Part 1 of 4–The Universe Demanded a Deal from a Monster and a Coward: 10 years was the best I could do?

“You could have set me free 10 years Earlier” The Universe demanded a deal, I should have included her….

 Last week I had a talk with Shelly, my ex-wife, mother of our four children.  We talk a lot and I am not always easy to deal with.  Between her and Bill I have found my way to where I am now, and it seems that I might finally be able to tell this story.  You see, I always assumed that Michelle must have known that I was struggling with being gay.  I mean, I told her before we were married that I had same sex experiences before I joined the church, and my Bishop told me to tell her that Jesus has forgiven me and she should also.  I said, “If you are concerned about marrying me you should talk to your Bishop”.  I had rehearsed that line from the day Bishop Davis and I had our ‘temple marriage recommend’ interview.

Mormons have to get certified worthy as individuals to enter the temple annually and prior to marriage.  During my ‘temple recommend interview’, I shared my concerns with my Bishop.   I told him that I had not participated in homosexual sex since I had joined the church three years earlier, and that I still thought about men sexually.  I reported that daily prayer, scripture reading and writing daily in my journal had kept me on the path of eternal life and that I took my temple covenants seriously.  I had just finished serving a mission three weeks earlier, in May of 1987.  For more than four years I had been fighting every single day to not act upon my sexual feelings.  It had taken me more than a year to stop masturbating.  Mormons have to be free from masturbation for at least one year prior to entering the mission field.  Though one might say I slipped up several times in the mission field and had to confess these slip-ups in letters to my Mission President, Stanley Smoot.  I have all 50 of those letters and his responses.  They will be published, it’s so amusing to read them today.

But back to Shelley and that warm June day.  We were driving on 680 South through Pleasanton, CA.  I gave her no details and she trusted my answer and never spoke to her Bishop.  This, my friends, is the ultimate pinnacle of power Mormon women live under.  God says it to the man and man says it to the woman.  I told Michelle what my Bishop had said; Jesus has forgiven me.  She knew I was speaking the truth and that her Bishop would simply tell her that my Bishop was right.  In the 1980’s, the church was a huge advocate  of marriage therapy for homosexuals.  They had already discovered that electrocuting our genitals did not work and that it was actually quite abusive.  So getting us married was in line with the Gospel’s teachings.

I asked Shelly, knowing what she knows today, had I told her I had same sex attractions prior to joining the church would she marry me today?  She said, ‘no’.  To me, that is the most telling part of our life story together.  We both had an infantile understanding of homosexuality and its immutable effects.  I wanted to believe that this immutable human characteristic was a choice, who wouldn’t want to believe it was a choice?  I wanted to believe that it was a choice, that I chose to have gay experiences when I was young and that I was simply choosing not to have gay experiences now.  I wanted to believe that my juvenile sexual experiences were simply boys being boys or curiosity.  I did not want to be gay.  I had not been gay since I had joined the Mormon Church about four years earlier.

Today, my confession to a young woman would most certainly be one of the largest alarm bells a man could ring that would scream, “this man is not for you”.  Case closed, end of discussion.  Even the Mormon Church had moved its position.  In the 1980’s we were encouraged to get married.  Today’s approach is lifelong celibacy. Yeah, that works!  Look at the Catholics to see how well celibacy works.  The church is moving forward, and at least they are no longer setting families up to fail like they did our family.  We were set up to fail.  This was an impossible task, and in our innocence and naivety we both greedily latched on.

My confession in place, and her willing obedience to the will of man in the name of God, we were married.  I had been home for a month and we had a wedding planned for two months after I returned, but we eloped.  Listen, as hard as it is to say this out loud, I was horny after four years of sexual repression and virtually free of masturbation, I would have fucked a dog had one bent over and presented itself to my throbbing cock.  I know, strong adult content, sexually inappropriate.  I am going to say right now I will be sexually inappropriate as I write this.  I am generally sexually inappropriate, it is what it is and it is likely immutable also, but I do control if I see fit.  This is just a warning as to what follows will be very sexual in nature.  I sexually repressed myself for 17 years and what follows is to the best of my memory, which is vividly alive through these journals.

