Coming Out in Mormon Heartland pt. 2 College

About halfway through college, I was at the reception for a cousin’s wedding, and one of the family members of my new cousin-in-law (either her uncle or her dad), introduced himself and asked me who I was and where I was from. 

I told him I was the groom’s cousin, and when I said I was from Utah, a weird sort of smile crept onto his face. And it kind of stayed there without either one of us saying anything. Me, shrinking ever so slightly. Him, grinning down at me like he suddenly knew something about me.

Another cousin-in-law was in the vicinity and, carrying the conversation, he asked this guy if he made it out to Utah very often. There was a dismissive laugh in his response as he assured him that he did not, saying something along the lines of, “Folks tell me, ‘Oh the Utah mountains really are something,’ but they never say that about Utah people for some reason.”

He said that with me just standing there. Not that I think it would have bothered him: he seemed confident that, as a Utah people, I would not discern his meaning. I mean, he was being so subtle …

Anyways, this is the part where I talk about my experience being SSA at BYU, which is really the story of my experience being a Utah kid at BYU.

From Here to Eternity (1953)

And this is another one of those things where a hundred different people will give you a hundred different stories. Again, I can only speak for my own, and that's all I'm going to do. I personally was never made to feel afraid of having similar encounters to what I had with JOE. I actually had more problems with people like my cousin-in-law’s uncle.

The first thing you ought to know is that I was at BYU during a time where there was a remarkable upturn of interest in the intersection between the LGBT community and Church Culture. And from this, I observed larger efforts to direct the conversation to BYU’s queer student body.

During this time, I attended a panel of queer BYU students sharing their experience. They each told their stories, detailing some truly heartbreaking treatment from friends, family, and trusted church leaders.

After each of the panelists shared their stories, the question was presented, “How can I help advocate for gay members while still being respectful?” One of the girls responded, “Listen, there is nothing radical or controversial with advocating for basic human respect. And if they find that offensive, that’s their problem.” Her answer was met with immediate applause.

This went on for about an hour, after which the panelists all walked off stage as the entire auditorium gave them a standing ovation. The Salt Lake Tribune wrote a piece about this event, an excerpt of which made it into The Daily Universe.

I can imagine that these outlets were perhaps helpful for certain individuals, but I almost always left these things feeling more isolated. I couldn’t imagine a scenario where I would ever receive this same kind of reaction. These guys were being embraced, yes, but they were also telling a very specific crowd exactly what they wanted to hear, and I couldn’t see myself joining that choir.

Most of what this dialogue did was highlight the exit sign for gays in bright, neon paint. This was a call for members to “be more accepting of gay individuals,” but all that really meant was that gays had a right to exit the church without inquiry or conversation. I would learn firsthand just how little interest there was in generating discussion about opening doors within the membership. Few who are interested in this conversation are willing to believe that gay saints can thrive while still living the prophetic teachings about marriage. 

When people try to extend sympathy about how hard it must have been for me as a gay student at BYU, it’s generally with very specific expectations. “Surely those weekly devotionals and religion courses specifically about 'The Family: A Proclamation to the World' must have wrought such a heavy toll upon you.”

I never really know what to say to these people. I can certainly imagine that this may have been the reality for certain gay members, and perhaps that’s where they draw their experience from. But I experienced no friction there. And when I try to assure these people, “No, really. I’m happy in The Church, and I never felt targeted at BYU as a gay member,” they often look at me like a pinata who’s still holding out for a couple more whackings. Surely I must be in denial, or else trying to perform wholesomeness. Or maybe I just lack the rhetorical abilities to arrive at the same conclusions that are so obvious to everyone else. They probably didn’t teach that sort of thing in Utah …

When I think about how hard it was being gay at BYU, I don’t really think of my religion classes or anything “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.” Mostly what I remember is being told again and again that I would only ever be accepted for half of who I was at one time, never holistically. Never completely. And lucky me, I would always get to choose which half I brought before the judge, but I would have to choose nonetheless. 

As I said at the start, the only story I can really speak for is my own, and that’s what I’m here to do. Speaking just for Zachary Troy Miller, my time at BYU was made infinitely more stressful, and unnecessarily so, as a Utah kid than it ever was as a person experiencing same-sex attraction.

