Part 6 of 7: ‘oh that is just a theory’, Identifies you as a person with only an eighth grade education, who lacks critical thinking skills, read on and learn why

For me, learning was, is, and will always be the single most exciting thing I can do as a human. When I joined the Mormon Church at 19, I loved the church. I was excited to have answers to life’s most basic questions and I loved that Jesus Christ had forgiven me of my sins. Looking back at my journals from that time and reliving those days and my excitement for the Lord and my eagerness to serve, only paled, in my desire to learn everything I could about my the Mormon church’s history.

I loved going to the local LDS bookstore and buying my next book. Which was a lot of books.I loved to read and I read everything I could find. My love of learning was really focused on my salvation and learning all I could to be a devout follower of Jesus Christ.

I would read the books that claimed we were a cult and I would scour my own library of LDS books to find answers to the questions they posed. There is an entire industry within the Mormon church dedicated to writing and publishing books to keep us, the extremely curious Christians, completely happy. I loved my church and I loved the Lord. I was happy to be there, in that space during that time of my life. Extremely happy and focused on praying the gay away.

During that first year at Modesto Junior College, I also took Honors English 102. I don’t know the beliefs of the professor and it was not this class that caused me to become an Atheist. It was this class that began to help me focus on critical thinking skills.

If I remember correctly, in this course we had to read a ton more than regular English 102 and we had to write 10,000 more words compared to the standard class. My professor was a rather boring Asian American, but he was clear in what he expected of us and tore our arguments apart in our papers. He really required us to defend what we wrote.

We had a quiz at the beginning of each class, a vocabulary quiz that came from the readings he assigned us. As we read, we were required to write down every word we did not understand from the readings, defined them, and hope that we got every word that we did not understand. The vocabulary quiz, were words that he had written down from the readings that he figured we as honor students should already know.

No list to prepare from, just a sure fire way to get the student to do the readings, or miss words they might not know and fail the class. I think the quizzes added up to one third of the grade. You did the readings or you failed the class. It was that simple.

At the end of the class my vocabulary had soared, even today I find myself always being asked what this or that word that I use means. I found the class produced a new value system of heuristic exploration, that allowed me to accurately assess information and experience in my quest for understanding the world. The class taught me to really think on my own and not in canned messages or bumper stickers.

We learned about the various types and styles of arguments, like strawman, slippery slope, red herring, appeal to ignorance, begging the question, one-sidedness, gamblers fallacy, black and white fallacy and were asked to bring in personal experiences where we saw these in being used in the media, by politicians, by churches, and so forth.

It is not my job to educate you about all these arguments or to make your decision for you to be a Christian or not, it is only my job to share with you how I came to no longer believe in God. Everyone has to face these decisions through out their life and some people find the decision is much easier to arrive at much younger than I did.

My partner Bill and I talk about these things all the time on our porch. Bill never really gave God much of a nod. He said he figured out pretty young that this God and Jesus stuff was the thing of fairy tales. My son, Michael, asked me when he found out there was no Santa Claus, was I lying about God also? My daughter Felicty figured it out when she was 9 and the two most vocal about their atheism is my daughter Hillary and Jayne.

I raised four atheist in a Mormon household, in one week at Christmas, two weeks at spring break, and a month in the summer. That alone could be a book! Of course I should have seen my eventual ascension to Atheism  when I was a young boy glued to the television enamored with Rosalind Russell version Auntie Mame.

From the first time she meets Patrick she handed him a book and told him to write everything down he did not understand and later she, Auntie Mame would explain to him everything he needed to know. I have to wonder if my English teacher stole that from the movie. Heaven knows, Bill and I raised thosed children as if we were channeling Auntie Mame. I digress, you do that when your old.

This class did not make me an atheist, it made me curious to see things as they really are, not as they are presented in the various argument styles. I was learning to learn in ways and about things and ideas prior to my conversion I was really never very interested in.

Something clicked inside me that first year and I threw myself into five years of intellectual development which had been lacking in my life. I had been flown to Austin Texas to interview with a software firm as an sales representative after handing the FEMA account for Grantree Office Furniture. The genteman who referred me thought I would excel in that area, despite my lack of education. He got me this amazing interview.

When I got home to my wife, I knew I did not get the job. They looked at me like I was a dumb hick from a small country town who exuded to much Mormonism and not enough exposure to the world. I found that out after I got home. The guy who referred me apologized for the interview.

It came down to art, I could not believe the amazing art that this firm had in their offices. Sculptures that I had never seen outside a Museum. I was giddy with excitement and it showed. My complete lack of understanding the world outside my faith was obvious. I did not re3sent it, for several months later I was a pharmaceutical sales representative for Goldline Labs, it was the loss of the software company.

Besides, it is hard to tell a person he is not good enough for a job, when the person is pocketing a $17,000 commission check for the FEMA account as a result of the Loma Preita Earthquake. It was the biggest check I had ever gotten. That earthquake paid a lot of bills for Shelley and myself. So I was not really that devasted, but his comments to me after the interview remind me how little information I had back then.

I looked at the world like all faithful Mormons, but that world was beginning to demand that I consider new evidence and the skills I learned in Honors English 102, required me to no longer blindly follow everything I was had learned over the last several years.

This evolution towards becoming an Atheist had nothing to do with me being gay. It had nothing to do with Satan creeping in and stealing my faith, there was no great crisis of faith, I was just being challenged to think more critically and was beginning to build skills of research and conclusions based on research being able to stand up to scrutiny.

In my geometry class they focus was on applying logic to deductions. In my zoology class on of the most profound things I learned was the definition of a ‘theory’.

You see when discussing the theory of evolution, one of the chief arguments made by low information individuals is that evolution is just a theory.

The problem lies in the definition of a scientific theory. When people say it is just a theory, they have just indicated to those of us who are informed exactly how stupid they are. I know it sounds harsh. I just called you stupid.

I used to be stupid also and I used to say, evolution is just a theory. Till I had my Zoology 101 course at Modesto Junior College and learned what a Scientific Theory actually is.

A Scientific Theory according to Wikipedia, is “a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed throughobservation and experiment.”^[1][2] Scientists create scientific theories from hypotheses that have been corroborated through the scientific method, then gather evidenceto test their accuracy. As with all forms of scientific knowledge, scientific theories are inductive in nature and do not make apodictic propositions; instead, they aim for predictive and explanatory force.^[3][4]

You see you just cannot say, oh that is just a Theory, let me tell you how this definition works in real life. So that you like me don’t embarrass yourself to some intellectual, who you might be interviewing with for a job. These things happen, our opinions should not be handed to us by others, we should develop them on our own based on real review of a subject.

When you say, oh that is just a theory, you give yourself away as a person who did not actually study the issue and you signal that likely you have an 8th grade education level. Which you may not have, but scientific theory is taught in the 9th grade if your paying attention. I was not paying attention, I remember learning in the ninth grade, but not understanding it the way I did at the age of 28.

So let me explain to those exactly what a scientific theory is in real language.

A Scientific Theory is well substantiated explanation of the world. That means that test after test have been run, on this explanation and pretty much 100% of all test have concluded that evolution as a Theory has been well substantiated, there are basically no test or studies or experiments of the thousands that have been done that refute the idea that humans evolved, like everything else on this planet is rooted in evolution.

If you click through all the links above you will see further explanation of how an explanation becomes a scientific theory. Basically there are natural laws and theories. Gravity is a natural law, the law of Thermodynamics is a natural law. The step right under natural laws are theories. Theories, are true, they are almost laws of nature. To become a law a theory must assess the explanation from every possible angle, imagine the theory of life and compare it to the law of gravity. Clearly one is easier to evaluate than the other.

So we are sitting in a world, slinging the word theory around when we don’t even understand it. I was 28 when I learned to no longer argue something is just a theory. It did not change my belief in God to know that we in all actuality did evolve from monkeys, it was simply added to my belief system of how God created the world.

That first year of school was challenging for me on many levels, everything I had accepted as truth was systematically being destroyed, but not in an emotional way. I did not once feel like I was loosing my testimony of Jesus Christ or that Satan had infiltrated the campus and was targeting me because of my great faith, which is what Mormons and most Christians are taught.

It was simply me being a good student and learning to learn.

 

Part 5 of 7: Abortion, Christopher Columbus, Evolution, My journey to Atheism continues!

It is going to be difficult to put this all in exact order of how I arrived at the conclusion I was an Atheist.  I think there are people who are born, and from the beginning you sense that they are enlightened individuals.  That may be too strong a description.  I am talking more about people who really just seem to understand spiritual matters.  I always felt like I was one of those people.  My journal certainly reflects the way I look back on that time of my life.  I believed in the miracles of the Spirit and that we all have connections on a spiritual plane before this existence.  Many of us view ourselves as spiritual people and we recognize those who are spiritual.   That is the foundation of understanding the spirit of God.  I, like others, felt a deep and abiding connection to God for my entire life.

When Shelley and I and the kids moved to Waterford, CA, so I could enroll in Modesto Junior College, it was after much prayer and deliberation on our part.  We always prayed about the big life decisions together, and the Lord blessed us with confirmation that I should go to school and get the skills a lucky high school drop-out did not have.

That first summer I took Beginning Algebra, you know the class I should have completed my freshman year of high school.  I had tried it at Chabot Junior College twice, Mount San Antonio Junior College once, and had already enrolled in Modesto JC and dropped out of it.

I had always been keen on going to school and getting an advanced education.  Almost all the successful Mormon men in the church had educations and those educations had rewarded them with good careers.  I had spent so many years reading the scriptures, studying church history, reading church doctrine from the church’s point of view and reading Mormon fiction, that I was actually prepared how to learn.

When you have no examples to follow in your life of how to get into college, it is extremely tough to actually learn the discipline necessary to actually study and pay attention.  Well, two years serving a Mission had taught me discipline in study and that setting goals and sticking to them could accomplish a great deal in my life.

That summer in that Beginning Algebra class, I sat in the front row.  I went five days a week for six weeks and we completed the entire one year high school beginning algebra class.  I did not miss a day.  I was a 28 year-old high school drop-out with two kids and one on the way.  It was vital that I get these skills so that I could support my family.  It was what the Lord wanted for Shelley and I so that we could be more effective as members of the Mormon Church.

