At New Haven’s Church of Latter-day Saints, a gay, lapsed Catholic decides whether or not to come out to the director of the chapter.
The first time I walk into the Church of Latter-day Saints’ Institute for Religion, Brother James Williams sits at a circular table with his congregation and everyone already knows my name. Whiteboards on the walls command me to remember things like “the Godhead” and “the priesthood keys.” The room smells like Play-Doh and microwave lasagna. Brother James stands up from the table, puts his manly hands around my shoulders, and brings me into the circle.
Today, as on most days I’ll see him, Brother James wears a blue checkered shirt buttoned all the way up. It’s not at all the black-and-white, name-tagged Book of Mormon look I was expecting from a member of the Church of Latter-day Saints. As he pulls me over, I become conscious of the fact that I am wearing a short-sleeve black linen shirt, unbuttoned an inch below my collarbone. The A/C blows, and I feel the hair on my chest bristle.
Brother James is the director of the Institute, which means his job is half operational and half devotional. He teaches scripture study—confusingly, the Church also calls this “Institute”—every Thursday but, these days, he’s in charge of making dinner too. This is typically someone else’s job, but the Institute is “in-between” senior missionaries, he tells me. Before I know it, we’re cutting pumpkin pie together in the kitchen by the lounge.
The congregation is having a watch party for the General Conference, their twice-yearly broadcasted address from the Prophet, the head of the LDS Church. Hence the snacks. The familiar conversation and clatter of dishes in the kitchen remind me of the moments before Thanksgiving dinner: everyone around a table, warm, expectant, food-oriented. Meanwhile, Brother James opens the fridge and explains that in every Mormon church kitchen you can always find ice, ketchup, mustard, and ranch.
After we’ve sliced the pie, we set it down on a long table covered by a crunchy plastic tablecloth and, for the second time since I arrived, Brother James pushes me into a large circle of Mormons who simultaneously exclaim how excited they are to see me. These are the Sisters. They all wear thick sweaters and long skirts, as though they were swallowed by a Free People store. Sister Hiatt’s mother was from Mexico, Brother James makes sure to point out, just like my family. One by one, they take turns asking me how my day has been. I ask them how they ended up on missions to New Haven of all places and they tell me church officials prayed about it and decided it was what God wanted.
Brother James gives me a tour of the four-story building. There are pianos and religious paintings everywhere. I ask him if the paintings are originals and he tells me that, actually, every Mormon interior designer picks from the same fixed list of replicas. In the nursery, I spot a half-finished coloring sheet of big bubble letters that say SCRIPTURE POWER and wonder what became of the child who was working on it.
The building’s design seems to promise that anything you could ever need to have a good life is here. At the same time, I find the level of devotion here disorienting. I can’t tell if things are actually ominous or if I just interpret them that way because I’m gay and have a general distrust of institutional religion. When Brother James asks if I consider myself religious, I say I was raised Catholic. He assures me that Mormonism and Catholicism are actually very similar. I am no longer particularly Catholic—my mom thought people got too rowdy at American church, so we stopped going—but he doesn’t catch on to that. Instead, he welcomes me into the circle.
* ✟ *
Brother James was born in Rexburg, Idaho. Brother James was raised in Idaho Falls. Brother James went to college at Brigham Young University–Idaho and dreamt of teaching in Idaho. There’s a statue of Brother James’s great-great-great-great-grandpa in Paris, Idaho, and much of his education led to him teaching at BYU Idaho. As you can tell, Brother James Williams rarely left Idaho.
In college, Brother James wrote his undergraduate thesis on religious college students experiencing crises of faith after attending secular institutions. He conducted nearly one hundred interviews for the paper and devoted his days to reading philosophy and psychology about cognitive dissonance. But one day, as Brother James sat surrounded by books in his study, his biological brother pointed out to him that he was spending more time researching than praying, more time reading Aristotle than Joseph Smith.
At one point, he looks me in the eyes and says, “Gosh, I hope that Yale doesn’t destroy the faith of Emiliano.” I turn away, blushing, diving deeper into my lie.