I assumed Shelly knew I spent 17 years of my life living in a self-imposed torture.  That she knew I was tormented every day by something I did not understand, that despite year after year of pleading with God, begging God, writing in my journal in code so no one would ever know what the real problem was outside my Bishops.  That ear after year reading scriptures, going to church, going to temple, family home evening, temple marriage, funny underwear and all, I was still gay.

We eloped to Salt Lake City, Utah for a temple wedding.  Everything that could possibly go wrong on that trip did go wrong.  We eloped because we were horny.  I was 23 and Michelle was 24, (an old maid by Mormon standards).  We were kissing, having sleepovers where I would spend the night at her house in a different room.  One day, we were in her bedroom kissing and dry humping and I came in my pants.  Twenty-three year old men who have not had sex of any kind in four years are horny.  I was so horny it did not matter it was a woman.  I guess men in prison and men on ships can relate, you know, ‘a man is better than a hand’.  For gays and lesbians in marriages shrouded in excessive cultural sexual oppression it is just like prison.  After four years of no sex any sexual contact would be a welcome relief.

The car we were driving, my mother in law’s car, broke down.  We were stranded in Nevada, with little money and an appointment to get married the next afternoon, arranged by my former mission president Stanley Smoot.  Sitting in the Winnemucca McDonald’s, we were next to another Mormon family discussing this situation and they offered to take Michelle and I on.  Joy, Michelle’s mother, would meet us there.  We did not have money for a hotel room for two nights, as one of the nights was being spent in Winnemucca.  This nice family offered us a place to sleep and then dropped us off at the Temple so Michelle and I could get her a dress and make the arrangements.  Joy arrived at the Temple as we kneeled at the altar for our sealing for time and all eternity.  Let the sex games begin!

Michelle and I were horny.  We were young, and we were filled with ideals.  We both deeply believed we were creating an eternal family and that these sexual urges we were feeling needed to happen in marriage, so we eloped before we fucked.  Despite my sister’s insistence that Michelle and I had sex before we were married, we did not.  My hand did graze her breast on the day we married in the Salt Lake Temple, but we simply shrugged it off since in a few hours we would be married and gleefully tucked into our room.  That night, Michelle and I had sex and I climaxed six times, rubbing her raw.  Who knew that could happen?  What can I say, after four years of no sex, I was DTF!  The rules had changed it was open season on sexual intercourse.

The next day we began the drive home.  On that drive I saw that I had made a mistake, a really deep and eternal mistake.  I had sex six times with a woman, and all six times I was thinking about kissing Elder Robert Allen Gardner Brown.  I was still gay and I had to picture a man to have sex with my wife.  It crushed me.  I knew I had made the biggest mistake of my life and I sat quietly in the car.  Somewhere on that long dusty ride, Michelle could not help but notice my solemn face.  I was crushed for me, for her.  I was gay and I was married for time and all eternity to a woman.  I simply told her that I thought I had made the biggest mistake of my life.  I told myself I was stuck with it.

I knew it was a bad decision and I knew it was never going to work, but my life was filled with people who loved me.  Michelle loved me, my friends did not call me gay anymore, and no one ever discussed it.  I was a return missionary.  I had an obligation to control my sexuality and to get married so that I could make it into the celestial Kingdom.  Michelle’s family was this huge fifth generation Mormon family.  They loved me and I was rescuing Michelle from a future that seemed most certainly not to involve family or children.  Most girls get blessings that foretell temple marriages and children and Michelle was missing that blessing.  She had come to believe she was never to be married until we met.

There is a love story there and that story will come out in one of these posts I am sure, but let’s get back to that night a few weeks back where Shelley and I had a real talk about our life together.  The one where I had confessed to Shelly just how deep my torment and struggle was, just how secretive I was and just how desperate my life was to become.

Michelle and I have had a number of talks over the years since we divorced.  Her life has been a long, hard struggle and she put those kids first in ways that I really could not.  I have to stick to this story.  I have to tell it.  You see, Michelle and I were talking about one of our daughters who seems to think that I abandoned her and her mother when I left the family to be gay.  I have harbored resentment towards Michelle and her family from the day we divorced.  Michelle, her family, her attorney and the Church wanted me out of the picture.  Michelle and her attorney and her family offered me the opportunity to sign off on my children, lose all access to them and never have to pay child support.  That is what they wanted.