I hated MATH!  I was no good at MATH!  I have a long and documented history of failing MATH classes.  If you’re a math hater or a person who believes that they just are no good at MATH, I was one of you.

I am not anymore.  Math is my bitch.  I own math.

So, I sat in the front.  I copied each formula the professor wrote in verbal language.  I copied word for word what she wrote, and the equations that followed each rule of formula.  These classes were about five hours long every day.

You want to hate math, try it five hours a day after years of math misery.  The problem is that five hours of math at Modesto Junior College meant about six hours of math homework every night.  Every single night.

We all come to decisions in our lives that we take seriously.  When I joined the Mormon Church, I took that decision seriously.  It lasted 17 years.  When I decided to prepare for a mission, It was another serious decision.  I worked tirelessly until I found myself surrounded by hot Mormon Men on a daily basis for two years. Getting married even with the doubts I had, I took that seriously.

I took math seriously for the first time in my entire life.  I saw math as my ticket.  If I could just master this math class, I could go to college and then a university.  I knew I could do it and my wife, Shelley, believed I could do it.

So, I sat in the front row, paid attention and each night I did six hours of math homework.  As far as having a porn addiction or time to be running in and out of adult bookstores, that all stopped when I entered Modesto Junior College.  Modesto is a small town and those places were within spitting distance of Modesto Junior College.

I was a husband, a father, a priesthood holder, and a student.  I was going to conquer the Demon of Math.

I did.  I finished that class with an A.  The Lord and blessed Shelley’s and myI decision to go to school by allowing the spirit to actually help me learn.  Other than masturbating in a car, next to a car, that another guy was masturbating in and exploring pornography, adult theaters, a couple of sex shows in San Francisco, I had not actually transgressed with another person.

I was still loyal to my wife and my vows.  There was lust in my heart, though I had managed to leave that behind when we moved to Modesto Junior College.  We were poor!  Two kids, one on the way and a very small 401K check. There was no money for anything but the necessities, and not really enough for that much less money for porn.  We barely had enough money for books and tuition.

You know when you spend your whole life dreaming of going to college and you try a bunch, it surprises you when you actually have success.  That summer I took all those years of Mormon discipline, applied it to learning and it worked.  I could do it.  I knew I could now enroll in the fall semester and finish all my classes this time.  I had a vision for myself and for my family.  We had a new direction and a new strong focus that would keep me from being gay.

I know you’re waiting to hear why I am an Atheist, it’s just is not that simple.  I had taken many college level courses and completed them in the past at a ton of schools.  But this time it was different.

Being a husband and a father in a Mormon family means that everything rests on your shoulders.  Everything. Only a man works outside the home.  Michelle was a true and faithful Mormon who believed it was my priesthood responsibility to support the family.  I had struggled with that from the time we were married due to years of poverty, but the pharmaceutical job was dropped in my lap from a member of the church.  The Lord had rewarded us.

You see, as a Mormon, every aspect of your life is lived in the glow of the gospel and the Holy Ghost.  We even approached going to school with Shelley being a stay-at-home Mom.  That fall, I enrolled in a full schedule.

I was in an Honors English and Latin American History Class (combined), Geometry, Chemistry 101, Zoology and Algebra 101.  I applied the same skills from my math class to all of my classes.  I paid attention and did the work.  That first year at Modesto Junior College was the year that my mind began to explode with an understanding of the actual real principles behind evolution, not just of man, but all living things.

After actually studying evolution and paying attention to the class, I was no longer a creationist.  I mean, there comes a point when I looked at all the information scientist were looking at and I was 100% a believer in evolution.  Mormons traditionally are creationist, and when I joined the church there was a pretty good and robust discussion at the upper levels but no official doctrine.  Belief in evolution was not inspired by Satan or part of the Lucifer’s plan to deceive God’s people from his actual story.  For me, evolution was undeniable and I quickly found many members who also shared a belief in evolution.

The real miracle is that an idea I had held firmly for 28 years, that we were created by God as the Bible teaches, that idea had to evolve in the light of irrefutable science.  So for me. like many others, I had to evolve.  I clung to my faith and found a way to accept science.

So my math class is teaching me that discipline in school works, my science class is teaching me how the Earth is created, Geometry, which I took simply because I never did in high school was teaching me how to arrive at logical conclusions.  At no time in this process was Satan or evil involved in deceiving me to become an Atheist.  I was simply a student at school actually doing the work.

That year at Modesto Junior College was the year as a campus we explored Christopher Columbus.  For me, I had always loved the version of Christopher Columbus that we had been taught.  When I became a Mormon and read the Book of Mormon, in all my classes each year on Columbus Day the church speakers would of course read from the Book of Mormon, the prophecy, as translated Joseph Smith over four years beginning in 1823.

As a Mormon, my love of the Christopher Columbus story was only intensified.  Knowing that the Book of Mormon predicted he would come here and would be led by God, so that the Gospel, once it had been lost from the Earth in the Dark Ages could be restored.  Christopher Columbus was part of God’s plan.

You know the guest lecturers, copies of Christopher Columbus’ journals as he wrote them were all over campus. English professors had us attending these lectures and writing about them and reading his journals.  I found it rather confusing that God in His wisdom would choose Christopher Columbus.

Christopher Columbus was a crazy, excessively religious murderer.  His journals detailed his accounts of slavery, murder and the total and complete disregard for human life.

There is no way I could possibly believe that God would have actually used Christopher Columbus.  I was not ready to give up the Mormon Church, but I was starting to feel like things were not adding up.

In just a few short months, life-long beliefs and assumptions were beginning to fall away.  I did not become an Atheist first or right away.  I just started wanting more informed answers about church history.  I started asking tougher questions and I started evaluating what my beliefs really meant to me.

I never once doubted in Jesus.  I was beginning to doubt Mormonism, not completely, but I was simply open to hear the truth.  So of course, as I was learning all this stuff, I would ask these questions in Elders Quorum and I was given answers:  like the Lord chooses to use people who can get the job done despite their worthiness.  I accepted that answer, but it was beginning to feel like Joseph Smith had probably bent the truth and added that popular piece of history to the Book of Mormon, to add to the proof of the Church.

It was then I began to suspect several sections of the Bible found in the Book of Mormon.  Despite believing for years that it was God’s plan to have those repeated for the Native American when Jesus came to the Americas, it was becoming clear that Joesph Smith had probably just added that.

But I still had my prayer and my conversion story and I had my family.  My family did not ask for a gay husband and father.  Shelley was not buying into evolution or into any of the questions I was posing to her.  She had five generations of faith, no reason to question the zip code of her birthright.  For her faith was that simple. For me faith was becoming limiting and questionable.

Not faith in God, just faith in things that science and history can refute with actual facts.  Mormons, myself included, and many other fundamentalist have an uncanny way of denying facts.  Or we create answers for facts  that explain them.  We say things like, ‘how do you know the source is true?” “the real history could have been destroyed”, “Satan has ways of fogging the truth”, Mormons themselves have their own translation of the Bible called the Joseph Smith Translation or JST.  Simply flip open any King James version of a Mormon Bible and the footnotes and the more perfect translation of the Bible is sitting there for Mormons to use to clarify their beliefs.

Mormons it appears, are already preparing their members to accept anything and everything they present, by undermining the Bible.  I, like every Mormon, only believe in the Bible so far as it is translated correctly.  So anything in the Bible that does not match up can be explained by the JST or modern revelation.  It’s just another answer for everything.  But a crack in my Mormon faith was developing.

And let me tell you, Mormons have answers for everything, I mean everything.  The answers for Christopher Columbus, simple.  God used a wicked man to further his purpose.  Really, are righteous men that hard to find? I wasn’t buying it.

As my knowledge was growing, I was actually being challenged to truly examine my value system.  I was in an Honors English 101 and Latin American History Class being taught by an Atheist and a Buddhist.  Three hours, twice a week.  Only twenty-four students.  Huge reading and writing requirement.  Of course I got an A!

More importantly, I learned about Latin America from Spanish Literature, Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Latin American History.  I had a new understanding of our history as Americans and the history of our country and Latin America.  We were kind of imperialist assholes to Latin America.  As a Christian and as a Mormon, my commitment to helping the poor had been real.  My family and I fasted once a month and donated to the fast offerings on top of tithing to feed the poor.

That Imperialism, according to history, was chiefly led by the GOP.  I started to actually think about my values as a Christian and I saw my views on abortion begin to be challenged.  Not whether or not abortions should be legal, I was a right to lifer.  That did not change.  But I started to question why Mormons were Republican.  It just seemed to me that Jesus Christ’s real message was one of love and food.  Jesus and the Bible are filled with selfless acts of  feeding the poor.

But in Latin America we pillaged and left entire populations destitute.  Were they not children of God?  When I hear Fundamental Christians and Mormons rail on and on about abortion from their party leaders and churches, I think of GOP policies that kill millions of children due to lack of resources.  Not a finger is lifted unless it is an unborn American child.  Not a finger in this country is lifted to help children with a strong safety net.

It was like my real values, my Christ Centered values, were being confronted with never before seen, at least by me, information that was pretty damning when you look at outcomes.  It just seemed odd that the Party of God, which is how I viewed the GOP and how most Mormons view the GOP, and how most fundamental Christians view the GOP, could pillage resources and environments for their own good, while leaving God’s children destitute.

Who cared about abortion or whether or not a woman had one, when we were not even respecting the kids that God has already placed here, the living children.  We could not show the respect we profess in the very basic and simple principles of the Gospel.  Feeding the poor, suffering the little children, those real day-to-day ideals were being weighed against our actions as Christians and myself as a GOP voter.

I was not ready to give up my membership as a Mormon, or a GOP voter, but I became a pro choice Christian.  It just seemed to me that the Bible made it clear we are all punishable for our own sins, and just like I would be punished for having homosexual thoughts and desires, a woman deserved to stand before God and make her own decisions about abortion and whether she believed she was killing a child.

Mormons, like most Christians, believe that aborted babies and children who die before eight years old go straight to heaven.  Not a bad deal actually, would have rather gone directly to heaven than be born Gay, at least  that was what I thought back then.

