Timpanogos Storytelling Festival

If you live in Utah (or if you are coming to Utah this weekend for the Blog Party), be sure to check out the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. If you don't know what storytelling is, well, it's basically a hybrid of standup comedy and a conversation with your mother-in-law. Well, perhaps not your mother-in-law, lest that image conjure up negative associations for you, but my mother-in-law, who always has entertaining stories to tell. Every year professional storytellers come from around the world and talented amateur storytellers come from the Wasatch Front to tell stories at the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival. If you've never experienced something like this before then you really need to, and if you have then I don't need to convince you.

For eight bucks you can attend one of the evening events--Look Who's Talking on Thursday, My Favorite Stories on Friday, Laughin' Night on Saturday, or, if you have small children, Bedtime Stories on Friday--or for twenty bucks you can attend a day of storytelling on either Friday or Saturday. Forty bucks will get you into both days and all three nights, and a hundred will get your whole family into everything.

Check out the link above for more details, then call the Orem Public Library to order tickets, or you can buy them onsite at Mt. Timpanogos Park. Tell them Master Fob sent you. It probably won't mean anything to them, and will more than likely get a confused stare, but I'll be amused when you tell me about it later.

Ohana Utah

The Fob family--not my wife and children but my parents and siblings--consists, more or less, of five girls and two boys, plus the parents, a stepmother, and several in-laws. Of that group, those of us who live in Utah are known as Ohana Utah (if you don't know what ohana means then you obviously haven't seen Lilo & Stitch).

Ohana Utah began for me back in 1997 when I came to Provo to attend BYU. At the time, Lika (#2 of 7) was living in Provo, having graduated from BYU a few years previous. I being #7 of 7 and there being 14 years between us, Lika and I had not actually grown up together much at all. Lika was very excited for me to live in Provo so that she could feed me and give me rides and buy me things, and, even though I could have done without the constant pressure to go Latin dancing with her, I'll admit that I was not unhappy with the arrangement. From the day I arrived, Lika took good care of me.

In the summer of '98, M (#3 of 7) moved to Provo with her husband, M. Though M is eight years older than me, I had always felt rather close to her just because she is the type of person who, if you know, you feel close to. There's something about her empathetic nature that encourages intimacy. When I decided that rather than go to school fall semester I'd work and leave on my mission as soon as possible (I turned 19 in November), M&M were gracious enough to let me stay with them. I was thinking it would be just a month or two--September and October--but as it turned out the church needed a little more time to ask my therapist if I was mission-ready, so I didn't go into the Missionary Training Center until mid-December. Thankfully for M&M's sake, I spent a month of that time working with my uncle somewhere along the border of Nevada and California.

On my mission, Lika and M competed to see who could send me the most letters and packages. Lika won by a long-shot, sending me letters often two or three times in a week, but M certainly didn't skimp. M&M served as my hub, scanning in my letters home and putting them on the internet for all the family to read (my first blog, I suppose).

When I returned to Utah in January of 2001, Lika and M picked me up from the airport and took me to lunch and M announced that she was pregnant. That summer, Ohana Utah added not only Baby M, but also my brother Svoid (#6 of 7), who moved to Spanish Fork from Wisconsin just so he could be close to us. Svoid is three years older than me, so we were pretty close when we were little--close in the way that brothers who constantly fight but still ride their bikes to the toy store together and have a secret G.I. Joe club are--and we had become friends again during my high school summers when I had gone to visit my dad and brother in Wisconsin. It's been great over the last five years for me to get to know Svoid again as and adult, and to see how much we are able to relate, despite the seemingly different worlds we occupy. Svoid has also joined the ranks of people who spoil me rotten--he is responsible for a good portion of the small appliances and electronic devices I own, including the computer I'm using to write this post, and has taken Foxy and me out for dinner more times than I could possibly count.

When I started dating and then married Foxy J, she was accepted into Ohana Utah without hesitation. She was the first sister-in-law to join the Fob family, and there is quite a gap in ages and interests between her and my sisters (I'm going to get in trouble for that "gap in ages" line, I know), but none of that stopped Lika and M from loving Foxy and treating her like the sixth Fob sister.

Ohana Utah has seen other additions over the years--Lika's husband and his son, and later Lika's son, Svoid's new girlfriend, and of course S-Boogie and Little Dude--and, sadly, we suffered a loss when M's husband was killed in a motorcycle accident in 2002, but through it all we've remained a pretty tight-knit group. We get together fairly frequently for Sunday dinners and holiday barbecues, and we do wacky things--usually spurred on by Lika's wackiness--like dress up to make Valentine's cards to send to the non-Utah ohana, and we trade babysitting (though if we were counting trades, Foxy and I would be in serious debt to all three of my siblings here).

In short, I have grown much closer to my brother and sisters in the last five years then I ever was growing up. Leaving them to move to Seattle pretty much sucks. I'm going to miss my Ohana Utah.

My only hope is that Foxy and I will lead a mass migration, and soon I'll be telling you about Ohana Seattle.

If You're Still Not Sure You Want to Come to the Blog Party

Just look at how much fun everyone had last time. (You can see it in their eyes.)

Mormonism and Me: The Shocking Truth About the Self-Made Poster Boy for Married Gay Mormondom

When Another Other emailed me after reading my essays on being gay, married, and Mormon to tell me how much he identified with what I said, I felt obligated to quickly dispell any false ideas about my religious beliefs the essays written two years previous might have given him. Oddly enough, "coming out" about my religious status is even more unnerving for me than coming out about my sexual orientation ever was. I have this notion that people will not like me if I tell them how I really feel. Thankfully, AO was quick to point out how silly it was of me to think that we couldn't be friends just because I don't fully subscribe to the same dogma he does. I hope you'll do the same.

