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Q. Is one of these men bisexual?
A. Probably
Better A. It depends on how you define it.
Bisexuality is an extremely problematic label, simply because it has never been defined. Nobody (and I mean NOBODY) can define bisexuality because there is no consensus on what it means. It is generally understood to refer to a person who can be sexually attracted to both males and females. However, sexuality is very complex and this simple definition is not only useless but is harmful, because of the mis-understandings it creates.
For the purpose of this essay I am going to attempt to avoid the word bisexual by dividing people with any same-sex attraction into 2 broad categories:
Group A: Those who can succeed in a Mixed-Orientation Marriage (MOM)
Group B: Those who can’t
It might be argued that most people in group A are at least partly ‘bisexual’, and the people in group B are ‘totally gay’. Those simplistic labels don’t allow for the complexities involved, and so I will try to talk about Group A or Group B.
Until very recently, most people in group A who were Mormons remained fairly invisible and married people of the opposite gender. These people also had an easier time staying in the church. Many of them found themselves to be Bishops, Stake Presidents, General Authorities and even Apostles. The people in this group ended up having a huge impact on how the church viewed homosexuality.
Meanwhile the people in Group B had a different experience. Many of them knew early on that they couldn’t maintain a mixed-orientation marriage (MOM) and chose either celibacy or same-sex relationships. Others entered MOM’s but these invariably failed. These people did not find themselves in leadership roles in the church because single people are never given high callings, and openly gay people have generally been extruded. The reasons that they couldn’t enter or maintain MOM’s surely was closely correlated to the sum of their (sexual) attraction to the same gender and their aversion to the opposite gender. (It should also be pointed out that attraction/aversion will also be variable in various realms of relationships including emotional bonding, physical intimacy, etc.)
It is impossible to know how many people fit in group A or group B, but it is reasonable to guess that among men, 5% of the population fits into each of these groups. I am only going to talk about the men right now because women have long been excluded from policy and decision making within Mormonism.
So let’s think about how each group is impacting the place of homosexuals in the church. Historically, the men in group B have had virtually no impact in Mormonism, simply because they are all marginalized or extruded, and are virtually never in leadership roles. Men who remain celibate and single are virtually never extended leadership callings, and marriage is a requirement for Bishops, Stake Presidents, and General Authorities. Divorced men are similarly excluded from leadership and influence, and openly gay men and women even more so.
Meanwhile the men in group A, which I estimate as 1 in 20 Mormon men, blended into every level of Mormon hierarchy. This means that every stake likely had at least one bishop or high councilor who had same-sex attraction (and maintained a successful marriage).
These Group A men had lived a particular experience. They had felt same-sex attractions and may have had homosexual encounters. However, they were in a position to choose a straight life-style, and they did so. The men in group B didn’t have that possibility. Many of them tried to by getting married, but these marriages ended in failure and substantial damage.
Although the men in Group A were discreet about their histories of same-sex attraction, they were most certainly drawn to the issue whenever it came up. They certainly agreed that it was a choice, since that had been their experience. They also were very likely to be more homophobic than their peers who had never had same-sex attraction (this is actually well supported by research).
It is therefore highly likely that throughout the history of the church, there have been men serving in the quorum of the 12 who have experienced same-gender attraction, who have exercised the choice to get married, who have had successful marriages, and who likely have taken an extremely homophobic posture as a mechanism of self defense in that conflicted position. And it is highly likely that these men have had a huge impact on the policies impacting all homosexuals within the church (much to the misfortune of those in Group B, who didn’t have a voice).
You can easily imagine one of these men in Group A serving as a Bishop. It is obvious that he would counsel any person reporting same-gender attraction to do exactly what he did–make a choice and get married. You can easily imagine the Group A person on the high council attending a church court where somebody is being excommunicated for homosexual relationships. You can imagine a Stake President who also is in Group A addressing the Aaronic Priesthood in the stake. The outcomes are decent for the Group A people in their congregations, and terrible for those in Group B.