I was nowhere near becoming an Atheist during my first year but you can see that going to school and being exposed to new ideas, facts, and history was actually helping me see my beliefs more closely and not follow so blindly with total absolute faith.

Shelley, she was moving towards these ideals, not the evolution idea, but she was understanding why I became a pro-Choice voter.  She too believed helping the living was Christ’s real concern.

Is this Satan? Was he sneaking into my text books and planting false information there?  Was this part of Satan’s grand design, that he introduced the evidence I was seeing all around our planet that guided me to accept science and evolution?  That we would be giving Satan was more power on this planet than God, seriously. God can’t show you anything but a burning in the bosom and faith that He really did sneak those Gold Plates away.  But Satan, he could control science.

It was like I was actually thinking for myself and it was scary.  Everything and every way I viewed the Earth was being challenged.  So I went back to what I knew.  Prayer, meditation, the spirit.

Like the aha moments of prayer and self discovery, the still,small voice once again, in a quiet and clear manner told me that my views on everything that was changing was OK.  I could make my own decisions and choose my own beliefs.

I was becoming more rational, my fears of Satan and his desire to thwart the Gospel by disrupting my life were disappearing.  I started to question the power of Satan and why he seemed to exercise more actual real power than God had.

Becoming an Atheist was pretty much out of the question for a lifelong believer, I simply made room for my new facts and information with the Gospel as I truly knew it.

But the Spring Quarter at Modesto Junior College was Psychology 101 and I was going to get new information about homosexuality and that was going to spark my next quest.  God, Jesus and the Bible!

 

Part 3 of 5: My Conversion to Jesus Christ Must Be Witnessed, or Atheism is Meaningless

It does take work to become an Atheist; it didn’t happen right away.  It came slowly, in moments of extreme clarity.  You see, I had been taught how to pray, to meditate, to contemplate and express myself to God from a very young age.

I remember living on Purple Leaf Street, in Fremont, California .  Every night, my mom would keep me up with her waiting for my dad to come home.  My mom was lonely being married to my dad.  I knew that at 5 years old.  That is how old I was when I would sit on the couch, night after night, waiting for my dad to come home.

I don’t know if I heard her on the phone talking to her sister, or if she told me directly, but I knew when I was five staring out the window waiting for my dad, that he did not want to be with us.  She might as well have told me, I knew the hour he got off work.  I do remember the sounds of desperation in her voice as she called the bars.  I don’t know how I knew it was bars she was calling.

There were times she would get him on the phone.  I could never hear the other side of the conversation, but I heard her.  I heard my mom, begging, crying, voice cracking, tears streaming down her cheeks, pleading with my dad, asking him to come home.  I would turn and look at the house across the street from my perch on the couch, looking for my dad.

I wanted my mom to stop hurting.  I would crawl under my mom and dad’s bed until I was in the third or fourth grade.  It was an old Queen Anne Style queen bed that my dad had antiqued.  I would look up at the slats and wonder why my mom stayed with my dad.  I would contemplate, hoping that one day God would show me the answer.

Being alone and praying had been a place I could find solace my entire life.  I truly believed in God.  The Mormons gave me direction for my belief.  I think there are many people of faith who if they speak honestly, feel this same connection to God and they recognize His hand in all aspects of their lives.  I had always believed in God, and to become an Atheist, I was going to have to deny all that my life had ever been.

It was never my intent to become an Atheist.  It was the end result of a process so familiar to me my entire life. I stood there in total disbelief at how simple all the answers were if one frees him or herself from the encumbrances of faith.  I think that you understand that my faith was real, my devotion to God sincere, and that I had bought completely into the Mormon faith.

I had bought it, fully and completely.  I think before we go directly into what took me away from the Mormon Church, I think I should discuss my conversion process.  It was a long time ago, and my lifelong belief in God, with or without actually having a church to support my faith was firmly in place when I was nineteen years old.

In my own life, prayer and meditation had always led the way to peace and solutions.  I had learned about the still, small voice from my great-grandmother.  I had always known how to pray.  The Elders from the Mormon church had challenged me to pray on our third visit.

I was skeptical at first.  I mean, Mormons make a lot of claims.  First, they believe that God the Father appeared to Joseph Smith.  When they hit you with that, you are on the third discussion.  They zero you down to the basic truth; the one truth that either cements the Mormons as the one and only true church representing God on this Earth, or that Joseph Smith’s claims are false.

That is the question, isn’t really?  They ask it on the third visit.  Then they challenge you to pray about it.  OK, I may have not been a particularly religious person.  I may not have been that familiar with the Bible and the sacrifice that Jesus made for all of us, but I had felt amazingly peaceful when these two men taught Cindy, Pearl, and myself the first discussion and left us with Book of Mormon.

The first discussion is very Christ-centered.  My entire life had been surrounded images of Jesus, stories of the Bible’s Miracles, but I had never been taught about Jesus in the way these Mormon Missionaries were presenting Jesus.  Of course I was not going to join the Mormon Church, I was gay.  I was modeling in San Francisco.

Cindy and I worked at the Pleasanton Hotel, in Pleasanton, CA.  One day, I remember coming home and Cindy was jumping up and down with her dark brown hair and intense eyes filled with joy.  She had prayed liked the Elders had told her to, and she felt the warm burning in her bosom.  She knew by the power of God that the story of Joseph Smith was true.  I was bewildered.  I hadn’t even prayed about it.  I had pretty much decided that the Elders’ church was simply not for me.

I was going to have to quit snorting cocaine, smoking pot, drinking coffee and tea, give up my horseback riding and competing on Sundays.  I was dating two people at the same time.  I had been for a long time.  My young gay lover and I had been carrying on for years right under our families’ noses.  I had a girlfriend whose virginity I had taken.  I was up on both counts.  Frankly, I thought the church was a little too old-fashioned for me.

Cindy was jumping up and down, so excited.  When the Elders came for the fourth discussion later that day, I still had not prayed.  Cindy had received an answer to her prayer.  They asked each of us, I listened to Cindy and I listened to Pearl.  Pearl was pretty amazing, she told us that she felt the spirit when she prayed and she felt the church was true.

Pearl’s prayer was answered.  I still had not prayed.  The Elders showed us a film strip.  Yes, that is how long ago this was.  Elders were teaching with filmstrips in people’s homes.  The story was of a woman who died and how families can be together forever.

My family was a wreck, but this family as portrayed by the church was happy even in death.  I felt the Spirit again as they taught.  It was warm and loving.  It was everything I was looking for, and I did not know I was looking for it.  It was a family facing death with hope.  It was pure love.

That night, I prayed.  I asked the simple prayer, the only prayer that mattered.  I asked, there in the quiet of my bedroom on my knees, at the side of my bed.  The same place I had prayed while playing Hot Wheels, the same place I had knelt next to my grandmother, I asked God, to have mercy on my soul.

You see, if everything I had learned from the missionaries was true, if Joseph Smith appeared to God the Father and Jesus Christ and this was his true and only church, then I was a sinner.  The entire world was screaming I was a sinner, you could not miss that message in the 1980s in America.

I was a sinner I needed mercy of Jesus Christ.  I was condemned and broken.  I told the Lord my God, in the most fervent prayer of my life, that if he would come into my heart and answer this one simple question I would give my entire life to Jesus.

My head was bowed in prayer, and the words came desperately out of my lips as I prayed.  Father have mercy.  I was on my knees.  There in my humbled state, my head resting on my hands, I confessed to my Heavenly Father, that in all my life I never felt like there was answer for being gay.  But here were answers, here was a direction.  Here was salvation.

I wanted forgiveness, I wanted answers, I wanted mercy for a life that was just beginning to become hell.  So I confessed my loneliness, confessed my sins, and then I asked the question after maybe twenty or so minutes of prayer.  I let the question hang out there, I sighed and felt the words again, “Oh Lord please tell me if you appeared to Joseph Smith?”

Please, I begged.  The question circled round and round in my head, and my head started to move slowly with the words in a slow circle.  No doubts, no confusion.  The words were forming over and over again in my head  with clarity.

When my last breath escaped, my head found itself resting completely back, with my chin lifted straight up, my chest lifted towards heaven, my shoulders rolled back and my arms dangling.  My chest was burning, and I felt as if my soul was streaming to heaven.  It was one of the closest physical connections I had ever had while praying.  It seemed I had gotten so caught up in prayer that I lifted my eyes and soul in offering to God.  I offered up myself in sacrifice if He would only give me direction.

Burning from within was the word yes.  A simple yes, not audible, just a clear and simple burning yes.  This was the Church Of Jesus Christ.  This was the Lord’s restored church and He had just revealed it to me in the same way He had always come to me, in that still, small voice as I was taught by great-grandmother.

I could not deny that I had felt the spirit exactly as I described it here in this blog.  The Lord had answered my prayers, really answered my prayers.  That is what I believed.

What more did I need?  The Spirit had bore witness to me that this was God’s Church and that God had appeared to Joseph Smith.

You know, surrendering to that question, that simple question, really was the key to understanding what happens to me and all Mormons.  You see, a spiritual experience is built upon the answer to that question.  It absolutely blocks out every critical question you may ask after that.  If that is true, then everything else the Church teaches is true, no matter how unorthodox you might think it to be.

My conversion to the Mormon faith was real on many levels to me.  It was spiritual, it was physical, and it was emotional.  You absolutely cannot understand what becoming an atheist for me was about unless you truly understand my devotion to God.  My conversion to Mormonism, the way I lived my daily life, my political beliefs, my devotion to my church; all of it rested on that July day in 1983.

When I begged God for an answer on that day He answered me.  I felt His presence direct my life.  I made a decision that day, in that prayer to give my life to God, and I did.  I gave it to God.  So, for me to walk away from all that I had ever believed was going to take some doing.  The problem was that I was no longer alone.  I had a wife and a family who were going to make this journey with me.

But the roots of my questions started before I ever joined the church.  It was 1983.  The Mormons had only been letting black people hold the priesthood five years earlier.  I was not aware of that, until Maryanne at work told me.  Mormons did not let black people join.

That was where my questions began.  We will pick up there in the next post.  I still needed to be Baptized, but before I was Baptized I asked my first critical question and received my first answer.  You see, it is easy for the Christians to see the label Atheist and not think that Atheists are like them.

