Looking back through the years, my time at BYU seems so surreal. Compared to my life today the time spent in Provo feels like it never really happened. But it did.

I recently was thinking about some of my roommates and whatever happened to them. I was curious to see if any of them were still active, etc, so I did what any self respecting user of social media would do: I looked them up and lurked.

I don't know if it was just me, but there always seemed to be a bit of sexual tension in the air (yes, same sex. So you see where this is all going). Sex talk was often common. Though the ever present Big Brother eye of the church was all around and the institutionalization of guilt was prevalent I still managed to mess around with three of them (of which one would have done much more but just flat out told me he couldn't deal with the guilt afterwords). One other kept giving me mixed signals but every time i'd start to pick up on it he'd retreat. There were other roommates as well where nothing happened but they were more than happy to talk about pre-mission (and some post mission) conquests, etc.

So, getting to the point of this post, I was curious as to the church status on some of these guys considering our, um, activity and their ambivalence about it when I knew them. Two are inactive. Another was inactive for awhile and sadly took his own life a few years ago. Two are active LDS with one of them teaching now at BYU.

Anyway, not sure if my experience was normal - I can't say it was considering the climate of induced guilt and shaming that exists at the Y - but honesty, it was pretty easy getting some of these guys to experiment.

The End.

I'm calling bullshit on this story. Sorry, but I have to. If gays only represent perhaps 7% of the population, you would have been the luckiest four gay men on campus to find yourselves living together. Multiplying 0.07 x 0.07 x 0.07 x 0.07 gives roughly a 2.5 in 100000 chance of the four of you randomly coming to live together. If it did happen, good for you in defying the odds! Perhaps there is a god in heaven after all!

No, not BS. And this was over a 5 year span. Not all living together at the same time in the same place.

I was thinking the same. I hate to break it to you, but every guy you meet isn’t gay. I suspect the “at first but retreat” phenomenon may simply be guys who are initially friendly but back away when they realize what you’re really getting at. I think it’s a fairly normal dynamic, and I’ve experienced as a guy trying to hit on girls, and I’ve experienced it as a guy being hit on by guys.

Ok, over five years, but it’s still easy to misread “interest” from someone, especially when we’re projecting our own interest and they are oblivious to it.

You should contact the guy who’s now a BYU prof and see if he’s still interested. Does he teach theatre or music. ;)