            The thing about Mormons is that … we have always been a little too good at self-parody. It’s kind of our impulse to make fun ourselves before anyone else can. Maybe that’s helped us be more self-aware. But I’ve also observed it’s given an entire generation of church members a very specific image of what it meant to be a part of this church—an embarrassing image. And when that generation starts to hit BYU, you’re suddenly stuck with a bunch of young followers who don’t even feel comfortable around one another.

The natural impulse becomes to distance oneself from these signifiers of Mormon culture. Maybe you were Mormon. But you weren’t that Mormon, right? Or at least, not that kind of Mormon?

And I felt the division basically from the first day. My first set of roommates, summer term 2014, all sort of found a shared commonality in being the only well-adjusted people attending the university. The only ones who weren’t out of touch with “the real world” and weren’t afraid of a little grown-up joke here and now.

I was the only one who was visibly uncomfortable with the jokes they would make, or the comments they would make about the girls in the ward. This, of course, did not bother them. If anything, it validated them. If this Utah kid thought their jokes were a little too edgy, they must be doing something right. (I don’t think my squirminess with their comments had to do with anything Utah. I would have many roommates during my BYU adventure, the majority of whom were from out of state. And even when I could see we had different expectations for these things, I never felt like they were crossing the lines for propriety the way these guys would.)

Mean Girls (2004)

One of these roommate in particular, I’ll refer to him here as BILL, made a point to frequently remind me of these things, especially in front of other people. Which led to a lot of deeply humiliating experiences in which I felt very targeted.

 I'll remind everyone that, in addition to often striking me as invasive and inappropriate, sex-jokes were often lost on me. So, summer term 2014 when I heard my roommates talking about making it to “second base,” I could infer that it was at least sex-adjacent, but I honestly thought it was a reference to a movie I hadn’t seen, or else some code specific to the boys of Heritage 10 #2102. I made a fatal mistake in asking them, “What’s second base?”

Their reaction was immediate and emphatic. This was fundamentally the same mistake I made when I casually misused the word “queer” in 8^th grade. Except that even though I was now stumbling in front of a crowd of two, their laughter did more to fill the room than an entire classroom of 9^th graders had. They didn't laugh this hard watching "The Office." I specifically remember the Cheshire Cat grin on BILL’s face when he pronounced from across the room, “Dude! You are so Utahn!”

“Utahn.” The word felt so gross. Incriminating. Like every injury I could accrue would somehow be justified under this moniker. And he said it with such authority. Like he knew something about me, something that I didn’t know about myself.

And honestly, the fact that I was not fluent in this kind of talk, that may have had something to do with being from Utah, but … most of my Utah friends felt the same way about me. I also remember an experience I had as a priest during a quorum swim activity. Some of the men in the locker room (not part of our ward outing) were bolder at getting undressed than I ever would as someone who genuinely felt uncomfortable being naked around other guys. I made an observation to my friend about whether it was asking for too much for some of the guys to undress in a stall or behind a towel, and this friend laughed at me about how “Aw Zach, you would not survive out of Utah!”

It’s actually only with hindsight that I really recognize how many friend groups I was a part of, both in high school and college, that only kept me around because I was some sort of social trampoline. Pushing down on me and my inability to keep up helped make a lot of insecure millennial Mormons feel elevated, secure that however awkward they felt as “a peculiar people,” at least they weren’t as peculiar as this Zach kid.

Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

But even at their most patronizing, my Utah friends never made me feel like the way BILL did. The vigor with which these guys would ostracize me, while also marking some kind of ownership of me, that wasn’t something I really experienced in my quorums or in my classrooms.

            BILL came to that conclusion about me fairly early on. After that first week, I could probably count on one hand the number of conversations that didn’t end with some observation about my Utah-ness and what this meant about me as a person. The onus seemed to fall on me to prove in advance that I did not deserve the snideness or abasement. 

            I remember one conversation in particular where we had some doctrinal disagreement over scripture. The ideas he was expressing felt very counter to everything I had learned about the Atonement or The Savior, but that only assured him that he was in the right. (To this day, I have never heard his ideas corroborated by any Religion Professor or General Authority.) He apparently thought he had won this debate because I remember walking out of his room hearing him musing with our roommate about how, “You know, sometimes I actually feel kinda bad being the one to ruin his perfect little world …”

            Culture clash is one thing, but the friction I experienced here was near debilitating. I could never gauge when I was walking into a situation that would leave me feeling humiliated. My defenses were up here far more than they were growing up among other members.