When I left Michelle I was never leaving my children or abandoning them, I was simply leaving their mother.  I never knew she would end up fleeing the country with our children without even notifying me.  She up and left and took the children out of the country.  I showed up to pick them up for my visitation and they had been in Canada for two weeks.  It took me two days to find them.

I harbor a lot of resentment towards Michelle for doing that to our children, and the very few interactions I have had with her family seemed to confirm a deep and abiding message of hate directed towards me over the years.  Most of which Michelle was unaware of until I told her.  Michelle was not the enemy in this equation, it really was her family.  Her mother showed up one weekend to Bill and I’s bed and breakfast.  When Bill answered the door and I introduced her to him she said, “You mean nothing to me” and just stood there rudely.  There were a number of these types of occurrences with members of Michelle’s family that led me to believe my children were being taught that I abandoned them.  Michelle never told the kids I abandoned them, though she was guilty in her own little digs. For years, when I called I was referred to as the ‘Butthead’.

I put an end to that and a lot of other shenanigans by calling Michelle’s Mormon Bishop.  I addressed him from his belief that he, as the Bishop, was responsible for the spiritual welfare of my children.  He tried to brush me off, but I quoted Mormon doctrine to him and persuaded him that my children’s spiritual welfare was endangered.  He intervened, and Shelley and Biff, Shelley’s husband were set on a more correct path in their interactions with me.

Sometimes completely understanding Mormon faith has its benefits in holding Mormons accountable to the doctrines of their faith.

As you can plainly see I really resented the Church, Michelle, and her family for taking my children more than 50 miles away while a small Carson City, NV judge was bent on keeping me from my kids.  He said that I lived too openly gay of a life to have access to my kids, and it took me nine months to get permission to see them.

I hold a lot of resentment for the mental abuse my children and I suffered at the hands of people who are close-minded and lack the enlightenment that their faiths now show towards gay and lesbian people.  All of us suffered, all of us were victims of a society coming to grips with a group of people who had been so completely and totally hidden and were beginning to realize their power and worth.

Anita Bryant and the religious right were demonizing us, but we were beginning to come out and speak.  We were beginning to group, and I was married to a woman for time and all eternity.  I believed that God would take this away.  He never did.  If anyone says that I did not pray enough, or that I did read the scriptures enough, then they do not know how completely I dive into any venture in my life.

When I jump into something, I do it all the way.  I hold nothing back. That is how I embraced Christianity, because as a Mormon I was a Christian first.  Mormons are Christians no matter what the blathering lunatic evangelicals say.  They worship Jesus Christ and they believe he died for their sins.  To me, that is the definition of Christian.  Let me tell you that in my 17 years as a Mormon, I consumed more Mormon and Christian Doctrine than you can possible imagine.  It was my mana from heaven.

The Bible, The Book of Mormon, Marvelous Work and a Wonder, The Miracle of Forgiveness, Mormon Doctrine, I read almost every major work produced for the Mormon Church, by the Mormon Church and about the Mormon Church.  It was that constant religious obsession that dominated my day to day life.  I kept reading, reinforcing the message of Christ in a desperate attempt to wipe out the gay.

I consumed every article in the Church’s monthly magazine.  I attended not only the weekly church meetings, but all the various church entertainment activities.  We had family camp outs and our life rolled forward.  I was always thought of as a zealot.  My wife confirmed she thought I took it all a little too literally or too seriously.  How was I supposed to take it?  This was the only thing I had ever learned about homosexuality; that it was wrong, that I probably was gay because I masturbated or was molested as a child and that masturbation leads to homosexuality.

Yes, I was molested, but I knew I was gay before I was molested.  He was not that much older than me and I just though this is what boys did.  I mean I was attracted to my gender, and my earliest dreams of sex were of men.  I never chose this.  Just in the same way straight people can’t identify when they were straight.

Michelle knew.  She buried it.  She ignored the signs, like when she discovered my history file online contained porn addresses.  The first time, I blamed it on pop ups and a paper I was writing on homosexuality and pop ups.  The second time, I blamed it on the 19 year-old Mormon kid we had living with us because his parents could not control him.

