Alone and Unobserved

Growing up, I thought coffee was the devil. Booze was the devil squared. People who drank coffee or beer were evil, filthy, satanic. They were destroying their souls. And besides, caffeine and alcohol were poisons, right? Those people were poisoning themselves.

Even worse, Mormon propaganda films so conflate alcohol and drugs that there was almost no distinction in my mind between a) drinking vodka, b) smoking pot and c) shooting up heroin, and there was certainly no way to do any of these things responsibly. Any and all of them would inevitably lead to you overdosing and dying… presumably while your pure Mormon family stood around your bed, weeping at your lost potential and blaming themselves for your terrible life choices.

While I was growing up, I heard all the time about Mormon girls who slept around, who got abortions, who lived with their boyfriends without getting married—pretty much the worst things you can do in Mormonism besides murdering someone—but who wouldn’t touch caffeine, alcohol or tobacco. When you heard these stories, you were supposed to laugh at how screwed up the worldviews of these women were, because keeping dietary restrictions is way less important than staying chaste and morally pure.

“Hahaha! They have sex at the drop of a hat, but they won’t smoke a cigarette! What idiots.”

(It’s also interesting that the subjects of these stories were all female—men were expected to remain pure and chaste as well, but somehow it felt worse when a woman crossed that line.)

And yet, what was my experience of giving up Mormon teachings like? I drank my first cup of coffee furtively at ten o’clock at night in a Salt-Lake-area Village Inn, feeling guilty and sinful. But before I allowed myself that first sip, I had already

• Made out with any number of boys, including strangers
• Had two boyfriends
• Given my first handjob
• Received my first handjob
• Given my first blowjob
• Received my first blowjob
• Stopped wearing my temple garments

My first mouthful of liquor was from a friend’s Cosmopolitan at a party. It looked delicious, but to my virgin tongue it tasted like turpentine. Poison! I thought. I didn’t really have my first drink until two years later, by which time I had

• Resigned from the Mormon church and had my priesthood authority and temple covenants revoked
• Had SEX-sex—like, all the way—with any number of people, including hook-ups and one-night stands
• Railed openly against the Mormon church and its history of corruption and deception

I stopped even paying lip service to “divinely inspired” Mormon dietary restrictions quite early on in my deconversion, but still they were almost the last part of my upbringing that I let go. And I can’t explain why.

In our lovely Deseret,
Where the Saints of God have met,
There’s a multitude of children all around.
They are generous and brave;
They have precious souls to save;
They must listen and obey the gospel’s sound.

Hark! Hark! Hark! ’tis children’s music—
Children’s voices, oh, how sweet,
When in innocence and love,
Like the angels up above,
They with happy hearts and cheerful faces meet.
(“In Our Lovely Deseret,” Eliza R. Snow)

I’m sure all ex-Mormons (and lots of other people too) have a most-hated hymn. I have several! But at the top of the list is “In Our Lovely Deseret,” a cheery abomination written for Mormon children by Eliza “Zion’s Poetess” Snow, whose poetry career just proves that “prolific” and “talented” are not even remotely related attributes. The music her hymns are set to is, if anything, worse: do not, under any circumstances, go searching for an online recording of “In Our Lovely Deseret,” because it will colonize your brain and drive you mad.

In second place we have a sixty-way tie between all of the solemn hymns about Jesus bleeding and dying for my sins. They make my mouth taste like the white bread Mormons eat for communion, and the paper cup they drink the communion water from. (Yes, you heard that right: Mormons drink water for communion, and no, I’m not going to try and explain it. I don’t have to explain Mormonism to people now that I’m not Mormon.)

In third place—

Never mind. When I hear a Mormon hymn, I’m transported back to a time in my life when I hated myself. Worse, I believed in an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good being called “Heavenly Father” who hated me, too. Is it any wonder that my list of hated Mormon hymns encompasses the whole Mormon hymnbook?