I won’t say that literally every one of my BYU classmates held this attitude. But neither do I think this was some kind of phenomenon. It’s always been easy for members raised outside of Utah to project certain things onto us, I’d imagine, for many of the same reasons why it’s always been easy for the larger world to look down on The Church as a whole. It would later occur to me that many of the observations my roommates would throw down on me were inherited.

These were kids who had been punished by the world for their association with a church that had been judged “weird” and “backward.” They were relieved to arrive in Mormon Heartland, and they delighted in Utah kids like me on whom they could displace all that baggage. If only the world could see, Mormons aren’t dumb, naïve, backward, it’s just the Utah kids who give The Church a bad name! (These were, invariably, the first people in the room to complain about how they couldn’t stand BYU’s judgmental culture.)

I felt pre-emptive guilt that I was somehow enabling him to carry these conceptions around, making things harder for the next guy from Utah Valley who roomed with BILL. I consistently bore the shame of feeling like I was making things harder for Utah kids everywhere by not being smart or charismatic enough. How could I tell the world, “I swear, not all Utah kids are as awkward as me, please don’t make them suffer my transgressions.” And from this cycle bred further awkwardness and further distance.

The Searchers (1956) John Wayne hovers outside the threshold of the home, knowing he doesn't really belong there, before he returns to the wilderness

This also had repercussions for how I was treated in classroom or apartment discussions. My favorite was always anytime the topic of gays in The Church would come up, and I’d inevitably have roommates who considered themselves learned in these things linking the suicide rate among queer youth directly to The Church. I’d express a deviating perspective, formed by my own experiences, and propose some alternate explanation. The BILLs in my life would return with a grin and some assurance that I’d feel different once I was as close to the subject as they were. Even when I was agreeing with what was being said, whenever I bothered to contribute I still often found myself somehow on the receiving end of looks saying, “Sorry, Zach, the adults are talking.”

I will afford a modicum of grace here and let myself assume that most of these folks were not being actively spiteful or malicious—even as many of them would go out of their way to target me. Most people have a very singular vision of what it means to advocate for saints with same-sex attraction, and I absolutely did not fit within the framework. But neither am I fully content to believe that they were exercising their full range of open-mindedness, certainly not to the extent they thought they were.

There was a way to escape this treatment—you could renounce Utah as your homeland. Join in the joke. Reassure the majority that, yes, being raised in Utah is the worst caste you could be born into. You paid membership to this club by supplying more horror stories. A lot of my Utah classmates would take this approach. But that seemed like a terribly steep price to pay. And so I was frequently left wondering why the flagbearers of tolerance always left me feeling like their respect came with a price tag.

I would also occasionally experience the flip side of this in groups where I had managed to find myself in everyone’s good graces. What happened almost as often was a friend assuming that because I was so well-adjusted, I obviously couldn’t be from Utah. Or if I was, then surely I must have wished otherwise. This happened even more once I enrolled in BYU’s Film Program during the start of my 3rd year. I remember a night when we were at BYU’s Life Science Museum for a special class, and one of the info graphics explained the basics of evolutionary theory. A classmate made a snickering comment (not directed at me specifically, I think) about being surprised that they were even allowed to talk about this in Utah.

I don’t imagine for a second that no one carries a heavier cross than Utah Mormons. But I’ve long beheld certain ironies in how people have chosen to interact with me. In spaces where I did disclose my situation, I would occasionally be assured that the world needs to “hear my story” or that “your pain is R E A L,” but when I shared something like, “I really wish that people would stop assuming that I’m more stupid than I am just because I’m from Utah,” their eyes would sort of glaze over.

And in this way, a lot of my associates have revealed a lack of imagination in their supposition that us members who happen to grow up in Utah Valley have never had trials, that we have never had our testimonies challenged. Medical hardships, bullying, the death of a parent, these were not things we knew about here in Happy Valley. And we certainly never have to figure out our place in the world as Saints who experience SSA and kinda get the idea that neither party really wants us.

