Gay/SSA and Mormon? Some Advice

      Are you gay, lesbian / experience same-sex attraction and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?  If you are, I know the dissonance and pain you may feel between how you feel towards people of the same sex and your faith.  It may seem almost insurmountable the disconnect between the two.  How can I be a Mormon and gay.  Do I have to give up the church and it's teachings and eventually be with someone of the same-sex or can I just work really hard and be the best I can be and my same sex attraction will go away and I will be heterosexual, be married in the temple, and have a great life.  Do I need to go the celibate route, live alone the rest of my life, and God will reward me in the eternities?  These questions I hope to address in this blog post.

      Growing up gay and Mormon all of us knew and know that ultimately we would have to make a very important choice in our lives. This choice would be one where we would either trust in our leaders and live a a celibate life or, God willing, have a mixed-orientation marriage.   These choices both seemed bleak but for me I felt that if it was God's will it would all work out.  So I suppressed my feelings and would not accept their reality.  I had low self-esteem and I had a fear of being outed.  I was afraid that this dirty secret that I had hidden up would somehow surface expose me and destroy my life and my relationships.  This I can imagine happened to many of you or is currently happening to you.  For me it lead to a very dark time one where suicide seemed the only option to my pain and anguish.  For many of us sadly that became their end in this journey of mortality.  So what are we to do.  I have seen people reject the church and it's teachings completely.  I have seen people try there best and be miserable in the process, and people who are actually quite successful and happy.

      The advice I give is my own and may not work for everyone.  Ultimately everyone needs to work with God to find their own unique way through mortality.  I offer four steps in the process of accepting your reality and moving in the direction God would have you go.

1. Come out to yourself and to God.
2. Come out to close family and friends when the time seems right.
3.  With the help of God, learn about all possible paths in your life.  Even ones you may be extremely uncomfortable with.
4. Make a decision with God on how to proceed with your life.  It may be for a short time it may be for a lifetime but commit to God and remain prayerful and trusting in His guidance.


1. Come out to yourself and to God.  

      Using my own experience I hope to convey what it is that helped me.  Starting from puberty I felt a desperate struggle inside of me of what I presented to the world and what I felt.  The months and years went on and through my trials I began to realize something.  I had never asked God about what he felt about me.  Truthfully, I had just assumed from what I implied from my priesthood leaders and society in general.  One day, I decided I would find out for myself.  I wrote about the experience in my coming out story which at the beginning of this blog.

      "I kneeled down one night and prayed to my Heavenly Father.  I asked him if these feelings were acceptable in his eyes and whether or not he still loved me even if I was attracted to the same gender.  What followed would change my life.  A wonderful, indescribable warmth filled my chest and spread to the rest of my body.  I knew at once it was the spirit and that God accepted me for who I was and would always love me.  All my life I had not only lived in fear of others rejection but God's rejection.  I found out, beyond a shadow of doubt, that God loved me and accepted me for who I was.  I came out of that spiritual experience with the knowledge that God accepted me."

      So my first piece of advice is not to assume how God feels about your attractions.  Ask him yourself, develop that relationship with him and find out that he loves you unconditionally.  This changed my life and led me down a path of healing and I know it can change yours.  Even with God's acceptance, it still does not answer many of the other questions, but it can provide a foundation to build one's life off of.

2. Come out to close family and friends when the time seems right.

      The next step I would recommend is one that could take a very long time.  This step involves, with the help of God, learning to accept yourself and then ultimately coming out to your family or close friends.  Research has found that the process of coming out is beneficial for the man or woman who does so.  Not only will it strengthen your self-esteem it will also make the relationships you have with others more genuine.  When you have a core group of family or friends you have come out to it can then help stabilize you not only emotionally and personally, but also spiritually as well.  I understand that for almost everybody this is something that is very difficult and terrifying.  Sharing something you have kept secret for so long and that has negative connotations in Mormon culture lays bare to everyone a place that is raw and can be easily used to harm you.  But this is a necessary step.

      If now does not feel like the right time, wait.  Ask God what he thinks and be patient.  If you do not feel safe sharing this part of yourself with family, colleagues, friends, or church members.  I would recommend some support groups such as Mormons Building Bridges, USGA at BYU, Affirmation, NorthStar, etc.  It's important to find someone that you can share with who won't judge you or put you down.  Mormons Building Bridges has been building a roster of LGBT friendly people in wards throughout the country that also might be a good place to check.  http://mormonsbuildingbridges.org/roster/

      Ultimately do what is most comfortable to you and come out in a safe environment.  I promise that although it may be the scariest thing you may ever do.  It will also be one of the most freeing experiences that you will ever have.  Trust me, a weight will be lifted off of your shoulders.  Even if others do not take it well.  You will feel much more genuine and much more true to yourself and God.

