Another take on Jonathan Langford's No Going Back

FoxyJ posted her review on Northern Lights.

(See my review here and a bunch of other reviews linked here.)

No Going Back

No Going Back by Jonathan Langford was a hard book for me to read. It brought me back all too vividly to my life as a teenage gay Mormon, being torn apart by my religion on one side and my sexual orientation on the other, and all the unpleasantness that entailed. Fifteen-going-on-sixteen-year-old Paul's story is hardly an exact replica of mine--Paul's is much more interesting--but he and teenage me have enough in common that immersing myself in his world was very much like taking a trip back to my youth. I haven't felt so angsty in a long time. Despite that discomfort, or more likely because of it, I found myself not wanting to put the book down. I flew through a year and a half of young Paul's life in less than three days, and would have done so quicker if not for distractions like work and sleep.

I was a little hesitant going into No Going Back because I knew it was written from an orthodox Mormon view of homosexuality--that homosexual feelings are not a sin but homosexual behavior is--and over the past several years I have come to have very strong objections to this point of view (the latter part, not the former). I was happy to find, though, that I don't mind reading fiction written from a perspective opposed to my own, so long as the author doesn't warp his presentation of reality in order to support that viewpoint. Langford's novel is, as a blurb on the back states, a "thoroughly orthodox" Mormon novel in that the main characters remain loyal to orthodox Mormon doctrine, but he places them in a world that rings true to the world I see, where other characters are just as loyal to other beliefs (including several who fall closer to my own), and none of them are portrayed two-dimensionally. Just about every character, from the protagonist to his straight best friend to his mom and the bishop and the members of the high school gay-straight alliance, breathes with the life only an author's love can infuse. I certainly don't get the sense that Langford thinks any less of his non-Mormon characters than his Mormon ones. If anyone is portrayed unsympathetically, it's the members of Paul's priests' quorum who ridicule him for being a "faggot."

An English professor of mine liked to talk about good novels being both a mirror and a window (and I'm sure he got this concept from someone else, but I don't feel like looking it up). As a former gay Mormon teenager, I can safely say that this book does a good job of providing me a mirror--perhaps too well. An added strength of the book, though, is that it does not spend all its time in Paul's head. Much of the narration is devoted to Paul's best friend, his mother, his bishop, and several other characters. I enjoyed the windows this provided me into what it might be like to be a gay kid's straight friend, or to be a gay kid's mother, and so on. And lest we think the world revolves around angsty gay teenagers, each of these characters is developed beyond his or her role in relation to Paul, so we get equally enlightening glimpses into the lives of a woman going through a mid-life crisis, a man trying to balance his various roles, a kid struggling in school. This is what good novels do--they help us better understand ourselves and others.

Every now and then I read something that reflects a part of me so accurately that I want to tell everyone I care about, "Here, read this! You will understand this part of me in ways I'm incapable of making you understand." I had that experience with Alan Rex Mitchell's Angel of the Danube, a novel I read shortly after serving an LDS mission in Europe, when all other portrayals of LDS missionary life I saw were so different from what I'd known. I had the same experience when reading the antepenultimate chapter of Robert Mayer's Superfolks, at a time when I knew few would understand, when I hardly understood my reasons for returning to a heterosexual marriage when there were untapped universes of homosexual relationships to explore. No Going Back doesn't reflect my life as it is now, but it reflects a part of my life--and based on my emotional reaction, a part I still haven't fully recovered from--in such a way that makes me want to shove it in front of everyone I know and insist they read it. I won't actually do that (I've never been very good at proselytizing), but I will say that I think the book is worth your time.

In Semi-Solidarity with the MoHos

You might not know that November was National Wear Your MoHo Uniform to Church Month. Despite the fact that I've never liked the term MoHo much and I don't consider myself a Mo(rmon )Ho(mosexual), I thought it would be nice to participate in honor of my many gay Mormon friends. I ran across a couple problems. First, I don't go to church or, for that matter, any place that requires a dress shirt and tie. I overcame that problem this morning, albeit a week late, by attending a service at the local Unitarian Universalist church. I was overdressed for their casual Sunday meeting, but not so much that I felt uncomfortable.

The second problem was that although I have several blue dress shirts, it turns out I don't own a single green tie. I found a remedy by reversing the official MoHo uniform with a green shirt and a blue tie. MoHo purists, who stick to the official (albeit backward) definition of the term as a Mormon who happens to have ties to homosexuality, might find this inversion appropriate, as I am by their definition a HoMo, a homosexual who happens to have ties to Mormonism. Never mind the fact that the shirt and tie really don't go well together at all.

Please note, everyone, that if this trend catches on and other LGBT former Mormons hop on my green-shirt-and-blue-tie bandwagon, leading to the adoption of new terms to define gay Mormondom--i.e. "Are you a Blue Shirt?" "Oh, no, I used to be, but now I'm a flaming Green Shirt."--I want you (I'm looking at you, Oxford English Dictionary) to remember that I was the first.

