A poem for Iseult of the White Hands

True Love is no great thing 

It is more the wordless gift of a Diet Coke on your bedstand 

(Because I just thought you would want it later)

than it is an epic story of heartbreak and longing

It is the hypnagogic kiss, sleepily left on your shoulder, every night,

not an ecstasy of moonlight and song

Tristan had it wrong

Love is not a poison to consume 

It is white hands reaching to steady you

when you've forgotten to steady yourself

It is a thousand tiny moments 

the assuring presence 

of someone who would never 

leave you to hurt alone

There is No Drama Like Closeted Gay Mormon Drama: A Review of Autoboyography, by Christina Lauren

I am a Mormon from pioneer stock. My ancestors crossed the plains with oxen and handcarts, I am Mormon in my ontology, my culture, my history, my assumptions and my worldview.

I am also queer.

Both my Mormonism and my queerness are integral aspects of my identity, one as equally changeable as the other.

Because of this, I am both the best and the worst person to review this book.

Autoboyography, by Christina Lauren, is the story of Tanner and Sebastian. Tanner, a bisexual non-Mormon newly closeted by the ultra-conservative culture of Provo, UT, falls in love with Sebastian, the gay, closeted even to himself, son of a Mormon bishop.

Sebastian, like me, is Mormon. It is ingrained in the way he thinks, the way he responds, the ways he learns to smile to cover his feelings and the way he shuts down or runs away from something he has been conditioned to reject about himself. “Sebastian’s identity isn’t queer,” says Tanner. “It’s not gay. It’s not even soccer player or boyfriend or son. It’s Mormon.”

That rang true.

A lot of this book rang true to me.

A lot of this book made me want to apologize to every person who has ever had to date me. (I am so sorry, y’all. Queer Mormons are an exhausting mess.)

I lost count of the number of the times I wanted to scream and throw my phone (I read this book on my phone) because it had hit a nerve I’d forgotten about.

I could only finish it in the arms of my partner. She held me while I read the last few chapters. I was shaking. She has learned to recognize when I am having Mormon-related trauma. She can see it on my face, often speaking it before I even realize I’m experiencing it. Sometimes she whispers, Fuck the Mormons. Sometimes she whispers, You’re beautiful just the way you are. Most of the time she just holds me.

I imagine someone who isn’t Mormon, particularly someone who isn’t queer, would respond with skepticism to certain parts of this book.

But this book got so much right. And even some of the parts it got wrong? They are important—integral to the purpose and impact of the book.

Things the book got right:

1) The description of BYU.

Tanner says BYU is “a lot of long skirts and modest shirts, straight trimmed hair and genuine smiles.” He is dumfounded when someone playing Frisbee actually says, “Gosh darn it!” And then says “BYU is exactly like I imagined.”

I mean. I laughed. So hard. 

2) When Sebastian says he’s not gay.

How can someone admit to being exclusively interested in boys, but not, as Sebastian says, “Not… that?”

In Mormonism, there is no room for homosexuality in the Plan of Salvation. The highest order of the priesthood, the highest order of salvation, is in heterosexual marriage—the “sealing” for eternity that is meant to provide the template for this life and the next.

While having feelings for the “wrong” gender isn’t overtly considered a sin (don’t get me started on the subtext), “acting on them” is considered one of the gravest sins. The church discipline for being in an active same-sex relationship is the same as it is for attempted murder. Entering a same-sex marriage is considered the highest apostasy, and triggers mandatory excommunication.

I have known since I was a teenage student at BYU that I had an annoying habit of falling in love with women.

It wasn’t until I was in my thirties I was even willing to speak a name to it. 

3) Sebastian’s angst.

Maybe people will find Sebastian’s angst unbelievable.

If anything, I think he didn’t have enough of it.

He was able to speak it, out loud, to Tanner. Even as he said he’d never said it out loud before.

It was only a few years ago I spoke it out loud. I sat in the passenger seat of my friend’s car. We drove out to Utah Lake. It was frozen, a mix of white and brown and grey.

