Harry
Mormonism is my first tongue. It’s how and why I talk about God… how I frame my own altruism, how I measure the distance between where I am and where I should be. I couldn’t leave it if I wanted, and I don’t want to.
I started attending the LDS Church with my sister and was baptized at the ripe old age of eight. A year later, she moved away, and the ward picked up the slack. Every Saturday night, the ward choir nag would call and remind me that if I wanted a ride to choir, she’d be by to pick me up. My home teacher also happened to be my letter carrier, so I saw him a couple times a week. A couple of Sunday school teachers lived around the block. There were an inordinate number of Mormons in my Pacific Northwest neighborhood, watching over me. I think I may have been in one of a handful of Celestial wards.
I heard plenty of anti-gay rhetoric, growing up—and some of it was directed at me. I hadn’t connected the dots, just yet. That didn’t happen until after my mission, after I fell in love with my mission trainer, after I fell in love with the boy next door at BYU. Yet the rhetoric weighed me down. I may not have been gay… but I knew damn well that I was different. So at an early age, I started to construct my own sanctuary… my own place under the heavens, where people were kind and where I belonged. There were a handful of trusted adults and my books.
When I finally came out, one fateful Saturday night at 3am, I had had lots of practice at redrawing the lines in my life—editing toxic people out and drawing beautiful people in.
Once I started the long, inexorable journey out of the closet, those lines were even more important as I found my tribe newly awakened to my status as a threat to the Family and a threat to the Faith. I’ve had a few enlightened bishops and plenty of lucky breaks. My path out of the closet didn’t take me out of the Church… but staying takes work—sometimes daily work—to shore up the walls of my safe spaces against the steady drub of news from the Church Office Building and words from the pulpit.
And still I remain… worshipping in a sanctuary I’ve had to build and rebuild with my own two hands.