Mormon Phrases

When Skylar moved to Utah in 2016, he basically had to take a Utah-immersion course just to understand basic life. He'd occasionally wander into the house and say things like "what's a CTR ring?"

So I'd explain it. And that would usually prompt more questions. Sometimes I would get defensive and be like "IT MIGHT SEEM STRANGE TO YOU BUT IT'S NOT IT'S WONDERFUL" and he'd respond "no, I think that thing you just explained is terrific" and I'd be like "WELL IT'S NOT IT'S VERY WEIRD" and he'd be like "well, I guess it is a little" and I'd be like "HOW DARE YOU HAVE SOME RESPECT" because that's what it looks like to have complicated feelings about your former religion.

Sometimes his naivety is lovely. In Utah, the predominant religion can be polarizing. Most people who have lived here for very long have pretty strong feelings, one way or the other, about it. But Skylar has no dog in the fight. He's just interested. Nothing else, really.

A few years ago he came home all excited because he learned about an organization called "Encircle" which is an LGBTQ organization in Utah which was created because some of the other national groups weren't as good at understanding the unique dynamics of coming out in a very devout Mormon family and/or community. Educating and providing support to kids and parents who speak a very different language than most of the rest of society requires some special tools, process, and vocabulary.

Sweet Tea and Facebook Live

Momma's got a few things for you today.

First, I found the two worst movies of all time. I'm serious. We can stop searching now. These cannot be topped.

They are two Mormon films from the early 80s concerning the "Word of Wisdom" which is the set of guidelines around health practices church members follow (don't drink alcohol, coffee, bleach, etc.). I somehow never saw either of these films growing up and now I'm exactly split on whether I wish I had.

If you've been wanting more movie recaps from me, look no further. I wrote about both of these films for The Beehive. Please check them out.

Second, my grandma ("G-Mac") lives in an independent living center. She moved herself into it a few years ago so she could be around her peers and sort of revitalize her social life.

G-Mac is an extreme extrovert and I'm 100% sure this is exactly where I inherited that gene. Her ideal day is to have everyone she's ever met and liked all in the same room with her together for the full 24 hours, and she would like to repeat that day every day for her entire life. And that's how I feel, too. I ache that I can't see you people right now. This whole social distancing business is honestly my own personal Trial of Job.

Forever?

A few years ago I started having ongoing debates with a friend about whether the existence of an afterlife is scarier or less scary than there being no afterlife. She was devoutly religious--Mormon--but she said about once a year she would wake up in a panic, thinking "OMG what if I'm totally wrong and there is no God!?"

She said she has to force herself not to think about this possibility because it freaks her out so much. As she was telling me this I started laughing, because apparently I'm insensitive in the face of another person's most terrifying vulnerability.

Really, though, I found it so funny because my whole life I have literally had the exact inverse of this fear. When I was a kid I went through this phase for about a year where the thought of living forever kept me up at night.

"What will I even do, forever?" I remember thinking. "Eventually I'll run out of TV shows to watch."

I got to a point that I had to force myself to stop thinking about this because it was not productive.

I told this friend that I could not relate to her fear because what she's essentially contemplating is the possibility of a thing you can never possibly confirm. Because the only way to find out there is no afterlife is to die and cease to exist, but if you cease to exist you can't know, well, anything. Because you no longer exist.

Worlds Collide

Palau is so much more beautiful than I remembered. I knew it was breathtaking. At least, that's how I described it when people asked. But coming back here and waking up to the calm reefed waters dotted with vibrant green jungled islands in every direction has caught me a little off guard.

The place is calmer--happier than I remembered it, too. I know a lot of that probably has to do with the eyes through which I'm viewing it now. I'm not totally surprised by this. When I returned to Ukraine a few years after living there I had a similar experience. The revisit softened some of the rougher edges that clung to every ounce of nostalgia. I think there's something about seeing a place that didn't kill me and realizing that all that's really left beyond that are some sweet memories and scars I wear with pride.

Skylar thinks Palau is lovely. He has joked a few times about moving here with me. Since he only weighs around 30 pounds and is perpetually shivering, the equatorial heat and suffocating humidity is more like a welcome warm blanket on a holiday sleigh ride for him. But also, he has devoured the hiking to waterfalls and kayaking through dramatic island canyons to find secluded blue bays for snorkeling.

The other day we went on an all-day tour where we swam with dozens of sharks, hung out on a remote white-sand beach and then snorkeled in Jellyfish Lake.