I had been trying to say the words for hours and I hadn’t been able to.

My friend had been teasing me. “It can’t be that bad,” she said. “Did you drink coffee? Did you get drunk? Do you want to have an affair? Please tell me you’re thinking of having an affair, monogamy is so boring.”

I laughed. She was joking (I think). She was a teenager when she was married, only a little younger than I was when I married my husband. We were, all of us, virgins on our respective wedding days. (I had never even been to second base.)

Finally I said, “If I did have an affair… It … would be… with a woman.” It felt like I was spitting the words, trying to get them out. I thought I might choke on them.

I had never said it out loud.

I had fallen in love with woman after woman after woman. And it had never occurred to me to give it a name. I knew it was something you buried. It was something you kept quiet. It was not, ever, something you admitted out loud.

4) The part in the acknowledgements where they talked about “teen after teen who honestly believed, devastatingly, that their parents would probably rather have a dead child than a gay one.”

This is not just something the teens believe. It is something that is true. I have heard so many parents (who may or may not have known whether they had a queer child) explicitly say: It would be easier to have a dead child than a gay child.

I had a friend, a blonde gay boy, maybe 20 years old. He wanted to be a cook and once he cooked me something Japanese that I’ve never had again, though it was one of the best things I’d ever eaten. He told me, “My mom asked me why. Why couldn’t I keep my gayness to myself? When I told her I was suicidal, it was either kill myself or come out, she said, I wish you would have killed yourself.”

I told this story to another Mormon mother in horror. She just frowned at me and said, “But it would have been easier.”

Even for queer Mormons with supportive parents, suicidality is a major problem. In most states, suicide rates fell after the legalization of gay marriage. But in Utah the numbers have steadily risen and are now nearly triple what they used to be. The rise—which correlates with the LDS church’s tightening of rhetoric against gay marriage, particularly in the 2008 push for Proposition 8 and the 2015 policy change which bans the children of gay spouses from baptism—prompted the CDC to issue a special report investigating the issue.

The last time I was in Provo, I sat with the mother of a gay Mormon boy who committed suicide. We had both since left the church, and we sat in the bar of the hotel, holding our drinks. She told me about his first kiss. How he was so excited. She told me how long it had been. She told me a lot of things. The silence after she spoke told me more.

I was on the phone with another queer friend once, begging her to drive to the hospital instead of walking into traffic.

Yet another queer friend once told me, “I’m doing OK… by which I mean, I am no longer involuntarily committed… that is the standard that I measure OK by now.”

I could tell literally a hundred of these stories.

I cannot think of a single queer Mormon friend of mine who has not struggled with depression and suicidality.

One of the biggest things that prevents suicidal behavior is human connection and that is the one thing the Mormon church expressly forbids for its queer members.

Most of us leave the church. We decide that it is better to live than to be Mormon. It is harder than people understand to leave the church. It fractures us on the inside. Giving up Mormonism is only slightly less difficult than asking us to not be queer.

But we do not all make that decision.

And far too many of us simply don’t survive.

Things the Book Got Wrong

1) Little Things

Most of the things the book got wrong were little things, really. Orem is many things, but it is not quieter than Provo. It is called The Honor Code, not A Honor Code at BYU. Mission interviews are not with the missionaries. There were several little things like that.

Honestly, I’m more surprised at how much the book got right than how much it got wrong. The authors clearly talked to actual Mormons and did research beyond internet searches. I was most impressed by the subtext they got right. So much of Mormonism happens in the subtext. Mormons are polite, as the authors point out. They do not say the things they think, they are pathologically incapable of being overtly mean. The text conveyed this well. 

 2) Sebastian had not nearly enough fear of getting in trouble at BYU

As a BYU student I was utterly terrified someone would think I was queer. Even being queer was forbidden when I was a student. Today being queer won’t get you in trouble, but doing anything—anything—that could remotely be considered “acting on it” could be grounds for expulsion.

