Autoboyography
Page 15
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As usual, Google helps.
For all my jokes about Jesus jammies, it turns out garments aren’t just a modesty thing; they’re a physical reminder of the covenants they made to God. Also, the word “covenant” is everywhere. In fact, the church seems to have its own language.
Within the LDS Church, the hierarchy is exclusively male. This is one of the things Mom is spot-on about: Women get screwed. Sure, they’re the ones who make babies—according to the church, an integral part of God’s plan—and can serve missions if they choose, but women don’t have a lot of power in the traditional sense. Meaning they can’t hold positions or make decisions that influence official church policy.
The biggest piece on my mind lately—other than the Sebastian/garment question—is the one thing in the world that will make my mom’s blood boil: the LDS Church’s terrible history concerning gays.
The church has since condemned the practice of conversion therapy, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t exist, or ruin many, many lives. From the bits I’ve gathered from Mom, here’s the basic situation: An LDS individual would come out to their family, who would quickly ship them off somewhere to be “fixed.” This type of therapy involved institutionalization and electroconvulsive shock therapy. Sometimes medication or aversion conditioning, which sounded okay until I realized it meant they would use drugs to make the person nauseated while viewing same-sex erotica. The Internet tells me that more “benign” versions included shame conditioning, or retraining in stereotypical masculine and feminine behaviors, dating therapy, hypnosis, and something called orgasmic reconditioning, which—just no.
When Aunt Emily came out twenty-eight years ago, her parents offered her a choice: conversion therapy or excommunication. Now the Mormon Church’s stance on queer stuff is clear as mud.
According to any church statement you can find on the matter, the only sex that should be happening is between a husband and a wife. Yawn. But surprisingly, the church does recognize a difference between same-sex attraction and what they call homosexual behavior. In essence: guys feeling attracted to other guys = we’ll look the other way. Guys kissing guys = bad.
The funny part is that, after these lines in the sand that basically insist a gay Mormon put their nose down and be unhappy and unfulfilled their entire life in the name of God, most church statements also say that all people are equally beloved children and deserve to be treated with love and respect. They say that families should never, ever exclude or be disrespectful to those who choose a different lifestyle . . . but to always remind those who choose differently of the eternal consequences of their choice.
And, of course, everyone who lives here knows the big hoopla that made the rounds on the news a couple years ago: a change in a handbook that said members in same-sex marriages would be considered apostates (or defectors from the church—thank you, Google), and that children living in those households should be excluded from church activities until they’re old enough to renounce the practice of homosexuality and join.
In summary: love and respect, but only if you’re willing to live by their rules . . . and if not, then exclusion is the only answer.
See what I mean? Clear as mud.
From somewhere on my bed, my phone vibrates. Since I’m alone in my room, there’s no one to see me actually dive into my covers to retrieve it.
I’m around BYU all day tomorrow.
And then, while the screen is still lit up with his first text, another comes in:
And I’ll miss seeing you, too.
Something is happening between us. Something has been happening between us since our eyes met on the first day of class.
I want to see him before he leaves town. I don’t care what Mom says. I don’t care what the doctrine is.
After all, it’s not my church.
• • •
Provo High has a closed campus at lunch, but it’s an official thing that nobody follows. Campus is surrounded by fast-serve restaurants like Del Taco and Panda Express and Pita Pit. Four days out of five we skip out and grab something easy.
I’ll admit that I know Sebastian is an English lit major (it didn’t take a huge amount of sleuthing to get there), but I also know—because he told me at the library—that he likes to hang out in the Harris Fine Arts Center because it’s quiet.
Today at lunch, I buy enough Panda Express for two.
Before I moved to Utah, I heard a lot about the church from people who, admittedly, have never been a part of it. They marry their daughters off when they’re twelve! They’re polygamists!
They don’t and they’re not—polygamy has been banned since 1890—but because of my mom, I knew that Mormons were just people, and I expected Mormon teens to look like anyone else on the streets of Palo Alto. What’s crazy is they don’t. Really. They look like the upper end of the bell-shaped curve in terms of polish: They’re clean, their clothes are especially modest, and they are exceedingly well-groomed.
