My Best Two Years

“Called to Serve the Salt Lake South Mission
Jello, roast beef, mashed potatoes too!”
Those are the beginning words of a joking ‘mission theme’ that the elders of my mission would sing to each other, certainly out of earshot of the mission president. I was called to, where I served honorably for two years, the Utah Salt Lake City South Mission. It’s funny, perhaps not humorous as much as just strange, but my mission, in a way, was exactly what everyone told me it would be. It changed everything for me. An LDS mission brought me out of my social shell, forced me to talk with complete strangers, get along with even stranger missionary companions, and brought a lot of personal strength while demolishing a bit of my naivety about the world.

I was told that my mission would forever be a source of strength, a pillar I could rely on the rest of my life. To be honest that’s still entirely true to this day. My mission was a huge turning point in my life, and psychological well being. Somewhere around five or six months into my mission, I was serving in the Midvale, UT, area. My last companion had just been emergency transferred because of inappropriate relations with a single mother in the area, something I didn’t find out about until months later. The area was in shambles, we had very few investigators, none that were progressing. My new companion was someone who had a reputation in the mission for being an amazing scriptorian, excellent with words and a great teacher. He proved to be all of these things. He also proved to be someone that I was unable to not butt heads with. However he also proved to be someone who to this day has earned great deal of respect from me.

On one of our preparation days (once a week missionaries get half of a day ‘off’ to do laundry, go shopping, play games and otherwise ‘unwind’ to prepare for the coming week, ours was on Tuesdays) we were shopping at Deseret Book (an LDS bookstore) when a book at the bottom of one of the shelves caught my attention. To be honest it caught my initial attention because the guy on the cover was attractive. I reached down to pick it up and read the title, “In Quiet Desperation: Understanding the Challenge of Same-gender Attraction.”

I stared at the book cover for a good minute or two, unable to believe what I was seeing. Mormons didn’t talk about this subject, certainly not in a way that would seek any kind of ‘understanding.’ I looked around, suddenly afraid someone would see me, a missionary with name tag and all, looking at a book that had to deal with homosexuality. I read the back of the book and I got more and more intrigued. I sandwiched the book between two other books I was buying and mustered up the courage to go to the counter. The nice, older lady at the counter didn’t seem to notice anything strange about the book I was buying, or if she did, she didn’t say anything about. I’ll love her forever for that.

I took the book home and absolutely devoured it. I read it all the rest of our P-day, read it during dinner, and read it into the night when our appointments were done for the night. I read more in the morning during personal study, during breakfast and lunch, in every spare moment. My companion had to have taken a look at the book at some point and knew what it was about. I made up some flimsy story about it being for a good friend back home that I have to imagine he saw right through. The amazing thing, though, is that he let me have my space and read to my heart’s content. I will always respect and appreciate how he handled that situation, knowing how much we often disagreed or bickered, when it mattered he did the truly Christlike thing. He could have spread rumors throughout the mission, and to my knowledge he never did.

I must have read the book four or five times in the first three days of owning it. I simply couldn’t put it down, couldn’t keep myself from it. The book is told in two parts. The first part is written by the parents of a gay man in Salt Lake City who killed himself on the steps to his church building and had left his parents a note explaining his struggles with homosexuality. The parents, mostly the mother, recount their story and the process they went through to deal with it.

The second part of the book is written by a young, gay man, returned missionary and active member of the church. He spent quite a few chapters dissecting homosexuality through the eyes of actual church doctrine, not member-driven fear and rhetoric. He talked about the scriptures of Paul, the teachings in Leviticus and how the Plan of Salvation could be applied to gay people.

While there are a few things in this book that I now disagree with, I still keep it on my bookshelf at home because it marked the first moment in my life when I felt that I wasn’t broken, that I wasn’t evil, that this was simply another part of me. One of the best object lessons the parents talked about in the book that they would use with people is that they would hold a piece of paper right in front of someone’s eyes and ask them what they could see. Obviously the paper filled every portion of their vision. When the paper was pulled away, the rest of the world came into focus, allowing the young man to see all the rest of the room they were in.

They helped me to understand that homosexuality is just a word that describes one aspect of my being. An important one, true, but just a part. I’m not first and foremost a gay man, or at least not just a gay man. I was a brother, a son, an uncle, a Christian, a temple-worthy member, a nerd, a gamer, an optimist, a Jayhawks fan, an avid reader, a writer, a musician, a student, and a human being, who also happens to be gay.

To say this changed my life is an understatement. Of course I had challenges after this, but this was the beginning of the journey back to self-love, self-confidence, and self-respect.