One would think after the fabulous work we did on Christmas trees alone in the years we were married she would have gotten a clue, or the fact that I would allow her to climb on top of me and ride me till she orgasms, then I would flip her over enter her doggy style while going into a deep visualization of the local guy from Home Depot, the post man, or Mario who always rings twice.  This only worked for so long.

But we were wrapped up in creating a family, earning a living and going to church.  Sometimes I look back at those years in the 1980’s when everything really cool was going on and I realize I missed out on just being me.  While the Mormons literally saved my life, there was a personal cost and a personal toll that I was going to have to face.

I never once told Michelle how difficult the struggle had been.  She told me that as far as she knew I was straight one day and gay the next.

I sat there holding the phone in my hand.  My wife did not know I was struggling the entire 13 years we were married.  So I told her the nitty gritty details.  I did not tell her everything.  I don’t know if she was ready for everything, but it dawned on me that I am ready to tell the nitty gritty details of my coming to terms with being gay.

Maybe if I tell it as closely as I can remember it, from the first time I slipped up and looked at a Playgirl to the crazed obsession gay sex became until I was set free, maybe just maybe another person will be saved.

You see, I only lasted as a good Mormon for seven of those seventeen years. The last ten I did out of duty, out of love, out of fear, and finally out of desperation.  The universe demanded a deal from me.

I was given a life, a straight man’s life.  I had his trappings and I wore them well.  I could never be who and what I was supposed to be.  I had Michael, Jayne, Hillary and Felicity.  Everything they ever knew, everything they had ever been taught was going to fall apart and I could not face that, but more importantly I was Michelle’s savior, at least to me.  She had very little opportunities for love and I was going to destroy her.

Listen in this story.  I am a MONSTER, not a martyr.  The Monster is a part of me every day, looking to be abandoned by people who love me.  People whom I knew were going to abandon me did.  I could have prevented it.  I guess if I want to be truly honest, I could have made it to the end of my life pretending to be straight keeping everybody happy, and growing angrier and angrier by the day.  My ex-wife and my kids will readily tell you that I could be a monster when it came to anger and be absolutely evil with my insults.  The repression fed the Monster, and it was not until I accepted myself as who I was that the Monster subsided.

Michelle and I were both volatile.  She was in a relationship haunted by the words I uttered on our second day and I was haunted by my identity.

The Monster comes out of me now and then, especially when I am wounded.  I can’t tell you how painful it is to look at yourself day in and day out and wonder why God made you gay when you finally utter those words.  When you finally surrender to the fact that God made you gay and when you hear yourself say it and accept it, the only thing you feel is love.

I walk every day with that feeling, no longer supported by the delusion of God in my life.  I was born gay, I am gay, I was created gay by natural laws that are beyond me.  I am ok with it and would never wish to be anything but gay.  Straight seems a mystery to me and unappetizing, despite having eaten plenty of meals at the straight buffet.  I have no use for feeling anything but love for who I am and what I am.  It just is.

How could Michelle not have known this was a constant daily struggle, didn’t she ever read my journals, they were laying all around the house?  No she hadn’t.

Wow, I thought she spent the last 12 years thinking she and the kids were the only victims.  She had no idea I was suffering and tormented every day of my life.

So I told her when it began, when I started losing control and when my faith in God left and she said, “You could have left me 10 years earlier, I could have been free earlier”.  I never thought of it in those terms.  I quickly reminded her that we had two more children after that, and we love them dearly so we should tread slowly down this path.

I could hear the hurt in her words.  Like I said I am the MONSTER here, don’t have pity for me.  While I am a victim of societal pressures, cultural pressures, family pressures, and a whole lot of self hate, I was a COWARD.

Only a coward would have been this afraid to face the truth.  So the pages that follow and the depth of despair that I take you through, be aware that I was a coward.  I was afraid.  I was afraid of a lifetime of loneliness.  I liked being straight and I was too cowardly to give it up.

The Universe demanded a deal from a monster and a coward.  The best I could come up with was, “Michelle you might see it as deceptive, because I was a coward”.  The next post will bring my readers face to face with the my deal and how it evolved until it could no longer pay its side of the bill.