I look down at my old Social Distortion T-shirt over a blue thermal and mostly intact jeans. I would not feel more out of place on the Brigham Young University campus even if I put on a purple chicken costume and moonwalked across the quad. It’s early in the term, and there is some sort of youth program happening outside the main student center. It’s a lot of long skirts and modest shirts, straight trimmed hair and genuine smiles.
A few guys play Frisbee; one of them drops it and yells out a placid “Gosh darn it!”
A trio of girls is playing a hand-slap game accompanied by a song.
BYU is exactly like I imagined, and also probably exactly like its founders hoped it would be, even a hundred and forty years later. It’s only across the street from Provo High, but it feels like a different world.
Inside the Harris Fine Arts Center it’s surprisingly dark, and quiet. Modern architecture makes the space feel more “austere engineering” than “art building,” and the upper levels are open in a rectangular frame, looking down on the ground floor. Every sound—my footsteps across the marble, a murmur of voices coming from upstairs—echoes across the entire atrium.
Sebastian isn’t at any of the lounge chairs or small desks dotting the second floor, and in hindsight my bag of food seems embarrassingly overconfident. I wonder whether there are cameras tracking my movement, whether the BYU cops will come in, decide I don’t belong here, and gently escort me out of the building, wishing me safe travels and promising to pray for me when they leave me at the campus border.
After a few minutes on the third floor, I’m just about to leave and stress-eat two lunches worth of questionably Asian food when I spy a pair of red Adidas peeking out from beneath a desk.
Walking over, I declare, “I have plenty of the world’s least healthy lunch to share.”
Sebastian startles—and in the time it takes him to turn around, I beg myself to go back in time and never have done this. At the beginning of this school year, a freshman gave me an envelope and then actually ran off in the other direction. Bewildered, I opened it. Glitter poured out onto my shoes, and the letter inside was full of stickers and looping handwriting telling me she thought we might be soul mates. I didn’t even know her name until I read it at the bottom of the note: Paige, with a glittery heart sticker dotting the i. I don’t think I’d realized until that moment how young fourteen is.
But standing here, waiting for Sebastian to speak . . . I am Paige. I am an emotional infant. It suddenly feels creepy—or absolutely immature—to be here, bringing him food. What the hell am I doing?
For all my jokes about Jesus jammies, it turns out garments aren’t just a modesty thing; they’re a physical reminder of the covenants they made to God. Also, the word “covenant” is everywhere. In fact, the church seems to have its own language.
Within the LDS Church, the hierarchy is exclusively male. This is one of the things Mom is spot-on about: Women get screwed. Sure, they’re the ones who make babies—according to the church, an integral part of God’s plan—and can serve missions if they choose, but women don’t have a lot of power in the traditional sense. Meaning they can’t hold positions or make decisions that influence official church policy.
The biggest piece on my mind lately—other than the Sebastian/garment question—is the one thing in the world that will make my mom’s blood boil: the LDS Church’s terrible history concerning gays.
The church has since condemned the practice of conversion therapy, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t exist, or ruin many, many lives. From the bits I’ve gathered from Mom, here’s the basic situation: An LDS individual would come out to their family, who would quickly ship them off somewhere to be “fixed.” This type of therapy involved institutionalization and electroconvulsive shock therapy. Sometimes medication or aversion conditioning, which sounded okay until I realized it meant they would use drugs to make the person nauseated while viewing same-sex erotica. The Internet tells me that more “benign” versions included shame conditioning, or retraining in stereotypical masculine and feminine behaviors, dating therapy, hypnosis, and something called orgasmic reconditioning, which—just no.
When Aunt Emily came out twenty-eight years ago, her parents offered her a choice: conversion therapy or excommunication. Now the Mormon Church’s stance on queer stuff is clear as mud.
According to any church statement you can find on the matter, the only sex that should be happening is between a husband and a wife. Yawn. But surprisingly, the church does recognize a difference between same-sex attraction and what they call homosexual behavior. In essence: guys feeling attracted to other guys = we’ll look the other way. Guys kissing guys = bad.
The funny part is that, after these lines in the sand that basically insist a gay Mormon put their nose down and be unhappy and unfulfilled their entire life in the name of God, most church statements also say that all people are equally beloved children and deserve to be treated with love and respect. They say that families should never, ever exclude or be disrespectful to those who choose a different lifestyle . . . but to always remind those who choose differently of the eternal consequences of their choice.