See, the shocking truth about the self-made poster boy of married gay Mormondom is that I'm not really Mormon. Well, I am, but I'm not. Like everything else about me, it's complicated.

I've talked about my religious turmoil here before, but it's been a while and I think people tend to take the fact that I'm still going to church regularly and appearing in newspaper articles whose headlines profess my supposed religious affiliation as an indication that whatever doubts I had have passed and I am once again as Mormon as they come (and then, you know, there are a couple people who haven't read every blog post I've ever written--may God have mercy on your poor souls). I'm not entirely bothered by this assumption, but at the same time it's not entirely true.

I have questioned several tenets of the LDS church since I was in high school. Among the things I've questioned are the historical veracity of the Book of Mormon, the exclusive claim to prophetic revelation, and the mixed message you-can-pray-and- receive-your-own-personal-revelation- but-if-it-contradicts- official-church-doctrine- then-it's-wrong philosophy, but always central to my doubts about the church was the contradiction between what the church taught about homosexuality and what my instincts told me. At each major decision point--when I chose to go to BYU instead of a non-church university, when I decided to go on a mission, each of the 600+ times I decided to stay on my mission, when I decided to get married--I prayed and received what I interpreted to be confirmation that I should put the doubts aside and proceed according to plans. I believe that some of these confirmations came from God, and I'm not opposed to the idea that all of them came from him, but really who knows? Basing life decisions on feelings and faith is the only way to go sometimes, but it leaves a lot of room for second-guessing later.

Almost two years ago now, all these doubts came to a head when I decided that I was unhappy with my life and surely this gay, Mormon, and married thing just wasn't meant to work. I saw before me two choices: stay in the church and stay married to Foxy J, or leave both of them. The problem was that I simply couldn't convince myself that leaving my wife was the right thing to do, but the more I thought and prayed about it, the more I felt the church wasn't everything it claims to be. Sorting out what I wanted from what I believed from what I thought I should want or believe was nearly impossible. When a simple question about the truth of a religious dogma carries with it not only the question of church attendance but also your marriage, your family, and your entire life, it's suddenly not a simple question at all (if it ever was). Eventually what I had to do was decide what I wanted in regards to my marriage, regardless of what the LDS church said I should or shouldn't do, in order to take the weight off the religious question. So that's what I did.

Without my marriage hanging in the balance, the answers to the religious question came more clearly. I found that all the doubts I had about the church were genuine concerns, that they were not merely an excuse to justify something else I wanted. I asked to be released from my callings because I didn't believe some of the things I was expected to teach others. I decided to continue attending the LDS church in support of my wife's beliefs, and found that many things that had bothered me about the church no longer did. I could disagree privately and let others believe what they chose to, and it was okay. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I was being completely honest with myself and others.

I believe in God. I don't know that he exists, but I have seen enough evidences of his existence and his love for me to feel it would be foolish to say he's an imaginary construct invented to make us feel better about ourselves. I suspect that God is more complicated than any single religion can grasp, but I believe most religions, as long as they're trying to make people better and happier and discouraging them from hurting each other, are good. I don't know what God thinks about homosexuality in general, and I don't care because I know that for me, the right thing to do is to be faithful to my wife.

I'm not opposed to being called Mormon or even calling myself Mormon because I have been Mormon all my life, and I do attend the Mormon church every Sunday and really, just like "gay," I can make the label mean whatever I want it to. Words are words--they have only the meaning we attach to them. Even though I don't believe the LDS church is the one true church, I still think and act in very Mormony ways. I learned how to approach God through the LDS church, and I see no reason to change that. When I pray I pray like a Mormon. When I interpret answers to prayers I use the methods taught to me in Mormon Sunday school. When I think of God I envision a very Mormon God, much like you'd find in any painting of Joseph Smith's first vision. I don't know that the God I'm imagining looks much like the one who actually exists, but I'm not sure it matters.

In the end, there's only one God even if Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jews, Mormons and Pseudo-Mormons pray to him in different ways and call him different names. I don't think he cares whether I call myself Mormon and gay or Branch Davidian and quadrisexual; I imagine he's much more concerned with what I do and who I am. So here's hoping that whatever I call myself, I'll be a good husband, father, brother, friend, yadda yadda yadda, and a decent person.

And I hope we can still be friends.

Back to Square One

So we discovered yesterday that the apartment offered to us by university housing is not available until mid-October. I need to be there in two weeks. After spending yesterday discussing our various options--finding a place that will rent to us for a month, finding a motel that does long-term rentals, having Foxy and the children stay here while I go to Seattle and live on the street for a month--we decided that all of those options involve way more cost, both financial and emotional, than the close, cheap on-campus housing is worth.

So now we're back to looking for an apartment. Except now we're working with a smaller pool of possibilities and with less time before we need somewhere to unload our seventeen-foot U-Haul.

Blaugh. Somebody shoot me.

Plane Specs from Jesus

There is a nice gentleman who comes every day to Library #2 and draws a boat or plane, complete with detailed specifications, on a large white piece of poster board. Most days, he personalizes the drawing for a staff member, then gives it to us. I have now received three:




When he gave me the last one, he explained that it is a personal revelation from Jesus Christ that he received for me, so I should not rip it up or throw it away. Which poses a problem--if Jesus gave this man a revelation just for me, then I probably ought to figure out what it means, but I'll admit I'm at a loss. Any ideas?

One More Thought

The blog party is in a week and a half. That makes me happy.