The Tipping Point OR Speculating the Unspeculatable

If you had asked me a year ago--and several people did, at one time or another--whether I thought the Mormon church would ever change its position on homosexuality, I would have said (a) I don't care, (b) I don't know, and (c) probably not. Once I left the church I ceased to care what they believe because it doesn't affect me, at least not directly. Honestly, I believe the church's teachings on homosexuality do horrible damage to gay people in and out of the church by teaching that who we are is a lie, but I suppose I see that as something so far out of my control that it's not worth my time and energy worrying about. I had come to recognize lies for lies and truths for truths, and I've seen countless other people do the same. It's rarely a painless journey but hell, nothing is.

Even the fact that the church regularly told its members to vote for anti-gay legislation didn't concern me too much, because it's not like Mormons make up a significant portion of the voting population in many areas of the world. The past six months have proven me wrong in my assumption about the extent of Mormons' potential influence on secular legislation, but even now I'm not particularly invested in the church announcing that same-sex relationships are just as valid in the eyes of God as opposite-sex relationships. They're welcome to go on believing that homosexual behavior is sinful, so long as they learn to keep the legal codification of that belief within the bounds of their own membership.

So today my answers (a) and (b) remain the same, but I'm no longer so sure about (c). My belief that the LDS church was unlikely to ever change its stance on homosexuality was based in the same reasons most Mormons will give: the eternal nature of gender and family relationships are so entwined in basic Mormon doctrine that it would be impossible to pull the beliefs about homosexuality out without unraveling the entire belief system.

I began to question this assumption, though, a couple months ago when Scot posted about a talk given in 1954 by an LDS apostle in which pretty much the same arguments the church uses to oppose same-sex marriage today were used to oppose mixed-race marriage then. It's really quite jarring to read the racist rhetoric used in talks like this one--I was born a year after the revelation that gave black men the priesthood and so have seen very little of this side of the church's history. To think that church leaders could talk like this at BYU or in General Conference, and that people just accepted it, is both apalling and enlightening. One can't help but wonder if fifty years from now Mormons will be just as appalled by the heterosexist rhetoric used in today's fireside devotionals and conference talks.

It's hard to imagine how the church would reconcile acceptance of homosexual relationships with the rest of their doctrine, but I'm sure it was once just as hard to imagine how a God who is "the same yesterday, today, and forever" would change his position on plural marriage or on the exclusion of the "descendants of Cain" from the priesthood. The common explanation of those changes now, looking back, is that the church changed policy, not doctrine, or that it was just a matter of the Saints misunderstanding God's will. I doubt, though, that those Saints would find your opinion any less heretical if you were to go back in time and tell them this.

Over the past several weeks I've developed a theory: In order to survive an institution must evolve; the LDS church has shown this ability to evolve and thus has thrived over the past century and a half. One of the church's virtues, in fact, is its ability to change, based on the doctrine of continuing revelation. If not, it would have died out a century ago. There came a time when in order to survive the church needed to change its position on plural marriage; the world at large simply wouldn't tolerate a church that continued to practice a marriage system that had mostly died out in Western civilization centuries earlier. It changed and it survived. Later, there came a time when the world at large would not tolerate a church that continued to deny some of its members the most basic and essential rites of its doctrine (i.e. eternal marriage) based simply on their race. This is not to say that anyone was going to step in and take away the church's right to practice its beliefs, but that people would not want to associate with a church they saw as racist, and so the membership would dwindle away to nothing. The church changed and it survived.

Curious to see if the facts supported this theory, I looked up the historical growth rate of the church and found this on Wikipedia:

At first glance the graph supports my theory. Right around 1966, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, there's a rapid decline in the growth rate, which doesn't find its way back up until 1989, once the church had had a decade to move away from its image as a racist organization. Before my supporters pat me on the back and my naysayers jump on me, though, let me say that this correlation is far from proving causality. It doesn't take into account, for example, the fact that the late sixties also saw a lot of mission-age young men otherwise occupied in Vietnam, which would certainly have an impact on the growth rate. For all I know studies have been done showing the race issue had absolutely nothing to do with the drop in growth rate.

But I believe, nonetheless, that if the church had not changed its position on race it would not currently be the 13 million-member worldwide organization it is. There would have come a tipping point in public opinion after which people simply would not even talk to representatives of a church that held onto antiquated beliefs about race.

That time will come too for homosexuality. This post about evolving public opinion on gay rights and gay marriage (which I just don't get tired of linking to) suggests that time is not all that far away. Either the LDS church will change or it will cease to exist. History--not only the history of the LDS church but also the history of the similarly-dogmatic Catholic church--tells us that ceasing to exist is not a plausible reality. I suspect that long before it gets to the point where most people (within and without the church) are no longer willing to consider the possibility of a faith that excludes same-sex couples, the church will change.