And, of course, everyone who lives here knows the big hoopla that made the rounds on the news a couple years ago: a change in a handbook that said members in same-sex marriages would be considered apostates (or defectors from the church—thank you, Google), and that children living in those households should be excluded from church activities until they’re old enough to renounce the practice of homosexuality and join.
In summary: love and respect, but only if you’re willing to live by their rules . . . and if not, then exclusion is the only answer.
See what I mean? Clear as mud.
From somewhere on my bed, my phone vibrates. Since I’m alone in my room, there’s no one to see me actually dive into my covers to retrieve it.
I’m around BYU all day tomorrow.
And then, while the screen is still lit up with his first text, another comes in:
And I’ll miss seeing you, too.
Something is happening between us. Something has been happening between us since our eyes met on the first day of class.
I want to see him before he leaves town. I don’t care what Mom says. I don’t care what the doctrine is.
After all, it’s not my church.
• • •
Provo High has a closed campus at lunch, but it’s an official thing that nobody follows. Campus is surrounded by fast-serve restaurants like Del Taco and Panda Express and Pita Pit. Four days out of five we skip out and grab something easy.
I’ll admit that I know Sebastian is an English lit major (it didn’t take a huge amount of sleuthing to get there), but I also know—because he told me at the library—that he likes to hang out in the Harris Fine Arts Center because it’s quiet.
Today at lunch, I buy enough Panda Express for two.
Before I moved to Utah, I heard a lot about the church from people who, admittedly, have never been a part of it. They marry their daughters off when they’re twelve! They’re polygamists!
They don’t and they’re not—polygamy has been banned since 1890—but because of my mom, I knew that Mormons were just people, and I expected Mormon teens to look like anyone else on the streets of Palo Alto. What’s crazy is they don’t. Really. They look like the upper end of the bell-shaped curve in terms of polish: They’re clean, their clothes are especially modest, and they are exceedingly well-groomed.
I look down at my old Social Distortion T-shirt over a blue thermal and mostly intact jeans. I would not feel more out of place on the Brigham Young University campus even if I put on a purple chicken costume and moonwalked across the quad. It’s early in the term, and there is some sort of youth program happening outside the main student center. It’s a lot of long skirts and modest shirts, straight trimmed hair and genuine smiles.
A few guys play Frisbee; one of them drops it and yells out a placid “Gosh darn it!”
A trio of girls is playing a hand-slap game accompanied by a song.
BYU is exactly like I imagined, and also probably exactly like its founders hoped it would be, even a hundred and forty years later. It’s only across the street from Provo High, but it feels like a different world.
Inside the Harris Fine Arts Center it’s surprisingly dark, and quiet. Modern architecture makes the space feel more “austere engineering” than “art building,” and the upper levels are open in a rectangular frame, looking down on the ground floor. Every sound—my footsteps across the marble, a murmur of voices coming from upstairs—echoes across the entire atrium.
Sebastian isn’t at any of the lounge chairs or small desks dotting the second floor, and in hindsight my bag of food seems embarrassingly overconfident. I wonder whether there are cameras tracking my movement, whether the BYU cops will come in, decide I don’t belong here, and gently escort me out of the building, wishing me safe travels and promising to pray for me when they leave me at the campus border.
After a few minutes on the third floor, I’m just about to leave and stress-eat two lunches worth of questionably Asian food when I spy a pair of red Adidas peeking out from beneath a desk.
Walking over, I declare, “I have plenty of the world’s least healthy lunch to share.”
Sebastian startles—and in the time it takes him to turn around, I beg myself to go back in time and never have done this. At the beginning of this school year, a freshman gave me an envelope and then actually ran off in the other direction. Bewildered, I opened it. Glitter poured out onto my shoes, and the letter inside was full of stickers and looping handwriting telling me she thought we might be soul mates. I didn’t even know her name until I read it at the bottom of the note: Paige, with a glittery heart sticker dotting the i. I don’t think I’d realized until that moment how young fourteen is.
But standing here, waiting for Sebastian to speak . . . I am Paige. I am an emotional infant. It suddenly feels creepy—or absolutely immature—to be here, bringing him food. What the hell am I doing?