He was just like the subjects in his thesis, swept up by the demands of the secular world. Brother James pointed to this moment as his own crisis of faith. It was here that he asked himself: do I believe in a Supreme Being?
The answer was yes.
But first, he had to think through why it worked for him. Why monotheism instead of another kind of religion? Why Christianity? Why Mormonism? Why, why, why?
“I see God’s fingerprints within my religion,” he says. “This cannot be just man-made.” He talks about Mormonism with an appreciation for its order and design. When you talk to Brother James, Mormonism’s intricate bureaucracy does seem like a means to carry out the will of God. Walking through the carefully organized Institute with him, I understand why he believes this. Even the carpet is so pristine it seems it’s been purified.
In the Institute, Brother James wears his religious authority practically and reliably, like his checkered shirt. He often refers to the “common sense” test when he talks about his religion: he only believes in things that make sense to him. Faith is something he must prove first and foremost to himself.
Brother James realized he needed to leave BYU when he asked his students to apply the “common sense” test to original sin. The Church teaches that it was all part of God’s plan, but Brother James wanted to know whether his students thought the Fall had been for better or for worse. The question made one student so uncomfortable that he complained to BYU’s religion department.
Soon after the student complained, Brother James requested that university administrators consider him for a position elsewhere. They interviewed him, then prayed and approved his request—partly, he thinks, because of his thesis on college students and also because that paper turned him sort of Mormon micro-famous. But I can tell this memory left him wary. He keeps anticipating the way his approach to faith might be viewed, even by me. Throughout our time together, he often half-jokingly calls himself a heretic. At one point, he looks me in the eyes and says, “Gosh, I hope that Yale doesn’t destroy the faith of Emiliano.” I turn away, blushing, diving deeper into my lie.
* ✟ *
I come back again for scripture study. Tonight, the meal is breakfast for dinner. On the fourth floor, everyone welcomes me again. In a corner, I spot the President of this LDS chapter wearing a rugby shirt I’d totally own. I go to greet Brother James, who’s flipping pancakes. I offer a hug to Sister Hiatt, who politely declines, telling me sisters can’t hug men. I apologize and we start chatting. She offers to bedazzle me a Book of Mormon.
“EVERYBODY GET YOUR BUTTS OVER HERE SO WE CAN PRAY OVER THE FOOD,” a young woman yells from the lounge. For blessing the bacon, she and Brother James call over a lanky, redheaded boy named Tanner Bacon.
The bacon is, in fact, heavenly. Everyone wants to know how my day has been and they are delighted that Brother James is worthy of journalistic interest. I grew up around a lot of Mormons—there was a Mormon temple less than a mile from my house—and they have always struck me as exceptionally nice people. Middle schoolers in a Texas public school can be particularly unkind, but many of the Mormons I knew were round-faced and smiling, like cherubs wearing Justice and Under Armour.
Around the time I met the middle school Mormons, I also began to understand my sexuality as a legible marker of difference. As the social hierarchy concretized, I realized the people around me understood I was gay long before I had put real words to it. And still, the Mormons never stopped being nice to me. Their kindness began to unnerve me and I wondered if they would be so kind if I had said it out loud.
Sitting around this table eating pancakes reminds me of middle school all over again. I can’t decide whether they can’t tell I’m gay or if they do and are just refusing to acknowledge it. What I do know is that a gay couple at my high school got invited to Mormon Prom and had to go with separate female dates. But God, these pancakes are so good. And I am mesmerized by Brother James’s enthusiasm as he speaks, the seductive force of his belief. At some point, we break to go look at the northern lights outside and I feel like a little kid as I run to the fire escape. In fact, I am so swept up that I don’t realize it’s past 9 p.m. Shit. I have a date to get to. Margaritas with some guy I was set up with. I pull out my phone to text him.
* ✟ *
I like Brother James. He seems to really like me too. The more time I spend with him, the more hesitant I am to ruin our blossoming inter-faith relationship. I imagine Brother James applying the common sense test to my life if he knew I were gay.