Of course the skeptic in me sees this as a simple matter of LDS leaders changing what are ultimately arbitrary beliefs, but my theory doesn't require the assumption that the church is not indeed led by a prophet inspired by a true and living God. The Mormon understanding of the revelation on the priesthood is that Spencer W. Kimball pleaded and pleaded with God until he received the answer he sought--that all men could hold the priesthood. Perhaps all that's needed here is a prophet, spurred by a declining growth rate, who pleads with God until he gets the answer he's looking for, an answer current leaders don't see not because it's not there but because they haven't even thought to ask.

Or, alternatively, the world might fall subject to a cataclysm brought on by global warming or terrorism, sending people running back to the comforting arms of fundamentalist religion and the reassuring belief that it really was all the gays' fault. Because it always is.

Because Today I Have Hope

Compartmentalizing

Because I have things to say that very few people who read this blog care about and because some other things I have to say can potentially do more good if said elsewhere, I've expanded my blogging venues. I've started a blog about comics and related geeky goodness which I don't anticipate anyone here will be interested in but I hope will find an audience elsewhere, and I've begun contributing to the Isocrat.org blog, which is where the majority of my LGBT-related thoughts will now be going. The blog is just one part of Isocrat.org, a massive site of LGBT resources that Scot is putting together with a little help from me and a few other friends. I've been working (slowly) on helping to organize the library of articles Scot has put together, and this morning I published my first post on the blog. Among other things, the post explains a small change I've just made to the About Me text in the sidebar here. -->

The Fobcave, meanwhile, won't change much. It will be the repository of all the "everything else" things I feel like blogging about, which is pretty much what it's always been.

Love the Sin, Hate the Sinner

(Or is it the other way around? I can never remember.)

In any discussion about homosexuality and the LDS church between believers and nonbelievers, the following exchange has a 95% chance of occurring in some form or another:

Nonbeliever: I'm tired of your church hating on the gays.

Believer: No, you misunderstand. We love the gays, we just disapprove of their sinful actions/lifestyle.

Having been on both sides of this argument, I recognize and respect the distinction between actions and people. I question the appropriateness of an individual or organization judging the actions of other people that affect no one but the "sinners" themselves, particularly when the act in question is every bit as personal and meaningful to the people involved as the same act is between any husband and wife, but still I recognize the distinction. In all my criticism of the church I am meticulously careful to maintain this distinction. I have said that I find the church's political stance regarding Proposition 8 anti-family and more recently that I find the decision made by some church members to vote against their conscience in order to be obedient unethical, at best selfish and at worst cowardly. I have not once said that the church is anti-family or that the people who make that unethical decision are selfish or cowardly. I make selfish and cowardly decisions all the time but to say that I am a selfish or cowardly person wouldn't really mean anything, because every human being is selfish and cowardly by that standard.

It's extremely frustrating, then, that several times in the past few months I have been accused by friends and family members of being hateful toward the church and its members. I do not hate Mormons, else I would hate the majority of the people who are most important to me, and I do not hate their church. I have noted on several occasions the good that the church does. This doesn't change the fact that the things they do to harm other people make me furious, and I reserve the right to express that anger. If it is hateful of me to express indignation when I see people hurting other people, then it was hateful of Christ to throw the moneychangers out of the temple. Hate and anger are not synonymous.

I understand that those of you who are faithful Mormons hold very high opinions of your leaders, your church, and your God. I assure you I hold very high opinions of some of the other people I've criticized. Accusing me of hate every time I express anger at the unjust actions of these people serves only to send the message that you wish to invalidate my opinion. Which doesn't make me feel particularly loved, sinner that I may be.

Another Interview

The holiday season killed the momentum on several of the interviews I was doing for my series of straight spouse interviews on Northern Lights, and I haven't managed to get very many of them going again since then--as much due to my own busyness as to theirs. Miki Biddles, though, has been kind enough to keep going steadily through the interview and I've finally managed to put all my questions and her answers together and post them. Enjoy.

Velvet Rage

When I came across The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man's World by Alan Downs, my first thought was that I didn't fit the bill. What right do I have to claim the rage or pain of being a gay man in a straight man's world, when I live in the social comfort of a heterosexual marriage? I'm not really gay. But then I got over myself and admitted that yes, regardless of where I am now, my experience growing up was likely very similar to that of many gay men.

As I read Downs's description of the three stages of a gay man's* development--the shame of realizing you have a horrible secret that you can never reveal to anyone, the extravagance of compensating for that shame upon coming out, and the authenticity that comes upon leaving the shame behind--I did see myself in a lot of it. Particularly the first stage fits my adolescent self to a tee, the closeted gay boy who believes there is something fundamentally wrong with himself and seeks validation by becoming whatever people want him to be. I find myself still trapped in that mindset sometimes, skillfully covering up the parts of myself I don't want people to see, believing they wouldn't like the true me if they saw it.

The second stage best describes where I'm at now. I am for the most part out and no longer view my sexual orientation as flawed or broken. Like most gay men in this stage, though, I haven't managed to really get past that belief that something is wrong with me, and I try to compensate for that shame by being fabulous at everything I do--whether it's being the best student in a class, being the most efficient employee at work, or being the most thoughtful and articulate writer around, I thrive on excellence and above all the praise that comes with it. Incapable of finding validation in myself, I seek it from external sources. This feels nice when it works but leaves me feeling miserable when the external validation doesn't come pouring in.