3. With the help of God, learn about all possible paths in your life Even the ones you may be uncomfortable with.  

      The third  recommendation that I give is to find out what to do next.  I have seen two polarized sides when it comes to this and not very much people in the middle.  Although there are some.  One side talks of the importance of following the Prophets, Apostles, and the official policy of the church whether it be through a mixed-orientation marriage, which is no longer recommended because of the negative consequences of the decision, or celibacy for the rest of your life.    The other side tells you to be true to yourself and have a same-sex relationship and get married if you are able.  What I see as a problem is that sometimes people on  both sides see each other as enemies or lacking in one respect or the other.  Some on each side say that they are right and everyone else is wrong.  But what does God say to you on this matter.  If our hearts and desires are pure he says, "Therefore, ask, and ye shall receive; knock, and it shall be opened unto you; for he that asketh receiveth;and unto him that knocketh, it shall be opened." 3 Nephi 27: 29.

      My advice is to go to our Heavenly Father and ask Him yourself.  I encourage everyone to learn from both sides, learn of the struggles and failures but also the triumphs and successes.  One can do this successfully using a computer but also personal experience.  Some websites to check out are www.ldsvoicesofhope.org and voicesoflove.org.

      I grew up thinking that LGBT people were immoral deviants who I should never associate with.  Come to find out after following many promptings from God.  They were actually just normal people.  Just as moral or immoral as straight people.  Learn in safe environments about either side.  I encourage you as you go on this journey of learning and growing to not hold anything back from Him.  Do not put qualifiers or exceptions,  trust in Him and let Him teach you and lead you anywhere He sees fit.  Follow the Law of Chastity when learning about this and always seek to have the spirit with you.

4. Make a decision with God on how to proceed with your life.  It may be for a short time, it may be for a lifetime, but commit to God and remain prayerful and trusting in His guidance.  

      The answer might be one you felt like you should do all along.  It might be completely different.  It might bring fear, it might bring hope and joy.  If it be from God he will provide a way, he promises this, the fruit will be good and God will sustain you.  If ultimately it is not the way God wants you to go, you will have confusion, a loss of clarity, and the fruits of those actions will be bad.  Ultimately I encourage you to have faith in God and know that He has a plan for you that will bring you happiness and that God will provide a way for you to accomplish it.  Follow the law of chastity as it applies to all members and relationships, God is not a respecter of persons.  Maybe if it is God's will you will marry a person of the same-sex and have a deep and loving relationship with them, and build a family together, or you may be asked to go the opposite route.  He even may ask you to wait and remain celibate.  Remember to trust in God's will for you.

      Some people may say that God will never say anything against what the prophets and apostles have said. However we know in the scriptures that this is not the case.  When Nephi was told to kill Laban in the Book of Mormon.  This action was murder, plain and simple, something that all prophets have said is a grievous sin.  But God had Nephi do it because he had a greater plan in the action.  Ultimately, God is the place from where all truth flows.  Christ due to the atonement is the light of truth.  The Apostles and Prophets are men, which means that they are imperfect and they may use their own understanding until a new revelation from God comes.  Although they are called of God they ultimately are not the source of all truth.  You all are entitled to personal revelation for yourself.  God will guide you as you pray on the words of the leaders of the church.

      This process will take time.  It has taken me many years and each step was long and filled with ups and downs.  I promise you that those trials will strengthen you. Looking back on my life now I realize and have grown to understand through my trials what Peter spoke about in 1 Peter 1:3-10

3) Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,
4) To an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you,
5) Who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.
6) Wherein ye greatly rejoice, through now for a season, if need be, ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations.
7) That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, through it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ:
8) Whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.
9) Receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of your souls.
10) Of which salvation the prophets have enquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you:

      The trials of my faith have been more precious than gold.  I have grown closer to God and I have gained greater insight and understanding in my life through those trials.  I know that God loves each and everyone of us and that he seeks that best for each of you.  This decision is between you and Him.  I can't tell you which direction is best for you because I don't know your reality.  There is one person who does and that is Jesus Christ.

      That decade of my life between puberty and when I turned twenty years old was a definite trial of my faith in God.  Whether He knew me and whether He actually cared was my struggle.  Peter writes "That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth"  My trials are much more precious to me than anything I have ever experienced and they have led me to a place of love, happiness, and joy that I would never have imagined just two years ago.  I found my joy in a place I never expected that I would. Whatever trials lie ahead of you I know that God will be with each and everyone of you as you work out where He wants you and where your happiness in his Kingdom is.  I encourage you all to remain active in the church.  Whether your path leads to celibacy or a loving relationship with the man or woman of your dreams, whether they be of the same sex or not.  You have many people cheering for you on earth and in heaven and I know God will never fail you.

