I received an email this week from a family member that, once again, forced me to deal with the realization that any contact with my siblings elicits a nauseating, visceral reaction in me that can only be equated with that penetrating sadness that one feels when they hear of a child that was kidnapped as a preteen and kept locked in a cell under the garage for a dozen years without ever seeing the light of day. And then, after being free for just a short time, somebody comes up and tries to defend the person that did the kidnapping by claiming that the young person somehow provoked the event.
It is in this way that contact with my family reminds me of how cruel siblings can be. What makes it worse is that when this kind of cruel behavior is taught to really young children they just don't seem to understand the importance of changing their behavior as adults. Instead, they live out their lives in denial that their behavior is even inappropriate and hurtful.
This is how it works in my family. Just so you know, I am 51 years old and I am the youngest of six, so this behavior is deeply entrenched. My problem is that I only started calling my siblings out for their cruelty in 2008, so they still seem shocked that behavior which used to be tolerated for decades is now being cast in a different light.
That is what it is like with my 5 Mormon siblings, but the difference is that I survived the first three times that they did this to me. The problem is, and this is the cruel part, they keep pretending that it has never happened before. In ever-so-subtle ways they keep trying to draw me in close enough so that their spines can penetrate my heart at the moment that I become most vulnerable. Examples of this behavior over the past while have come in the form of an invitation to participate with them in flowers for an uncle's funeral, a son's wedding, a phone call on my birthday, an invitation to a family reunion, and a short note that my sister's husband is going in for very dangerous surgery; stuff like that.
You might say, "Oh, there's no harm in what they are trying to do. That's normal family stuff." It might be normal for you, but when it comes being gay and a 7th generation Mormon, there is nothing that can ever be normal so long as the church stays in the mix. You need to understand the cult-like hold that Mormonism holds on its members."
Let me tell you about the three times that I was stabbed in the heart before I came to understand the tactic that almost every Mormon family will use on a gay sibling, son, or daughter. Luckily I'm still alive to tell the story so that other's might be saved. Other gay Mormon's have not survived the rejection by their families.
June 2006
The first time that my family sent a spike into my heart was when I was excommunicated in June of 2006. I had never been intimate with a man, but I had come out and said very publicly that I felt that I had been born gay. In spite of that (and this was an integral part of my very public message) I was intending to stay faithful to my wife of 25 years and somehow make our mixed-orientation marriage work.
Within weeks of finding out I was "gay" my stake president excommunicated me for apostacy. Because there had been no immoral act I appealed that decision. I was very open and honest with my siblings and asked them to send letters of support to the prophet on my behalf. While each of them, to a one, told me that my stake president had "gone rogue," there were no letters of support. In spite of the lack of tangible support from my siblings, I still won my appeal. In January 2007 the prophet ordered my excommunication proceedings vacated. I forgave my cowardly brothers and sisters and the dozens of nieces and nephews who were old enough to understand what had just happened. With their words of support over the phone they had pulled me in close for an embrace, making their failure to provide any tangible support that much more difficult to take. Their words had been empty, and the embrace felt contrived.
Strike one.
June 2008
After a year of muddling through, my ex-wife and I decided that we were still young enough to pursue authentic and more fulfilling relationships, so on her advice I started dating men. By April of 2007 I had met a man that would eventually become my husband, and over the next year my family continued to claim to support me in my desire to have a loving, authentic relationship. Their acceptance reached the point where most of them agreed that if my husband I were to visit we would be given the guest bedroom, just as they had done for the prior 25 years when I had visited with my ex-wife. My heart soared! This was amazing progress, and once again I allowed them to draw me in close in an "embrace," but within weeks fervor of the Prop 8 battle reached a fever pitch in California. By June 2008, two years almost to the day from my excommunication, my siblings had once again hit my heart with spikes. The turning point came when a letter from the Mormon prophet was leaked to the media. The letter was to be read in every Mormon congregation in California, essentially ordering all Mormons to give money and donate time to ensure that Proposition 8 would pass on the November 2 presidential election. I asked my siblings if, in a show of solidarity, they would walk out of church when the letter was being read. If not that, at least tell me that they disagreed with the church getting that involved in politics, and promise me that they would not donate time or money to a campaign that would directly impact my ability to have any kind of equal treatment in this country. I could not see how any good could come of what the Mormon Church was doing. In spite of my appeals, to a one each of my siblings said that they could not oppose the prophet with even a dissenting opinion, even in secret. They were still buying into the old axiom, "When the prophet speaks, the thinking has been done."
Strike two.
October 2008
Well, during the Prop 8 campaign, Mormon insiders were heavily involved in the Protect Marriage coalition that had designed a deceitful ad campaign that came to be known as the "Six Lies." It was the brainchild of Frank Schubert and Jeff Flint. The coalition, propelled by the Mormon insiders, ensured that my siblings were pressured into being heavily involved in spreading these lies.
Jeff Flint, another strategist with Protect Marriage, estimated that Mormons made up 80 percent to 90 percent of the early volunteers who walked door-to-door in election precincts.
The canvass work could be exacting and highly detailed. Many Mormon wards in California...were assigned two ZIP codes to cover.
Maybe Fred knows the fellow from San Diego who was cited in a news story after he was on a conference call with Mormon leaders:
Robert Bolingbroke, a Mormon who lives near San Diego, said he and his wife decided on their own to donate $3,000 in August. Later, he was invited to participate in a conference call led by a high church official, known as a member of the Quorum of Seventy. Mr. Bolingbroke, a former president and chief operating officer of The Clorox Co., estimates that 40 to 60 Mormon potential donors were on that call, and he said it was suggested that they donate $25,000, which Mr. Bolingbroke did earlier this month. Mr. Bolingbroke said he doesn't know how he or the other participants on the call were selected. Church leaders keep tithing records of active members, who are typically asked to donate 10% of their income each year to the Mormon Church.
