My take on Mormons and the Gay issue

My blog is called Daughters of the Shadow Men because I considered my father one of the married men in Utah who I suspected at five years old of having homosexual affairs. One man who later came to work for him molested me and later on that year I saw him and my father shoveling in a field from my vantage point on a high hill. Suddenly they disappeared. I thought they went into the same corn where the hired man had taken me for the same purpose, sexual activity. I felt very sad for my father because I suspected this was part of an old pattern in his growing up on ranches. I figured he had probably been molested enough as a boy that he retained these feelings in adulthood, even though he had married my mother and at the time already had three daughters and would soon have two more.
This was the beginning of my life time study of bisexual men in Utah and elsewhere. Most married bisexual men are never going to admit to you they are bisexual so if you are to detect their activities you have to be very alert. I kept the molesting secret until I was incarcerated into a psyche ward at the University of Utah in my senior year, which is in Salt Lake City. At the University I suspected a popular married teacher in the English department of being partial to young males. His favorite student was brilliant, a veteran, and talented poet who in a very cold blooded fashion tried to exploit me sexually, ten years younger, so as not to appear gay because he had ambitions to become a professor. This is the conclusion I came to, so I decided to leave the English department because of too much teacher partiality to male students like him, and changed to the theater department even though I thought I would probably encounter married bisexual professors there, too.
The head of the department was a famous director of Shakespeare who was able to entice famous Broadway and Hollywood stars there each year to do Shakespeare and other plays, which included Charles Laughton, Victor Jory, Agnes Moorhead, Orson Welles, etc. I began to interact with him and in spite of my desire for more normalcy in the professors began to suspect he was also bisexual from his behavior and attitudes, not from anything he said. Are you crazy? Does anybody actually expect married bisexuals to admit it and keep their jobs? The head of the theater department was a professed Mormon which kept them all happy, but he had been able to bring a protege of his into the department to teach also who was so obviously gay just about everybody suspected it. And this protege teacher also turned out to have a sadistic streak that I didn't like. Once he was browbeating a friend of mine in class apparently trying to break him down into tears, and I got up and left the class in protest, so naturally he never liked me again even though he taught the play writing class which was offered for the first time, and I wanted to be playwright!
Anyway not only had I never talked about the molesting, but had never told anyone I thought my alcoholic father was a bisexual. As I had more and more to do with the head of my department I came to think he was a classic married bisexual. He contrived to go out on the road with plays more than any head of a department I could imagine. On one on the road production I was in with him as director, we were off around 250 miles from home and the gay protege teacher turned up on 'vacation.' Probably nobody but someone like me with a father I suspected of doing the same thing would have thought hanky panky was going on. I also did the tech for a play he cast his wife in as the lead, (I tried out for it and failed to get the role) and he refused even to work with her. He was so totally indifferent to her that I thought she gave a bad performance in a leading role, a plum that had been tossed her I thought so as to keep her happy and not apt to complain about how she was treated by him. I was also aggravated because it seemed to me he had to give so many plum roles to people who had known him a long time to keep them happy there were hardly any left for students, especially the female ones.
Again, I felt this department head was partial to young males, but he had a national reputation as a director of Shakespeare so what else could you expect but a bisexual partial to young males? Wasn't the famous bard one, too?
A young actor who had come off a Mormon mission turned up who was also so obviously gay everybody suspected that, too. He was given so many plum roles he could hardly even handle them even though he only had one lung and told everyone very bitterly he did not expect to live long. The directors risked killing him they wanted to work so badly with this handsome talented charmer.
But I could see that it might be forever before I would even be able to surface what my life and thoughts and had been about as the daughter of a married bisexual, a cattle rancher. So I began to think about leaving this place forever. I did not think I could tolerate such an atmosphere until I graduated. Too many secrets and lies.
What could the Mormon Church do about this state of affairs? Nothing. These professors were far too sophisticated and brilliant for the rather naive Mormon authorities I thought to pin down. Mormons love Shakespeare I think because Shakespeare is a little too hard to understand for them to be confident about criticizing thespians.
Utah still has one of the finest Shakespeare centers in Cedar City where the original Globe Theater has been recreated and some of the best acted plays in the U.S. attract audiences from all over the world. And there is probably a very healthy contingent of gays who act in these plays who Mormons tend to leave alone, just as they left the then famous director alone at the U. of U. when I attended.