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Starting with Me

They say the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, yet that first step is always the most daunting. I suppose when making a blog about my story in leaving the LDS church and the reasons behind it, it would be best to start with a little bit about who I am, and how I came to be who I am today.

As of this entry, I am a 26 year old gay man living in the greater Kansas City area. I am no longer active in the Mormon church and do not consider myself a member, but am still technically a member, meaning my name is still on the records of the church.

I was born in Sandy, Utah, at Alta View Hospital, in September of 1985 — an awesome birth year in my opinion — to two incredible parents, to be the youngest of four children. I have an older brother who is a little over three years older than me, and two sisters who are nine and seven years older than me. I was born into the Mormon church, both of my parents having been married in the Manti Temple, making me what is considered a ‘child of record’ in the church. This means that I was on the records of the church from my birth. In a decision I regularly thank my parents for, my Dad took a job that moved our family to Kansas City when I was still just two years old, a city that I love to this day and where I hope to spend my life.

From everyone else’s perspective I probably seemed to have had a very typical Mormon upbringing and childhood. I was baptized at age 8, became a deacon, teacher and priest at the appropriate ages. I held various callings in my teens including president of the teacher’s quorum, priest’s quorum first assistant, and even a stake youth representative, in which I helped to plan, and teach at, a youth conference. I went to early morning seminary, though I stopped going my senior year because of early morning school commitments and thus never graduated. I gave a number of talks in church, that were very well received by the members who talked to me afterwards. I would request the opportunity, even, of my Bishopric (the bishop and his two counselors) because I enjoyed the preparation and delivering of talks. I went to stake dances, participated in mutual (youthgroup), scouting, received a patriarchal blessing, and did everything I was instructed to do as I prepared to serve a full-time mission at age 19. I was, by all accounts, a good, happy, Mormon kid.

The problem was, I was not happy. I was not good, at least I didn’t view myself that way. I had a problem. A huge problem that I didn’t know how to deal with.

When I was in sixth grade I was the target of a large amount of teasing, something that followed me through the end of middle school (eighth grade). I attended Pembroke Hill at the time, and small class sizes and differences in religion and socioeconomic status will cause a number of issues with elementary and middle school aged kids. Strangely enough I was never teased about my religion, or about the fact that my parents weren’t as rich as the kids who I went to school with. Kids started leaving notes in my locker calling me gay, whispering about me as I walked past in the halls, and outright making fun of me during classes, lunch time, basically whenever the moment struck them.

At the time I didn’t even know what ‘gay’ meant. I just knew I was being called it and that these kids didn’t like it. Eventually I would connect it with the attraction that I started to develop in my male classmates, and the realization that my other male classmates were different than me. They were all talking about girls in the way I was feeling about them. Slowly I began to understand I was different than them, but that it was something I not only couldn’t admit or act on, I had to deny it and do my best to try to tell them they were wrong. I spent all of sixth through eighth grade trying to be invisible and created a giant social shell to hide in.

I remember in an early Sunday School class the topic once came up. I had to have been around 14 or so. I spoke up, naively, saying that gay people were born that way. I had certainly never chosen to have these feelings. I was instantly, and vehemently, corrected by one of the girls in my class, around my same age. I remember it vividly, I still remember which classroom in that church building it was in. She looked very sternly at me and said, “No, Trent, it’s a choice. Gay people choose to be that way, and God doesn’t like it.” The teacher, who’s name I still remember, must have felt like that just about covered it, so we moved on with the rest of the lesson.

This provided me with my first theological crisis. I certainly had no memory of choosing to be gay. If I had chosen it, how could I go about unchoosing it? I didn’t want to be this way. If I didn’t remember choosing it, did I choose it when I was really young somehow? Was it a consequence of a choice made when I was really young? That’s the theory that stuck in my head. I had done something, either in the earliest part of my life, or perhaps even in the pre-earth life, to make God mad at me. This was my punishment. I was broken. I was an abomination before God, and he hated me for being the way I was. I hated myself too. I hated myself for doing whatever it was that caused this, for ruining my life before it had even begun.

This feeling was reiterated by the many things I heard from Priesthood leaders, Sunday School teachers, others in the church, from talks and conversations, and even though they didn’t know they were doing it, my parents and family. The sentiment was just so commonplace. It was just the way it was, no one really questioned it, it just was. This was how I viewed myself until I was about a quarter of the way through my mission, when I read a book that changed my life.

This is getting long, so I’ll start there with my next entry. Please feel free to leave comments or questions below, I’ll definitely respond or address them in my next entry.

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Welcome, and Disclaimer

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