I was stuck in a horrible orientation at the Mormon Church History Library today, WITHOUT PHONE SERVICE. Here are the irate things I jotted down on my phone while I endured it in suffering silence. (If you want to know why I was there at all, consult this page.)

I can’t believe they’re making us watch a Mormon propaganda film. WHAT.

It’s a terrible film, too, all about the sanitized Mormon history they’re “preserving” (read: creating) here at the Church History Library. *vomit* *puke* *gag* *retch*

LET ME OUT OF HERE. I want to see the conservation lab, not this horrific, manipulative glurge.

I’m-a gonna CUT A BITCH if this video doesn’t end soon.

Thank the good nonexistent god it’s over. Why are they showing this crap to professional librarians? We don’t care about your doctrine or your regurgitated feel-good pablum.

“You wouldn’t believe who wrote to Brigham Young in the 1800s. He was the ‘Dear Abby’ of 19th Century Utah.”

OMG, they debunk over-the-pulpit feel-good stories! At last, something USEFUL.

Okay, okay, you’ve made your case for why you needed this special new building. But why am *I* here, and why should I care??

I wonder what would happen if I asked to see my Mormon membership record. “Whaddaya MEAN I can’t see it????”

Every Mormon ward+stake has a historian who submits an annual “history” to Mormon HQ?!

“The financial records of the LDS Church aren’t going to be released to the public, for obvious reasons.” It’s not at all obvious to *me.* Please explain your reasoning!

They are apparently desperately behind in digitizing their collection.

I did survive the orientation, and so did everyone else. But JUST BARELY.

Well. I wasn’t expecting to move anytime soon, but a room opened up in Craig’s house and—it’s done. I moved out of my old apartment over the weekend, and now I’m slowly starting to settle into my new place. It’s weird having a roommate, and it’s especially weird not knowing where to put any of my stuff. I may not have tidied up my old apartment much, but I usually knew more or less where everything was, and now… let’s say that the move was extremely chaotic, and all my things are currently living in piles, boxes, bins and heaps all over my room and all over the house.

While I was going through some old things before the move I ran across my Mormon Trove, a box where I had shoved all my Bibles and Book of Mormons and hymnbooks and mission stuff years ago and forgotten about. The scriptures and Sunday School study guides I have no use for, but as soon as I started leafing through the mission papers and letters and notebooks and journals I was sucked right in. I didn’t really keep a journal when I was a teenager, so my mission writings are a fascinating glimpse at a young me who was very earnest, desperately conflicted and working very hard to reassure himself that GOD EXISTED AND THE CHURCH WAS TRUE DAMMIT. Besides my doubts and shaky faith, my mission was incredibly stressful and almost proved too much for me emotionally, and the journal entries provide a picture of a young man continually on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

But my mission was also an amazing experience. I lived in Italy for two years! That still isn’t real to me, especially since traveling and seeing foreign countries is so far from my current life as an impoverished quasi-librarian. I learned to speak Italian, I learned how to cook Italian food, I got to know a procession of interesting and diverse Italian, European and African people. My journals and notebooks brought all of those wonderful things back to me just as much as the bad.

Over the past few days I’ve also reconnected in a small way with other parts of my Mormon past: BYU Men’s Chorus, the BYU ballroom dance teams, the BYU Math Department and Math Lab… all were major parts of my life at one point. I no longer consider myself even culturally Mormon, but Mormonism made up a huge part of my upbringing and a significant portion of my college experience, and a large percentage of my friends and an overwhelming majority of my family are still Mormon. And maybe I’m finally ready to stop being embarrassed by that fact and accept the formative influence that Mormonism has been in my life, for ill and good.

At my birthday party last night—YES, IT WAS AWESOME—I got into a conversation with a friend about belief, atheism, and leaving Mormonism. Both of us have resigned from the Mormon church, and both of us have had to break that news to our parents, and we compared stories of how our mothers had reacted to the news.