I've already posted in a previous blog post a complete reduction of the "Six Lies" that explains, and completely refutes, the ad campaign that would eventually be supported with over $24 million dollars in donations. Furthermore, the "Six Lies" proved to be completely indefensible in the subsequent (victorious) court challenge of Prop 8. Over this period of time I held conversations with each of my brothers and sisters to explain this to them, but there was no getting through. As evidenced by my brother's October 22, 2008 blog post, he and my siblings had bought into the "Six Lies" lock, stock, and barrel. They had gone door-to-door and donated money to deny me any form of equal treatment.
Strike three, and they were out. They had drawn me in close for the last time.
The Funeral
A short time later an uncle passed away, so my sister calls and asks me if I would participate in buying a flower arrangement from "the six of us" to represent our family at the funeral. Well, I wasn't exactly feeling the love at this point, so I told my sister that before I would be sacrificing my hard-earned money I would like to have first seen some evidence of solidarity. I didn't see any benefit to me of demonstrating any kind of "belonging" to a group of siblings that only wanted to be seen as a family when it was convenient. I had given my five brothers and sisters three chances to "claim" me as part of this "family," but in three out of three times they had shut the door on me and left me outside in the cold. It felt like this was an attempt to just "move on" without addressing the "three strikes" that had just happened.
The Wedding
By the following summer it was obvious that my son was getting serious with his Mormon girlfriend, and we knew that a wedding was likely in the works. In spite of advice from my husband and my other three children, I could not expose myself once again to the temptation of an "endearing hug." In a June visit with him when he came out to Florida I explained to him that if he was going to insist on a temple wedding in the Mormon Temple I would not be attending his wedding. I was not going to fly out to San Diego just to be a lawn ornament at the temple, where I would be expected to wait politely for the photo op. This was my "Rosa Parks Moment." I was no longer going to settle for the back seat on the bus and allow the Mormon propaganda to dictate what kind of a relationship I would have with my family. If I were going to have a relationship with my family, including my son, it would be on common ground that we could share between us. It would certainly not be at a wedding where everything was dictated to me by a Mormon prophet...through my own son.
A Birthday and a Family Reunion
This brings me to my birthday last October when my sister called. After wishing me a happy birthday and cheerful catching up, she said the family would all love to see Mickey and I at the family reunion in January. I asked if there would be any awkwardness in talking about what was happening about gay marriage and civil unions for same-sex couples, to which she responded, "Well, there will just have to be some topics that we will agree not to talk about." I chose to hang up rather than beat a dead horse to get it to go one more time around the block.
Cancer
And that brings us up to this week, when my sister's husband sent me an email to advise me that he was in Seattle, preparing for prostate cancer surgery in two weeks at one of the nation's leading hospitals. The contrast between the worries and concerns that he and my sister do not have, and the worries and concerns that my husband and I would have, were just too much. They take for granted the following rights that "marriage" naturally has granted to them:
- That a spouse from out of state will just naturally be allowed next to his side throughout the entire procedure and the recovery. My husband and I were married in Connecticut and have a domestic partnership registration in Broward County (a very progressive county in South Florida...like an oasis in a desert). However, a feature of DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act that was passed in 1996), that the Mormons supported in order to avert any consequences from the battle in Hawaii over same-sex marriage, was passed in order to prevent a same-sex marriage or civil union or domestic partnership of one state from being recognized in another.
- That if my sister's husband dies from the surgery, or if his life is not prolonged by the surgery, his estate will pass seamlessly to my sister. If my husband were to die, these are the consequences of DOMA in our lives:
- 1. His brother could easily challenge the will, forcing me to defend it in court. It would cost thousands of dollars and it is often done by antagonistic family members who just want to be malicious against a gay sibling's lover, somehow blaming him for their sibling falling into temptation. In some states the courts rule in favor of the family members, leaving the widower a tenant in his own home. Thankfully, Mickey's brother is not likely to do this, but it still happens far too often.
- 2. I would have to pay an estate tax to IRS on anything that I get from Mickey. Because of DOMA the federal government sees me as an arms-length stranger to my own husband. Clause 2 specifically states that "spouse," wherever it is used in any law, has to mean a person of the opposite sex, which nullifies our perfectly legal Connecticut marriage certificate, and further precludes civil unions from being validated should a state not go after the word "marriage."
- 3. I would not get any of Mickey's survivor benefits from his Social Security, in spite of him paying into it his entire life, once again nullified by Clause 2 of DOMA.
And so I find myself as the child who just escaped a basement cell in 2006. In my short five years of freedom I have found wonderful and supportive people who remind me that my captors were not horrible, awful people. No, my friends remind me constantly that my siblings were themselves victims of a captive childhood, and that they carry all the same scars that I do. My husband and my friends remind me that, like Jesus, I should just say, "Lord forgive them for they know not what they do."
And so I try, but then they reach out to me. At first it seemed genuine. It felt nice to hear their reassuring words in my ear, but then, three times in a row, right after whispering support in my ear, all of their poisonous barbs come out. The pain is unbearable.
It would be far better if they just kept to themselves until they find the courage to get counselling to help them see the world as it really is, instead of looking at it from the windows of their basement cell.
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