It is meaningless to view me as an Atheist if you can’t accept my conversion with the same veracity and zeal as  I did.  This was my conversion to Jesus Christ; it likely mirrors your conversion.

 

Part 2 of 5: Faith is Not Easy to Walk Away From, You Have to Work At It

You’re probably wondering why I am so concerned about the reader understanding my devotion to Jesus Christ and my devotion to the Mormon church.  So many people who meet me today can’t believe I was ever that devout.  When I read my own writings in my own journal from 26 years ago, I cannot deny those things happened to me.  I can’t deny that I felt the way I wrote or the spiritual experiences I recorded all those years ago as I served Jesus Christ on his errand.  The language of those days flow so simply through me like it was yesterday.  You have to see me as I see myself when I read those journals.

I believed in Jesus Christ, that He was the Son of God, our Father in Heaven.  I believed that Jesus Christ died for the sins of the world, for my sins, and my sexual desires which I had no control over.  He died for that sin, specifically for me.  I believed that Jesus Christ had died and risen on the third day, that He not only appeared to His servants in Jerusalem, that He also appeared to the lost tribe in the Americas as recorded in the Book of Mormon.

I believed that Jesus Christ and God the Father appeared to Joseph Smith to restore God’s church to the Earth. I believed that I held the Melchizedek Priesthood as conferred upon Joseph Smith by Peter, James and John, when they appeared to Joseph Smith to restore the priesthood ordinances.  I held that priesthood.  I had served the Lord for two years of my life as a missionary.  I was married in the Mormon Temple and I wore the Mormon underwear.  I used the priesthood to bless my wife, her family and our children.

I baptized three of our children.  I blessed them all when they were born, and I blessed them when they were sick.  I lived a life in the service of God to the best of my ability, and to the best of my understanding.  I was a man of deep and abiding faith.

For those of you of faith, you recognize the level of my devotion, for your own lives are as devout as mine was. Your days are greeted with prayer, your meals are blessed, and your family events are engulfed in traditions of faith.  That was my life.  I truly believed.

It is not an easy task for one to go from pure and total devotion to complete and total abandonment of that belief system, especially if that belief system was practiced for seventeen years.  It was all I knew.  It was everyone I knew.  To become an Atheist was to deny everything I had ever conceived of as reality.  Every answer I ever had to every question I had ever asked was found in my faith.

I must not be alone in thinking that way about my faith.  It was the only way I knew how to interpret life and understand life.  Last year my ex-wife Shelley and I spent hours talking about why the four children and I were Atheist.  She said, “Because it is easy”.  Easy?  I was stunned at how simple her answer was, it was easy.

Like being in the closet, my understandings of the church and how the church presented itself to the world were starting to fracture.  I was starting to see reality from superstition.  Mormons are very superstitious and the Mormon Folk Lore of Myth and Miracles reads like a modern urban legend.  Mormons are very superstitious.  The Three Nephites are translated holy beings that walk the Earth doing miracles, secreting Temple names that only God can utter to say aloud only invites Satan to have power over you.  I could go on and on about Mormon Superstitions, but that is not the point.

The point is, I was a faithful follower.  Losing that type of faith is not easy, it does not happen overnight.  It does not happen as the desperate consequence of sin and a desire to live with sin.  No, becoming an Atheist is simply not that easy.

Next to coming out of the closet, becoming an Atheist is the second hardest thing I ever had to do.  The first hardest was going into the closet.  The one thing those journal entries scream at me is, self torture.  Man, I tortured myself for nothing, going into that closet.

You see, believing in God and the miracles and wonders of God was part of my soul, my very identity.  Even when I accepted that I was created gay, it was with God’s love.  But the wiggle room that moment of enlightenment allowed just before I entered school was just enough light to start asking the obvious questions about Mormonism.

You cannot be a Mormon and not be exposed to the Mormon Mysteries.  The doctrine of the church that we really should not be delving into.  There are specific Mormon Mysteries and Doctrines that even devout Mormons have to simply swallow with faith that God knew best.

Regular Christians have to swallow those things all the time, like Martin Luther as his revered role by the Mormons and the Lutherans as the Christian Reformer.  Martin Luther authored the seven points of dealing with Jews, he wanted them exiled.  The Great Christian Reformer and father of Jewish hatred all wrapped up in one divine leader of  Christianity.

Christians today all have to face the literal histories of God’s dealings with man leading to absolute horrors in almost every long-standing Christian faith.

One would think that the restored Gospel, the one with the living breathing God who appears to prophets, modern prophets to restore God’s church and priesthood, could at least get it right in a modern restoration. Right?

It is not too much to expect God to get it right for polygamy and for blacks in the priesthood.  Maybe, just maybe, the modern restored church with a direct line to God could just possibly have gotten the Adam God Theory mixed up.  There in my own church were some mysteries for me to actually finally look at.

Beyond the weird mysteries and superstitions Mormons practice, there is my in-depth research into everything ever written about homosexuality in the Bible.  Not just how the Christians and Mormons interpret the Bible, but the Christian scholars, theologians, historians, and researchers studying the Bible and its origins.

I had no idea that my research was going to separate me from my faith.  I simply wanted one answer to one question.

What did the Bible really say about me being gay?  That is the simple question.  That is the answer I was looking for.  It was not the answer I found, either.

The answer I found is complicated.  But that is the answer I am trying to dissect for you.  Taking God out of one’s life is not deliberate or easy, and it certainly does not involve Satan.  That would be too easy.  Separating yourself from a deeply held belief in God does not happen to everyone who has followed in my footsteps.  I am not unique in studying these things, or alone.

People have an amazing ability to look at the same information I looked at, and arrive at completely different conclusions.

After your read this, you may decide that you have a completely different conclusion than I have; that the same still small voice that has confirmed to me that I am gay, that there is no God, that the climate is changing, that every life on this planet is sacred by the sheer and perfect miracle of life.  That same still small voice may tell you that I am wrong and your views are right.

There is no guarantee that you will see the answers I saw and react the same way.  But maybe, just maybe, you will understand Atheism from someone who understands faith, really understands faith.  Faith is one thing I understand.

Faith is not easy to walk away from, you have to work at it.

 

I was saved, I was chosen before I could get sick and die, to share the Gospel. Purely Magical Thinking. Wishful thinking. Desperate thinking.

May 26, 1985

Today was our last Sunday here at the MTC and our (all) district was asked to stand and bear our testimonies. The SainT Paul District went first, then ours the Thibadauex District. (If that name was chosen by our district, it was surely suggested by me. The year before I joined the Mormon Church, I was modeling for an agency in the Castro District of San Francisco, like I said, it was lurking) It was a very spiritual meeting. All the elders gave such strong and personal testimonies. Elder Barnson said just a few words, but they really touched my heart. I could totally feel the spirit when he bore his testimony. He’s from Bountiful, Utah. His parents are totally in-active, but he is here because he can’t deny the Lord. What an example of faith he is. (This kid was so cute!!! I had a crush, sure I felt a burning in my bosom.  What a waste, so much time wasted chasing a delusion) 

President Bishop gave his final farewell talk. Well only two more days, then Wednesday, we leave.

I was called to the Ohio Akron Mission.  I had received a letter from the Prophet of God.  The living breathing Moses on Earth.  I had been studying the gospel for weeks at the Mission Training Center.  Those were some fun times.  We’d sneak pizzas over the fence.  We’d tell stories of our lives at home.  I held back the real stories.  I held back the real me.  He was disappearing.  I was a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ.  I was following His plan. 

May 27, 1985

Today was a very spiritual day! I was able to block out most of the worldly aspects of life. (Just what was I trying to block out, what was I writing but not saying, what secret was I cowardly keeping?) I even tried to have a prayer in my heart all day. I wasn’t always successful but I watched myself.

Our in-active member did not show-up for our TSR, (Teaching Standards Rating). But Elder Carter and I were still able to teach one of the zone coordinators here at the MTC. First though my companion and I (Elder Carter) had prayer in the room.  We went to class and sang “Oh how lovely was the morning”, the spirit filled the classroom. Sister Palatis told us that her inactive friend could not show up. She also felt and identified the spirit. She went and made a few phone calls and got the zone leader to come. 

While we were teaching I could totally Identify the spirit. It was with us every time we needed it. I even felt inspired to challenge him for baptism. Well after all this, you would think I was filled with enough spiritual experiences for one day. Well it was just beginning. After Class Elder Turnbow said goodbye to us and bore his testimony and blessed us in prayer. My companion and I went up to our room and being full of joy I knelt in prayer to my Heavenly Father.

We all came up to the room after dinner, to rest for a while. Our next class was not until 7:00 pm. It was our ambassadorship class. Elder Newman taught us about charity and love. We watched a film compiled of Church TV commercials, again the spirit touched my heart. After leaving class I was so warm and comfortable inside. I was really happy. Went to our last class, which is Practice and Review. We were going to read the Book of Mormon, but before I felt inspired to go into a room and pray. I was a very satisfying prayer. I could feel the love my Father in Heaven has for me.Well I am alright, I am even better, I like myself.

May 28, 1985

Well tomorrow we fly out. I can say I have never been happier in my entire life. I’m sad to leave all my friends I have made her, but eager to serve the Lord. Basically today has been a blow-it day, we went to Sizzler for lunch and to the Mall Shopping. There is no spirit at the mall.

John Thurow left a package for me at the front desk. I haven’t heard from him in eight months. Sister Susan Hardisty gave me a letter. I really think she is special. I’m glad she is going out to serve the Lord. That’s what I want in a wife. I’ve locked my heart, now no more girls. 

Well I need to go to bed. I am sick as a dog. Hopefully I will feel better in the morning.

PS I love life.

The Mission Training Center was the first time in my life I had to live within a set of strict rules.  From the time we rise until we sleep we are studying the seven or eight discussions that we would be presenting to families as we go door to door sharing the gospel for two years.

The culture of the Mormon faith, as my writings demonstrate, are filled with identifying spiritual experiences and recording them in your journal for your posterity.  So that our posterity will know how dedicated to the Lord their forebears were.  We were admonished to not write of our transgressions, only that we were tempted.   All members of the Mormon church are taught that their journals should be a testament to their family of their great faith.  We were not to dwell on our sins, only how the Lord saved us from our sins.  That is the basic underpinning of journal writing in the Mormon church.