That conversation made me remember the I wrote to my parents when I resigned, and I realized I hadn’t looked at it since I sent it three years ago, and that I only had a hazy idea of what I had actually put in it. Turns out it was pretty long and detailed! It also turns out that it does not at all resemble the kind of letter (or blog post) I would write today if someone asked me to explain why I am no longer Mormon. But I’m glad I still have it, because the guy who wrote it three years ago was in a very hard place, and that letter (as well as the earliest posts in this blog) keep me from forgetting that he existed.

And then it occurred to me that I had never posted that letter on my blog for the whole world to peruse! So here it is. (Be kind. I was only twenty-four—the merest child.)

Dear Mom and Dad,

This letter is for you. Once you’ve read it you can decide how much of it you want to share with the kids, but I wrote it to you.

I want to tell you something you may not know about me. As I was growing up, starting when I was fairly young (about five or six), I suffered from mild-to-severe depression and anxiety. This continued all through my teenage years and into my mission. On my mission the anxiety and obsessive-compulsive elements became so strong that I began to have panic attacks, and almost decided to go home multiple times. When I asked for help, I was told that a good missionary would be able to overcome such problems with prayer. Things did get better, for whatever reason, and I was able to complete my mission.

After my mission things quickly became much worse. Even though I was praying and fasting and reading my scriptures, my depression, anxiety and self-hate continued to grow stronger, to the point where I even considered suicide. I saw a therapist, but that didn’t help—in fact, it made it worse. I saw a doctor, and he prescribed medication, which did help. Unfortunately, the side effects were so intolerable that I decided I had to learn to function without drugs.

When I asked myself why I was so depressed, I realized it was because I hated myself. I really, truly did. When I asked why, I realized it was because I was torn between my own nature and the teachings of the LDS church. I told you several years ago that I was attracted to men, but I’m not sure either of you understood how pervasive and fundamental a thing that is in a person’s life. I grew up being told that I was supposed to fall in love with and marry a woman, but that was something that only puzzled and horrified me. On the other hand, the idea of falling in love with a man was completely familiar and attractive to me from an very young age. When I really thought about it, I realized that I completely disagreed with the teachings of the LDS church on this subject: I did not think that homosexuality or homosexual relationships were any less valid than heterosexuality or heterosexual relationships.

I realized that I had always been afraid to question my beliefs; in fact, a great deal of my obsessions and compulsions centered around religious matters and making sure that I never wavered in my “faith.” As I began to hold my beliefs up to the light and seriously ask myself if I still accepted them, one by one they turned out to be nothing more than determination to believe, instead of actual belief. When I questioned them honestly they vanished, instead of growing stronger as I was always told true faith will.

This went on for a while. The short of it is, I now consider myself an atheist. I no longer hold any religious beliefs whatever. I accept myself as a gay man. I no longer hate myself, and no longer suffer from serious depression or anxiety. My obsessions and compulsions are now almost gone. I see this as a positive step, and think I have a happy, fulfilling life ahead of me.

I am dating men. All the things that were lacking in my interactions with women are available to me with men—mutual attraction, love, and devotion. I am interested in gay marriage rights, and am considering becoming politically active in the push for marriage equality in America.

As I no longer believe in the LDS church, and am in fact actively opposed to many of its teachings, I am drafting an letter officially resigning my membership. I plan on sending it right after I send you this letter. I know you asked me to only write you about uplifting stuff, but I figured you would want to hear this from me rather than from someone else.

I love you, Mom and Dad, and hope you will understand. If you don’t (and I know this is hard to swallow all in one bite) think it over carefully, and then call me if you have any questions. One thing I’ve missed a lot is a close relationship with you, and I hope we can take this opportunity to be honest with each other and grow even closer. I don’t expect you to agree with my decisions, and I respect that. I hope you can respect my right to make such decisions anyway.

With love,
Your son
Sean

P.S. Call me even if you don’t have any questions.

