A new website was born this past week, and I think it deserves close attention. Sponsored by Affirmation: Gay and Lesbian Mormons, the new site seeks to help parents, siblings, church leaders, spouses, and gay people understand better the pain experienced by everyone when a gay family member comes out of the closet as homosexual.
Keep Them and Love Them is an appropriate name for the site. I have seen families shattered when a young person — trusting that he or she would always be safe at home — dares tell parents they are gay and learns that home is no longer a place of refuge. Too often they find just the opposite: “Pack your bags and be out of here in an hour and don’t ever come back.” Nearly half of young homeless people are gay, a very sad statistic. This site can help families with at-risk family members.
“Our family is the most important thing that we have here on this earth; it is what we must fight hardest to defend and to protect. If outside forces, including social pressures, faith issues, finances, or whatever, come in conflict with keeping our family together, we need to base our values and our actions upon what will keep the family whole.” - From the Keep Them and Love Them mission statement.
Laudibly, LDS Church leaders for years have said that parents should not treat their children this way, but to many young people their words ring hollow, outweighed by the reality of what they see and hear every day. The constant insistence that being gay can be “cured” shows a frightening lack of understanding of the issue and makes kids feel like total failures. The scientific world is clear about this, but speeches such as that last week by Elder Bruce C. Hafen, an LDS General Authority, once again drag us back into the sexual dark ages and give LDS gay people nothing but a future of despair to look forward to.
The rhetoric of everyday life shows LDS families with gay teens a different reality.
- Being gay isn’t a sin, but you can’t go on a mission unless you hide it and lie to your bishop.
- The reward for being alone and loveless for a lifetime is that you’ll eventually resurrect feeling “normal” attractions.
- We expect the same behavior from homosexuals as heterosexuals, except that you can’t hold hands, dance, go on a movie date, or hang around with other gay teens.
- Pedophiles are much more likely to be heterosexual, but because you are gay you can’t serve in the nursery, Primary, or Boy Scouts.
- Keep your teenagers away from gay teens, or they might be “recruited.”
- Families are the basic unit of society, but only if they have one father, one mother, and children. Other families are abnormal and need to be fixed.
- Your favorite older sister/brother/cousin/uncle has been in a committed same-sex relationship for 20 years and your neighbor can’t keep a marriage going for a year, but hers is a sacred institution and we must donate thousands of dollars to keep your sister/brother/cousin/uncle from getting married.
As gay LDS adults, we have the distance of time and that allows us to see through all this. We know that no quantity or quality of trying, praying, fasting, and service will make someone heterosexual, because we’ve tried it all. But children can’t see that far ahead. They see older gay Mormons who have suffered electroshock treatment, chemical aversion therapy, and all manner of abusive experimentation in the name of “fixing their same-sex attraction.” For so many gay teens, that’s not much of a future to look forward to. More and more often, they just give up and kill themselves.
When a teen commits suicide, the family usually says, “We had no idea how bad things were.” It’s often hard to see the difference between a normal surly teen and one who is truly despondent. It’s difficult to get teens to open up and share their feelings and concerns, but doing so before things get desperate is the goal of everyone. Hopefully, this new web site will show families that there is hope and that resources are available to usher them through the difficult coming out process. If such a web site saves just one life, the time and effort are well spent.
