Gay

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Inspiration. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.

“Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew?” — Job 38:28

I wrote last time about being embraced by a group of people who gave me a strength that runs still through every thread of my life—the writer, the athlete, the teacher, the lover, the friend. Today I’m going to write about when that embrace went away, and what it has meant. Building the creative body is partly an exercise of identity, an exploration of one’s role in the world, and sometimes finding your calling can be costly. This essay is about how loss lives alongside strength; about how these two things are able to come from the same place.

Separating from the Mormon Church (whose present leader insists with a particularly keen absurdity that Mormons not call themselves Mormons) did not mean losing all my relationships within it. Past and current members of the church remain close friends of mine; they are much of my extended family. And, crucially, my family—Mormons and non-Mormons alike—has always basically had my back. There was some processing, there were some arguments, there had to be some reconciliation, and there are still some things I don’t talk about with my aunts. But the all too common queer story of expulsion from one’s home is not my story.

Still, when I came out as a gay man, and did not agree to be celibate for the rest of my life, the community was no longer mine. At the time, I accepted the story that I had lost a culture; that Mormon Michael was behind me, that what lay ahead was for me—was my opportunity and my burden—to build.

A major renovation of the Salt Lake Temple.

You can guess at some of the things this meant for the product of a close-knit integrated homogenous culture: the loss of a Sunday routine; the loss of a kind of general approval and esteem; the loss of incidental interactions with church acquaintances—the inter-class nature of which was a major advantage of my not-wealthy upbringing. The loss of connections that might have helped build a career. The loss of a shared base for humor. (When I dated another ex-Mormon years later, one of the best parts of it was getting that material back for jokes.) The loss of the kind of prospective partner and family that I had always been told was the only path to God’s highest favor, the only good model of stability and love. The loss of a musical canon. The loss of a moral code.

The greatest loss was of purpose. I left the church just short of going on a mission, where I would have spent two years seeking converts. A couple of years before that, one of the men in my community with whom I shared a church assignment, someone whose intellect and curiosity I adored, turned to the people in the room with us after I had given a short religious lesson. “I wonder where they’ll send him on his mission,” he said. His pride still rings in my ears.

And that admiring, encouraging affection—that assurance that I was right where I belonged—is exactly what I am driving at here, because then it gave way to the shame of believing I’d lost it, that the pride had dissolved when my affiliation did. My continuing project of healing has included recognizing that the pride was a gift that could not be withdrawn. That actually all of it was.

Joseph Smith was a violent perpetrator of savage wrongs. He was also: a blue-eyed giant with a deep appetite for human beauty and a vigorous, cultivated love of athletics and music; a writer, someone who loved words and constructed his theologies with a fastidious attention to them, who studied Greek and Hebrew so he could read scriptural texts in their archaic forms. He was a great improviser who dictated his novel, the Book of Mormon, without the use of notes. He liked to drink and laugh and be with his friends and have his way. Perhaps underappreciated about Joseph now was his sense of ceremony, his love of ritual, the way he would agonize over the atmospheric details of the experiences he gave his followers. Joseph was, as his defining biographer Fawn Brodie notes, “no hair-shirt prophet,” ranging the wilderness and starving himself. He was right there in the middle of all of it, a student of joy and mastery, embodied fiercely.

What this adds up to is that Joseph and I have a lot in common. I used to think this was a coincidence. Over time I realized that it almost couldn’t be less of one. Joseph, in a way very few people in history have done, singlehandedly gave rise to a people. And those people are mine. They made me.

I wish sometimes that my other people, the queer ones, had this kind of figure. My personal inquiry about my sexual identity has always lingered a little over the question of why it’s been adaptive for our species to have such a robust population of non-heterosexuals. Warriors and artists and religious leaders offer perhaps a hint of the answer—that queerness confers other ways for a society to be generative, other kinds of protection for it. But because queer people have been so often silenced and punished and killed everywhere they lived, we lack the kind of durable culture of our own that religions or ethnicities carry. We are constantly in a new search for who we are. Regardless of individual circumstances, it is always the task of any queer person to build what we couldn’t inherit. I wonder if someday we will more collectively transcend this limitation. I hope we do.

Coming Friday: Counting.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.