Once, I told my colleague from my current university this. I told her holding hands with another woman would have been enough to get me thrown out of BYU. I had not admitted to anyone that I was not straight. I was in my 30’s, still married to a man at the time. I have a feminine appearance. So when she looked at me, directly in the eyes, and said “That must have been hard for you,” I felt part of my throat close up into a choking near-gasp, feeling utterly exposed.

Incidentally, I did hold hands with a woman at BYU. I was 20. She touched my hair and she held my hand and for days I couldn’t sleep. I was absolutely overcome with panic and shame and horror. No one could know. No one could find out. I rationalized that it hadn’t been… wrong… not exactly. (Neither one of us admitted it was something related to… that.) But I was utterly terrified of what it could mean and I was utterly terrified of being found out.

Sebastian and Tanner do more than hold hands.

He should have been way more freaked out by that. 

3) Sebastian generally has too easy of a time with the physical affection

Doing anything more than kissing before you’re married—even if you are a hetero Mormon couple—is something that would require a lengthy repentance process and a confession to the bishop.

With Sebastian’s background, he came to the conclusion that it was OK faster than I think someone with his background would have.

Here is where I start to become really torn, though.  

Sebastian does address the question of guilt. He prays. He prays and feels peaceful. He says, “I haven’t felt guilty about it […] which is unexpected.” He comes to decide that God approves of his relationship. He says, “Guilt is sort of a sign that I’m doing something wrong […] and when I feel peaceful, I know God approves of what I’m doing.”

As a queer Mormon, I recognized this feeling.

Mormons put a lot of emphasis on gender, on gender roles. But they also emphasize prayer and personal revelation.

When I look at myself, when I look at my partner… I start to get a sense about the eternal nature of gender. I feel like it is more complex and more beautiful than we understand. It is more than a simple binary. And this feels very, very sacred.

Like Sebastian, I have never felt guilty about the fact that I am not straight. I have never felt like I was doing something wrong when my partner touched me. When I pray, I have never gotten the sense, even once, that God wants anything for me other than to have a relationship that makes me happy.

But I have struggled with shame.

I have struggled with the walls-closing-in-on-me sense that my people will never accept this. That they would rather cast me out than accept me in a relationship where I can be the kind of person I was born to be. When Sebastian says, “It feels like I’m pushing through the dark and I know that what’s ahead is safe, but no one is following me there,” I knew what he was talking about.

The first relationship I had with a woman failed for a lot of reasons, but a big one was I couldn’t get past this shame. It became debilitating, overwhelming, and I broke underneath it.

And so… I want queer young Mormons reading this to hear Sebastian’s truth. Even if I can’t fully accept it as 100% believable. Because I want them to understand what Tanner understands: “A God worthy of your eternal love wouldn’t judge for who you love.”

Mormons often try to simplify homosexuality down to a question of sex, libido. It is a perversion, they say. One you can overcome with enough prayer and fasting and faith.

But this is a lie.

Homosexuality is about so much more than sex. It is about bonding. It is how our bodies were built to love.

And I want all the queer kids who read this book to believe this.

Which brings me to the final bit this book got wrong… 

4) The immediate sense of hope

Most queer Mormons do not get beyond their Mormonism the way Sebastian does. At least not while they are still teenagers and not without the support of affirming parents—parents who often have to walk away from the church along with their queer children to give them the hope they need. I have been blessed to meet many such parents working with the Mama Dragons, a group that supports the mothers of Mormon LGBT children. They are remarkable for so many reasons, not the least of which is that they are willing to give up everything for their children. But they are in the minority.

Queer Mormons with families like Sebastian’s go on their missions. They enter their mixed orientation marriages. They do not tell their parents they are gay. They struggle for years with the loneliness and despair that comes from denying such an essential part of themselves.

I personally know dozens of people who underwent “conversion therapy.”

I personally know people who have died.

The reality for most queer Mormons is much bleaker and much more heartbreaking than the hopeful ending of this book makes it seem.

And I loved that.

And so I don’t actually want this part of the book to be different. It may not be accurate. But it is necessary. Because I want young people who read it to know and understand that they are lovely, that happy endings are possible, that there is a way out that does not involve death.

