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.