Mormonism, like many religions, structures its beliefs around a prophet, in this case Joseph Smith. In 1820, Joseph Smith received a series of visions from God. By 1830 he was taking a party to Illinois, which was to be their God-given headquarters (I have always found Illinois pretty unglamorous for a holy land). Mormonism is the one and only start-to-finish American religion. It is organized much like a camping trip: congregations, wards, and churches are called stakes, branches, and tents. They no longer believe in polygamy but they still believe in going on missions to spread the word of God and abstaining from coffee. These mandates all come from councils in Utah called things like The First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.
Even commandments from a prophet sometimes require clarification. In 1995, the President of the LDS Church and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles published “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.” In it, they reminded the members of the Church that “God’s commandment for His children to multiply and replenish the earth remains in force.” They proclaimed with extra emphasis that “God has commanded that the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife.”
In 1999, then-President of the LDS Church, Gordon B. Hinckley, led Mormons in a coordinated national effort to oppose the legalization of same-sex marriage. Under his supervision, Church spokesmen encouraged congregations to “do all you can by donating your means and time” to banning same-sex marriage in California. At that year’s General Conference—just 25 years before the one I watched— Hinckley gave a speech titled “Why We Do Some of the Things We Do.”
“Some portray legalization of so-called same-sex marriage as a civil right,” Hinckley said. “This is not a matter of civil rights; it is a matter of morality.”
The Mormon Church centers on a particular vision of family: holy, multiplicative, condiment-stocking. A family in which a mother is “primarily responsible for the nurture of their children” and where a father is “the priesthood leader of his family,” according to one of the Church’s manuals. Over the hearth in Brother James’ home, he keeps a sign that says “familia es todo.” Family is everything. He smiles at me when he speaks in Spanish and I know he knows he just earned points from me. I think about the Proclamation, the “sanctity of marriage.” I marvel at how sanctity can mean such different things. To Brother James, it’s stability and warmth. To the Church, it’s a means of enforcing heterosexuality.
Since the 1990s, the Church has evolved slightly in its attitudes toward homosexuality. In fact, today, Church pamphlets specify that homosexual thoughts aren’t a sin unless you act on them. “People inquire about our position on those who consider themselves so-called gays and lesbians,” a pamphlet called “The Law of Chastity” reads. “If they do not act upon [their] inclinations, then they can go forward as do all other members of the Church.” This makes me feel better about my tendency to read scripture as vaguely homoerotic—God always commanding men to do unto others what they would want done to themselves. Another pamphlet reads: “Through your covenant connection with Him, you will find strength to obey God’s commandments and receive the blessings He promises.” Reading these words, I feel bizarrely held. I’m not Mormon, but still, I want strength. I want a covenant connection.
When Brother James describes the impact of the Church’s policies on homosexuality, he uses playground words like “mean” or “hurtful” which makes me feel as though he has sent all the gay people in the world back to third grade and told their bullies to go stand in the corner. It isn’t that the Church doesn’t believe homosexuality exists or that it’s a genetic flaw (“that would be hurtful,” says Brother James). It’s just that they have traditions they have to follow. When he says this, he seems protective and stern and all the things a Mormon father should be. He says “family” and I can’t tell whether he’s using it in the way the Church does to enforce heterosexuality. He keeps his interpretation just beneath the surface, just out of reach. I wonder if he’s ever doubted the Church’s concept of family.
And I wonder if he knows I’m lying to him—about my sexuality, about being a Catholic, about a hundred small things that have cropped up since. When I am with Brother James, I feel his investment in my goodness. I can’t help but wonder whether this relationship is real, when he’s been so open about his life and I haven’t been about mine.
* ✟ *
I decide to come out to Brother James the day of our final interview. The day is unseasonably sunny. I sit in the same chair where Sister Hiatt offered me a bedazzled Book of Mormon. And I tell him.
“One of my big challenges with my faith has been my relationship to organized religion, in particular, because I’m gay,” I say. “So what would it be like, hypothetically, for somebody to be gay in the Mormon church?”