Love and the Christian Imagination: a way to Understand Others who are Different as Taught by Christ.

Hello Everyone,

After I recently came out on this blog I have been overwhelmed by all the positive responses and wonderful declarations of support. I am planning on writing more on this blog about many different topics that are important to me.  However with school starting up I may take a little longer to update the blog.

So in the mean time I thought I would post a wonderful talk given by Robert Reese Ph.D. an active Latter-day Saint who has been an ally for LGBT Mormons for a long time.  This talk gives a very thorough and wonderful insight into what it is like to be an LGBT and Christian.  He calls on both sides to build understanding and love for the other.  He also speaks on an interesting subject that I am guessing the vast majority of people probably haven't thought of before.  I encourage everyone to read this talk. I hope that it can open hearts and promote greater love and understanding for all of God's children.  Enjoy!
       Lance

Love and the Christian imagination 

~ Robert A. Rees, Ph.D.

Part of what it means to be a Christian is that through the grace of Christ we have the capacity to imagine what it is like to suffer as another person suffers. It is impossible to do this if we have anger, hatred or revulsion for the other. Such imaginative projection is possible only within the context of love. Thus, those who revile and persecute homosexuals, who treat them as if they are flawed or have some kind of sinister agenda, cannot possibly take on their suffering, cannot possibly hope to feel what they feel, but those whose compassion is inspired by Christ, can feel, at least to some degree, what it must be like to be anathema to society. We can imagine what it must feel like to be taught to hate our own bodies, to be condemned for feeling what we naturally feel, to be denied normal fellowship within Christ’s kingdom, and to want to blot out our deep soul suffering through suicide.

Reviewing the sad history of homosexuality among the Mormons, I conclude that where we are today as a Church and as a people, though in many ways advanced from where we have been, can best be described as a failure—a failure of faith, a failure of courage, a failure of imagination, and most of all a failure of love.

I want to talk about two aspects of that failure today—the failure of imagination and the failure of love. I don’t think one can have a truly mature faith that isn’t to some degree graced by imagination. We don’t often speak of imagination and Christ in the same breath, but I read the gospels as the product of a great and fecund imagination. It isn’t just the inventive language, the subtle irony and humor, and the fresh narratives that flowed from his expansive heart and mind that make Jesus of Nazareth such great imaginer, but especially his capacity to imagine each of us caught in the snares of sin, lost in the tangled wood of mortality, each uniquely in need of love, mercy and grace. Beyond this was his god-like capacity to imagine each of us as glorified beings, each of our futures a reflection of his present. Only such an imagination, I am convinced, could have emboldened him to descend into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and ascend to Calvary the following Friday.

If we share some of Christ’s imaginative gifts, as I believe we all have the capacity to do when we take on us his name, then we can use such gifts to expand his work in the world. We can imagine not only that, but how, we can be better disciples than we are and the Church a better institution than it is. The Church I imagine, like Joseph Smith’s view of God, can be “more liberal in [its] views and more boundless in [its] mercies than we are ready to believe.”

The way in which I believe we have failed you our LGBT brothers and sisters is that we have not used our Christian imagination to try and understand your experience or to understand our stewardship in relation to you. Instead of seeing you as Latter-day Saints who have made heroic efforts to conform to Church requirements, we have instead characterized you as rebellious and unrepentant.

Instead of seeing you as exercising faith in promises made by Church leaders and therapists that if you were only sufficiently faithful, you could change your core identity, we have tended to see you as willfully disobedient and unfaithful.

Instead of honoring the often heroic efforts you have made to prove to God and the Church that you were worthy of such a miraculous promise of change, we have accused you of not being sufficiently righteous.

Instead of applauding you for spending years and in some instances decades in therapy trying to deal with your depression, despair, and existential angst over your identity, we have accused you of not being sufficiently valiant.

Instead of seeing you as people who have made amazing sacrifices to fit in with your family, friends and congregations, we have stereotyped you as lustful, narcissistic Sybarites bent on indulging in and celebrating a “life style” that we have labeled outrageous, deviant, and predatory.

Instead of seeing you as desiring the Mormon ideal of fidelity in marriage, we have characterized you as desiring something unnatural and uncivilized.

In short, instead of seeing you as fully human, we have tended to see you as alien and other.

