Dear friends and family,
This letter may be difficult to read for my family and friends who are faithful members of the LDS church. I want you to know that I do not condemn or begrudge your membership in the church. I love you all very deeply. At this time, however, I have to make a stand and make hard choices about what is right for me, my life, and my continued happiness.
Five and a half years ago I began to come to terms with my sexual identity. It started in the moment I finally realized and accepted that, which I had had adamantly denied to myself and the people around me for so long, I was different. That difference being my sexual orientation. In that moment, my sense of self, my understanding of where I fit into the LDS faith and the future of my mortal and immortal existence fell under a cloud. Every iota of what I understood was being challenged at every possible level.
Even as the act of acknowledging what I then called my “same gender attraction” opened the floodgates of uncertainty, fear and doubt I was overcome by a sense of peace and warmth and joy unparalleled by any other spiritual prompting or personal revelation I had yet received. I was trapped between the emotions of despair as I now found myself on a very isolated road in the spiritual world and excitement at knowing I was not some lone freak of nature without precedent or possible common ground. The small and pathetic boy who I saw in the mirror and despised was replaced by a man who was capable of so much more than I thought possible and had accomplished so much more than I had been able or willing to admit.
I was beset by an avalanche of overwhelming ideological, spiritual, intellectual, and emotional conflicts. In typical fashion, I began my research. I researched dozens of articles in the church’s reference materials and read and re-read every possible passage in the scriptures for any possible hint at what direction I should go. I found myself left with more questions than answers and the feeling that although I could choose to live life by the rules of the gospel, the aloneness would be too much to bear. Even more disturbing to me was the fact that this isolation would mean I would be deprived of the opportunity to have a family of my own.
In the months before I came out, after reading about Heather Armstrong’s struggle with post-partum depression and coming to grips with my own mental health, I had come to appreciate the experience she related of building her family. Having a family of my own had seemed to be a foreign concept up until that point. I think this was partially because I was antisocial and I was a bit of a neurotic mess, but mostly because I didn’t grasp the idea of taking a mate from the opposite sex. By the end of her struggle with PPD, I saw the partnership she had built with the significant person in her life and the excitement and joy that raising a child brought into their lives, in spite of the life-threatening challenges they had to overcome.
I had been keeping a journal and had begun thinking of my distant children one day reading it in the time before I came out. However, months after coming out and beginning my research of the teachings of the church, I found no way to reconcile my sexual orientation and my desire to have a family. I wanted a family and I wanted children and this very new goal, this very new concept, this very righteous desire was suddenly dashed against the rocks.
Based on the meager selection of information I could find, I felt that if I had only been stronger I could have willed my homosexuality into non-existence, that if I could have prayed and studied harder, the desires would have been taken away. I felt that because of this deficiency, both in strength and my very nature, I had destroyed my own children. As a potential father, I felt I had not been strong enough to fix myself so that I could give them life. I had deprived them of their opportunity to live and depriving someone of the opportunity to live their life can be argued as murder and I felt, in that dark moment, as though I had killed my babies.
It was the night I had this sickening realization that I first attempted to take my own life.
After that night, the options I had were distilled down to two very clear choices: I could remain active in the church and be alone until I died or I could seek my own way in the world and have chance to eventually build a family of my own. I chose the latter.
The comments by President Boyd K. Packer last weekend forced me to re-visit the choice I had to make five years ago as the options became slightly more polarized: I could remain in the church or I could work to build a family of my own.
The decision remains the same and I will be resigning from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
This decision has been a very difficult one. It has been something I have considered over the last two years, but up until now I have always stayed myself from making this choice. It means that for me to be able to pursue a family of my own, I forsake the principals and ordinances of the church which would keep myself and my family together in the afterlife. The problem is that it has now been made very clear that the church, as an institution, separate from the individual beliefs of some of its membership, opposes my desire and–what I feel is my right–to have a family of my own.
Sincerely,
Eli