A short preface for any Mormon family or friends who read this: You are not the intended audience for these notes. If they hurt you or offend you in any way, I’m happy to talk through that with you. You know that I will always love you and respect you, but just be warned that these notes explore residual anger for the Church, and you don’t need to read them if you feel it would damage our relationship.
I’m sitting in the lobby area of Salt Lake City’s Sheraton hotel sipping my Americano when a gaggle of misfit teens descends from a gaudy, curving staircase. Uniform red lanyards and plastic name tags hang from their necks. Across from me, a giant black arrow pasted to a poster points up the stairs.
The poster reads:
Community, Integrity, Hope
WASATCH
BREAKOUT
ROOM
Youth 13-18
I recognize the organization, of course. I was pulled in by a time with their message that one can “struggle” with gender or “same-sex attraction” and stay an active member of the LDS Church. As I watch them, a familiar rage begins to burn.
I pull out my laptop, and by the time I’ve finished describing their descent, many of the teens are already heading back up the staircase in small groups, all holding heaping plates of food.
What is it? I ask myself, I’ve been away from Mormonism for so long; I thought I was over the hard feelings––what’s so affecting about this particular scene?
There’s no simple answer—it’s so many details—all together—at once.
It’s their innocent laughter, their acne, their wild hairdos, their ill-fitting clothes, their awkward gaits.
It’s the boy with the fancy haircut prancing excitedly up the stairs to catch up to another boy with a muscular frame—
It’s the girl wearing an oversized black-and-white checkered sweater on a hot summer day, the right half of her flowing hair dyed blue, the other half dyed black, wandering aimlessly during the lunch break—
It’s the morose teen with the buzzed haircut trapped in a too-tight navy blue button-up that’s tucked into his navy blue shorts, staring at his white sneakers as he walks—
It’s the memory of being him.
It’s my anger at the sight of so many suit-wearing, dress-clad Mormon adults shepherding them up and down the staircase, brimming with good intentions, telling these teens when they’re supposed to be where—telling them who they’re supposed to become.
For so long, I’ve thought the soul-wounds of my Mormon youth had long since scabbed and scarred over, but the sight of these vulnerable teens and my imagination of what they’re being told in those conference rooms seems to rip the wound wide open.
I feel a rage bubbling up inside me, a rage that wants so badly to barge into the WASATCH BREAKOUT ROOM, erect a rameumptom, and sermonize flamboyantly.
“There is an entire sky full of stars!” I imagine myself saying.
“Why follow Polaris instead of bright Sirius or red-flamed Betelguese ? Who told you which star was best to follow? Who taught you that North was the direction to walk with your life?
“You are misfits! You are queer people! Your peers don’t understand you—they can’t! Your parents don’t understand you—they can’t! You can’t even understand each other yet! And you won’t if you’re not taught to stop trying to fit and instead, to find your own mind, your own star.
“This conference they’ve convened today is just to circulate the same, tired tales they’ve been telling for decades about how happiness is the result of obedience. But that is not a message of community—it’s one of coercion. It’s the same tactic used by salespeople and marketers the world ‘round—buy this, do that, and then you’ll finally be happy.
“They are trying to reshape you, saying all the while that it’s so you can become like God. They’ll teach you to interpret certain universal human emotions as divine communication, delude you into calling feelings ‘knowledge,’ and then pressure you to bear testimony over and over until you’ve bent your own heart backwards to be the ideal ‘saint’ they think you should be.
“And then they’ll teach you that your bent and painful heart is called ‘integrity.’ And it will be difficult to pause and ask questions because you can feel so tangibly the deep love behind their teachings, however misguided.
“But pause for a moment and ask yourself—could true integrity ever feel so twisted?
“Queerly beloved, there is a stark difference between integrity to commandments and integrity to yourself. And what good would it be if you were to bend yourself ‘perfect’ but lose your own soul?
“Young friends, before placing your hope in anything anyone teaches you, place it first in yourself.
“Forget the names of the stars, the shapes of the constellations, and look up at the sky as if for the first time. Sit awhile. Bathe in the infinity of possibilities, and then follow whatever star sings strongest to you.
“And if, later on, a new star sings louder, follow that one instead.
“Community and integrity will come to you in turn when you learn to listen to the still small voice of your own genius instead of the din of scriptures, prophets, and conferences.
“Trust yourselves. Find and follow a star all your own. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”
As I step down from the rameumptom in my mind, I can feel the awkward silence of unwelcome preaching. I can see the fear of mothers and fathers in the room that their children will break away from the straight and narrow way, become a law unto themselves, which would make the parents’ own deepest hopes for a family together forever in heaven something impossible.
And that’s exactly what separates me from my Mormon friends and family: the wide gulf of impossibility.
In their theology, my own personhood is an impossibility. The Plan of Salvation they hold so sacred erases me. The only path I’d ever have towards the highest heavens would be laying down my actual personhood and being reborn as some ideal heterosexual believer, a person who is not me.
To gain exaltation, I would have to lose my own soul.
My own impossibility inside Mormon theology makes, in turn, their highest hopes and deepest longings an impossibility (or at least, improbability) that they, too, must bear: I will not be together with them forever in the heaven they hope for.
As I watch these innocent teenagers wander around the hotel, I start to wish it could all be possible—
I wish the boy prancing up the stairs could freely express the feelings that draw him to the boy at the top, and I wish a future for them would be possible in the imaginations of their parents and community—
I wish the girl with the half-dyed hair could believe that the integration of her two halves is possible, that her family could imagine a heaven together with her authentic soul—
I wish the morose boy in the monochrome clothes could look up from his white sneakers and see the shining star of his own happiness as a possibility far in the distance. I wish no one would think lesser of him for choosing his own path over the star in the North.
But until tectonic forces close the gulf between our minds, I can only try, at least, to make articulate to myself the reasons my heart burns when a gaggle of misfit teens descends a gaudy, curving staircase at a random hotel on a Saturday afternoon in early June.