I have moments when I feel like I'm approaching the third stage but I'm afraid I'm not there yet. The gay man in Stage Three no longer feels shame because he's learned to confront his weaknesses head-on and realized they really weren't as bad as he thought. This is the man who no longer needs to have the perfect body or the perfect boyfriend, who finds happiness in who he is and what he has. Granted, I've never sought happiness by having sex with lots of beautiful men, but heaven knows I've believed that's where happiness lay--and still do, sometimes.

There are certainly points where my life diverges from that of the average gay man. Unlike most men who Downs would place in Stage Two, I'm not living from boyfriend to boyfriend--I've never even been with a man. But I like to think I also differ from the average Stage One closeted man hiding from his homosexuality in a straight marriage; I'm not hiding. Despite these differences, I think what this book provided for me is a sense that I am on a journey that a lot of gay men have been on and are on now. As Downs points out in the book, the nature of our society keeps men in the three stages from really being aware of each other: men in Stage One are hiding in the closet; those in Stage Two are living the high-flying gay life of nightclubs and bars and gyms; and those in Stage Three have retired from this scene to a quieter life. The most visible are those in Stage Two, and that sends a false message, that that's all there is to being gay. This lack of a cohesive community across the stages creates a lack of role models and road maps, a gap Alan Downs fills with this book. I recommend it to gay men in any stage of life.



*Downs clarifies that while much of what he says may also apply to lesbians and straight men and women, he focuses on gay men so as not to do injustice to the unique nature of each group's experiences with these stages.

WOW!

Last week I learned that some of the women who participate in the spouses group over at North Star are putting together a weekend retreat for women who are married to same-sex attracted men. It's called WOW: Women of Worth, and will be held in Holiday, Utah, in June. For all the info, go here. I think this is a good thing and I hope it's a positive experience for everyone involved.

I would also like to point out that I totally found out about this before Ty posted about it on Northern Lights, but I was slow to post and so now I look like a follower. Oh well. I'm cool in my dreams.

Foxy Exposed

I haven't and don't intend to link to every straight spouse interview I post on Northern Lights, but I suspect several Fobcave readers may be interested in reading the interview with FoxyJ I posted this afternoon. Wondering what my wife really thinks about Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley? Click here to find out!

Her Ex is Having Sex With Rex

I first learned of Jennifer Lee's memoir My Ex is Having Sex With Rex in a review on C.L. Hanson's blog. It sounded like an interesting book so I put it on my Amazon.com wishlist, but never got around to buying it until my brother got it for me this Christmas. It's a quick and entertaining read and provides an enlightening look at a mixed-orientation marriage and its aftermath from the perspective of a woman whose husband has left her for a man.

(As a side note, I always find it interesting when people talk about how the woman's perspective is generally ignored in the discussion of gay men marrying women, because the extent of what I've come across on the topic are books like this and Carol Lynn Pearson's Good-Bye, I Love You and Amity Buxton's The Other Side of the Closet, which are all about women who are divorced from gay men. Since the rise of the blogosphere I've seen a lot of married and divorced gay men blogging and a few lesbians here and there, but what I've seen very little of is straight women who are currently married to gay men, a lack I'm hoping to remedy a bit with the series of interviews I'm doing on Northern Lights.)

I admit to having a hard time, when reading this book and Pearson's, of taking these accounts of another person's experience as just that--another person's experience. It's too easy for me to read about Lee and her ex-husband and say, "Oh, that's just like FoxyJ and me" or "That's nothing like our relationship." It's too easy to look at others' experiences and see them as omens of things to come, to see the pain these women have felt as pain I will inevitably cause the woman I love.

At the same time, I'm bothered by statements Lee makes like "Bottom line: There's no hope of having a committed, connected, love-at-the-very-core-of-your-being marriage between a straight woman and a gay man." Really? Really? Have you based that statement on researched scientific data? I will never argue with Lee or anyone else who has come to that conclusion about her own marriage. I would not even argue with anyone who came to that conclusion about a potential marriage she chose not to enter upon learning her fiance was gay. But I have a hard time accepting such blanket statements made regarding all straight-gay marriages. This is not a matter of me defending my personal experience; I would have and did say the same thing when Foxy and I were separated with the intention of divorcing.

That said, I enjoyed My Ex is Having Sex With Rex. It's the honest story of a woman who was thrown unknowingly into a really crappy situation and is now in the midst of making the best of it. Quite admirably, she's concerned not only with making the best of it for herself but also for her children, her ex-husband, and everyone else involved. Even her conclusions about the impossibility of mixed-orientation marriages seem to be coming from her charitable attempt to view the end of her marriage and the pain it's caused her not as the result of her ex-husband's decision to leave but as an inevitable result of their situation. Ultimately Lee comes to a conclusion similar to one I came to this summer: it's not about whether she's happier now as a single woman than she was married to a gay man; she had a happy life as a married woman and she's made a happy life for herself now. In both situations there have been pain and joy. Lee's story is one of recognizing the past and possible futures for what they are and living in the present.