That I’m in contact with any of my old friends is a miracle—specifically a Facebook miracle. It’s thanks to Facebook that I’m still in touch with former roommates, former BYU friends, former dance partners, former fellow grad students, former coworkers, former professors and former boyfriends, as well as cousins, aunts, online acquaintances, fellow atheists, fellow ex-Mormons, fellow gays and so on and so forth.

I’m beginning to wonder if this is really a good thing. I just lost a friend, primarily because of what each of us has posted openly online (see the comments on this post). She is a practicing, faithful Mormon who supported Prop 8 and who opposes same-sex marriage because she believes homosexual sex is a sin. In fact, like many other Mormons and many fundamentalist Christians, she doesn’t even believe homosexuality exists, per se. She has written a great deal about her views on her blog.

I, on the other hand, am a confirmed atheist ex-Mormon gay man who believes the Mormon church is a man-made organization that is characterized by bigotry, lies and self-righteousness. I believe Proposition 8 was motivated by intolerance and deception and homophobia, and that the Mormon church bears a great deal of the blame for its passing. Just last weekend I participated in a protest against the Mormon church’s opposition to gay rights and support of Prop 8. I have also made no secret of any of these things on my blog.

So she found my blog and was horrified and upset by what she found here, and I found her blog and was horrified and upset in my turn. I wrote a blog post in which I speculated cynically about the true reasons behind the Mormon church and its members’ opposition to gay marriage. She wrote a hurtful comment in response, in which she questioned my integrity and called me bitter and closed-minded. I wrote a cold rebuttal, which I closed by stating that I didn’t feel much friendship for her anymore. She agreed.

Are there some former acquaintanceships that are worth preserving, at least for nostalgia’s sake, but which are too fragile to handle the constant barrage of truth and stream-of-consciousness honesty that accompany an online relationship? Would Summer and I still consider ourselves “friends” if neither of us had a blog and neither of us was on Facebook? Is it possible to preserve a friendship by willfully refusing to know the truth about another person?

Just a few years ago, Summer’s devotion to the Mormon church and opposition to same-sex marriage would have been things we had in common, not things that drove us apart or set us at odds. People change. Our ideas of what friendship is also change.

And then there is my family. I don’t really discuss these subjects with them, but I’m Facebook friends with several of my siblings, and I’ve seen their status updates and the causes they’ve joined. And I’m sure they’ve seen my statuses and notes and causes. How is it possible to preserve a relationship, knowing what we know about each other?

I filled out a BYU alumni survey tonight. The questions and structure felt much more official and “party-line toeing” than the phone survey I blogged about a couple years ago, so there were some places where I didn’t feel like there was an answer that fit me—whoever wrote the survey apparently didn’t foresee the possibility that any gay ex-Mormons would respond, or didn’t care to prepare for that eventuality by including responses the would fit such persons. Nonetheless, I filled it out as honestly as I could, and even responded to the two open-ended questions at the end with mini-essays on why I despised my time at BYU and would never go back. I’m sure my efforts at communicating my experience will fall on deaf ears, but as a personal exercise it was somewhat cathartic.

The survey was divided into sections that correspond to the official “Aims of a BYU Education,” i.e.,

A BYU education should be (1) spiritually strengthening, (2) intellectually enlarging, and (3) character building, leading to (4) lifelong learning and service.

The “Spiritually Strengthening” section consisted of a series of deeply disturbing statements, such as “Each day I accept the gift of grace through Christ’s Atonement.” Um, can you get any more nauseating? Or more Protestant?? Not that there’s anything more wrong with Protestantism than Mormonism, of course.

As for the other sections, it was interesting to see what subjects/achievements/attributes/skills fell under which heading.

Subjects that BYU considers to be “intellectually enlarging,” according to the survey:

LDS History and Doctrine
“How confident are you in your understanding of the following?”

• “The basic doctrines of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as taught by priesthood authorities and the scriptures”
• “The origin and historical development of each of the four standard works”—i.e., have you heard the one about Joseph Smith translating the gold plates by looking at a “seer stone” in his hat?
• “The historical development of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the 19th century”—i.e., have you heard the real story of the institution of polygamy?