It seems pretty obvious that these men had a role in forming and perpetuating church policies that encouraged reparative therapy and aversion therapy, as well as marriage as a cure for homosexuality. It was only recently that the Apostles decided to start paying attention to the experience of its own clinicians at LDS Family Services who had been noticing and reporting the disastrous results of these policies. This was helped by a core of faithful Mormon activist allies who came to the cause in the 1980’s and 90’s who helped the church leaders start considering the large body of scientific research that proves the futility of trying to change sexual orientation.
A new climate in Mormonism thus emerged, that is slightly more open to considering some of the realities of homosexuality. This has created a different type of Mormon in Group A–married men and women who openly acknowledge their homosexuality (or SSA/SGA). Although they do face some marginalization for speaking out, some of them have found a voice in the Mormon community and have become influential to the church leaders as they contemplate issues impacting LGBT people.
This new breed of Group A members have had both a positive and negative impact. The positive has primarily come because some high-profile individuals have succeeded in partially removing the stigma of homosexuality and have helped promote the message that having homosexual attractions is not a sin (in and of itself). The negative effect comes because many of these group A people generalize their own experience, ignoring and denying the realities of Group B members. The people in group B still have almost no voice within the church, and are still only represented by people in Group A, all of whom happen to have inborn capacities to follow a respected path in Mormonism and assume everybody has these same capacities. These Group A voices often try to promote their path as being superior, thus continuing the marginalization of Group B.
I must point out that there have been some amazing exceptions to this trend, as a growing number of Group A people are advocating for the needs of those in Group B. Although few in number, there is also a brand new development of Group B people who have just barely started to have a voice within the church’s dialogue about homosexuality.
Meanwhile in the leadership of our Stakes, Wards and in the upper hierarchy of the church, there remain closeted homophobic Group A individuals. (Fortunately the homophobic stances by any church leader are being harder to maintain as the younger, more tolerant generation moves into these leadership positions.)
A broader discussion of bisexuality is badly needed in our Mormon community, partly to recognize the above phenomenon. It is also badly needed as part of a discussion of how to identify who can successfully enter a mixed-orientation marriage. Even though MOM’s are no longer being held out as a cure for homosexuality, it is still being pursued by young LGBT people because it is seen as the only socially acceptable way to participate in Mormonism. Single Mormons don’t hold an enviable position in Mormonism and for many LGBT Mormons, even a MOM seems less dismal than life as a single Mormon.
Unfortunately, Bishops who counsel young LGBT/SSA people aren’t given tools to help them make good choices. This leads to many disastrous marriages that end in divorce and familial disintegration and even suicide. It is pretty clear that sexual attraction to one’s spouse has been an essential feature in these MOMs that succeed. So whether or not you call that bisexuality, opposite sex attraction and aversion need to be taken into account.
But it is not just sexual attraction/aversion that predict success. There are lots of anecdotes of gay people who described good sexual relationships with their opposite sex spouses, but had to leave the marriage due to the ever increasing suicidal feelings that led them to either leave the marriage or die. These questions badly need the help of research, to really identify factors that can predict success and failure.
There is another more serious problem that has arisen due to the different realities of Group A and Group B, and it is currently contributing to the church’s non-action on the dreadfully high suicide rate among LGBT Mormon Youth. Research has clearly established that the family and community rejection experienced by LGBT youth during their adolescence is the biggest factor leading to suicides both as teens and later as adults. And there is similar proof that rejected teens also are more likely to be infected with HIV and be involved in drug addiction both as teens and later as adults. The difference in outcomes between rejecting and accepting families is huge, as research by the Family Acceptance project has shown an 8 fold increase in these bad outcomes for LGBT people who came from rejecting homes. The church has been reluctant to act on this information, because they still operate on the wishful thinking that if we discourage teens from calling themselves gay, then they are might outgrow it. Research has shown this thinking to be faulty. If the church would listen to the experience of people in Group B they would have tons of testimonials.
