The other day, I was having a discussion with a new straight friend, Darren. He is an active Mormon, a husband and father, who within the past year has discovered that two of his closest friends in the world, other members of the Church whom he has known for years,…
Author: Invictus Pilgrim
Jimmy Creech: A Prophetic Voice for LGBTQ Equality
In May 1984, a closeted gay man in a small town in southeastern North Carolina went to see the pastor of his United Methodist congregation. The man Adam was upset and announced that he was leaving the church. When the pastor asked why, Adam replied that he could no longer…
Celestial Glory Shall Be Mine
Celestial glory shall be mine if I can but endure. One of the very first songs a Mormon child learns to sing is I Am a Child of God, a very sweet little song that contains within its simple melody and honeyed phrases the essence of Mormon theology. At a…
Masks: Lesbians and Landing Gay Side Up
This post features a Mormon lesbian’s “struggle to be free” and a discussion of Orson Scott Card’s comments on homosexuality. Both accounts originated in comments left on a MetaFilter post. For the last couple of days, I have written about how pleased I was to discover that some of my…
Masks: Its the Longing that Gets You
Mormons are sometimes accused of being insular. Even when we Mormons disagree with or among each other about a policy or practice or doctrine of the LDS Church, we tend to think of these policies, practices and doctrines in uniquely Mormon ways. This is one reason I was delighted to…
Beards, Masks and MetaFilter: New Perspectives
The use of Mormon Beard or beard perpetuates a second class status to ALL straight wives married to gay men, and denotes an ugliness. So wrote a commenter to a post I published last Friday, which was the fifth in a series of posts whose titles began with the words,…
To the One: Suppression and Undeviating Determination
This post is a companion piece to Mondays essay, To Young Men Only: The Gay Version. I had intended to write this back in January, but it never happened. I think it is appropriate to insert it here in this series of posts as a follow-on to last Fridays post…
To Young Men Only: The Gay Version
This post is inserted as a sort of intermission into the series on issues relating to mixed-orientation marriages that I started last week. A substantially similar version of this essay was first published on my blog in late December of last year, following a series of posts addressing issuesrelating toMormon…
Mormon Beards Exploring the Issues: Turn It Off
This is the fifth in a series of posts addressing issues relating to gay Mormon men marrying heterosexual women. As I have previously explained, beard (as used here) refers to a slang term for the heterosexual spouse of a gay Mormon who is effectively used to conceal the husbands sexual…
Mormon Beards Exploring the Issues: Patriarchy and Duplicity
This is the fourth in a series of posts addressing issues relating to gay Mormon men marrying heterosexual women. The first post was published on my own blog as well as Main Street Plaza. The next two posts were published only on my blog (here and here), and beginning with…