The culture of the Mission Training Center is one of great reverence for the work that is about to be embarked upon.  Add into it a healthy dose of Mormon folklore, stories of Modern Mormon Prophets, blessing the grounds of the Mission Training Center to protect the Lord’s Army from the evil Angels of Darkness and the Host of Hell, who were seen in a vision lining the great granite walls of the Wasatch Front.

We were set apart and sanctified by the Holy Ghost to represent God’s restored Gospel on the Earth, and the Host of Hell were lining the mountains all around us, ready to pounce on us, tempt us with our sins, and steal us from the Lord’s errand.  This was the culture of our days and nights; always being told that if there were any sins we had not repented, please go to your Branch President and confess.  It was like they were passing, ‘get out of jail free cards’ to everyone who repented.  Several of the Elders and Sisters I had met had confided in me they had transgressed morally and had privately repented, but had not confessed and the Lord had blessed them with forgiveness and wiped their sins away in honor of their service.

It was so important to confess your sins as a missionary.  The spirit could only be identified by those called and found worthy to serve.  I had confessed all my sexual sins and desires for men, all my masturbation to the Zone Leaders who interviewed me for Baptism, to the California Oakland Mission President before I was Baptized, to three Bishops as I prepared to serve a mission, and to my mission branch president.

I had been told the Lord had forgiven me.  I had felt His spirit, time after time, fill me with warmth and peace, but it still haunted me.

In fact, reading these words today, I see the beginnings of madness.  I was driving myself mad, looking for signs of the spirit, desperately wanting each feeling of love, each feeling of acceptance, each feeling of forgiveness, looking for a cure to the monster I was.

The demons on the hills surrounding the Mission Training Center, they knew me.  They knew my weakness.  They threw it in my face and danced with joy as my secret got buried deeper and deeper.  Leaving for the Mission Field I was leaving behind the gay guy.  I had finally and fully confessed my homosexuality to my priesthood leaders.

I had adopted a way of life, a straight way of life.  I had found the tools to enter adulthood as a straight white male.  Two years down and two years to go, two years of faithful service to God.

What was I thinking?  I sit here reading what I wrote all those years ago and I see a completely paranoid and delusional kid.  Surely this is not me, this writing, my writing?  How was I ever so crazy?  I mean, not just crazy, but loony.  Someone please hand that kid some Haldol with a side of Ativan.  It has to be that culture that fosters this type of delusional thinking.  I have not even gotten to the real crazy yet, and I am only a few days ahead of the reader.  There is some psychotic and delusional stuff in tomorrow’s post.

In reality, I was a victim of magical thinking and an uber desire to please and fit in.  What I am about to say may sound harsh to those who believe in God, any God, especially those who believe in Jesus Christ and his power of redemption.  His blood spilled for our sins.  We can simply kneel, confess, pray, ask the blood of Christ who died for our sins to heal us and forgive us of our sins.  I know exactly how special that belief is, it was my belief for a long time.

I was a magical thinker, looking for signs and symbols of faith in my life.  Recording them, almost as if I was trying to convince myself.

You see, it is magical thinking to believe that Jesus can die for your sins.  Yeah, I believed in magic and superstition.  It embarrasses me today.  It utterly and completely embarrasses me today.  It is humiliating to be so hoodwinked by magical thinking.

It is not often you get to sit down and read in your own handwriting just how delusional your past in faith can be, face to face with your real demons, your fear of being found out and the great lengths people who are hated will go through simply to fit in to feel love.

All self deprecation aside, I can hate on myself better than anyone who has ever hated on me could ever wish.  I forgive that young kid for taking me there.  It was for my own good.  It allowed me to learn a value system and morals my family had been devoid of.

I know each and every day, that my life as a Mormon was a blessing, that I am likely alive because I was not having gay sex during the height of AIDS.  I have four beautiful children and a life as colorful and rich as a storyteller could hope.  All of that is because I was lucky enough to join the Mormon Church and not run away to some big city where my peers were dying.

Yeah, in my fantasy, the thing that kept me from running away was my fear of dying a horrible death by HIV.  It was all around us, in the news, in the papers.  The pulpit ministers nationwide were warning about AIDS being God’s punishment for Gays.  Not for me.  I was saved, I was chosen before I could get sick and die, to share the Gospel.  Purely Magical Thinking.  Wishful thinking.  Desperate thinking.

I still did not know if I was AIDS free, I hoped desperately that I was.  It would be years before I really had an HIV test.  I was sure I was negative.  I never showed any symptoms.  But I did not want to know and now I was on a mission.  I would have had to get funds from my Bishop at home to go to a doctor to find out.  If I went to a clinic, my companion would know why and I was never going to talk about homosexuality again.  I was never going to tell anyone.

I was free.  I had my new life.  No one knew, but what if I was a carrier and passed it on to my wife someday? This is the story that is also lurking in the background.

I had proposed to Shelley at the Oakland Temple one day kind of on a whim.  It had snowballed into a relationship and she had decided to wait for me.  I don’t know if you caught that Sister Hardisty and Sister Karg, were also under that same impression.  I have no excuse for my behavior.  If my ex-wife, whom I adore is reading this journal, she is seeing how really confused I was about having her wait for me and that I was entertaining thoughts of other women.

I was in no place to be with a woman.  I was just enjoying the attention. Who doesn’t like it when women pay attention to them?  I had a lot of Mormon women paying attention to me, surely I was straight.  Shelley was different than the rest, she loved me the way I was.  She made me feel more important than anyone had ever shown me.  I loved her, like a best friend.  I gazed into her eyes lovingly for years.

Yet as soon as I was at the Mission Training Center, I wanted to Dear Jane her.  I wanted to be free of her, not just her, but of women really.  But I was a coward.

I had run from my family to the Mormons all the way to Ohio.

 

“I had a secret weapon for curing my gayness, the Gospel-I hoped I was HIV negative, paranoid of not knowing. I had a lot of gay sex.

May 21, 1985

I really got into reading the Book Of Mormon today. I am reading in Mosiah. I’ve never gotten so much out of anything I’ve read. There is no way that this is not inspired. I know that this is the restored Gospel.

May 22, 1985

We did sealings at the Temple today. It was very spiritual experience to witness the wedding ceremony. It will make me more serious when I choose a wife. Sister Bonning, Sister Isrealson, and her companion did them with my companion, Elder Alvord, and elder Barnhardt. The reason my writing is so shaky is because I did 185 or 125 push-ups for being late. My companion and I skipped our service project and were reprimanded for it. Afterwards we knelt in prayer and were renewed. The spirit is very special. I hate to lose it. I’m going to really strive my best.

Mormons go to the Temple for their own Endowment Ceremony, for their Washing and Annointings, for Baptism of the Dead, and for Temple Marriages for time and all eternity.  Baptisms are held at local chapels, but all other rituals are held in the Temple.  There is a whole blog post coming on my first Temple Experience.  Once you go through the Temple for yourself, you then go monthly for the rest of your life, doing those same rituals, in special temple clothing for people who have died already.  Yes, Mormons really do go to the temple and get baptized dozens of times in a row, over and over, for people who have died.  This is something to hold your breath over, at least while it is being done to you.  Mormons also scour marriage records and conduct temple sealings for those who have died, so they too, can be married for time and all eternity.

May 23, 1985

Well I went to the Temple today for the last time for the next two years. When coming out I felt totally peaceful. The spirit just swelled in my bosom. It was a very nice feeling to have, for the last time I go. Today I took the Gospel Mastery Test and I missed three out of fifty. Afterwards we had prayer and everyone was being irreverent and goofing off. I included in the prayer that we were sorry for our conduct. My companion and I talked afterwards and he pointed out that it really was not appropriate (for me to judge others in prayer). I agree though. As long as I learn from my falls (though). He also payed me a compliment on how far I’ve come. I need to have more self-confidence (in myself). I really enjoyed myself today.

I think I have always majored in Sanctimony and Condescension, even while praying, apparently.

May 24, 1985

We gave Elder Barnhart a blessing today. I pray that he will strive he’ll strive to live up to the things that were said. I need to go steadily in an upward direction not bouncing back and forth. Tomorrow I will try harder. I wrote my Bishop again today. I wish my parents would right though.

May 25, 1985

My journal has been a day off, that is why I rewrote the days.

The water in the showers was freezing this morning. I showered so fast that when I crawled back into bed it was still warm. I hope they fix it by tomorrow.

There’s an Elder here who goes around pulling ties and exclaiming, “I used to work for a rail road company, pulling ties”. Well one of th guys just pulled his tie and it came off. It was a clip on. The entire floor was busting up. I’d never wear a clip on. 

Basically I did alright today. My companion and I (Elder Carter) are going to be teaching an inactive member Sunday. Our teachers say that we’re really good teachers. I hope that I can teach with the spirit. Maybe I can say just the right thing if the Lord needs me to. What really happened is that we were told we are the best teachers in our group. This really means a lot to me. I just hope that I can still put forth enough effort to be blessed with the gifts my ‘father’ has given me.

The Plea

I am here inside myself, 

Can you help me find my way out?

My heart is cold and I am lost,

is there anyone with some warmth?

It is getting sort of lonely here

and the walls are caving in.

Touch my heart and give me warmth,

show me where to go.

I’ll follow you.

This is how I felt before I joined the church. I was inspired by the fact that we are going to be teaching in-inactive members, who is probably feeling the same way. We all have the light of Christ in us. We just need the Holy Ghost to make it shine. I hope that I have it shining when I teach on Monday.

That poem.  Wow, nothing captures your state of mind like a poem does it?

I had worked for two years to get to the mission training center.  I had never in my life set a goal and achieved it like this.  There was no family supporting me.  My grandmother sent a small amount every month.  I had saved $4000 to go, but that had been spent getting in the door.  My Bishops in Livermore, California and my ward (a Mormon congregation), recognized my hard work at preparing and saving.  They witnessed me dedicating my life to the Lord.  They saw my effort, it was genuine.

There was a miracle happening in my life.  People were simply loving me as I was, the gay guy had disappeared.  I had not masturbated.  I had not allowed myself to think about gay sex, and when I felt the attraction swell, I diverted my thoughts.  I diverted my eyes.  I tried every day.

