Hawaii

My senior year of high school, homosexuality was a hot topic in Hawaii. For the most part the state was a fairly liberal place, accepting of all kinds of people--at least it had always seemed that way to me--but now that same-sex marriage legislation was being discussed, the religious conservatives in the state felt a need to stand up and say, "Hey, tolerating your existence is one thing, but, pffft, giving you equal marriage rights? I don't think so." So they did just that. They organized a huge rally at the state capitol in order to show that supporters of gay marriage were in fact nothing more than a vocal minority. Among the major organizers of this rally and the political movement behind it was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which just happened to be the church little gay seventeen-year-old me belonged to and believed in with all my little gay heart.

I was torn. Despite my Mormon upbringing, I was a fairly liberal, free will-loving kid, and despite the fact that by this point I'd decided that same-sex attraction was merely a challenge God would help me overcome, I felt a sense of kinship with other gay men and women--at least in theory, as I didn't actually know any real live gay people. It felt inherently wrong to me that a law should force my own beliefs about homosexuality on others who had different beliefs. When the bishop of my family's congregation read a letter from our prophet urging us to do all we could to oppose same-sex marriage, though, I knew that I must do what I had been taught to do since birth: Follow the prophet.

I felt very self-conscious standing in the massive crowd gathered at the state capitol building. Would people around me see my lack of enthusiasm, recognize the truth, that in reality I belonged with the relatively tiny group of drag queens, dykes on bikes, and rainbow flag-waving fags at the counter-rally across the street? The most painful thing was the fear, gnawing at my core, that I really was on the wrong side. The derision and contempt the people on my side of the street displayed for those on the other served only to strengthen this fear. Ultimately, though, I did nothing. I stood there quietly, lending my body to the count of Honolulu's "silent majority" that saw gay marriage as unacceptable, irreconcilable with celestial law, repulsive to all decency.

Utah

Over the next few years I struggled through tremendous doubt and mental anguish, but through it all I remained faithful to the religion I'd grown up with. I attended Brigham Young University for a year, then served a two-year mission in Spain. After my mission I returned to BYU, determined that the next step was marriage--to a woman, of course, because marriage to a man was beyond the range of possibilities I could comprehend for myself.

A friend of mine who I'd known in Spain as Hermana Frome came to BYU and entered the Spanish translation program I was then pursuing, and I got to know her as Jessie. Before we even started dating I had decided that I would marry her. It was a completely logical decision--I knew I needed to marry a woman, so I picked one with whom I had an established friendship, who had the same interests in literature and language that I did, and who occupied more or less the same philosophical space I did, where we questioned the traditions of our religious culture while strictly affirming the doctrines of the religion itself. Jessie and I hung out for a week before I asked to hold her hand, another before I asked to kiss her, and then a third week before we started talking about marriage. Neither of us had been in a serious relationship before and this whirlwind romance--not at all atypical of BYU, I should add--felt both overwhelming and completely natural.

Now, after years of hitting my head against the wall of reparative therapy, I had no hopes of waking up one morning and suddenly not being turned on by men. I had never seen heterosexual marriage as a cure for homosexuality--rather, just as something that God expected of me just as he expected it of all his other children, and beyond that, as a necessary ingredient in the happiness of myself, my future spouse, and our future children. With these things in mind, I knew that the only ethical way for me to approach marriage was through complete honesty. Before I even officially proposed, I had to tell Jessie that I was attracted to men and probably always would be.

So I told her, and she thought about it, and a few months later we were married in the LDS temple in Salt Lake City.

The next few years were a mix of happiness, sadness, and, more often than not, just plain old existence. At times I was in a state of euphoria, thrilled with the great relationship--emotional and physical--that Jessie and I shared. At other times I was miserable, convinced this all was a sham and I needed only to gather up the courage to leave her and start my life over more honestly, being true to my gay self. My faith in the LDS church was wavering during this time, more so than ever, and this only complicated matters. In my mind, my membership in the church and my marriage to Jessie were intricately and inseparably connected. When I believed in the church I saw the wonderful things in our marriage and when I believed the church was a grand hoax I saw only the deficiencies in our marriage. Likewise, the strengths in our marriage strengthened my faith and the weaknesses weakened it. At a point when my faith in the Mormon version of God and my contentment with our marriage were both high, Jessie and I decided to have a baby. Our daughter was born, simultaneously the glue that reinforced my cheerful commitment and the chains that held me where I sometimes didn't want to be. To end the marriage now would hurt not only Jessie, but also our daughter.