To Be Seen

I kept myself busy throughout my life as a coping mechanism. If I was too busy to stop and think, I would be too busy to be afraid. If I was too busy to stop and think, I would be too busy to suffocate from my cognitive dissonance. If I was too busy to stop and think, I would be too busy to have to grapple with being gay.

So I absorbed myself in dozens of hobbies and I signed up for everything. In high school I ran cross country and track & field, I sang (badly) in the school choir, I went to every school activity, and I packed my life with social events--as many as I could find.

In college I took a full class load and worked sometimes as many as three jobs at once. "I like being busy," I would tell people when they asked me how I had the energy to do everything I was doing.

The truth was I didn't like being that busy. I didn't like having a plate so full of tasks, many I didn't really enjoy doing, that I constantly felt overwhelmed. I didn't like not sleeping. It was stressful. But I was terrified of the alternative.

I would watch my friends guard their free time and I would feel jealous of them. Then I'd watch them get married and slip away. So I would make myself even busier, busy enough that I wouldn't have time to think about what my future looked like.

Voicemail Surprise

It was 2007 and my roommate, Quinn, had a birthday coming up so I decided that I should throw him a little birthday party. I was going to make a cake and everything.

I found a time that would work, put together a guest list, and then started calling people to let them know. I was responsible. I was organized. I was just a damn good friend.

Quinn had recently started dating Pam. The two were high school sweethearts that had spent a couple of years apart because of a Mormon mission, but now they were getting back together. I think I had met Pam once by this point. I'm not totally sure. I may not have met her quite yet. This detail is foggy.

The point is, I absolutely did not know Pam well and she hardly knew me at all.

Pam was on the invite list, but since I didn't really know her, I had to find a sneaky way to get her number. This was before Facebook was nearly as ubiquitous as it has since become so I'm not sure trying to find and contact her there even seemed like an option to me. In fact, although I had set up a Facebook account in 2005, I don't think I actually started using it until about 2008.

So I stole Quinn's phone while he was in the shower and pulled Pam's number from it. This was pre-smartphones so his phone wasn't password protected. It just struck me as so odd that we used to be able to flip open any person's phone and access its content without ever being asked for a password.

A Text Gone Wrong

Hola--Before we get to today's story, please enjoy Part 2 of our series on cringeworthy classic Mormon movies. This week we look at films about family. Isn't it about . . . time.

 

*****

Like anyone who is paying attention, school shootings stress me out and make me sad. There's nothing funny about them. The fact that we have to worry about them and that they regularly happen is insane.

But.

You guys.

My friend Nancy texted me the other day about a thing she accidentally did and I canNOT stop laughing.

The Mormon Coffee Rumor

Meg is mad at me about coffee. I didn't actually do anything wrong, but homegirl is taking all of her anger out on me anyway.

It started a couple of weeks ago when she tweeted.

How verified is this coffee rumor?

— The Meg (@MegMorleyWalter) March 29, 2019

Skylar "I don't even use Twitter and that's why I never like your tweets don't take it personally" Westerdahl immediately showed it to me and asked whether I knew what Meg was talking about.

Quick side note, yesterday morning I somehow ended up in a very confusing journey through Skylar's twitter. I got deeeeeep. And eventually found the moment he became gay.

Went to #MagicMike. NOT A MOVIE ABOUT WIZARDS.

— Skylar West (@SWesterdahl) July 13, 2012

Mormon Films, Part I: Gender Roles

For a little while I've been wanting to do a series on the cringiest and most memorable Mormon films from my childhood. There were a whole bunch of these that I grew up watching over and over at church functions.

These films hold a weird special place in my heart. There's a certain special horror and nostalgia I feel watching them as an adult. Nostaliga, because they remind me of being a kid in the early 90s when times were simple, but horror because most of these films have not aged well.

This week for Strangerville we released the first of what will be a four-part series reviewing and analyzing these religious movies. Today's offering includes some films that explore gender roles and the treatment of women in the 70s and 80s.

Please enjoy.

Conversion Therapy

My state has been debating a bill that would try to ban conversion therapy. As you could guess, this is a topic about which I have some thoughts.

I've never engaged in any form of conversion therapy. I'm lucky. That's luck. My inexposure to the torture is not something I chose. I never told anyone I was gay while I was a child, so no one ever thought to force me to go to camps and beat an effigy of my parents or blame my dad for not loving me or undergo shock therapy or pray the gay away and take personal responsibility for my lack of faith when it didn't work.

I was fortunate.