Modern Times (1936) starring and directed by Charlie Chaplin, the greatest comedian in history
Theater critic, Walter Kerr, wrote of Chaplin, "Infinitely adaptable but universally a fraud, Chaplin now has no one identity to embrace, to enter wholeheartedly, to feel secure about, to find rest in. He can only come out of nowhere, open his bag of tricks on demand, pretend to be what is asked of him for a moment or so, and go away again."

Now, there are a few reasons for me describing these experiences in this space—feeling targeted as a Utah kid at BYU is an essential part of my story as a gay member.

I feel like it’s important for one to communicate that there has never been any single indicator that a person was “safe” for me. Conservatives looked down on me for one reason. Liberals for another. Members raised outside of the state were just as likely to ostracize me as members raised in Utah, and they were both just as likely as nonmembers.

The difference being that … MRS. JOE did what she did, I assume, because she thought I was trying to steal her husband. The MRS. JOE situation was frustrating, absolutely. I didn’t like it. But I understood it. I accepted that I was a bit of an aberration in a rigid system, and that this would create friction. With BILL, though, it just felt so needless. No one was making him do the things that he did. There was nothing like self-preservation at work here. Just him wanting a bunch of 18-year-olds to tell him he was cool. 

And something I need to convey is that I put up with way more BILLs in my college years than I ever did JOEs growing up. I would often be surprised at how conversational many of my schoolmates would be about this. There was no Gospel Doctrine lesson, FHE game night, or American Heritage lab where this topic could not come up. And why wouldn’t it? This was basically how you made friends at BYU, particularly in a lot of the more left-leaning circles I often myself in as I followed my academic path. Even many of the professors sort of caught onto that disenchantment with “Mormon culture” and had figured out that they could score points among their millennial demographic if they found creative ways to signal that they, too, were above this sort of thing.

This also isn’t to imagine that I hated my time at BYU. I was grateful for my experiences there and for many of the friends I made. And not every person who would have called themselves “ally” felt like a really aggressive TSA agent. I interacted with a lot of folks whose commitment to advocacy rang true. There were a lot of people with whom I made genuine connection and from whom I learned a lot.

The only person with whom I shared my experiences with SSA during this time (who was not a family member, ecclesiastical leader, or participant in a support group) was a trusted professor who had very outspoken liberal ideals. She was also one of those few people I interacted with during this period of my life who saw me as not just “nice” or “sweet,” but smart. She was rare in her ability to make me believe I actually had ideas that were worth listening to, and she even helped arrange for me to present at an academic conference my final semester.

My observation is that whatever political persuasion a person feels predisposed to, wherever they grew up, and whether or not they are practicing members of The Church, they each have equal opportunity, and responsibility, to learn how to coexist with a person whose life experience they don’t understand. At the end of the day, I have always allowed people to show me themselves what it meant for them to be a disciple of Christ or an #ally through their actions.

I’m grateful that the culture within the church has progressed such that gay individuals are afforded more protection than they were in the past. I’m glad that there has been a reckoning with the specific realities that queer people face. I’d posit, however, that there are further steps that need to be taken in order for members to truly love as Christ did. And outspoken allies of this crowd would certainly agree with me on that, but I might further posit that they will never actually find out what those steps are so long as the membership is taking notes from people who have never liked us. 

Anyway, it was during this time that the possibility of going public about who I was really started to stir in me. More than once, I got to wrestle with whether I should offer a piece of myself that I wasn’t ready to offer, or just resign myself to the public castration. I was tired of people looking down on me, of them daring to assume that ruining my “perfect little world” was their lot in life. 

But these emotions were not motivated by righteousness. Not by the love of my Savior. It wasn’t really even something I wanted to do to stop people from hurting me. Really, it was something I wanted to do to hurt them back. To make them feel stupid.

But this was the most personal piece of myself I had to offer. And I didn’t want to sell it for spite. And so in the end, I chose to continue in my silence. Not out of shame, but because my yoke would have absolutely not been made lighter by making myself vulnerable to people who simply chose to see me as less-than.

But the possibility of going public, that never really left me.

Frozen II (2019)

        To Be Continued ...