My daughter was about a year old when same-sex marriage came to the forefront of Utah politics, and once again the leaders of the LDS church encouraged the members to take a stand against anything that might harm "traditional marriage." At this point in my life there was no question in my mind: I might believe that homosexual relationships were wrong for me, but I had no right to force others to live by those beliefs. My vote against the constitutional amendment achieved nothing, of course, as it unsurprisingly passed with overwhelming support, but this decision had a profound impact on my life. If the prophet of the LDS church could be wrong about this--and I had no doubt he was--then what else might he be wrong about? How could he claim to speak for God and still be wrong? And if he didn't speak for God, then what use was he to me?

Many Mormons, I know, have asked similar questions, and the answers have led them back to their faith, though perhaps to a more self-aware, self-responsible faith than that of others who refuse to ask the questions in the first place. For me, though, the questions led me away from the church I'd held onto for twenty-five years. In order to take the weight of my marriage and family off of the questions, I had to first separate the question of religion from the question of marriage. Approaching the issue from a completely secular viewpoint, I concluded that, regardless of what any God might say, at this point in my life the ethical decision, the one that would hurt the fewest people, was to stay with Jessie and raise our daughter together with her. Relieved at least temporarily of that question, I got back to tackling the religious questions. I did exactly what I'd encouraged others to do when I was a missionary in Spain--I read the Bible, I read the Book of Mormon, I meditated, I fasted, and I prayed to know if the LDS church was indeed God's church.

Praying is the easy part. Getting an answer is not so easy. According to LDS doctrine, answers to prayers come via the Holy Ghost, which can be any kind of warm, comfortable feeling you might have, or sometimes a stray thought that seems to pop out of nowhere. The problem with this approach is that I then become hyperaware of every feeling, every thought, and I analyze and overanalyze what they might mean. Was that the Holy Ghost or was it my stomach grumbling? Was that thought telling me to get up and do fifty jumping jacks inspiration or delusion? If I don't act on it, I'll never know. This is why, every time I'd questioned my faith in high school, in college, on my mission, I ultimately stuck with the church. I'd always had a mix of positive and negative feelings toward the church, and the safest interpretation had always seemed to be the one the church gave me--the positive ones come from God and the negative ones from that other guy. Emphasize the positive, ignore the negative, and voila! Good little Mormon boy.

Except this time the positive feelings were quickly diminishing and the negative refused to be ignored. The more I studied and pondered and prayed, the more the LDS church just seemed so wrong to me. None of it made sense--how did people believe in this stuff? For months I continued attending, each Sunday's services making me angrier and angrier until finally one Sunday morning I got up, left, and went to Target to buy some new underwear. I had never felt more peaceful and sure of anything in my life.

I let Jessie and my church leaders know that I would continue to attend in order to support her in her faith, but that I no longer considered myself a believing Mormon. It was a huge relief to take that step, and with that crisis of faith behind me I felt happy once again with my life and therefore with my decision to stay married to Jessie. Not long after that, we decided to have another child, and the next year our son was born.

As it happens, while I was in the process of moving away from my Mormon identity I was also in the midst of setting myself up publicly as the poster boy of heterosexually married gay Mormons. I came out in a pair of essays that were published in a Mormon studies journal and at the same time on my blog, which led to an article about me and Jessie and our marriage being published in a major Salt Lake City newspaper and then to a story about us on a Salt Lake news show (1, 2) . Jessie and I felt it was important to encourage people--particularly Utah Mormons, who have a tendency to pretend unpleasant things don't exist--to recognize the existence of mixed-orientation marriage and to honestly discuss both the positive and negative sides of the issue. We don't regret this decision and for the most part we've seen that people treat us respectfully once they see we're willing to treat them respectfully, but at the same time putting our marriage on stage in such a way was stressful. The pressure, whether to succeed or to fail, was sometimes overwhelming.