As for how it all applies to FoxyJ and me, well, that's for us to decide.

Gay Mormons on YouTube

I saw references to these YouTube interviews with gay Mormon Clark Johnsen a few weeks ago, but didn't feel a strong desire to go see them. Yesterday Ron Schow suggested I watch them for a perspective on the whole gay men courting straight women issue, and I'm glad he did. I don't actively advocate gay people dating and marrying heterosexually (nor do I get the sense that Johnsen does), but if you're going to do it, this seems like the most honest way to go about it--Johnsen told her before asking her out the first time.

While I was popping around on YouTube, I also came across this interview with Lester and Barbara Leavitt, a couple I've heard of before but never looked into too deeply. They are former Mormons and he came out as gay a few years ago, after they'd been married for more than twenty years. I'm not entirely clear on their current marital status--I get the feeling that the video was made during a transitional stage in their relationship, but it appears they've now separated to pursue other paths while remaining friends. Apart from some overgeneralizing they've done in making statements about "the Church" when referring to stupid things local church authorities and members have done or said, what strikes me most about the video is the love they have for each other. Their strong relationship shows in how they talk about each other and how they interact. They seem like good folk to me.

Oh, and did you know I'm on YouTube? I am. It's nothing new--just last year's Fox13 interview with me and FoxyJ. It's nice to know it's on YouTube now so more people can make mean comments about us. It's okay, though--ignorant criticism is much easier to take than educated criticism.

Straight Spouses on the Go!

The first of the (hopefully) ten interviews I'm conducting with straight LDS women and men who are (or were) married to gay men and women is up at Northern Lights. I also recommend you read the foreword to the interviews, mainly because I wrote it.

One Thing (For Now)

A clarification, because I don't like to be misunderstood:

A large part of Holly Welker's argument against "Getting Out" rests on this paragraph:

I don’t understand people who call themselves liberal and progressive but are threatened by homosexual reparative therapy enough to try to stop people like me from having that option. In my mind, this kind of thinking is anti-progressive. The whole point of the civil rights and women’s liberation movements was to allow blacks, women, and other minorities to break free from what had been their traditional roles. We live in a world now where it’s okay for blacks to do what was once considered “white” and for women to do what was once considered “male”—get an education, have a career, etc. Why then is it not politically correct for a gay man to venture into what is usually considered the exclusive territory of straight men—to marry a woman and have a family—if that’s what he chooses to do?

Apart from her accurate criticism of my painting the women's liberation and civil rights movements in such broad strokes, her objection, if I understand correctly, is that I seem to be co-opting these movements for my own purposes, essentially equating my position as a married gay man to that of women and black Americans. I can see how it may appear that way superficially, and if you interpret it thus it is certainly offensive. As Welker has pointed out several times, there is absolutely no legislation against gay people marrying heterosexually, no institutionalized bigotry as there has been and continues to be against women and racial minorities. I would have to be a complete moron and self-serving jerk to claim that I've experienced anything comparable to this kind of oppression.

If you read what I've said carefully, though, you'll see that I haven't made any such claim. What I've said is that it's contrary to progressive thought--for which I list as examples the progressive thinking behind the women's liberation and civil rights movements--to say that anyone--using myself as an example--should not be respected in their choice to marry any person who wants to marry them. I've not said that anyone is denying me that right, because no one is*, but that my choice is not considered "politically correct." This is demonstrated by the fact that Welker and others like her immediately jump to the conclusion that any gay man who dares to express his right to marry a woman who wants to marry him must be a backwards-thinking conservative hick. Would they accuse a woman expressing her right to marry another woman of having an overblown sense of entitlement? No; Welker has said as much. Why then the double standard? Why are some choices more politically correct than others?

A commenter on Welker's blog says that she is "astonished by the backwards reasoning of that paragraph you deconstructed, particularly the idea that having a woman to reproduce with and run your household for you has historically/traditionally been denied to men who are attracted to other men." I would be equally astonished by the backwards reasoning of such an idea, had I read an essay that made such a claim. What I actually say in the paragraph above is that "to marry a woman and have a family" [notice I've said nothing about who is running the household] "is usually considered the exclusive territory of straight men." There is a huge difference between the phrases "is usually" and "has historically/traditionally." The latter, hers, makes claims about historical reality, while the former, mine, speaks only of present social attitudes. No, gay people have not traditionally been denied heterosexual marriage, because traditionally gay people haven't been a part of public discourse. Notice also that I use the word "straight," which is not necessarily the opposite of "men who are attracted to other men"; I'm speaking not of sexual preferences that have existed for thousands of years but of sexual identities that have existed for less than two hundred. I would argue that yes, in the past fifty years or so since lesbians and gay men have legitimately entered the discourse, the assumption is that their rightful position--at least as far as progressive thought is concerned--is in lesbian and gay relationships. As I point out elsewhere in the essay, gay people in heterosexual relationships are "not even recognized enough to be repressed."