The things this book got “wrong” are part of what makes the book beautiful.

This book was my life, in so many ways.

The geography, the emotion, the self-loathing, the stakes.

I have hiked Y mountain, I have skied on Utah Lake. I taught at BYU for 15 years. My house, in Salt Lake City, has Brigham Young on the deed.

I wish I could have read this book as a teenager.

I wish I could have started to envision a different sort of reality when I was young and so, so, so terrified of my own queerness.

I want every queer Mormon teenager to read this book, to know that hope is a possibility. That even in losing your entire world and half of your identity, there can be joy and there can be beauty.

You dance

When I was a little girl, I started to see a woman when I prayed. 

My eyes were always closed when I saw her, though I wasn’t always kneeling. Sometimes I lay on my back, rigid, corpse-like. Sometimes I lay on my side, fetal and full of yearning. 

My room smelled like humidity and wood the first time I saw her. I remember the frame of my waterbed, covered in my baby sister’s teeth marks. I remember reaching for it, to feel the rough grooves. I remember rocking there in the bed. The water was gentle. Like a cradle. 

I had been praying. 

(I often prayed, especially as a little girl.)

I didn’t mean to make her appear. 

God to me was Father God. He was kind, attentive, but irrevocably male. 

I spoke to him in formal tones, never wavering from the form of prayer taught to me in my primary classes. 

Invocation

Gratitude

Petition

Closing

(Sometimes, when I was full of that aching I never understood—sometimes I called him just Father. Sometimes I said “you,” instead of “thee” or “thou.”)

But it was a woman who appeared. 

She kept appearing, even though I never asked her to.

(I don’t know if she would have appeared if I’d asked.)

She was a shadow.

A shape I saw on the back of my right—always my right—eye. 

She was veiled, her face had no features.

But she was, unarguably, a woman. 

I didn’t know if she was the Virgin Mary, or maybe Mother God. I didn’t know who she was. 

I only know she made me feel peace.

When I was very pregnant with my first child, I desperately wanted a woman. 

I didn’t know what to make of it—the desperation. 

It was unformed. Primal. Overpowering. 

I told myself it was something biological, something to do with child birth. Having a woman around would increase survival in my female ancestors. Which would explain it, I told myself. It would explain this overwhelming need. 

I remember pacing in my tiny bathroom. 

I was barefoot, the linoleum smooth against the soles of my feet. 

I was too hot, too cold.

I washed my hands once, twice. 

I pumped the soap, deliberately.

I washed every finger and then

I reached out to dry them on a towel hanging on the wall. I can still remember the rough feel of the terrycloth underneath my fingertips. 

I could see the woman then—or rather an echo of her.

I cried out in the bathroom, holding my too-full belly in my hands.

I must have put on shoes, or gotten a coat. 

It was February and everything was frozen.

All I knew was that… I… needed. 

I didn’t know what. 

I didn’t know who to call or how to get it.

I didn’t know how to pray to a Father God, not about this.

(Father God could never understand this kind of ache.)

It was dark as I drove. 

I drove away. 

My cell phone lost its signal as the lights of the city disappeared. 

I was deep in the desert.

The ground was salt and dirt, nothing grew.

The shadows of the mountains were long in the moonlight. They reflected in the salt water pools. All I could see was shadow and mirror. 

Barren.

It was barren.

I wanted to stay until the aching let up, but I couldn’t. 

My contractions got harder and faster and I was alone and smart enough to panic.

So I drove myself home, giving no explanation to my husband when I got there. 

My children were still practically babies when I lost a quarter of my skin. 

Most of it to infection, the rest to prevent a cancer from spreading. 

Once, I was admitted to the burn ICU within minutes of my temperature spiking, just as the infection was entering my bloodstream. 

It had been a woman who sent me there. 

She was my nurse. 

I’d gone for a checkup with my oncologist. I knew I wasn’t healing well. That my graft had failed. That a fetid stench was coming from my wound vac. My doctor had scheduled me for another surgery in a week.