We have failed to imagine what it must have been like for you as children or adolescents when you first recognized that you were different from your peers and the societal norm you were expected to conform to and how frightened you were of telling anyone about your feelings. According to the recent survey of 1,600 Latter-day Saint homosexuals conducted by Dr. William Bradshaw and his colleagues, on average, participants report a ten- year gap between the time they first realized their romantic or erotic attraction to those of the same sex (around age 12) and their first disclosure of this to another person (around age 22). We have failed to imagine the exquisite fear and loneliness you must have experienced during that long, lonely decade—or how painful it was when you did finally muster the courage to tell someone, only to discover that they rejected you, driving you deeper into your loneliness, despair and alienation.

Nowhere has our imagination failed us more than in our refusal to place ourselves in your lives, in your hearts, your minds, and your bodies, to imagine how we would feel and act if we were asked to do what we have asked you to do—forego all romantic love, intimate affection, erotic expression, marital companionship and parent-child relationships for the duration of your mortal lives. Failing to consider the complexity of same-sex orientation and identity, we have encouraged (and even pressured) some of you to bind yourself to another person for whom you have no such desires or hope of any. We have also failed to imagine how it must be for you to suffer opprobrium, denigration of character, and alienation from the families, friends and congregations you most want to be a part of. We have failed to imagine how you feel on Sunday mornings when you want to be worshipping with your fellow saints and singing the songs of Zion.

Finally, we have failed to imagine the despair, the hopelessness that has led so many of you to take or attempt to take your own lives.

In a talk I gave over twenty-five years ago when I was bishop of the Los Angeles Singles’ Ward—addressed to the heterosexual members of the ward--I cited Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” in which Hopkins says that each of us

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—[that is,]

Christ. For [he says] Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.

What Hopkins means is that Christ as our advocate takes our part, acts on our behalf before the Father, letting his light shine through our features and faces so that the Father may see us as Christ sees us—lovely in limbs and eyes (that is, body and soul), in spite of our weaknesses, limitations, and sinfulness.

Since we have the light of Christ within us, since we take on his character when we are born anew through him, thus becoming his children of light, then beyond expressing who and what we are, we also express who he is. Christ justifies us to God, and it is through His grace that when we act before the Father, in a sense we become Christ, because his light shines through us. Christ plays in ten thousand places and through many times ten thousand faces which he makes lovely to the Father through his grace. Those faces Christ plays through are both heterosexual and homosexual. He would bring us all to God.

The Gospel of St. Matthew shows us that Christ intends for us as his disciples to imitate him in this way—that is, that we are to see one another as he sees us, to consciously engage our imaginations as he employed his so that we, like him, can see the very essence of one another’s being, in Latter- day Saint terms, see the light of Christ in one another’s faces. When we do this, our only response is to love one another with as pure a love as we are capable of manifesting. As the novelist, Francisco Goldman says, “The great metaphor at the heart of the Gospel According to Saint Matthew is that those who suffer and those who show love for those who suffer are joined through suffering and grace to Jesus Christ.”

I concluded my remarks to members of the Los Angeles First ward with these words:I pray the Lord will bless us as brothers and sisters in the Kingdom of God, as those who have taken upon us His name, that we will let Christ's light shine through our faces, that we will make of our community a wholeness, that we will seek that common ground of peace of which Paul speaks, and that we will learn how to love and serve the Lord by celebrating who we are, his heterosexual and homosexual sons and daughters. Because we are all his creatures, we are all born with his light. I pray that we may let that light shine among us, that it might grow, that we ourselves might be its beacon, and that, as a Church and as individuals, we not only will pray to the Lord for greater light and understanding, but that we will turn ourhearts with greater charity, love and acceptance of all of those whom we might consider strangers.

In Matthew 25 Christ puts Himself in the place of the stranger--of the homosexual, if you will, saying in effect, "Inasmuch as you have done it or not done it unto the least of one of these my homosexual brothers or sisters, you have done it or not done it unto me" (25:40).

What does this mean for you, my homosexual brothers and sisters? I wish I could say that you just have to be patient with us, your unimaginative, incomplete and wounded fellow saints, that you just have to continue to endure our spiritual immaturity as we strive to become more enlightened and more loving, but the fact is, you too have this role to play—you must also see us, those who have despised and rejected you, who have belittled and banished you, who have failed to find you in our imaginations—you must see us in the same way Christ calls us to see you. That is, even as we continue to cause you to suffer, you are called to imagine our lives--our fears, ignorance and prejudice that characterize our un-Christian treatment of you. That above all is what it means to be a follower of Christ. With him, we are to replace, ignorance with knowledge, error with truth, injustice with justice and, most of all, hate with love.