So if I'm not being oppressed, why then does it matter that some people, in the name of progressive thought, are so critical of mixed-orientation marriages? If there's no legislation against me, why am I complaining? Because bigoted legislation doesn't magically appear out of nowhere; it is borne of widely-accepted bigoted discourse. Twenty-six states haven't adopted constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage just because. They've done so because the majority of voters in those states believe the bigoted rhetoric against homosexuality that is so prevalent in our culture. Welker rightly criticizes my oversimplified statement that "We live in a world now where it's okay for blacks to do what was once considered 'white' and for women to do what was once considered 'male.'" No, as much as I would like to think so, we don't live in that world. I would like to live in a world, though, where no one's choices are limited by their gender, race, or sexual orientation, and I believe that world can only exist once we start respecting those who make choices different from our own, even choices we don't understand.

I am thankful for the many, many people--whether or not they would call themselves liberal and progressive--who have respected me in the choices I've made. I will do my best to return the same.


*Except for the campaigns against homosexual reparative therapy that I reference in the paragraph preceding the one quoted here, which I'll freely admit is an entirely different argument than the right to marry. I'll also freely admit that my conflating the two arguments in the paragraph above is confusing. On the other hand, they do both come down to respecting the right of mentally capable adults to make the decisions that they deem best for themselves. The only difference is that in the case of reparative therapy we're talking about a single person--the one who seeks out reparative therapy--while in the case of marriage we're talking about two people--the two spouses who, as consenting adults regardless of their gender and/or sexual orientation, decide to marry each other.

Cross-Posting (which is a lot like cross-pollination, or so I hear)

Yesterday I guest-posted on Northern Lights a Call for Questions and Interviewees for a series of interviews with straight spouses of gay people I'm hoping to guest-post over there. It occurred to me that I'm likely to reach a different group of people by soliciting help here as well, so here I am. Here is what I need:

1. Interesting, insightful, and respectful questions to include in the interviews. What do you want to know about straight people who marry gay people?
2. Interviewees. The implied focus of the interviews at NL is straight and faithfully Mormon people who are currently married to gay people, simply because that's the nature and scope of the blog, but if there are any straight people who are not (currently or ever) Mormon and/or who are no longer married to gay people, I'd love to interview you as well and post it in another venue (perhaps here?). So if you fit any of these categories and are willing to be interviewed (either anonymously or nomynously), comment here or email me at bgchristensen (at) gmail (dot) com.

The idea of these interviews, both in the public and personal spheres, is to shed light on an oft-discussed issue from the perspective of people who don't seem to be quite so oft-discussed.

Thanks much for your input.

It's a Small Gay Mormon World

A month or so ago I cataloged an anime movie called Akira. For some reason about half of the voice actors in the English dub of Akira use pseudonyms here that they pretty much don't use anywhere else. One of those is a guy credited as Jimmy Flinders, who IMDb says is really Cam Clarke. At the time I cataloged the video I checked the Library of Congress's Name Authority File and found no record for Jimmy Flinders and only one record with the name Cam Clarke. In the citation for that record Clarke is listed as the illustrator of a picture book adaptation of Carol Lynn Pearson's My Turn on Earth, which I thought was an interesting coincidence (because I happen to have seen that particular cornerstone of 70s Mormon pop culture), but also took as evidence that the Cam Clarke in LC's NAF was not my Cam Clarke aka Jimmy Flinders, voice actor for everything from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to He-Man: Master of the Universe.

So I set aside the info on Mr. Clarke until this week, when I finished the training that authorized me to create my own name authority records to be put into LC's file. As I did research in order to create a record for my Cam Clarke, though, I came across this Wikipedia article, which says that Clarke is best known in Latter-day Saint circles as the original "Jimmy Flinders," one of the lead characters of the other cornerstone of 70s Mormon pop culture, Saturday's Warrior. So he was Mormon, after all!

Then I came across this CD that Clarke recorded in the 90s, a collection of popular love songs recast from a gay perspective. Clarke, as it turns out, is a gay Mormon. (By which I mean that he has identified as gay for at least part of his life and he at least grew up Mormon, but I don't presume to say anything about his current identity in terms of the two things.)

He is also the stepbrother of Lex de Azevedo, popular LDS musician, which makes him the uncle of Rachel Coleman, the creator of Signing Time, a DVD series that S-Boogie watched nearly every day of the first two years of her life and of which Little Dude is now a devoted fan.

So I still don't know that voice actor/singer/gay Mormon Cam Clarke is the same as picture book illustrator Cam Clarke, but I do know that the former is related to Lex de Azevedo, who wrote the score for My Turn on Earth, and it's not unlikely that gay Mormon Clarke has some connection to Carol Lynn Pearson, the matron saint of gay Mormons everywhere. So I suspect the two are one and the same. I've emailed Mr. Clarke to ask him to clarify the issue, so hopefully he'll be kind enough to respond.