However, in this case, the church is only paying attention to people in Group A. Those people are the very ones who have had SSA, but have also had some opposite sex attraction. They describe this experience and conclude that they were better off not boxing themselves in with the label ‘gay’. This doesn’t surprise the researchers, since they conceptualize Group A as ‘bisexual’. However, since the Group A people reject this label there is no discussion of the distinction, and no effort to differentiate between Group A and Group B. The problem is obviously exacerbated by the church’s view that a homosexual orientation is clearly inferior to a heterosexual one. Without that back-ground assumption, then there would no mis-guided efforts to guide our youth toward heterosexuality. What the church refuses to recognize is that no efforts to impact a youth’s sexual orientation, one way or the other, has ever be shown to be effective. By the time they are teens, their orientation is something that is merely to be discovered, not changed. It is already formed and unchangeable. There is clear scientific consensus on this.
So the church has made a deal with the devil here. They think they are saving a few vulnerable youth (aka bisexual youth) from going to the dark side (same-sex relationships) at the cost of a huge number of suicides of the (totally gay) youth who could be saved if their families were taught by the church how to stop the damaging, rejecting behaviors. Either they are calling it a calculated loss of life, or they are not looking at the data. However, they are listening to the experience of Group A people who are convinced by their own experiences. Many of them are convinced that a ‘sinful’ gay life would have been too compelling if their families and church hadn’t given them rejecting messages–those same rejecting messages that end up killing so many in Group B. (Once again, I can not continue without a huge applause for the people in Group A who are exceptions to this generalization! I am acquainted with several of them, and they have opened themselves up to great criticism by bucking the trend. It is even more admirable because they have opened their own lives and marriages to intense scrutiny and criticism from both sides of the aisle–all in an effort to bring light to the suffering of their Group B brothers and sisters.)
It really is a matter of life or death. The lack of a nuanced discussion on bisexuality helps perpetuate a dynamic in the church that is leading to an enormous loss of life in our communities.
I hope researchers will begin addressing the complexities of sexual attraction and aversion and come up with more helpful categories that better help people assess and understand their own situation, and that also help the church make more compassionate policies toward the people impacted by these issues. I also hope that church leaders will start taking into account the realities and experiences of Group B men and women who still don’t have a place of full integration in the church and certainly don’t receive much hope from their church participation.
Daniel Parkinson
DANIEL PARKINSON was born and raised in Utah to a Mormon family with a thick Mormon Heritage. He comes to this issue as a psychiatrist, with a strong sense of activism, and a desire to help the two communities that he inherited as his birthright: the Mormon community, and the gay community. He administrates the GayMormonStories.org podcast and the NoMoreStrangers.org blog.
All posts by Daniel Parkinson
This analysis would be more powerful if you provided support for the claim that 5% of the male population falls into each of “Group A” and “Group B”. Without that, I don’t know how you can suppose that 1 in 20 Mormon leaders experiences same sex attraction.
Most studies actually put the number a bit lower. I wasn’t rigorous about the exact numbers because even if (low-ball) estimates put the number at less than half that, the impact is similar.
Although I agree with your overall argument, I disagree that high ranking leaders over the course of mormon history have “highly likely” negatively influenced policy and corporate views. Your two groups are too narrow. What about those of men who marry women and struggle their whole lives with it, stay active, but are not homophobic? That group I believe largely factions your group that turns homophobic. Your research link for that by the way doesn’t necessarily support your argument.
The group of non-homophobic men in mixed-orientation is an emerging phenomenon. A generation ago it was impossible for anybody to not be homophobic, including LGBT people themselves, because of the intense negativity in society. I do see it as a new thing that explains the more recent trend for these men to be more open and even high-profile about it (although I still don’t see these open men serving in high church callings….maybe that will happen soon as they actually gave Ty Mansfield a temporary position at BYU)
Outstanding insight and observations! I wholeheartedly agree.
Do you happen to have sources for some of the data you cited? (LDS LGBT suicide rates, HIV infection among rejected youth?). Is all of that on the Famiky Acceptance website? Or could you provide other links? I think those are important for more people to understand.