But the upshot of my story was that even when I showed signs of failing in my senior year after a good previous record the head of my department was totally unable to interact with me so he sent me to the Mormon Psychiatrist on campus, and in an interview that lasted about a half a minute, he deemed me mentally ill enough to be put under guard and taken to a locked mental ward facility where he knew I would likely not get out until I was subjected to a round of electric shock.
Let's see how did I interpret this move on his part? I thought it was complete insanity, complete over reaction, knowing nothing about me and having not found out anything. To decide that I was mentally ill enough to be locked up and subjected to electric shock therapy on such short notice was I thought outrageous abuse and violation of my rights, which is just what happened after my mother and dad were frightened into signing for me. I asked for an interview with Dr. Branch who was head of the psychiatric department in the U. of U. medical school and told him there was something wrong with me and I thought electric shock would be not only inappropriate but dangerous for me. He still delayed deciding until I went into a seizure from 5 days of not sleeping and terrible stress over what had happened to me, and before I came out of it I quit breathing and nearly died. After that happened they did decide something was so physically wrong with me I could not have electric shock, but they made me sign a paper that I had voluntarily committed myself to the mental hospital which was a lie, but I signed it to get out of there, vowing never to go to a psychiatrist voluntarily again.
I came out of the hospital a great deal sicker and more fragile than before I went in. I never saw the head of my department again. What was the use of seeing him, so much damage had been done to me that could not be undone.
But I have since fought for the rights of gays to be hired by universities without being required to hide their sexual orientation. If homosexuality is not accepted you are going to be get bitterness from those expected to hide it as was evident in the one professor. You are going to get brilliant homosexuals who marry and have children in order to cover up their homosexual activities which I thought was the case with the head of the theater department. He would never have gotten that plum job if he had not married and said he was Mormon.
If the Mormons or any other churches constantly preach against homosexuality are they going to want them to be hired anywhere in the school systems? So in order to get jobs people are naturally going to try to stay deep in the closet. They may intend never to allow these feelings to surface, either. But who can live without expressing their sexual feelings ever? Would heterosexuals be able to live without ever expressing their deepest sexual feelings?
Take my dad's sister, a school teacher. I went to live with her for two years during high school. At the time one of the most mannish female teachers I ever met, tall, with a short hair cut and a deep voice rented a room in her home. She wore pant suits, smoked cigarettes in a long holder, and she was not Mormon, but she was considered to be a brilliant teacher of history. My aunt was a man hater. She told me with very strong feeling that she would never date a man again. She claimed her ex husband had ruined all her feelings for men. Well, I never dared even bring up the subject of homosexuality to her for fear she would have a fit.
But I could not help but think that women like the other teacher were probably the only possibilities of satisfying her sexual needs. She used to go down and stay with her sometimes in an apartment she maintained in a city 40 miles away. About the only way I could have determined whether they were having sexual relations was by catching them in the act, but my aunt was so obviously defensive that I thought she over reacted and told me I had to attend Mormon seminary 5 days a week and go to church on Sunday and on Tuesday night. She also attended church regularly herself. She wanted to seem above reproach I am sure.
If she was lesbian she felt forced to lie and cover up for fear of being thought a bad influence. If she was lesbian and had ever been honest about it she would undoubtedly have been fired and been very unlikely to get another school teaching job in Utah.
This is what you get when you keep talking about homosexuality as a sin. What harm were these women doing that they could not come out as lesbian without fear of losing their jobs? But the way the religious interpret this, just being out with it would send a bad message to the young. Oh, the religious like to torture those with homosexual feelings, no matter how they protest they are not out to hurt anyone.
Now days women like these two women want to get married so as to have the legal rights married people have with a long time partner. The Mormon Church and other churches like it are having a fit! Imagine them wanting to go into the sacred territory of marriage! Let's see, let me look back on my parents' marriage, which I would characterize as made in hell. But it was legal. All heterosexuals' marriages are legal no matter what goes on in them. No, the religious just aren't reasoning very well as far as I am concerned about gay marriage. Because they basically regard homosexuality as a sin, they don't think gays deserve the privilege of marriage. If those without sin were the only ones who could legally marry as heterosexuals a whole lot of them would not pass muster either.
Not even in universities can gays come out as gays. Some cover up with wives and children. Is marriage supposed to take care of their sexual needs entirely? I noticed marriage did not take care of all the sexual desires my father had developed, and I seriously doubt that it takes care of similar bisexuals' sexual desires either. Especially if the wife doesn't know about it and may not even want to know it, so would not be any of the wiser if a homosexual affair on the side did take place. I was raised in a marriage filled with secrets and lies. These were not easy parents to have, as my mother eventually took to having affairs of her own, with other males, married or not.
