more acceptable.

A Request

Now that you have read my story, I have a request: Please do not share the link to my blog online. There are a couple of reasons for this:

1. The internet is a toxic place, and I am a sensitive person, so I don't want to deal with the hateful comments that will inevitably come from Mormons and ex-Mormons alike.
2. I sometimes hear that the stories of queer Latter-day Saints have been weaponized against people who have chosen a different path. I don't want my story to be weaponized against anyone. (On the other hand, since these stories have been weaponized, some people want to silence them. That's just as bad. If someone weaponizes a story, it's the fault of the person doing the weaponizing, not the person whose story it is. These stories might help some people. And even if they don't help one single person, it's still an individual's story, and they have a right to tell it.)

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out.

Thanks for reading! 💓🧡💛💚💙💜