There is excellent data at the Family Acceptance Project. The actual suicide rate can only be guessed at because the State of Utah has not taken an interest in identifying the roll of orientation in its extremely high suicide rate of young men. However, the it is important to note that Utah has one of the highest rates of suicide among young men, and anyone familiar with the issue is convinced that it is young gay men who are driving this statistic. The other stats about the roll of rejection in suicidality, HIV infection and drug use come from the excellent research by family acceptance project.
I’m also guessing that there are also several full-blooded ethnic minorities in their ranks also based on extrapolating national statistics. 😉
It is a little easier to hide your ‘same sex attraction’ than hide your race. I know several men who served as Bishops who are now openly gay. J Edgar Hoover made it to the top of the FBI, and there was not a lot of tolerance for gay people in that agency…in fact they actively persecuted gay people. The point of my article is that people with same-sex attraction are common, the ones who can survive in mixed-orientation marriages are not visible, and they are at every level of society, both in and out of the church. These same people have had a huge reason to be very homophobic, because they were forced to fight against their own homosexual feelings in order to maintain any acceptance in their churches and in their societies and they internalized this as a religious mandate, and also because they were very paranoid about being found out, and thus had to prove to others that they have no sympathy for gays. This is actually so common that most gay men can remember a time in their lives when they were in the closet and did exactly the same thing.
There are far to many extrapolations in your analysis to be credible. Also far too many assumptions on what a bi-sexually attracted Bishop might counsel a same sex attracted person to do, as in get married. Also assuming that people in the church advocating for tolerance are in Group A and/or B?
So many suppositions that group A is contributing to group B’s high suicide rates? It’s hard to comprehend just how many fact-ish sounding things you as a Psychiatrist have superimposed on what might also be a manufactured issue. Scientific consensus, calculated loss OR not looking at data?
The mental scientific community went from shock, lobotomy and drug therapies to nothing in researching possible change therapies. The religious change therapies filled the void caused by the sudden absence of the previously devious methods once employed, science is still unable to determine the origins of same sex attraction let alone have any “consensus” other than “we think the answer may be genetics”. And mental science is an even less exact science because the factors leading to certain mental states are not uniformly measurable.
You sir are doing a disservice to anyone who identifies as bi-sexual or gay by perpetuating the myth that sexuality cannot and will never change. Calling people homophobic who may or may not have had sexual experiences/attractions with same gender people and chose another path is absolutely offensive and so wrong. Please use less supposition and conjecture.
Also you used extruded multiple times instead of excluded. Extrusion is the process of creating materials (plastics, metals etc…) into complex patterns or with specific cross sectional properties.
I think you bring up a VERY good point; scientific research into SGA went from a kind of twisted science into absolutely nothing. Are you kidding? If any legitimate psychologist tried to do a study to say anything other than “they are born with it” then they would be ostracized, criticized, and blackballed. This is as much a disservice to the gay community, in my opinion, as homophobes telling them to just get married and get over it.
Science isn’t allowed to ask politically incorrect questions.
That said I do think that there may be some merit to this article. I don’t agree with the author on every point, and think he makes a few assumptions about church leadership. But nevertheless I think that we do need to approach SGA different than we do.
I don’t think that bishops, or any church leaders should encourage individuals with SGA to get married. In fact I would think teh advice should be the opposite. I mean if a hypothetical young man goes in and confesses to his bishop that he’s had SGA feelings then it would be more wise of the bishop to advise that young man to not worry about marriage right away. Why set him up for failure? Instead tell him to work on himself and get closer to God.
It’s so funny to me sometimes that alcoholism or smoking are met with universal “oh, yeah he’s got that problem” in the church, whereas homosexuality it met with an instant “no it’s wrong wrong wrong and you’ll go to hell”. I don’t think we should shy away from the fact that homosexual activity is a sin; doing so would undermine the moral values of the church. But we should recognize that some people are struggling with it and find ways to counsel them with more than “just get married” or “choose to be straight”.