We daughters tried to preach to her that it was wrong but she was too frustrated to listen to us. I remember telling her once that she should leave my dad if she was tempted to have affairs. To stay with him and lie was a very bad example to us girls. I tried to talk to her another time about the affairs she was having and she drew back and barely refrained from hitting me in the mouth with her fist. Instead she went to the door and slammed it as hard as she could 7 times and jumped up and down and screamed, "I want to be bad!" In other words she flipped out, marriage to my father was such a nightmare. I was scared of her and took off down into fields with my baby and didn't come back until my dad came home. No wonder I never dared tell her what I thought my dad was doing.
So when old Mormon authorities start preaching about the evils of homosexuality I tend to think they are not thinking well enough to be aware of the harm they might be doing to others.
Are molested children who develop these desires after having been molested long enough by a same sex pedofile evil, too? I started masturbating the same year I was molested at the age of 5. I was molested to sexual feelings the third time this man abducted me. One of the most notorious pedofiles in that country told me that at five a teen age boy his mother allowed to sleep with him involved him in nightly sexual activities for 2 years. He said he thought that made him into a homosexual, and it also helped cause him to become a young pedofile himself who in turn molested other little boys much younger than himself. My neighbor who is gay told me he was molested all throughout childhood by an older brother. He said he thought many gays were molested into it.
I think it is especially hypocritical for a church whose revered founder Joseph Smith introduced polygamy to consider themselves now authorities on how to cure homosexuality. Polygamy is a violation of womens rights, a clear indication they are not considered equal to men. It also produced generations of 'lost' boys who had no one to marry since the more powerful men who were supposed to wed 7 women to fulfill themselves often took all the available and prettiest younger women. What do you think happened to a portion of these lost boys as a direct result of polygamy? Milling around because a more powerful Mormon polygamist claimed their pretty girlfriend, bitter and disillusioned?
The 'lost' boys similar to my dad and grandfather often became lone cowboys camping out with men, some of them turning to one another to meet sexual needs. No good Mormon girl was going to want them after a while. My dad was a bachelor cowboy who probably never expected to find a girl who would marry him in Mormon Utah, but my mother was attracted to his prospects as a money earner as my grandmother had been to my grandfather when she married him when he was 30, after he had spent years on the trail mostly in the company of other cowboys. He was a lost boy, too. I suspected him of being a bisexual, too, from his habits of spending the winter months on his ranches with his cowboy hired hands while his wife lived in town, away from him. The lost boys of Mormonism. Bisexual for whatever reason.
I believe in everybody telling the truth. If you have a bisexual problem tell your prospective wife if you are determined to marry and have children so you won't have to lie to her and she can try to help you stay straight. But Mormons and other religious tend to make it so rough for anybody with homosexual feelings who admit to them when is that likely to happen with a majority?
The gay community needs to be accepted which is certainly not going to support pedofiles. The religious are the ones who are out of line, constantly insisting to everybody homosexuality is a sin and it can even be cured the Mormons claim. They can do it. I am sorry, but I do not believe this is true. Homosexuality for most is far too deep seated to respond to brainwashing techniques by the religious. So I think this is a dubious claim.
I listened to Boyd Packer, head of the Quorum of the 12 apostles, say that homosexuality is a sin and the church is not going to change its stand on that score. I do concede that churches have a terrible time changing any of their doctrines. The Federal government had to force the Mormons to give up polygamy, or we would have so many polygamists in Utah now, it would be everyone's worst nightmare.
I don't expect this man to ever see that it is better to accept homosexuals, many of whom have felt they were gay since they were children, some who feel they were born that way, for whatever reason accept what consenting adults do with one another. Let us worry about crimes involving children, and there are plenty of heterosexual pedofiles to be concerned about, too. By saying homosexuality is a sin you're trying to have it both ways, saying that you do not believe in hurting people. But you are telling young gays what they are feeling toward the same sex is a sin, if they act upon it. Mormons don't tell young heterosexuals that. That is why young gays commit suicide in record numbers. Who tells them homosexuality is a sin? The churches. No wonder they feel they can do no right. A Mormon preacher I listened to this morning said that to have these feelings is not a sin, but to act on them is. Well, what if heterosexual feelings are completely missing? How hard is it then going to be for them to act only on heterosexual feelings so as not to be considered a sinner?
But churches can do no wrong! Right? Yes, they can, but getting them to own up to it is beyond difficult. To be religious is generally to consider church authorities infallible. I could obviously write a book on this subject, the issue is so complex, but I am going to stop now.