What I do know that I didn't know yesterday morning is this:

1. Leonardo is a gay Mormon.

2. He-Man is a gay Mormon.

(Apologies to L for the provocative pictures.)

I can't imagine anyone being very surprised about He-Man being gay. I mean really, all the man wears is furry underwear. Leonardo is a bit of surprise, as I would have suspected it first of his brother Donatello, but hey, for all I know, all four of them are. But it certainly never occurred to me that either He-Man or Leonardo might be Mormon. I'll tell you one thing for sure: neither of them went to BYU dressed like that.

Does This Ring Make Me Look Straight?

Thanks to Tito over at Northern Lights for pointing out this fascinating article on MSN. It's about people who identify as gay or lesbian but have found themselves falling in love and in relationships with people of the opposite sex. While that is not exactly my situation--I was in the straight relationship before I completely accepted a gay identity--I relate to most of what the people in the article say.

For example:

[Says] Tricia Johnson, 31, from Philadelphia, "When I first went out publicly with my current boyfriend, I wanted to stand up and say, ‘This isn’t what it looks like! I’m not really straight!’ In my heart, I was starting to wonder who and what I actually was. I felt totally out at sea.”

Particularly after making a bigger deal of coming out than I was comfortable with while FoxyJ and I were separated, I find myself feeling very self-conscious of the wedding band on my finger lately. What will my friends think? Will they assume I've joined the ex-gay camp? Will they think I've become (or gone back to being) a repressed closet freak? Or will they think I just pretended to be gay in some insane attempt to get attention?

“I felt like a traitor,” says Daniel Wright, 32, from Los Angeles. “I thought, ‘I am going to lose my friends, and I’m going to lose my community.’ It was like coming out all over again.” And it may indeed be hard for your gay friends to accept your new relationship. Dr. Schecter says, “In general, the gay and lesbian community is a minority community. It fights hard to be treated equally. There is strength in numbers, and any potential loss of a member of the community is threatening.” There might also be a perception that a person who enters a heterosexual relationship has taken the “easy way out.”

When Foxy and I got back together, I was especially nervous about telling my gay friends. Despite my fears, though, I'm happy to say that every one of them responded with love and encouragement. My friends, regardless of their orientation or political values, are happy so long as I'm happy. Perhaps I'd do well to follow their example in the way I perceive myself.

Telling family members about your new relationship can have complications of its own, particularly if they were not accepting of your gay identity. Samantha Lewis, 37, from Providence, RI, says, “The religious members of my family were ecstatic. They never fully accepted me for who I was. It was just another slap in the face.”

I felt this too after announcing Foxy's and my reunification. I was wary of overly-zealous expressions of congratulations because, happy as I was to be back with my wife, I read the well-meaning felicitations of my more conservative family and friends as signs that they had been waiting on the edges of their seats for me to come to the light and realize I'd never be happy as a gay man. This turned what should have felt like feelings of victory into feelings of defeat. I can't honestly blame the family or friends who were sincerely happy for me, though--it's me who chooses to interpret everything as judgment, who sets up a false binary wherein one of us is the victor and the other defeated.

As a gay person in a relationship with someone of the opposite sex, you might struggle to find an appropriate label. Does this mean that you’re straight or bisexual? Can you be dismissed as a “hasbian” or “yestergay”? In the end, your identity is something that only you can define. Dr. Schecter says, “There are people who retain lesbian identity while in a committed relationship with a man. Others do not. Identity is shaped by individual meaning.” Your current situation also does not invalidate your past relationships or mean that you are or were “going through a phase.” Tricia Johnson says, “I struggled for so long with what to call myself. Eventually I thought why do I have to have a label? My experience is more complex than a single word.”

Labels? Me? Never. Say what you want to about the inadequacy of labels, but it's a natural human tendency to name things and to group together things that have shared qualities. It also happens to be a natural human tendency upon which my chosen career is based. What do you do, then, when there is no name, when all the available names seem to describe things that share some of your qualities, but not all of them? Either you reject the human tendency to label as futile and destructive, or you make a new label. I've opted for the latter approach. While transorientation may never catch on outside the realm of this blog, I maintain that it's a healthy step in my process of navigating largely uncharted territory, and I suspect that some of my fellow travelers described in this MSN article would benefit from a similar addition to their ideological lexicon.

At any rate, it's good, as always, to be reminded that FoxyJ and I are not alone in this.

Transorientation

Modern gender theory distinguishes between sex and gender, defining the former as "the physiological, functional, and psychological differences that distinguish the female and the male," and the latter as "sexual identity, especially in relation to society or culture." Sex, in other words, is something you're born with, while gender is a lot more mutable. We refer to people whose gender identity (man or woman) is not the one traditionally associated with their sex (male or female) as transgendered.