He doesn’t skip a beat. “That is, in my opinion, the biggest wrestle right now, within not just the LDS church, but I think in most Christian churches.” He says “wrestle” and I think of the story of Jacob, spending a night wrestling with an angel often painted beautiful and shirtless, with an impossible number of abs.
“I think that the LDS church is very clear in saying you have a place here.”
I sigh in private relief.
“But again, two-edged sword,” he says. “We have these time-tested, honored beliefs that go back thousands of years that basically say marriage is between a man and a woman.”
I have to give it to Brother James. It takes me a while to realize he hasn’t said anything outside of published Church doctrine, but his words don’t feel exclusionary. He admits that in the Church, there is a distinction between what you feel and what you do. He gives me examples of Mormons who have come out and been celibate, or gay Mormon men who have married women anyway, proof that it is possible to be both Mormon and queer at once.
After I come out to Brother James, I do some research and realize just how extensive the gay Mormon community is. There’s a journal that publishes extensive scholarship on queer feminist Mormon studies. Recently, a valedictorian came out on stage at BYU. And there’s been a Mormon LGBTQ+ support group since 1977 that offers additional verses to hymns with lines like “Come, come, ye gays and lesbians rejoice!” I wonder why so many people have set themselves on reconciling seemingly impossible things. D. Michael Quinn, for one, believed that to be a gay Mormon, “you have to develop a private faith, which I have, that God accepts all loving relationships,” as he said in a PBS interview in 2007. He came out to his wife and they divorced in 1985. It is unclear whether he ever engaged in romantic relationships again.
“It’s so hard, because I recognize that I fit the perfect demographic for a happy, successful Mormon life,” Brother James says. “Everything that I need to be happy within my faith, it was all just—I hate to say it—it was handed to me. I was literally born into it.”
I am taken aback by Brother James’s self-awareness. I also am overwhelmed by what Mormonism asks gay people to do. Sure, priests go celibate all the time, but as a choice. I imagine for a second being asked to make that separation of mind and body: no kisses on blue bean bags, no hand touches across margarita-stained tables, no morning pecks with jazz playing in the kitchen, forever. It strikes me that maybe I am lucky, too, to have been born into something different.
* ✟ *
The Sunday after I come out to Brother James, I go to service. Three people get up to the pulpit to testify about Jesus Christ. First, the church President. Then, a guest: a sleepy Dominican man who whispers his testimony and won’t stop smiling. He tells the story of meeting his wife, an American woman, who convinced him to convert to Mormonism with her. “I knooooow I am a child of God,” he says.
This is the Young Single Adults service—married people have their own—so everyone in the back rows is on their phones. The girl next to me plays FarmVille for the whole hour, stopping only to take communion. A few chairs over, I spot a high-school couple: a Latino boy and his blonde-haired, blue-eyed girlfriend. She has her arm around him and slips her fingertips in and out of the cuff of his shirt sleeve. It feels a little possessive and a lot unchaste. In front of me, a man stretches. I catch my breath as his sleeve rides up to reveal a frankly very attractive forearm tattoo.
The whole room thrums with subdued desire. I wonder if discipline is part of the appeal. In this communion silence, every member of the congregation could be thinking anything, feeling anything, but we are all doing the same thing. We sit in our chairs. We look ahead. We listen to the A/C turn on and off as we strive toward the divine.
I do not feel religious so much as awed at the steadiness of collective belief in the room. Somehow, here, the sense of sacrifice feels familiar to me. I’ve felt it every time I’ve chosen to withhold my sexuality from someone. I’ve felt it every time I’ve disclosed it too. Though I am not a Mormon, I understand what it’s like to acknowledge desire without acting on it.
“Our wildness is going to become like Eden,” promises the last testifier. I watch the sunlight turn the trees outside into shadows on the wall. I think of the moment right after I came out to Brother James. I sensed a shift in his eyes. I think they narrowed, or maybe he blinked. There’s no way to tell, so I convince myself I imagined it and we keep talking. ∎
Emiliano Cáceres Manzano is a senior in Benjamin Franklin College.
Illustrations by Lu Arie.