“I wasn’t doing anything that would jeopardize my job,” he said, “but I felt burdened by being gay at a school that would never accept me.”

https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2022/10/10/after-remaining-closeted-years/

He has known this from the beginning.
Why now? Why wait so long to get out?

Because he couldn’t find another job that paid as well. Same reason I didn’t quit while I was a BYU student, though I stopped believing then. Same reason an institute director friend didn’t quit until he retired. It would have caused more disruption than we wanted to deal with.

Which I think is the reason a lot of Mormons are still in the church. The shitstorm for leaving is just bigger than they want to deal with.

I read that article. Almost posted about it, but it hit too close to home. My ex was a prof at BYU for years, too. We still have the lifetime seats we bought when the new football stadium was built. My grown kids inherited them and sit in the same seats now. He told me that he used to sit in his office on campus and watch students as they went around campus. He often wondered if any of them were as tortured as he was. He was deeply closeted.

It is so complicated. I am glad this professor finally got out. But my heart hurts for his wife.

How common might these marriages been back in the 60s and 70s?

To yours or anyone willing to respond’s opinion, were there any particular situations that were taken advantage of back in the day in terms of how the YW were selected for these ventures?

Institutional tampering with the flow of an innocent person’s life just doesn’t pass the sniff test.

> Institutional tampering with the flow of an
> innocent person’s life just doesn’t pass the
> sniff test.

+ a very emphatic 1

I wonder if the notion that "it's just females lives we're messing with so . . ." was prominent in the manner in which it was justified.

And I suppose the in the llllooooonnnnngggggg view or eternal progression, being a ghawd's first wife was probably seen as a bonus for these women.  This 'blink of an eye human existence hardly matters, right?

I would agree except that the church treats men's lives as cavalierly as it does women's.

Everyone's mortal existence is expendable. And if destroying one is in some way a sin, there's always the second anointing to fall back on.

Isn't it wonderful? Isn't it marvelous?

You probably spent a lot more time in the church than I did, plus you have your female perspective, so I'm gonna cut you some slack...

I personally, based on nothing but old memories, think that while some men may be treated with the same cavalier disdain that I witnessed heaped on women, such men are the exception.  They may likely bring it upon themselves via their actions.  Whereas women are automatically assumed to be disposable and must prove otherwise, which back in the day made them somewhat pariah-lite.

Perhaps.

In some ways you are undoubtedly right, but you can't discriminate against one gender without harming the other. For every woman forced into a marriage with a gay man is a gay man who feels compelled to marry a straight woman.

And when you ruin a woman by training her to ignore her own needs and defer to men, you harm her husband and her sons as well. Those boys, to be more specific, are programmed to seek as adults partners who are incapable of fully loving others. And thus the harm is passed from generation to generation.

I guess what I was questioning in your comment is the presumption, intentional or not, that the gay men in gay-straight marriages are not victims--or are lesser victims. Telling homosexuals to marry heterosexually is the ultimate in Mormon dehumanization of both parties.

Everyone except members of the elite families is disposable in Mormonism.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/10/2022 11:22PM by Lot's Wife.

To be clear...I never knew he was gay until the day he told me which was weeks before our 23rd wedding anniversary. I was his one and only girlfriend. We got engaged in college and then I waited for him to serve a mission. We had 4 kids and he was faithful to me our whole marriage. He WANTED the whole mormon life and even served as a bishop. He kept praying and hoping he would eventually have romantic and sexual feelings for me. He loved me deeply, just not in the same way a straight man can.

It took time to understand everything and I spent a long time being so angry at him. We resolved a lot of our issues with each other during our 20 years of being divorced and when he died in 2014, I was devastated by the loss of this man I had loved for so long.

gemini Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> It took time to understand everything and I spent
> a long time being so angry at him. We resolved a
> lot of our issues with each other during our 20
> years of being divorced and when he died in 2014,
> I was devastated by the loss of this man I had
> loved for so long.

That is deeply touching.

I also (sorry for cliche) feel your pain, partly bc I loved <and continue to love> my now-former wife greatly more than she loved me, in spite of 29 yrs without abuse or adultery.

- Given MoCulture, I understand that many Mormons consider all of life including relationships as conditional; I myself don’t consider that as True Love.

- I also believe that Mormons rely heavily on influences from ChurchCo for support & direction; whatever they believe the church teaches / supports is good enough!

- ChurchCo is infamous for making bold claims (Honesty, Kindness, etc.) with inconsistent & ineffective follow-up, often no church action when their so-called rules or principles are not followed - obeyed (‘disobeyed’)

ChurchCo loves to present itself as the be-all. end-all of members’ lives and most personal choices-decisions Except for many real-life dilemmas, they’re good at taking credit for good but run & hide in challenging, convoluted situations.

Who would want to work at BYU anyways?

Exactly; I would hope that at an ‘institution of higher learning’ such matters - as long as there were no victims- would be promptly assigned to the rubbish bin.

But ChurchCo being ChurchCo, they ‘must’ be teaching the innocent young students their claimed, so-called values continuously.

They do, only this one was an 180 degree miss.

Rubicon, you are not allowing for the possibility of personal growth.

A lot of TBM students go to BYU convinced that they will love it but then discover that it's a terrible fit. For many, it's too late to transfer somewhere else--or else the family won't allow it. Other TBMs go on missions and lose their testimonies but rightly fear the repercussions of going home early.

There are also academics who are caught at BYU. They start their careers thinking the church is true, or that they are straight, or both. Then they learn better and would like to leave the Lord's University but that's not easy to do. With the exception of professors in a few technical fields, most academics cannot move to decent schools because their resumes are compromised by their time at BYU.

As with marriage, people often make critical professional decisions before they have all the relevant facts. Sometimes it's not easy to walk away after they have discovered their errors.