Posted by:
elderolddog
(
)
Date: March 22, 2023 04:57PM
I came this →▫← close to being involved in fulfilling a personal revelation!
I had the hots for an LM (lady missionary) during my three months in Guadalajara in 1966. I'd been "Dear John'ed" about five months earlier, which was probably a factor. My senior companion said he was embarrassed for me regarding the goo-goo eyes I was making at her.
She went home about a year before my release. I wrote to her right after it was 'legal' to do so; mission rules prohibited us from writing to each other while in the same mission. We stoked the fires for a couple of months, and then she stopped writing; there was no explanation.
I got home in mid-September of 1967 and went directly to the Y. Three weeks later, there was a mission reunion at the Y, the Friday evening of Conference weekend.
As the most recent returnee, I was called up to the podium near the end of the speeches part of the reunion, to report on what things were like "now" and to answer questions. While doing the standard terrific job of public speaking that missionaries are heir to, I spotted her in the audience. (There were at least 300 people there.)
During the socializing period afterward, she approached me and subtly let me know I should ask her out. We made a date for after the Saturday evening Priesthood session, which was the next day. I borrowed a car and picked her up at the house where she was staying. (She was from Ogden.)
We went to a movie and then I took her 'home'. We did a bit of smooching; I felt her bosoms swelling... I don't know Whether it was because of my ministrations or the joy of what she was about to reveal to me: She had received a revelation that she was to be married before the end of October.
She knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that this would come to pass... There was only one detail missing: it wasn't revealed to her who her husband-to-be was. She asked me point blank: Was I the one?
So she had come to the reunion in hopes of finding the husband promised to her. It probably was a bit of a surprise when I popped up. I don't know what she thought when she saw me up there at the podium, whether it was "oh, shit! Not him!!" or "Yum, yum, and hallelujah!!" (I have a personal preference.) As far as I'm aware, I was the only one she approached at the reunion.
After sitting there, absorbing what she'd told me, I suggested to her, watching her bosoms rise and fall, that we, my penis and I, were not at all averse to marrying her but that I'd overruled my baser nature and could not see how it was possible to marry before, at the minimum, the end of the school year!
This proposal (really, more of a suggestion...) was unacceptable to her because the revelation clearly stated that the marriage would be consummated before the end of October. I had no problem suggesting that the union COULD be consummated before the end of the month, with the legal niceties left pending. She considered this unacceptable.
Further efforts on the part of my hands to run wild, i.e., a good RM mauling, were repulsed, and we parted.
Seven years later, summer of 1974, I met up with her again. She didn't marry until a few years later when she "married" her partner (same-sex marriages weren't legal in Utah until 2014).
Yeah, she was gay and always had been. She told me a lot of stories about how gay Utah was and how lesbians held a lot of power, both in government and in the church; nothing specific but spoken with a great deal of assurance. She's a decade older than Sheri and Wendy, so I don't know what she might have known about them.
We stayed in touch for a few years, but I never did ask her about the revelation.