But it was there, lurking inside me, desperately wanting to escape.

I would lie in my bed in the Mission Training center at night and I would dream of leaving.  I would dream of running away to a big city were no one knew me.  Where I could just waste away in my sin.  I knew I was a sinner.  I kept praying, but I knew.

My life had been structured for two years: meeting with my Bishops weekly, and going to church dances for young adults.  Attending special speakers for young adults at events called firesides.  Doing my Home teaching, showing up every Sunday to open the doors.  I was making a whole host of new Mormon friends all who welcomed me into the church with enthusiasm.

It sure beat my life in Sunol and at Foothill High School.  I remember going to the Sunol wall at Foothill and being made to feel like I did not belong there.  So I hung out with the smokers and stoners in the smoking area.   Not everyone in Sunol was cruel, it was mostly the guys.  The girls were my friends.  The girls have always been my friends.  But here at the Mission Training Center, I was living daily with guys.  Young men who mostly reserved their attacks on me, but I was still alone.

No one knew.  I was free, no one knew.  I knew.  But I had a purpose and a promise.  I was promised that if I prayed and read the scriptures daily, this desire would leave me.

I prayed.  I prayed all the time.  I carried my scriptures with me everywhere.  I had for two years.  I read and read and read.  I prayed and prayed and prayed.

But, I knew.  It was not leaving.  I was alone and I would lie there and fantasize about New York, a city so big, no one would know me.  There were people like me there.  They were dying.  Would I die?

I still didn’t know that I was HIV negative.  I was paranoid of not knowing.  I had had gay sex, a lot of it before I joined the church.  Gay men were dying, was I sick and did not know it?  I already new gay men could not donate blood.  What if someone wanted my blood?  What would I say?  How could I ever tell anyone about my life before I joined the church, about being gay?

But I was chosen, chosen by God.  I was selected as the first in my family to have a testimony of the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ.

I had a secret weapon for curing my gayness.  I had the Gospel.  I did not need New York, I needed to pray.  I was promised.

Yeah, that poem, tells me a lot.  It made me cry to remember that scared young man.  That desperate young man.  That lonely young man.

I was building a fortress around myself.  A fortress of Mormons to keep me safe from the evil spirit of homosexuality.  No one knew anymore, no one in my life knew I was gay.  I didn’t need to worry about dying.  I had shown no symptoms of the AIDS.  I had the Gospel.  The Lord saved me from certain death.

I was safe.  I was loved.  I had repented.  I was alive.  The Lord had blessed me to serve a mission.

I was alone, completely alone.  No more weekly meetings with my Bishops.  No more living 24 hours a day for two years with young men who were as dedicated to the Lord as I was.

I had a new life.  I had new friends, a purpose.  People loved me and it was pretty fucking special to feel love like that!

 

My Journal Documents Exactly how often I confessed I was gay to my leaders in the Mormon Church

May 15, 1985, (continued entry from last post)

During priesthood meeting, the teacher was talking about baptism and repentance which is a popular subject around here. I started feeling weird. The spirit told me to get up and go talk to my (Branch President-name withheld). He had to have known I was coming. The spirit told me to get up and go talk to the President. He left just a few minutes before I did. I went to his office and he was not there, so I walked back to the meeting. While I was sitting there I started shaking and feeling funny. I could not stand it anymore. I got up again and went to his office this time he was there. He was talking to another young Elder. He asked me to wait a few moments and later I went in and we talked. I told him about very private incidents that happened before I joined the church. It was very hard to talk about it but I felt a great weight was lifted from me. I weeped as I told him but I reflected on the suffering of Christ though. my suffering was minimal. I love the Savior for what he did for me, I am thankful to be serving him.

When you are in the mission training center for a stateside mission, you are there for about three weeks. The entire time they are really hitting the missionaries who are preparing to go out and serve the Lord with one huge message. You must completely repent of all your sins in order to have the spirit of God with you while you are teaching the Gospel.

I had been in almost weekly meetings for two years preparing to go on a mission.  I had confessed I was gay when I was Baptized, and my weekly meetings with my Bishop had dwindled down the more successful I became at eliminating masturbation and my homosexual inclinations.  But I was still gay.  The thoughts and the attractions to me had hung on.  They had clung to every fiber of my being.  I was living in a Mission Training Center surrounded by men.  I told the Branch President of my struggles.  We prayed together and he assured me that I was on the correct path.  He told me that I was a follower of Christ who had been cleansed by the blood Jesus spilled for me.  I was morally clean and the Lord knew my real purpose was to share the Gospel.

I so badly wanted this to be true.  At the time it was true.  It was my only truth and my only Salvation.

May 19, 1985

Dear Journal,

Today was real intense. I studied hard and long. I helped Elder Barnhart learn some of the discussions. He really needs help.

May 20, 1985

Today was not quite as intense as yesterday. Though a lot happened. I was able to pass the 5th discussion mastery checklist today. The Lord has truly blessed me with the opportunity to to learn so easily. I did not talk to many sister missionaries today. I wanted to be more obedient to the rules. My companion teased me for it, but most of the time I enjoy talking to the sisters because they are all here for the same reason I am. To serve God. Sister Ruth Karg had to leave tonight for Virginia and I cried as she left. She has helped me so much. Heavenly Father puts us all in places we need to be there. She was there for me. I have decided to “Dear Jane” Michelle. I don’t need the distraction here anymore. I feel bad for what I am doing, but I need to do it.

Shelley was waiting for me and we had planned to get married after I got home.  Ruth was a friend from my life in southern California.  She had gone to the Institute of Religion.  You might say that I had made a promise to date Ruth that night when she got home and I was breaking up with Shelley.

Someone told me today on Facebook that I was focused on lust.

Focused on Lust! WTF?????

It appears to me that I was focused on Mormonism, totally focused and completely wrapped in Mormon thought and Mormon life.

Poor Shelley, she never knew.  There were actually three girls waiting for me.  Two I met at the MTC.  It was a badge of honor to have girls waiting for you.  The girls loved me.  The guys, they really just tolerated me.  I could feel that they knew I was gay.  I could always feel that.  I wasn’t hiding it well but I tried, I really tried.  For those of you who think I was led by Satan and followed only my lust, you are blind.  I have rarely met anyone, even when I was a faithful Mormon, that tried to be faithful and honest and spirit-filled for seven straight years.

Surely the journal and my writings in my journal testify to a life lived with God.  I did live with God, and I shoved everything I ever was behind me.  I buried it.  I repented.  I found Jesus.

I found the promise of redemption.

No one needed redemption more than me.  I was a faggot hated by everyone, and Jesus promised to take it away.

Here I am more than two years into the Mormon Church, two years battling every natural urge as a gay male I had.  I was praying harder than anyone I knew.  I knew I was chosen by God to do this work.  I was filled with purpose and spirit.  I was winning the war, and Jesus was guiding me.

You know, it felt pretty special, to be chosen by Jesus to be saved from my life of sin.  I read the words daily as if my life depended on it.  I prayed with fervor as if my life depended on it.

Yet people only see what they want to see.  They can only fit their understanding of what I went through into their limited understanding of the Bible and their moral superiority at being able to judge others and put them in their place.

Yeah, I really feel put in my place by people, ‘who know not what they do’.

 

If you’re a Straight Man, Close Your Eyes and Walk into a Woman’s Shower: stripped fully bare, naked, ignored….

May 15, 1985

Dear Journal,

When I wrote in my journal I was writing to God, to my future children, to those who would be faithful to the word of God.  These writings were my prayers.  My prayers, my confessions, my desire to to be faithful to my Heavenly Father. 

Our District and the Saint Paul District went to the temple this morning. They are great guys to hang around, they really lifted me up today.  I felt kind of sad when the session was over.  I realized that I could not have my family there with me.

The Mormon Temples are the centerpiece of the faith for Mormons.  All of the really important blessings of the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ on the Earth happens in the temple.  As a convert, I knew that my family would never know the joy of the Temple and how close you get to God.  They would never know the sweet feelings of peace and belonging to the only true Church on the face of the earth.  God had chosen me to be the one to introduce the Gospel to my family and in the two years since I joined the Mormon Church, none of my friends and family were interested in the Gospel.  I would never have my family with me in this life in the Temple.  I could only hope after they died that they would accept the baptisms we would perform for them after they died.  I was sad over being chosen to share the gospel and being a failure at witnessing the Gospel to them.  Sounds a little narcissistic to me today.  “Oh yeah, I was the chosen one in my family”, what the fuck was I thinking?  I have to forgive myself for being this willing to follow the Mormons.  Lord, what ignorance can cause a person to do.

I also made a friend today, who is teaching me about basketball.  His name is Elder Barnson, he’s from Bountiful, Utah.  We both had our share of tears together, afterwards I was grateful to have such friends, as (him) and Elder Butcher who held me as I cried.  He understood I think.  I really don’t know what I would do without the church and my testimony.  I’ve learned that people can really love people.  A pure love and that human relationships are very satisfying and rewarding.  You only get out of them what you put into them.  Two of the Sister Missionaries gave me a ‘cheer package’ with a ‘cheer bear’ in it.  It made me feel great.

I love my father in Heaven.

Clearly I had a crush on Elder Barnson.  Imagine being a gay male, on the beginning of a two year mission, where 24 hours a day I would be with another male of about my same age.  Twenty-For hours a day, 365 days a year, for two full years.  AGAIN, WTF? These guys I am writing about, these guys who are holding me as I cry over my family not being able to go into the Temple with me or join me in the Celestial Kingdom, are the same guys who I was showering with in huge open showers.  Not unlike the movies, I memorized their bodies.  Every inch of their bodies.

I marveled in God’s creation of the male body.  I was not a porn-addicted 21 year old male.  I had seen very little porn in my life.  My dad had some porn in our home that we discovered and laughed at, but I was never really brave enough to actually masturbate to it.  Besides, it had mostly girls and the men were never erect.  Plus, they were stashed in my parents’ bedroom.  They were not there very long.