Scriptural Studies
“How competent are you in your ability to…?”

• “Identify underlying principle that are not explicitly stated, but implied in a scriptural text”—I.e., how good are you at massaging/distorting scripture until it means what the prophet says it means?
• “Analyse and interpret figurative language in the scriptures consistent with the author’s intent”—i.e., how good are you at reading Joseph Smith’s mind, as interpreted by Thomas S. Monson and Dallin H. Oaks?
• “Distinguish between the inspired teachings of the prophets on specific issues and contrary points of view expressed by members of the Church”—i.e., how good are you at never having an original thought of your own and at warding off all attempts by evil apostates to infiltrate your mind with unapproved ideas? Oops, my brain just exploded.

Achievements/attributes/skills that BYU considers to be evidence of “character building,” according to the survey:
Strives to live a Christ-like life

• “I follow the promptings of the Spirit to help others, even if it involves sacrifice or costs me in some way”—i.e., voices speak to me in my head and I listen to them and follow what they say.

Views the world through an eternal perspective

• “I am genuinely concerned for the welfare of others”—…because if I didn’t have an “eternal perspective” I would be a hardened rapist/puppy-strangler.

Areas/achievements/attributes/skills that BYU considers to be evidence of “lifelong learning and service,” according to the survey:

Church Service

• “I make financial contributions to my church”
• “I actively strive to share my beliefs with others who are not of my faith” (I answered “extremely well” to this one)
• “I proactively use my initiative to find ways to serve my church.”

Technology Use
“How competent are you in your ability to…?”

• “Use basic office technology (e.g., computer, fax machine, e-mail)”—WTF? Using a fax machine or email is something to be proud of these days? Whatever.

At the end of the survey there were some general questions, such as

Considering the entire experience you had at BYU while earning the degree you earned in 2005, if you were starting your college career over, would you choose to come to BYU?

Definitely not

A significant part of the mission of BYU is to help students develop as educated disciples of Christ. These are disciple-scholars who can blend deep faith and rigorous intellect in every aspect of their lives.

How well did BYU help you to become an educated disciple of Christ?

Very Poorly

There were also two essay questions, which I had a great deal of fun composing answers to.

Describe how an education that integrated faith and intellect has influenced how you apporach your occupation, whether in or out of the home. Please be specific. [emphasis in the original]

I credit BYU with making me an atheist. Having religion crammed down my throat for four years and being surrounded by so many closed-minded hypocrites–students, faculty and religious leaders–for so long really opened my eyes. It was as a BYU student that I first began to question my Mormon faith, and first began to notice the discrepancies and logical inconsistencies that riddle every religious creed. The moment I graduated, I resigned my membership in the Mormon church and renounced religion in any form.

This experience has shaped my approach to being a librarian in the following ways: Having been fed propaganda for so long as a Mormon and a BYU student, I am much more sensitive to bias and bad reasoning than before. Being intellectually oppressed as a student has made me militant about open dialogue, free access to information and intellectual honesty for everyone. And finally, I much more skeptical of unsupported faith-based and pseudoscience claims than I was as a believer.

If you have any additional opinions, experiences, or suggestions, please share them here.

As a gay man who had to conceal his sexual orientation and his growing disaffection from Mormonism from friends, family, fellow students and faculty for four years, I found BYU to be hell on earth. The student body was insincere, closed minded, homophobic, intolerant of difference of opinion and fixated on unachievable perfection. The Honor Code was restrictive, patronizing and overly invasive. Being forced to attend church services did more to harm my belief in Mormonism than sustain it, and it meant being forced to be dishonest at every juncture. Academic and intellectual freedom were severely curtailed, where they were even allowed to exist..

Everything I learned as an undergraduate I consider myself to have learned in spite of BYU’s best efforts to keep me an ignorant, unquestioning sheep. I would not recommend a BYU education to anyone, and would certainly not go back myself if I were starting my education over again.