For some reason, I escaped even the private internal torture that a lot of young gay kids and adults experience in believing their sexual orientation could be changed and that they should be ashamed of themselves if their efforts to do so didn't work.

I don't know why, but it just didn't occur to me when I was 12 that liking boys was somehow my fault and that I could like girls if I sought help.  Even as a child, when straight people at church told me that being gay is a choice, I remember thinking "No it's not, because I didn't choose this."

Better or Worse

I woke up on Saturday morning to tweeted videos of boys from a Catholic school taunting and mocking elderly indigenous people. If you somehow haven't seen this yet, you can find at least one article about it here. The school and the boys are being raked through the coals on social media. The whole event and the seemingly endless stream of videos that have been surfacing has spurred a bunch of debates in a very short period, several of which have been fascinating and sometimes disturbing to follow.

This isn't a political post. It could be--there are plenty of articles being published now about the incident--articles that try to digest the politics associated with the thing that happened. That's fine and well, but while I've watched with horrified curiosity for a dozen different reasons, one of the sub-debates happening has made me think about a topic I've wanted to broach on Stranger for some time: religion. You know. That other thing about which no one has strong opinions.

Whenever religious people are involved in some publicized despicable act, a conversation about religion and whether it's good or bad or something in between often surfaces. I'm usually curious to hear these debates, largely because for a long time I was quite religious.

Growing up Mormon, I was used to spending three or more hours at church every Sunday. Church events took up portions of my weeknights, too. For all four years of high school, one of my daily school classes was a religion class held just at the edge of the public school's property. The home I grew up in had religious pictures hanging in every single room, bathrooms not excluded. As a child I just sort of assumed that this was probably the case with every house in America. I was used to this. The religion wasn't a thing we did; it was a lifestyle, infiltrating every aspect of everything we knew.

2018

I sit at my desk at home on this snowy Sunday in Salt Lake City. Two dogs are wrestling at my feet, occasionally humping one another even though both are neutered. Apparently we have perverted pets. Skylar has just made a mess of my kitchen attempting to cook pancakes. And it's time to pen a year-end post.

I started this tradition in 2010. Nearly none of you were around then. I mean, around Stranger. I'm sure some of you were alive by that time. In 2010 I wrote to an audience of about five. In fact, in that year-end post, I wrote that during that year "I blogged and wondered how many people were actually reading."

There have been so many dramatic changes in my life and in yours since I quietly wrote those words eight years ago.

Mormon Mothers

Skylar told me last night that he thinks "scolding" is a super power of Mormon mothers.

I had never heard this opinion from him, or anyone, but I implicitly agreed with him before taking a moment to blurt out, "wait; why?"

Skylar isn't from Utah. His exposure to mass Mormonism is a relatively recent aspect of his 28-year life. In fact, his first real visit (read: not an airport layover) was in late 2015. He was living in Wisconsin at the time. He started visiting Salt Lake City with some regularity that year because I'm very attractive and he couldn't help himself.

Uncovering Utah's uniqueness for him since then has been a surprisingly delightful experience for me. Most of this is because he has approached everything in our great state with nothing more than a polite and respectful curiosity.

Believe me when I say this is rare around these parts. Most people I know in Utah have very strong opinions, in one direction or another, about Mormonism and, specifically, Mormons. This is true of people who move here as well. They decide how they feel about the place before they get here and then they find whatever evidence they can to support their belief.

A Thing I Decided I Want You To Know

I'm pretty gay.

I know. You're all shocked. NO ONE guessed this. I'll give you a moment to recover.

This is something I just never thought I would really address on Stranger because I never felt like I needed to.

But several things have changed for me. The most important one is the mounting internal pressure to be more open about this because being open about being gay can literally save lives. It opens dialogue, and it helps people who feel alone feel less alone. Honestly, in recent years a part of me has felt a little selfish for not being open.

Coming out as gay to anyone is kind of a scary thing. Even in 2018. It took me many many many many years to come out to the people I'm closest to. Like, 29 or so years. A lot of this was because I didn't exactly grow up in a community that has a great track record when it comes to treatment of The Gays.

Flashback to a very gay boy in the 90s sitting in many lessons at church in which the teacher explained that no one is born gay but the wicked choose to be gay and for that reason their souls are lost.

A Kentucky Clerk

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you've probably heard more than you ever wanted to hear about a Kentucky county clerk named Kim Davis.