As with any temptation it’s far more important to look at where the personal relationship with God is first and foremost, and improve that relationship whenever possible. That takes time, understanding, and perseverance on the part of the individual and the ecclesiastical leaders working with him/her.
I greatly appreciate this article! I am pansexual (which I consider to be a subcategory of bisexual) and growing up in the church I used to say homophobic things like “it’s a choice” to people who fit in category B. I wasn’t intending to be rude, and even have always supported gay marriage, but I didn’t understand until more recently when I began to examine my own experiences and studies about sexuality that I realized sexuality really is a rainbow. =}
Fascinating post. The field of bisexuality is white (well, purple, actually) and ready to harvest/define.
May there be more love and understanding among all of us, from pink to purple and blue and all the other rainbow colors and groups.
How, exactly, do you think it felt, as a bisexual female in the church, to hear you say that you’re not even going to talk about me, because I don’t matter anyway?
How do you think it felt to read that my identity, my label, my orientation, cannot be defined or UNDERSTOOD?
How do you think it felt to be lumped in with men whose internalized oppression led them to oppress other queer people?
The idea that bisexual men are the impetus for the homophobic policies of the church is absurd.
The idea that an opposite sex marriage magically solves a bisexual person’s sexual and religions conflicts is insulting.
Props for being so illustrative in how bisexual erasure and misogyny hurt queer women, though. Good post.
Your concerns and comments here are extremely valid and relevant. I wrote this over a year ago, and if I were to do it again I would get more input from people who identify as bisexual. I would also make it clear that I wasn’t attempting to describe the experience of bisexuals today, but rather to discuss a dynamic that led the church leaders to mistakenly believe that all gay people could change their orientation, based on interactions with certain people (mostly male) who were bisexual (by definition..NOT by self identification).
This is particularly relevant now after the highly publicized TLC program “My Husband’s Not Gay” because these men who are clearly bisexual are adverse to using that label on themselves, and continue to perpetuate the idea that ALL gay people can survive in opposite-sex marriages.
None of this discussion really begins to address the issues actually faced by bisexuals today, nor the damage that is done to them when they are forced to hide or adapt to a role that doesn’t fit them. If my article appears to blame bisexuals for all the problems gays face, then it was a problem in how I presented the information. There are many bisexual AND homosexual people who contribute to movements that damage other LGBT people. They most often do it because of the internalized homophobia, or the need to survive in a hostile world. Many of them later realize the damage of their actions and the apologize (as we have seen lately from many ex-gay leaders). I personally don’t blame these people. I blame the system that forced/convinced them to deny their own sexuality, and hurt others in order to survive.
Calling the term bisexual ‘problematic’ was clearly a mistake. I guess I was thinking of certain complicating factors about the term. For my purposes, as well as the purposes of research, we sometimes need a definition that is separate from self identification. For example, if we define bisexual as anybody who is 2, 3, or 4 on the Kinsey scale, that would be useful for research parameters, even though people who are 1 or 5 could also be called bisexual. These guys in the TLC program would meet certain definitions of bisexual but clearly don’t consider themselves bisexual. Then of course there are lots of people who call themselves gay or straight who probably would meet those criteria of bisexuality. On the other hand there are people who are less bisexual, but prefer the term at that moment (as many of us unipolar gay people went through a phase where we called ourselves bisexual because it was easier to accept at the time).
I guess my point is that we have terms that are used for self identification, and we have terms that are descriptive, but independent of self identification, and they are used inter-changeably without much clarification of which you are using at the time.
We also have similar problems with the term gay. People on the far right AND on the far left will tell you that gay is a social construct. From a research perspective, I need a term that refers to a sexual orientation. If I hook a person teen to a machine that measures sexual arousal, then some of them will be aroused to the same sex, some to the opposite sex, some to both, and some to neither. Homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual and asexual would fit, but those words also have clearly different meanings that simply arousal patterns.
We definitely need way more discussion of bisexuality and the experience of bisexuals written from their perspective, especially women who are under-represented in every conversation about sexual orientation.