I remember my16th birthday party in Sunol.  My mom was spiking the punch bowl with a dash of rum, after we had already dumped a bottle in.  My mother was a hoot and we were a partying family.  I remember we had found in my parents’ 8mm movie collection some silent porn that had a man chasing a woman around with a can of whipping cream.  My access to porn was limited for the most part, and the porn that was available was hysterically funny and not sexual at all.

We streamed that movie in a downstairs bedroom as we played pool, danced, drank and smoked pot.  All the guys would go down and peek and we would laugh and then we would escape upstairs.  It was funny porn.  We were not downstairs pulling on our shafts, we were upstairs.  I was just pushing the envelope.  A skill I have since perfected.

That was my life.  No matter how many people called me gay or faggot in high school, everyone of them came to my parties.  My parties have been and always will be legendary parties.  Even the parties and family events Shelly and I planned during my Mormon years were always done with that special little flair.  Those of you who are reading this , who know me, know I can throw a party.

Yeah, I had the guys in the basement watching porn at my party for my 16th birthday.  I probably had a girlfriend, and if I think really hard I can remember who she was.  I am sure it was not my first true and real girl friend, Delia.  Perhaps I was just too girly to be her boyfriend, but she was one of my closest friends.

If you ask me, that journal entry sounded a tad homoerotic.  Being held by Elder Butcher. It felt safe.  He was a big strong man.  I felt safe.

I can’t tell you how I felt showering next to young men who were 19 to 24 years old.  Can you imagine it?

I had spent two years praying, praying everyday for God to take the desire to be with a man away.  There I was in the shower, washing my hair, and young naked men were all around me.

If you’re straight man, close your eyes, picture yourself naked, and walk into a shower, stripped fully bare, into a woman’s shower. They don’t see you as a man.  Tell yourself that, over and over again.  They see you as one of them.

Wash your hair, wash your body, closing your eyes, opening your eyes, feeling the water soak your hair as you rinse, your head thrown back, a sigh of ecstasy escapes your mouth.  Simply the satisfying sigh, released during a hot shower, being thoroughly enjoyed.  That is what the women think.  They are washing and sighing right next to you.  You were just relishing your shower as you wake up each morning as they are. 

All around you there are beautiful young women 18 to 25.  Imagine that they don’t see you as sexual at all.  They see you as one of them, but you’re not. You’re a man.  Your whole life has been built upon natural instincts you have no control over.

Yet God has commanded celibacy for you.  You know that God demands celibacy from you.  Despite your natural longings, you wash, breathe, you close your eyes, you repeat in your mind a prayer.  You beg God to give you strength to suppress your blood flow to your cock, not your cock, your penis.

You know you can do it.  You’ve been doing it.  You scrub your toes slowly, completely bent over, hiding your swelling bulge under you.  You pray and  you suppress, you’re hanging long.  That is OK, it is OK,  for a man to hang long.  Preferred in fact, to hang long in a shower.  You must measure up, even if no one is interested in it.  You close your eyes, you shower and pray.  You sing, silently,’the spirit of God like a fire is burning’, your cock is burning, filling swelling.  You suppress, you suppress, you beg.

You have desired women since you can remember.  Fully and wholly embraced the idea of kissing them and holding them and touching them.  Your whole life has been geared to the moment you are going to explore the simple shapes of a woman.  Even your nocturnal dreams, where your mind goes without your control is filled with women as you emit the orgasmic fluid.  You are powerless to say you ever chose to be straight.  You just are.  You know it was never a choice.  It was your manhood.

Now, you are washing and surrounded by women at the peak of their young, fresh sexual bodies.  They are washing, under their breasts, lifting them up, under their arms, bending over, and washing between their legs.  You wash and wash and turn and turn, bending over to wash each leg three times, you only wash your hair twice.  That is expected and normal, but you wash the rest of your body, slowly.  You are mesmerized.

But, you suppress the blood flow to your penis.  You call it a penis and not a cock.  You reduce your masculinity and cravings at all cost.  You will not show you are excited to be there.

You have spent two years living chaste without allowing yourself to fantasize in any way shape or form about a woman.  You blocked it completely, so you shower, you pray, you peek, you study, you memorize.  You can’t help it.  It is in your nature, you are a man in an impossible place.  You are a man in a shower with women.  You are one of them.  You close your eyes, throw your head back, sigh, rinse, and turn the water colder and colder.

That is what it was like for me.  I was there in those showers with those men and I reveled in the glory of God’s creation, His marvel.  His likeness, young beautiful manhood.  Man was God’s creation and I was man and I worshipped God.  There is something incredibly phallic about man and his relation to God.

I was born attracted to men.  I was born that way.  It simply is.

May 17, 1985

Didn’t do a lot today. Elder Anderson gave my companion and I a TSR. We did all right. I need to apply myself more. I was in bed almost on time.

May 18, 1985.

Today was Sunday, here at the MTC (Mission Training Center), I only went to a few classes. I slept for almost three hours this afternoon.

I can only look back at this post and think, I must have been exhausted from pretending to be straight!  1700 words, this post is long enough.  I will post more tomorrow….

I would love it if this was a fictional tale, or a story I created out of thin air.  But it is simply my story of when I had faith, when I believed.  It is clear.  I had a testimony of God, Jesus, and I was forgiven for being gay.

God had forgiven me and so had Jesus Christ.  They had chosen me and I poured out my heart every day in my journal, yet it seems so homoerotic today.  I am not going to cry, no matter how sad reading this lost boy’s journal makes me.  It makes me sad that I was so alone.  Surrounded but alone.

 

Part Four: Never intended to lie to Shelley, the Kids, the Bishop or God. I was left with no choice, the coward in me saw no choice.

Alone, completely and totally alone with the one thing I could not control

The only person left for me to talk to when the price became too high to talk to my spiritual advisers was God.  I get offended every time some Christian calls me a sinner or decides that simply based on the fact that I know longer believe in God, that my words are not valid and that my life story that does not fit into their opinion about homosexuality being a choice.

For seven years I prayed desperately for God to take this away.  My journals, my Bishops, my letters to and from my mission president, almost three years of total abstinence for masturbation, do you know how desperate I was becoming as my life spun out of control?

I never intended to lie to Shelley or the kids or the Bishop or to God.  I was left with no choice.  At least the coward in me saw no choice.

I was alone, living in a world where everyone thought they knew me.  I was deeply alone, isolated.

Two kids and a wife. A lap full of cum and a vision of destruction lay ahead of me.  Who would you have told? Had you so completely enshrined your life into the Mormons, everything you are, all of your friends, all of you family assumptions of you.

I made a deal with God, a desperate deal, a coward’s deal.

It is too simple for me to say that I lost my faith in God due to Christopher Columbus, but that was the point at which I pivoted from a total believer in everything the Mormon Church taught to a critical thinker. Education was making me a critical thinker, and was revealing to me a world I had been kept from as I chased the fairy tale that promised to make me straight.

There is a long complicated story of how I came to believe that God does not exist, for now I need you to understand that I felt God’s love testify to me that I was gay and there is nothing I was ever going to do to change that,

God embraced me, or I embraced myself.  The knowledge of my gayness flooded over me with peace and I was going to deny that for the sake of my family.  I was going to bury my truth.  For them, I was going to live the life they deserved.

What a fucking coward.  Try as I might to justify it at the time, I was still a fucking coward with a long history of running away from conflict.  I was a wimp in school, picked on till I had to go to another high school.  I was so afraid of Kelly Paul, a high school bully, that I ran away to Alaska,

All my fantasies from the time I was a kid evolved going to some big city and accepting I was gay and finding a life to live where no one who knew me would know the real me.

There was no place for the real me.

Yet in those quiet dark rooms in those seedy dark Adult Movie Booths, with glory holes for peering through, I got a gay education.  I literally became alive watching men touching each other.  I loved the long seduction scenes where men would caress each other’s skin and taste the sweaty saltiness of the a man’s body.

A man’s touch.

I learned about my sexual identity and accepted my sexuality in the worst possible place.  There was no loving mother to share my secret with.  There was no loving father to share my secret with.  There was an entire life of feeling absolutely horrible about who and what I am.

There was, and continues to this day, to be nowhere for guys like me to be honest.

I know you say I should have told Shelley, I should have told my mom, my sister, my siblings, my dad, my friends.  I should not have been such a coward.

Surely there was someone in my life I could tell I was Gay.

I did not know who that person was.  I was alone.  I was scared.  I was terrified.  I was drawn to gay sex, not by choice, not because I was evil, not because I was molested.  I was drawn to a man’s body simply the way straight men are drawn to a woman’s body.

Never once in my entire life was I ever drawn to be with a woman.  So that hunger, that craving, that longing for love was never going to be in my cards; it was never going to be the life I got to live.

I was 28 years old when Hillary was born, that was twenty years ago.  She was a baby.  She Joined Michael and Jayne.

If you have ever held a baby in your arms, a baby that is yours you will understand how I felt about Michael, Jayne and Hillary.  When I say that I would sacrifice my own life for them, you surely can see that is what I thought I was doing.

I was sacrificing for them, for their world, for their culture for their lives.  The Martyr was born.

I am trying so hard to stay focused as I write this, so hard to share the level of my despair and the lengths I was willing to go through to protect those kids and ultimately destroy their and Shelley’s lives.

We were on a collision course with destiny.  There is no holding a gay person back from who or what he or she is.  There is simply no keeping the natural sexual being contained.

Sex finds a way.  It calls out to you, whispers your name in darkness and you find relief in darkness.  You find it in low lit places with men who are just like you.

It ruins you, those dark places.

You see, I would creep at the edges of the gay world, the fringe locations, the places were gay sex was accepted or hidden.  That was my source of information, and I will tell you if you have a gay child, he is finding those places a lot faster than I did.

By time I was 19 and Mormon, the XXX Adult Movie Theaters and Book Stores were evil places where those who were filled with Satan dwelled.

I would park around the back and sneak in, keeping my eyes low, not making any eye contact with anyone, lest I was recognized.

Year after year, those first several years were simply done in silence, alone.  Not talking to anyone.  On seeing what other men were doing.  Just watching, craving, desiring.  This is all I let myself do.  I had already mastered the ability to go years without masturbation.

In public places I just watched.  In private places I masturbated, looked at porn and read pornographic stories of men seducing other men.  Year after year I avoided actual sex and the days became filled with work and family.  The nights when I was on business trips were filled with secret dark places,

These were places no gay child should have to learn about who and what they are.

