Choose your own ending

A good portion of this week has been spent in a delirious and feverish daze. I started getting sick Monday, and by Tuesday I was in full blown strep throat mode. I started antibiotics yesterday and today am finally feeling close to normal. Thanks to a semisynthetic penicillin. Yay drugs! That’s not what this post is about though. I’m still not exactly sure how to lay this out or what I’m going to say. Usually the best thing is to just start. So here it goes.

Imagine a conservative Mormon family. Probably not too hard to imagine so far, and FYI, I don’t have a particular Mormon family in mind. Let’s say the family is pretty rigid in their Mormonism and conservatism. So far it’s served their family well though. Their kids are bright, attractive and talented overachievers, who always stay inside the lines, just like their parents. Then along comes one of the kids, a boy, who begins to realize at a fairly young age that he has an affinity for other boys. He’s young enough that he doesn’t really understand what’s going on and he can’t realistically do anything about it. So he just keeps it to himself, because he’s been taught that it’s very ugly.

He continues on through school and graduates and goes on a mission. He gets back and real life starts setting in. He realizes that he is still attracted to men and that being a “faithful Mormon” hasn’t changed any of that. Not even a two year mission. He starts to notice that it’s going to be very difficult to live up to the cultural expectations of Mormonism. He decides to tell his parents, who love him, but don’t always know the best ways to show it. They expect him to continue to conform to their rigid views of what it means to be a good Mormon.

He begins to realize that in order to survive, he’s going to have to extract himself from the family and set himself apart from the family. Anyone will tell you how easy it is to fall back into family roles even after you’ve left the nest and lived away from your FOO (family of origin). The extraction from the family has to be dramatic and extreme, so that it will take and so that it will be very clear to the family where he stands. He probably even does stuff he actually normally wouldn’t do, but it’s all to make it very clear that the family’s way of being doesn’t work for him. A lot of that probably happens almost subconsciously.

As a result, the family clings even more tightly to their extremely conservative views and maybe even become more conservative. They must show that they can’t compromise on something like this. Not one bit. Each side runs toward and holds fast to their extreme views and behavior. The son becomes estranged from the family and the church and the family treats him as though he were no longer among the living. Nobody wins. Everyone just reacts. The family gets broken. I realize this isn’t the story of every gay Mormon, but I’ve seen it repeated enough to see a pattern or variations on this pattern.

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed about gay men, it’s that they have a deep, deep well of spirituality and ridiculous talent. With the scenario above though, it too often goes untapped. They are brought into families and a church that haven’t yet learned to fully appreciate and value and cultivate the incredible power and beauty that lies beneath the surface, and as a result they don’t recognize it in themselves. But it’s there, oh man, is it there. I look around and wonder if anyone else is seeing the gold mine we are sitting on and ignoring. I can’t wait until the day we learn to properly cultivate and tap those resources. I believe it will blow our minds. All over.

If you think about, the gay son born to a very strictly Mormon family sets up the perfect scenario for amazing transformation and opportunities for learning. They are a perfect foil for each other. In literature, a foil is a person who is a contrast to another character. I am admittedly not an English major, so if any English majors want to jump in and add anything, feel free. By providing this contrast, the foil might help the main character understand himself better, or help the reader understand the main character better. A foil gives something to be played off of. It provides some amount of tension.

A gay Mormon might help his conservative family learn to live a little bit outside the lines, in a way that expands their understanding of the gospel. The family might help the gay son not live self-destructively outside the lines. Each provides a necessary tug in different directions and as a result, they help each other live more fully.

I was recently involved in a retreat for the choir I sing in. We had a guest clinician come work with us. She had us do some exercises that helped us ignore some of the standard rules of good singing. She told us that sometimes you have to go outside your boundaries to see where they are. To add to the conversation, our director said that she sometimes has a lady come help her clean her house and she always warns her that it’s going to get messier before it gets cleaner.

This isn’t to say that I believe that we should explore everything and forget all boundaries. I do think, however, that we are sometimes way too scared to make mistakes. We cloister ourselves so far inside the lines that I think we miss out on opportunities for growth. Let your gay Mormon son be your tour guide and continue to be his. Just a warning though, his tour will probably be much flashier and might include song and dance. Just go with it. Trust me. The term foil refers to the practice of putting dark, polished metal (a foil) underneath a gemstone to make it shine more brightly.