Great job blaming bisexuals for causing their own erasure and putting them at fault for the oppression of gay men. I especially love how you feel it's completely cool to continue the process of ignoring femme identifying Mormons including queer females. Because why mess with that tradition of Mormonism? The really good parts of saying that bisexuals must be able to choose our sexuality and there is no way that gay men could be able to stay in mixed orientation marriages or oppress fellow members of the LGBTQIA+ community, even if there are records within the LDS church history of even a Prophet being gay! Nope, must be bisexuals fault because they somehow can choose their sexuality despite that being totally not possible for anyone. Oh wait, I forgot that we can't call people who have and identify as having varying degrees of romantic and sexual attraction to two (or more) genders. Heck, we can't even imagine using the generally accepted definition or labels of anyone who is bisexual or call anyone anything other than the "safe" words designed by the very people who want to ignore all of the LGBTQIA + persuasion and erase us.
Bravo for making sure that I know how much I really don't belong in the Mormon world as a bisexual woman.
Rose commented just above and expressed similar concerns as you. I explained my feelings about her valid concerns, and so I won’t repeat, but I hope you will see my response just above.
There needs to be a corollary to Poe and Godwin – any mention of sexuality on the internet with a comment section will inevitably result in a commenter derailing by claiming that a) bisexuality is both almost or completely universal AND erased and rendered invisble, b) gays, specifically gay men, are ultimately to blame either because of some mythical "gay privilege" or because gay men are really bisexual (they just haven't met the right woman apparently) c) biphobia is somehow both different and worse than homophobia AND heterosexism and heterosexual privege doesn't exist but is used by gay men to oppress bisexuals d) when delimiting an ascibed male non-heterosexual identity,a prior heterosexual relationship, sexual or otherwise, is both absolute proof of bisexuality or a gay men attempting to pass as straight against his true nature, depending on whether the man in question makes for a sympathetic exemplar for bisexuality. The internet has fueled a small but vocal cottage industry of trolls who may or may not be actually bisexual but whose real motivation seems to be a visceral hatred of gay men. What is the word we use for that? Oh yea, homophobia!
There needs to be a corollary to Poe and Godwin – any mention of sexuality on the internet with a comment section will inevitably result in a commenter derailing by claiming that a) bisexuality is both almost or completely universal AND erased and rendered invisble, b) gays, specifically gay men, are ultimately to blame either because of some mythical "gay privilege" or because gay men are really bisexual (they just haven't met the right woman apparently) c) biphobia is somehow both different and worse than homophobia AND heterosexism and heterosexual privege doesn't exist but is used by gay men to oppress bisexuals d) when delimiting an ascibed male non-heterosexual identity,a prior heterosexual relationship, sexual or otherwise, is both absolute proof of bisexuality or a gay men attempting to pass as straight against his true nature, depending on whether the man in question makes for a sympathetic exemplar for bisexuality. The internet has fueled a small but vocal cottage industry of trolls who may or may not be actually bisexual but whose real motivation seems to be a visceral hatred of gay men. What is the word we use for that? Oh yea, homophobia!
There needs to be a corollary to Poe and Godwin – any mention of sexuality on the internet with a comment section will inevitably result in a commenter derailing by claiming that a) bisexuality is both almost or completely universal AND erased and rendered invisble, b) gays, specifically gay men, are ultimately to blame either because of some mythical "gay privilege" or because gay men are really bisexual (they just haven't met the right woman apparently) c) biphobia is somehow both different and worse than homophobia AND heterosexism and heterosexual privege doesn't exist but is used by gay men to oppress bisexuals d) when delimiting an ascibed male non-heterosexual identity,a prior heterosexual relationship, sexual or otherwise, is both absolute proof of bisexuality or a gay men attempting to pass as straight against his true nature, depending on whether the man in question makes for a sympathetic exemplar for bisexuality. The internet has fueled a small but vocal cottage industry of trolls who may or may not be actually bisexual but whose real motivation seems to be a visceral hatred of gay men. What is the word we use for that? Oh yea, homophobia!