Ultimately, I am ambivalent about the time I spent at BYU, the time I spent on my mission, and the time I spent as a Mormon in general. It wasn’t all bad, and it had a lot to do with making me the person I am today. But then . . . it made me the person I am today. So it is responsible for a great deal of ca-RAZY.

As anyone who has spent much time on this blog knows, I was raised Mormon in a very conservative, very Mormon household. I went to church every Sunday, unless I was deathly ill or was able to convincingly fake being so. I attended early-morning youth religion classes every school day for four years. I received the “priesthood” (authority to act in the name of God given to every Mormon male over the age of twelve) and participated every Sunday in performing the rites associated with the “sacrament” services. Twice a year, I went with my family to view broadcasts of the general church conference.

When I was nineteen I went on a two-year proselyting mission in Italy, where I spent approximately sixty-five hours a week actively looking for, teaching and (if I was lucky) baptizing converts. I went to Brigham Young University for four years, where I took the required religion classes, attended campus devotionals, participated in my student congregation’s worship services and weekday activities. For most of my life I was what you might call devout.

And then, when I was twenty-three, I came out publicly as an atheist and formally resigned my membership in the Mormon church.

How could the underpinnings of my religious belief have disintegrated so quickly and completely? When I think back, it seems that the linchpin holding it all together was not my belief in deity, but my belief in spirituality—or rather, my belief in the validity of religious experience. Ironically, it was this very belief that started me on this journey in the first place.

Imagine that you have spent your whole life being trained to listen for and recognize “the whisperings of the Spirit,” a subtle confluence of physical and emotional sensations sent by God to comfort you, to confirm truth and to guide you on the correct path in life. Some of the most formative experiences of your life have involved “the Spirit,” whether you were at church singing or worshiping, or sharing a special moment with your family, or by yourself reading the holy scriptures or praying.

As a Mormon missionary, you spent hours each day praying and reading the scriptures, either alone or with your fellow missionaries. While proselyting, your main goal was to help the people you met feel “the Spirit,” either by preaching, bearing witness, praying or singing with them, and then to teach them what “the Spirit” was and how it could transform their lives for the better. And, more specifically, how “the Spirit” would confirm the truth of the message you taught them. You challenged them to read the Book of Mormon and pray to know it was true. You challenged them to pray to know if they should be baptized. You challenged them to pray to know if they should pay tithing, give up coffee or cigarettes, attend church, and on and on.

And it worked. Not for everyone (because not everyone is ready, or faithful enough, you told yourself), but for many. And you had faith that it would work for anyone (anyone!) who really put it to the test. Because you had done it, and it had worked for you. You see, you didn’t just think the Mormon church was the true church of Jesus Christ restored to the earth, you knew it was, because you had prayed, and God had told you himself. Through “the Spirit.”

Now you’re a young Mormon priesthood holder fresh of your mission, and it’s time for the next step. You’ve been taught all your life what happens now (although it didn’t work out quite that way for your mom or dad, but let’s forget about them for a second): you are supposed begin searching for a wife. You are supposed to find her as quickly as possible, pray to know that she’s the right one, and marry her in a Mormon temple in a ceremony so sacred you can’t describe it to anyone who hasn’t witnessed it. And then you are supposed to have as many children as possible, as soon as possible, because that is your solemn duty.

But!—and there is a very large ‘but’—you have a secret. A secret so secret and so shameful and so terrible that you went years and years and YEARS before you even mentioned it to anyone; a secret so damning and destructive that you denied it existed even as it began to get too big to ignore.

You see, you have no desire to marry a woman, let alone impregnate one. Ever since you can remember you’ve been attracted to men. You had little crushes on boys when you were a boy, you had bigger crushes on other guys when you were a teenager, and now you are an adult(!) and you are having trouble not becoming infatuated with every attractive man you meet.

For a while you do the right thing. You try to date girls, you read up on “same-sex attraction,” you attend counseling sessions with Mormon therapists, and you deny! deny! deny! and you repress! repress! repress! And you are on antidepressants within a year.