They wheeled me into the office because I couldn’t walk. 

My nurse had never met me. She was new to the office. 

She said hello and then she looked at me. 

I remember the way she looked at me. 

She got quiet.

She took my temperature. It was normal. 

She took my blood pressure. It was normal.

“Something is wrong,” she said. “Something is more wrong than they think.”

There was nothing to indicate she was right. No signs. Nothing that could be marked on a chart. She had instinct, alone.

But she made a phone call and I was taken to the burn unit for a consult. 

Sepsis has a 50% mortality rate. 

And I arrived in the unit minutes before I had any signs of it.

Once, I woke up from surgery screaming. 

The (male) surgeon didn’t believe the chart, with its calculation of how much medication I would need, and so he changed it; he changed it and the nurse taking care of me couldn’t give me anything that wasn’t on the chart. 

I remember I tried not to scream.

Or rather, I remember being outside myself, telling myself not to scream. 

There wasn’t any control. 

There was antiseptic, beeping. I could smell waste and cotton. I wanted to thrash my arms, my legs, but I couldn’t move. I could hardly open my eyes. 

I remember hearing my doctor’s voice when she got there. 

(She ran, they told me. She ran all the way from oncology when she heard my screams on the phone.)

“She is a cancer patient.” She was out of breath. Nearly yelling. “Not a burn patient. The calculation is different.”

I remember seeing her fuzzy form as she held up a syringe, as she put it into my IV. 

Her hand on my face was cool. 

“I’m so sorry,” she was saying. “This won’t happen again. Oh, honey. I am so sorry."

Once I almost died.

(More than once, but this time was different.)

I was unconscious, I knew I wasn’t breathing.

The air around me got cold. 

There were stars and quiet and motion.

I moved through a wind. 

There was a woman waiting for me.

She wasn’t beautiful. I’m not even sure she was human. But she was kind.

She took my hand. 

“Kerry,” she said. “Your mother gave you so many gifts.”

I knew it was true. 

(I didn't know if she was my mother, or if she spoke for her.)

She touched my hair. “So do you know what to do?” she asked.

I didn't know. 

She smiled at me. “You dance,” she said.  

There is a librarian at school who looks like a woman I kissed. 

She has short hair—I can’t tell if it’s blonde or grey—and wears big, round glasses. She’s small, dwarfed by her computer. She hunches over it, the enormity of her computer screen, or maybe the weight of my memories, making her look fragile. Whenever she sees me she smiles, as if she knows me. (She doesn’t. I think.)

I wasn’t ready to be kissed by a woman. 

I knew it was coming, but I didn’t know how to be ready for it. I didn’t know how to be ready for something I had spent so many years of my life fighting out of my consciousness. 

I didn’t have time to imagine what it would feel like to have her reach out and put her hand on my neck. 

It had been a habit, to shut thoughts like that down.

I could get as far as seeing a hand coming for my face, and I would slam the thought closed, like a book or a door. 

All that would be left was a darkness, its edges red with shame. 

I don't remember is she asked before she kissed me. (I would have said she could.)

Her voice shook. Her hands shook. She pulled the car off the road. 

I knew she was going to do it and I could have stopped her, but I didn’t have the words—didn’t even understand how I wasn’t ready, or what it would take to be ready. 

All I knew was that red-tinged darkness. 

I hadn’t been able to let myself imagine a kiss, and part of me thought actually kissing was the only way around it. 

But I wasn’t ready for it. 

I wasn’t ready for the way it made the edges of red grow crimson. I didn’t know how to get past the closing book, the slamming door. 

I was reaching in, reaching through, I should have known hands would get caught in the closing.

When the librarian smiles at me, I still feel the edges of that red shame. 

I wonder if I should have said no. I think about what it means that she isn’t in my life anymore. (Can’t be in my life anymore.)

I want to pull the librarian aside—ask her to forgive me. Tell her I didn’t understand how not knowing myself well enough could so thoroughly hurt her.