Washington

A library and information science program at the University of Washington got us out of Utah at a time when we really needed to get out of Utah, but the move to Seattle proved to add new stresses to our marriage. For my part, I experienced a new kind of identity crisis. Here I was in one of the most liberal, gay-friendly cities in the country, and suddenly I was back in the closet, a gay man living a straight man's life. In Utah I had been out to just about everyone who mattered to me, but now I didn't know how to casually explain that I was gay but married to a woman, but really, not because I'm a religious zealot or self-loathing closet freak or--as one online critic had suggested--a misogynist (3, 4, 5). I had a hard time reconciling my belief in gay rights and my conviction that my straight marriage was right for me and my wife and our family. In short, I didn't know how to be me.

Jessie, for her part, was dealing with the stress of a move to a new place, a sudden separation from family and friends, and an unhealthy dose of postpartum depression. At the suggestion of a church leader, Jessie went to a therapist, and her individual therapy quickly turned into couple counseling for both of us. From the first session, it was clear that this therapist--a devout Mormon--was convinced our mixed-orientation marriage was doomed and that the sooner we jumped ship the better it would be for everyone. This caught me at precisely the wrong time and I latched onto the idea, convincing myself that really I was making this decision for Jessie's and our children's benefit. I told her I wanted a divorce and she reluctantly agreed.

We were separated for about three months. We didn't file for divorce right away because, honestly, we didn't have the money. I moved into a little apartment a few blocks away and we worked out an arrangement where I had the kids on weekends and we all had dinner together twice a week, alternating between my place and Jessie's. I stopped attending the LDS church--one of the few decisions in my life I've not since questioned--and started seeing my own therapist, a counselor at UW. I worked with him through the tremendous guilt I felt for having failed at marriage and got to a place where I was happy with myself and my life. I didn't begin dating men mostly because I felt it was important to wait until the marriage was officially over, but also because I needed to find peace on my own and not in some other person. The funny thing is, once I found that peace I realized something I believe every healthy human being needs to learn one way or another: I didn't need a man. I wanted one, I have no reason to deny that, but I didn't need one in order to be happy. At that point, I could have pursued a relationship with a man and no doubt it would have added to my happiness, to my enjoyment of life. But because of decisions I'd already made, pursuing a relationship with a man would also mean giving up something else that added to my happiness--the relationship I had with Jessie and the family life we'd built with our children. It was no longer a choice between right and wrong, but rather a choice between two good things.

Meanwhile, Jessie was going through her own personal growth. She had been forced to face her greatest fear--that her gay husband would leave her--and she found that she could deal with it. She was strong enough to be a single mother, to maintain a positive relationship with her children's father, to take a crappy situation and make the best of it. She knew now that she didn't need me, which put her in a better position to honestly consider whether she wanted me. I approached her about possibly getting back together and giving marriage another try, and we agreed to give ourselves time to think about it and see how we felt.

California

This was all a little over a year ago. We put our marriage back together, I finished my library degree, and now we've moved to Davis, California, for Jessie to pursue a PhD in comparative literature. I make no claims about what the future holds because I have no need to convince anyone that mixed-orientation marriages are the right thing for everyone. I suspect, in fact, that for most people they're the wrong thing--but ultimately that's not my place to decide because I don't know what's best for anyone but myself. I do know, though, that for the past year I've been happy. I'm happy with myself, with who I am, and I find that Jessie adds to my happiness, as do our children. I hope I add to theirs.

It's September 2008 at the time of this writing and once again same-sex marriage is a hot topic--this time in California, where a proposition to amend the state constitution, defining marriage as between a man and a woman, will be on November's ballot. Once again, the LDS church has lent its support to a huge political movement trying to get this proposition passed. Jessie remains a faithful Mormon, though somewhat uncomfortable with her church's political ventures and particularly uncomfortable with the bigotry she sees in many of her fellow believers. I remain a happy agnostic, free to vote against the proposition without fear of an unseen God's disappointment in me for not following his prophet. I highly value my right to decide what marriage and family situation is best for me and will do all I can to ensure that same right for others.