“What’s wrong?” you think. “I’m doing everything I’m supposed to. I pray, I fast, I read the scriptures, I attend church and I’m chaste and virtuous. Why hasn’t God taken away my attraction to men?” At this point you would almost accept being celibate and asexual for the rest of your life if you just didn’t have this terrible, terrible affliction to weigh you down anymore.

And then gradually something changes. You begin to realize that, deep down, you simply do not believe that being attracted to attractive men is wrong. And the moment you finally accept this, all the weight and crushing despair leave you and you are left feeling better than you have in a long, long time. In fact, it’s like “the Spirit” is whispering to you, almost like God Himself is telling you that it’s okay. It’s okay.

In the end I realized that this was not a spiritual experience. I’m sure my Mormon bishop at the time would have agreed that it was completely physical and emotional: just an emotional weight lifted, just a few million synapses firing, just a surge of endorphins, just a chemical process. But here’s the thing: it was as convincing a “spiritual experience” as any I had had in my life. What’s more, as I’m sitting here at my desk, an atheist writing about his deconversion from Mormonism, I’m having an equally convincing “spiritual experience.”

It took a while, but that’s why I stopped believing in any of it. Because I discovered that the unique way of knowing I had been taught as a child—the burning in the bosom, the ineffable certainty, the transports of joy—were all either indistinguishable from physical processes, or were simply physical processes. And either way they were useless as ways of determining truth, or guiding my life, and I had (and have) no more patience for them.

One aspect of my vacation that I did not mention in the otherwise COMPLETELY EXHAUSTIVE post on the subject is what it was like being in close quarters with my family for two weeks straight. I could write/talk about this for hours, but I’ll restrict myself to the following points:

First, it was very nice to spend time with my family, especially towards the beginning when we were all in good moods. My family has always gotten on fairly well in the general run of things, even when we are crammed ankle-by-jowl in a tiny Ford minivan for hours at a time, forced to drink lukewarm water and eat nothing but cheese sandwiches and peanuts.

Second, my family is Mormon. “Duh!” you cry. “Surely you were aware of this previously, having been raised Mormon in their midst!” And, yes, I was aware of it . . . but not of how Mormon they are. “Bah!” you say. “Of course you knew.” All right, yes, I knew. But it’s been years since I’ve had to experience/endure their Mormon-ness in such close quarters for such a length of time. On a camping trip, there is no privacy, no time to oneself. I was present (if at a remove of several yards) for daily prayers and scripture reading; I drove them into town both Sundays for church and listened stoically as they recapped their worship services to me afterwards; I sat through a “Family Night” discussion of why the Mormon church was the only true church on the face of the earth (no lie); I listened to my father quote at length from C.S. Lewis’s inane theology; etc., etc. Strange how I live in Utah, but I usually have to go to California to associate with Mormons…

Third, everyone’s getting older. My little sisters are growing up very fast, and my parents are slowing down and feeling aches and pains they aren’t quite sure how to deal with yet. On hikes, instead of my dad racing off ahead and outpacing everyone, he lagged behind with my mom while my littlest sister blazed the trail at high speed. My mom says she may not be able to sleep in a two-person tent for much longer because she has trouble bending to get in and out of them; what this means for the family’s future camping trips has yet to be decided.

I’m done traveling for the next little while, for which I thank any number of imaginary deities. Over the weekend I flew to Vegas for a school-related seminar on diversity in libraries, which was held at a shoddy little casino out in the middle of nowhere, and then flew back Sunday night. I brought my camera, but didn’t take any pictures because nothing interesting happened and there was nothing worth photographing. And now I’m home, and am trying to adjust to the idea that I’m home, and that I have school starting next week that I have to pay for somehow.

P.S.: the original vacation post has been updated to include charming photos of Lake Tahoe and of various people hiking.