But, of course, she is not the one I hurt.

And I wonder where is the line between guilt and shame. 

Sometimes I dance in my kitchen. 

I make myself something with vodka in it (I am outside the church now; I am allowed to drink vodka) and I dance in the kitchen.

I’d like to think I look wild. That my dancing is laughter in motion, spinning circles of what it means that my life matters, that I am alive.

I suspect it looks nothing like this. 

I say “suspect,” but I know it doesn’t. My partner videotaped me dating once. My motions were clumsy, like an adolescent giraffe. The joy was evident, but that was its only beauty.

It doesn’t really matter. 

I dance because I am alive.

I dance because she told me to. 

I dance because it. is. the. point.

Father God still watches me.

I feel him, hovering on the edges of my mind. Or spirit. Is there a difference? I can’t tell. 

I can’t pray to him. 

To his credit, he seems to understand. 

Go away, I want to tell him. Stop watching me. 

He knows I cannot talk to him. Knows better than me why I can’t. 

She watches me, too. 

In the darkness, I kiss my partner. Her hands hold the edge of my face, her mouth against mine soft. She pulls me to her and I feel…

There aren’t words for what I feel. 

There are only words for what I see.

I see her. In the shadows, behind my right eye. (Always my right eye.)

She is still veiled.

She is still faceless. 

She is still love—the feeling, the being, the presence of it.

She still brings me peace. 

Thomas Monson, Love, and Biological Fragility

Shortly after he became prophet, I happened to run into Thomas Monson at Little America. He was escorted, with his wife, to the table next to ours, where we were out eating with our family. Frances, his wife, ordered soup and ate it with single minded purpose, not looking up as people came to talk to her husband. At first, I thought of trying to hide my diet coke, but then didn’t. It was so very… Salt Lake City… to run into the prophet at dinner and to worry about my caffeinated beverage.

            But as I watched him talk to people, something changed.

            It was a feeling.

            I couldn’t pinpoint it.

            His words weren’t slurred. He made eye contact. He answered questions. But… something was wrong.

            Something was wrong and I felt it, even if I couldn’t name it.

            Looking back, I think it was the beginning of his illness. I think, from the very beginning, he was losing a bit of who he was.

            For nearly my entire life, I loved Thomas Monson.

            I loved that he preached love. I loved that he said people were more important than problems. I loved the stories he told about being kind. Helping the widows, serving the orphans. I loved that his message was always inclusion and love, never exclusion. He called us to gather together, never to cast out.

            Which was why Proposition 8 was so painful.

            It was a departure.

            It was unkind.

            It was choosing the letter of the law over Christ’s command to love one another.

            When it happened, I remember feeling sick.

            And I remember thinking of that moment, in the Little America, when I had been so excited to see a man I had loved for so long and so struck that… something… was wrong.

            I am a gay Mormon.

            The church’s backing of Proposition 8, the 2015 policy of exclusion, barring the underage children of same-sex spouses from baptism, these represented, for me, the end of my membership in the church.

            I am a Mormon. I will always be a Mormon.

            But, largely because of policies enacted by Thomas Monson, I have been cast out from my people.

            But as a gay Mormon, here is something I know: none of us can escape our biology. We are all subject to the primal forces that cause our cells to cleave, drive our lungs to breathe. We are all fragile creatures, corruptible, imperfect.

            Thomas Monson spent most of his life teaching us that God loves us anyway. Even when we don’t deserve it. Even when we know we are unlovable. God loves us, even when we are broken.

            And all of us are broken.

            It is hard to celebrate someone who is largely responsible for a great deal of my own personal pain.

            But I saw with my own eyes his fragility. I felt with my own spirit that this was not right. I know, with all of my own biological imperfections, that God loves me. That god has never abandoned me.

            And so I am trying to forgive his brokenness. I am trying to remember what he spent the vast majority of his life teaching me: that, in the end, people are more important than problems. That, in the end, God loves us. That, more than any law, we should love each other.

            Love must always be more important.

            Let that lesson be his legacy.