Lately, everywhere I go there seems to be conversation about her. People can't stop talking about her since she was arrested for defying a federal court order to issue marriage licenses. She was refusing to do this because, according to her, she was acting under God's authority, which apparently takes offense to the Supreme Court's recent ruling on marriage rights for same gender couples. 

Kirtland

A friend had told me that Cleveland is apparently only like 20 minutes from a town called Kirtland and when I heard this I acted like I had won the lottery because I would be going to Cleveland in a few days and Kirtland is an old Mormon pioneer town so I immediately assumed that every day in Kirtland must be just a huge Pioneer Day and OH MY GOSH WHY DON'T WE ALL LIVE IN KIRTLAND!??!??!

I arrived in Cleveland bright and early on Thursday morning after spending the night on two red eye flights. I abruptly retrieved my rental car, located Kirtland on my phone, and ventured onward.

You guys. I was so excited to see this place that I drove to it before even checking into a hotel and after flying through the night.

I'm a history nerd. I was a history major in college. I have been known to venture far off the direct route on road trips just to visit places that once had a historically significant building near them. I'm one of those hippies that goes to a spot where an important thing happened and gets goosebumps because OH MY GOSH CAN YOU FEEL THE ENERGY!!!?

Pictures from my Phone & Weekly Distractions

This week I ventured off to Cleveland. Before doing so Bob and Cathie informed me that I would certainly die. I didn't take this very seriously because they always tell me these things when I go anywhere in the world (with, ironically, the exception of war-torn Ukraine, which they seem to have accepted as the safest place for me to go).

But alas. I was not killed in Cleveland. Fortunately. Or unfortunately, depending on how much you like or dislike me. I was, however, told by a woman on the street that I have "the best hair on a white boy" she's ever seen. I'm not kidding you about this. This actually happened. I thought for a second that she must have been a Stranger, but she gave no other indication that this was so. I think she just genuinely gave me the best hair compliment anyone has ever received. And I'm going to ride this high for a full decade.

And now, your Pictures and Distractions:

New Edison bulb string lights for my old patio (thanks, Costco!).

The Mormon Crisis and the "Gay Question"

A few years ago the nation recognized a new phase for my community. They called it "the Mormon Moment." Suddenly, almost out of nowhere, a number of significant events took place that put Mormons in the spotlight, largely in a very positive way.

I think it began around the time of the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002. It built up over the course of that decade. Members of the church seemed to be in the spotlight everywhere. Music, politics on the highest level, movies, reality TV, business, etc.

And for us Mormons, this was incredibly exciting. The generation just below me is probably the first generation to not really remember a time before the "Mormon Moment." In their lifetimes, the church and the culture that trails it has always been relatively well-known in America. But I remember a time when it was almost shocking to hear the word "Mormon" on TV.

There were never any movies about Mormons. No characters in TV shows that shared our faith. And in fact, back then pretty much every Mormon could proudly list all of the "famous" Mormons in existence since the beginning of time. These included Donny Osmond and a slew of people who were not actually Mormons but who kind of seemed like Mormons and so someone started a rumor about them and the rest of the community just latched on. Because this was before the Internets when you could go somewhere to verify.

Pioneer Day

You guys. I know you are all very excited and you've hardly been able to sleep lately. You've made paper chains counting down the days. You've spent all of your time in the last few months trying to pick out your outfits for the big day. And the amount of thought you've put into your hair! You've done all of this for good reason.

Because PIONEER DAY!!!!!!!!!!

And you know I don't italicize, underline, bold, and capitalize simultaneously unless it's REALLY important.

Pioneer Day is the greatest holiday in the history of all holidays in the history of mankind in the history of the world, matched possibly only by Twice Up the Barrel Once Down the Side Day, which happens later this summer, of course.

For the less fortunate who don't have the opportunity to experience the glory of July 24th Pioneer Day, I'll give you a little background.

The Mormons Be Talkin'

The Mormon world is abuzz this week at the announcement that two high-profile church members are apparently facing church discipline. For those unfamiliar with how this works or why this matters, I'll attempt to give a very brief and hopefully accurate explanation for what this means.

The church is very organized. It holds actual records of anyone who becomes a member of it. To become a member of the church, a person has to agree to live according to certain rules, which qualifies the person for baptism, the actual act that triggers official "membership." These rules include things such as agreeing not to drink alcohol or use illegal drugs as well as some less-defined obligations like be kind to others and attend church meetings "regularly." Church membership gives the person an opportunity to serve in various capacities within their local congregation. There are also spiritual benefits that church members believe they receive through their membership.