When I was fifteen, my older sister and I went out to South Dakota to spend the summer with my aunt and uncle and their family. By then four of their seven children had left home: three were at college or at work in other states, and one, Kevin, was on a Mormon mission in South Korea. Their family dynamic was very different than the one I had grown up in. They had a proper house with an upstairs and a downstairs; they had a Super Nintendo; they watched television, and had a large movie collection; and their children were not homeschooled.

That summer was full of happenings. There was friction, and there were new experiences, and I made friends and enemies, and I had my first bout of seasonal allergies. We watched Twister on the big screen, and then huddled in a gym bathroom watching a tornado warning on the small screen. We painted the house, and we chased fireflies, and we went to church.

To keep busy, my sister and I took a handful of part-time jobs. We worked for a little while in a fabric store, stocking shelves, doing odd jobs and even helping with a little craft day fair for local kids. For two weeks we detasseled seed corn in a series of South Dakota fields. The pay was good for a fifteen-year-old, but the sun was hot, the corn leaves cut my hands, and I was called a faggot by the other teenage workers. I hated it.

About two-thirds of the way through the summer, things suddenly changed. Something was wrong in Kevin’s mission. There were a few fraught, late-night phone calls from him and his mission president in Seoul. We prayed for him especially hard during family prayer. At last, my aunt came and told us all that he was coming home in two days.

“I know you two were supposed to stay here until August,” she said to my sister and me, “but we’re thinking about sending you back right now. We don’t want you to be exposed to this situation.”

I got the impression that Kevin had had a defining crisis of faith, that Satan had gotten ahold of his heart, and that my aunt and uncle were afraid he would contaminate us, his innocent younger cousins, if they didn’t protect us from him. The idea seemed frightening and appealing at the same time. We did not want to go.

I don’t remember why—whether we whined and begged, or Aunt Joy and Uncle Mike simply changed their minds—but we did stay in South Dakota another month or so after Kevin came back. That was almost the best part of the summer. At nineteen or twenty he seemed so old and grown-up, and yet, for someone so very much older than we were, he was always nice and fun and utterly non-patronizing. Nothing was said about him coming home early, or what had precipitated it. The family simply welcomed him back and included him in the rest of their summer plans.

In August, my sister and I went back home. Over the next few years, Kevin came to visit California once or twice, but never our family. I heard that he had dyed his hair (!) and that he had piercings (!!), which seemed all the evidence necessary of his debauched and sinful life. When I was nineteen I went on my own mission, and I’m convinced the memory of Kevin’s fall from grace is one of the reasons I was able to serve out my full two years; despite my being gay and neurotic and terminally anxious, I didn’t want to end up with piercings and highlights.

Just about three years ago, I got an email from my Aunt Joy saying that Kevin had passed away. It was suicide. Even though he and I had been living forty-five minutes apart for three years, I still hadn’t seen him since 1996. At that point I no longer considered myself Mormon, and was just waiting to graduate from BYU to come out to everyone as gay and ex-religious. I went to his funeral, where I saw his grieving family, some of them for the first time in fifteen years. At one point, one of my uncles—not Kevin’s father—announced his conviction that Kevin would be with his family in the Celestial Kingdom. I remember feeling a sense of blind rage overwhelm me. What if he doesn’t want to be in the Celestial Kingdom?? I fumed. How dare they condemn him to spend eternity in a place that denies everything he is and wants? And then I felt guilty, because I had no idea how Kevin had felt about anything, and it was me who had no desire to find myself in the Mormon heaven when I died.

I still feel guilty about not have taken the time to visit him in Salt Lake City when he was alive, about not writing or calling or emailing. The more I learn about him, from his family and friends, the more I think he would have been a great person to know. If I had realized he wouldn’t be around . . . but none of us is going to be around forever.

My cousin Bill has written a poem about his little brother, and about that July. It makes me want to re-watch Kung Fu Hustle, and find and watch that movie about the cannibal samurai, and get to know Kevin before he’s gone.

Why I Hate July, by Bill Tibbitts