I should have learned from my parents that it was OK for me to be gay.  But society was not ready to give permission to parents with gay children.  Society was decades away, and I had a lifetime of fear and cowardice to address.

The first time I actually had sex with a man was on the Altamont Pass on the 580 freeway.  Michelle, the kids and I were on some trip to California and I pulled over at the pass to watch.

It was broad daylight and I got out of my car to watch a fat guy give a blow job to a hot young dude.  I was trembling; fear was flooding through my body.  My body started to shake violently inside and I controlled my fear.  I wanted to get closer, to see real men actually having sex.  Not from far away, and not from my car.  I moved step by step closer to the car.

As he was sucking the other guy off, he reached towards me.  I was that close.  His hand found my bulge and I let it stay there.  Michelle was pregnant with Felicity.

I swelled and shook violently, unable to control the shaking, like a chill that runs through your body yet continues to convulse through you.  No matter how hard you try to shake off the chills, it still attacks you.  The fat man finished off the guy in front of me.  I let him snake my cock out, his warm mouth touched it and I came.

The shaking continued as I stumbled to my car.  I had done it.  I had crossed the line.

I had joined the church in July of 1983.  This was the summer of 1996.

For 13 years I had successfully controlled my actions.  I kept the beast, the monster hidden for thirteen years.

Everything you have read up to this point is the story of desperation and loneliness.

I had crossed the line, it would be months before it happened again.  There were other things happening in my life.  I was getting an education and I was learning about the world.  I was moving from Modesto Junior College to Weber State University.  I was getting good grades and I was beginning to question the very existence of God, or at least I was starting to think critically about everything.

That, of course, is another 5 or 6 part post.  We need to get back to the journals.

There is more darkness in my sexual development as a gay man that I feel comfortable sharing, but it will come later.  This story is only just beginning to take form, and I am filled with desire to share it.

I already know there are several people who are being helped, and that alone drives me to finish.  Tomorrow we go back to journal entries.

 

Part Three: I Am A Coward, A Total Fucking Coward

For seven long years I had fought against this moment.  Sitting in that car next to that young hot surfer, staring into his eyes at his bronzed body, watching him fervently stroking his cock, him looking at me with the hunger I had felt my entire life was as close to a spiritual experience as one can imagine.  For I saw more in his eyes than desire; I saw he accepted that he was gay and he did not care who knew about it.  That acceptance fed my excitement and I came with the release of pure peace.  I knew what I was and I accepted it.  Right there in that moment I knew, and all of my life decisions came crashing down on me.

There was no God angry at me, I never felt His anger, but I felt the enormity of my decisions.  I felt Jayne and Michael’s betrayal.  I felt extreme guilt over betraying Michelle, knowing I had been her salvation from a life that was looking to her at the age of 22 as an old maid.  I rescued her from that and we had children.  I was fucked.  I was doomed and there was no one I felt I could tell.

My parents, my family, and my childhood friends had gotten past thinking of me as gay, or at least I believed they had.  I had constructed a pretty tightly closed society around my gayness.  I had a fortress to hide my gayness behind, and that fortress now had a wife and two kids.

God was demanding a deal from me.  He was there as I wept and screamed and pleaded in one last desperate attempt to beg him to take away my gayness, if not for me, for the sake of my family.  The universe was crying out that it demanded something from me:  courage.   But an entire life spent running from what you are leaves you without courage.

Especially when you are alone.  I mean really alone.  Can you imagine being married, having two beautiful children, a wife who literally adores you despite your occasional wounded pride or irrational outburst?   Shelley loved me.  I felt her love and I loved her, not in a sexual way, and not in a way that lovers really love each other.  I loved Michelle like a really close girlfriend.  I really enjoyed being with her.  She made me feel safe and secure.

But even with that love there was a firm knowledge that that would go if I ever told her the truth.  And with that would go my job, so heavily connected was the company to Mormons, and a deep seeded racism was flowing through this company.  My direct supervisor, who was a woman, had told me that the company had hired a black man in the south who had stolen money from the company.  A lot of money.  She said she would never hire a black person, even though she was not racist, because she did not want that decision to be reflected upon her as a woman.

I knew if they knew I was gay I would be fired.  I knew that if my wife’s family and the church knew I was gay, I would be excommunicated.  I knew my own family was highly hateful of gay people.  I knew the community I grew up in hated gay people.

If I faced the truth, everything I was and everything I wanted to be, and everyone I loved would be taken from me.  I would be truly alone.

The problem:  I was already alone.

No one in my life really knew me.  Do you know how alone that type of isolation is?

Once I had joined the Church, had several years free of masturbation and seven years free of sexual contact, the Bishops had stopped asking questions and I stopped sharing the attractions to men when I was not masturbating.  So it was never discussed after the first few years.  I had successfully blocked those thoughts for years through obsessive scripture reading, journal writing, and church going.  I was winning the battle, but it was there building up inside of me, simmering under everything.

My wife’s sister had a smoking hot firefighting, helicopter-jumping boyfriend who sent me over the edge with ecstasy every time I saw him.

That hunger for a man, that desire to be held by a man, to look into a man’s eyes and feel real love, someone like me to love me.  In that moment our eyes met, I knew as surely as I knew Jesus was the Christ, that I was gay and it was OK.  In my tears and pleading to God on that day in that car, I felt His peace.

God had accepted me, He demanded courage, I gave him a coward.  It was all I had ever known, it was all I could ever give.  I promised God on that day I would live my life for my family, that I knew I was gay, I accepted it, and I made God a promise right then and there.

I promised God I would bury my gay sexual cravings for my family’s sake.  That is not what He wanted but that was what I gave Him.

I gave Him what I had mastered:  cowardice.

The universe was sitting out there waiting, keeping track of all my sins.  The hunger built and built, but I buried it.  I refused to acknowledge it.  I did not want to be alone.

I was alone, really alone, no one really knew me.  I was afraid, really afraid.  I was becoming a monster and I did not know it.

You see, the spirit or whatever it is that lives inside us and directs us, is powerful, it sees the truth.  It tells you when you’re right and you know it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

I knew what the Universe wanted that day.  I felt the decision flood through my entire body as clearly as when I had prayed for guidance about anything in my life.

God wanted me to be honest and leave my wife and kids and accept who I was.  That is what God wanted.  That is what the Universe in its wisdom communicated to me on that day.

This was not my choice.  I was a coward.  I still am a coward.  I fear being alone and being abandoned more than anything in my life.  I knew that I was strong enough to do it, but I stayed with Shelley and the kids.

I was a coward.  The Universe confirmed it.  I was a coward and there was a price to pay.

The Universe wanted to exact it full on me and it did.  My hell was only just beginning, and I was going to become a monster.  I should have listened to the Universe then.  I should have stopped playing God with Shelley and the kids’ lives.  I should have had the courage to face the truth.

I should have run away, like my fantasies and daydreams had compelled me to.  I told myself I should have run away along time ago , but now I can’t.  I just can’t.  I just can’t leave this family, this job, these people.  Even though they love me for who they think I am, it is love.  It is a life shared.  It is the only life I know.

Oh God please guide me, I begged.  I pleaded.  I knew it was time to go.  It was a hopeless situation.

The shock of my actions, my sexual actions and how close I came to losing it completely roared in my head.  I was able to recommit myself to at least putting on the appearance of a good Mormon.  I started reading the Book of Mormon and the Bible again, and was able to gain control of my sexual urges.  I could feel myself slipping back into the good Mormon.  I was rewarded with additional callings in the church.

I was made Elder’s Quorum Secretary, and in one summer we moved at least a dozen families.  Then we moved to Livermore, CA.  My territory had expanded I got a huge commission check.  Michelle, the kids and I had won a sales contest and took a Mormon history tour.  We were living the life of successful middle-class Mormons.  We constantly had financial problems, but things were looking up and we were getting it together.

Then I got fired.  Yep!  Fired.

No high school diploma and a great job for almost three years.  I was fired.

We were spinning out of control.  I realized that I needed real skills to care for this growing family, and at the time we had no idea that Shelley was pregnant with Hillary.

We cashed in our 401K, moved to Waterford, CA and I began going to school.  I needed skills.  All the Mormon men in my life who were successful had careers that demanded education.  I was smart, a quick learner, but I was a high school drop-out.

We had two kids and a third on the way.  So I threw myself into school.  You would be amazed at how completely easy it is to bury yourself in education.  There was a new purpose in my life.  A purpose.  I could deal with that.

I even took Mormon Institute of Religion Classes while attending Modesto Junior College.  I still believed in God and the Church; I had simply accepted who I was and that God had accepted who I was.  I really began to focus on the life of Christ in those years; His sacrifice for us, His lack of judgement and total use of love in all He approached and in all He did.

The hunger was easily distracted during that first year at school as I was filling my head with knowledge, getting an education, and learning about myself and others.

It would rear its ugly head and I would sneak off to watch gay porn or to visit a gay cruising area, but I never engaged in physical sex with another man.  I was very aware of HIV and very paranoid about bringing that home to my wife and family.

That first year at Modesto Junior College was the year I began challenging all the things I had swallowed whole and with unquestionable faith as a Christian and as a Mormon.

The truth is, my faith was challenged by the story of Christopher Columbus.  Imagine that!

It was Christopher Columbus that woke me up to see the truth of everything I had ever believed as wrong.  Not just wrong based on opinion, but factually, and there was no way for Mormons to walk themselves out of this one.  There was no amount of faith that would allow me to look past Christopher Columbus and his revered and divine status in the Mormon Church.  I had to swallow and recognize that the Mormon Church, like all churches, is a human-run group hanging on to its followers by a thread of lies.

It would be so easy to dismiss me as a nut job, someone who simply lacks faith.  But if you truly have faith, then my story is not a threat.  This is my story as I lived it.  This is my dealing with the Universe.

I built a life around one truth, that Jesus would forgive me and take my gay away if I prayed hard enough.  Well hell, how the hell much praying does one fucking have to do before this God Damned Therapy Works?  I use God Damned Therapy, because if there is a God, He would damn this therapy, He would damn those who pray away the gay.  It ruins people’s lives with false hopes.