I would propose, and I'm not the first to do so, that there is a similar relationship between sexual orientation and sexual identity. Like sex, orientation--what sex or gender you are attracted to--is something you're born with; you're heterosexual, homosexual, or whatever, and that's unlikely to change, short of some kind of as-yet-unknown orientation reassignment surgery. Sexual identity, on the other hand, is more like gender in that there are many ways to express one's sexuality and these do not necessarily correspond to one's orientation. We might call an individual who is born homosexual but for whatever reasons identifies as straight (or, for that matter, one who is born heterosexual but identifies as gay or lesbian) transoriented or transorientational (I'm undecided on which term I like better).

I have never had any question about my gender identity. I was born male and I identify as a man. I have spent much of my life, though, figuring out my sexual identity. For many years I did not call myself gay because of the LDS Church's counsel that people who experience same-sex attraction should not identify themselves by those feelings. Then a few years ago, even though I was still actively LDS and married to a woman, I began to call myself--both in private and in public--gay. The words "I am gay," this self-identifying speech act, relieved me of years of built-up pressure from refusing to acknowledge this important aspect of my identity. Some people questioned the prudence of putting so much energy into building a gay identity while trying to maintain a straight marriage, while others questioned my right to call myself gay when in fact my actions and lifestyle were completely straight, but I insisted that the word could mean whatever I wanted it to, and when I called myself gay I meant that I was attracted to men, nothing more, nothing less.

I still maintain that language means whatever the speaker intends it to mean (or, conversely, whatever the listener understands it to mean), but in the past month as I've rededicated myself to a marriage to a partner who happens to be a woman, I've begun to question the value of identifying myself as gay. There is no doubt that my inborn orientation is homosexual--I am sexually aroused by men. But the life I live, for all intents and purposes, is straight--the only romantic or sexual partner I've ever had or intend to have is a woman. Still, I'm not comfortable calling myself straight. Beyond the fact that I'm attracted to people who have a certain kind of reproductive organs, I feel that much of my inner life, my thoughts, and the way I experience the world are more like those of a gay man than those of a straight man. I have found, for example, that I tend to relate better to gay men than to straight men (with some notable exceptions).

One of the strongest arguments against homosexual people being in straight marriages is that we aren't being authentic to our true selves. Many, indeed, find the sacrifice of authenticity too much to make the marriage worth it. To be clear, I'm not staying married because I'm stronger or nobler than anyone else, or for that matter, because I'm less authentic; I'm staying married because I realized that for me, the sacrifice of giving up the marriage was greater than the sacrifice of giving up what I might have had otherwise. I believe FoxyJ feels similarly about the sacrifices she's required to make to stay in the marriage versus the sacrifices she'd have to make to end the marriage. Other people consider the same options and come to different conclusions. Every individual has his or her own values, priorities, and life situation; I can only act according to my own. La Agrado, a transvestite character in Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother speaks beautifully of the more literal cost she's paid to become a woman: "Well, as I was saying, it costs a lot to be authentic, ma'am. And one can't be stingy with these things because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you've dreamed of being."

My motivations for choosing a straight life have been called into question before because by birth I am a member of an underprivileged class and I am trying to pass, as it were, for a member of the privileged class. Perhaps it is for this same reason that while society tends to view male-born women as amusing, female-born men tend to be seen as threatening. Rest assured, my class-conscious friends, I have no interest in being part of a privileged class; I'm much too enamored of the idea of Mr. Fob the Oppressed. This is, to be honest, one of the less-than-noble reasons I cling to the label gay. What it comes down to, though, is that the person I'm in love with, am married to, and want to be married to is a woman.

Perhaps more than anything, I feel that to call myself straight without any qualifiers would be to pretend I'm something I'm not, to ignore the fact that, like a male-born transsexual in the process of becoming a woman, I'm a work in progress. So I won't call myself straight, but I'm not sure gay accurately describes me either. I'll try transoriented on for size and see how it fits.

Pride

Mr. Fob: You know, I've been realizing lately how important it is to me to be perceived as the "bad" kid--the one who's cooler than everyone else because he's above their petty rules.

FoxyJ: Huh. Do you think this need to rebel has to do with the fact that you didn't feel like you could be rebellious as a teenager?

Mr. Fob: Oh, I hadn't made that connection, but it makes sense.

FoxyJ: Yeah, it does.

Mr. Fob: Oh. Wow. I didn't realize this until just now, but that's exactly what "Getting Out"* was about--it was my "screw you" to conservative Mormons because as a gay man I'm marginalized and therefore better than them, and my "screw you" to liberal gays** because as a married gay man I was doubly marginalized and therefore better than them. Wow, I'm shallow.

FoxyJ: I don't think that's how people read it.

Mr. Fob: No, but that's how I meant it.

FoxyJ: I think it's valuable for gay Mormons to be aware of the tension that comes from existing in that space between homosexuality and Mormonism, from being both and yet neither.***

Mr. Fob: Yeah, but it's one thing to be aware of that tension and another to be proud of it.




*If it seems like I bring up "Getting Out" a lot, well, look at how many other titles I have listed under "Fobby Publications."
**Conservative Mormons/liberal gays, in case you don't know, is a false dichotomy.
***I don't think Foxy really talks this way, but I'm having a hard time reproducing her dialogue. Oh, for a constantly running tape recorder!