I know it is not just for you to have to respond in this way to an institution and individuals who have treated you in unkind, unjust and, yes, un- Christian ways, but if we are to find our way out of the labyrinth we are in, which I think we must do together, it is incumbent upon us all to do what Christ calls us to do. It is through this work that we reform both ourselves and our Church. It is in this constant reforming that we prevent both ourselves and the Church from becoming idols. Thus, in order for this to happen, we have to get out of our social and religious ghettos, see one another’s real lives and try to understand one another’s lived experiences. I love the old Shaker hymn titled “More Love,” which includes the following lyrics:

If ye love not each other in daily communion, How can ye love God whom ye have not seen? More love, more love;

The heaven’s are blessing

The angels are calling O Zion! More love.

If in the Church we can imagine change beyond policy and practice, beyond culture, perhaps even beyond currently accepted doctrine, we may become agents of change and thereby help transform the Church, perhaps liberate it from some of its less enlightened traditions, and even glorify it in new ways, thus demonstrating that we are indeed ready and anxious to receive on this subject new revelation regarding "great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God." As the humanist Ihab Hassan says, "Liberations come from some strange region where the imagination meets change. . . . We need to re-imagine change itself, else we labor to confirm all our errors." Or, as Saul Bellow’s Henderson says, “All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!”

In his powerful essay, "Notes of a Native Son," James Baldwin speaks about the rage he felt as he went through a series of humiliating experiences as a young man living in New York [City]. He was refused service in a number of restaurants simply because he was black. Finally, the accumulation of humiliations caused him to react with a kind of unconscious violence . . . . I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do, but from the hatred I carried in my own heart."

Later in the same essay Baldwin concludes, "In order to really hate white people, one has to blot so much out of the mind--and the heart-- that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose. But this does not mean, on the other hand, that love comes easily: the white world [and here one can substitute the straight world] is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous humiliation, and above all, too ignorant and too innocent for that . . . . Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law."

Twenty-one years ago I gave the keynote address at the Affirmation national conference in Palm Springs. In that address, I made an analogy between what was happening in the Church in relation to homosexuality and what had transpired in American and Mormon culture in relation to blacks. I quote from that address:  In a letter to his nephew, James, written on the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Baldwin writes, "There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. . . . We cannot be free until they are free."

Have any of you ever considered that part of your work for humanity might be teaching heterosexuals how to love better? It may not be fair that you are asked to do this, but I believe that it is God's will that you do so because, like blacks and other hated groups, you have experienced the deprivation of love in a profound way, and that depravation has given you a gift which, if you will use it, can bless your lives and the lives of others. Having been subject to rejection, ostracism, and even hatred, you may understand something about the importance of love which others do not. I believe that it is in rising through our suffering to such love that we attain holiness.

I would like to close with a story that illustrates this principle, Raymond Carver’s “A Small Good Thing.” In this story a couple, the Weisses, make preparations to celebrate the birthday of their only son, Scotty. They order a cake from the local bakery. On the day of the party the boy is hit by a car and lapses into a coma. The parents wait anxiously by the bedside day after day but their son never awakens and, after a short time, dies. The baker, unaware of the accident, continues to call the parents to come and pick up the cake. Grieving, they do not return his calls. He continues to call and leaves abusive, threatening messages on their answering machine. Finally, one night they go to the bakery to express their outrage at the Baker’s behavior. When they tell him that their son is dead, he is embarrassed and ashamed. A simple man, he does the only thing he can think of—he offers them some of his fresh-baked bread. As they sit in the darkened bakery eating, he reveals his own life of loneliness, of being childless, of working sixteen hours a day baking thousands of wedding and birthday cakes and imagining the celebrations surrounding them, none of which ever touch his life personally.

Finally, he takes a fresh loaf of dark bread from the oven, breaks it open and offers some to them. “Smell this” he says, “It’s a heavy bread but rich.” Carver writes, “They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the florescent trays of light. They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.”

This is a powerful story of loss, grief, death, forgiveness, and most of all of love. It is also a story of redemption. The association in the story of bread with light reminds us of Christ who is both the bread of life and the light of the world. Partaking of the bread of life each week, we too taste of his light. (Here I would add that if you do not feel comfortable partaking of the sacrament in a Latter-day Saint congregation, find one that welcomes you and partake of it there.) It is a small good thing we do and is akin to all of the other small acts of understanding, forgiveness and compassion we give to one another. Such acts of love, it seems to me, have their genesis in the light of Christ which is in every one of us. It is our sacred calling to magnify that light in our hearts and souls and to carry it to and receive it from one another as we receive the emblems of Christ’s sacrifice, that is, with gratitude and hope.

In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

More love, more love; The heaven’s are blessing The angels are calling

O Zion! More love.