Evacuation Orders
This past fall, I felt myself begin to crack again. I felt the threat of becoming a million disparate pieces. Also this past fall, Dr. Yolanda Pierce of Howard Divinity School gave a lecture at BYU on syncretic religious practice among early black Americans and what lessons we can learn from them. I attended. During the Q&A, I felt something jarringly familiar, something I remembered from the orthodoxy of my adolescence: the call to testify. The flip in my stomach, quiver in my fingers, trembling of my voice all reminded me of testimony meeting. So I got up, completely unsure of what to say, walked up to the front of the room, waited for my turn, and asked this question: how am I supposed to enter discussions of faith with my peers if my queerness, one of the cores of my identity, is on the chopping block?
Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised that I, activist and gadfly of BYU since my freshman year, would say such a thing. But at the same time, I could clearly see the back of Kevin J. Worthen's head. I want to imagine I saw a bead of sweat accumulate on his temple when he heard the gay twang in my voice. Regardless, her response to my question has now become one of my primary tethers to a God that I want to believe in. She said this: “Where you find space to bring your whole self, all of the pieces of you, those are going to be the spaces that are healthy and healing and transformative. If those spaces are saying that you have to hide any part of yourself in order to be here, then they're not ready for you.”
To be honest, this was not the answer that I wanted. After all, people had been telling me for months and years that I should just leave BYU if I don't "agree" with its policies. What I really wanted was for someone to tell me what to do, plain and simple. But she, unlike all the others, was placing the decision firmly within the space between God and me. It would be our choice to make together, whether I should go or stay, and what to do about it. As of writing this, I'm still not sure where I belong. I honestly distrust the idea that there is a place anywhere for me to show up with all of my pieces put together. Aren't we all constantly refashioning ourselves anyway, shaving bits and pieces off and then pasting them back on, all just to fit within this or that social situation?
If there is anywhere to be even close to whole, it might be here, on this page. This is ironic, of course, because language is so hopelessly limiting and fragmented, written language even more so. But I think there is a simple sort of power in avoiding the gaze of my audience. To write, if only for a moment, is to be with yourself. So, in an ultimately vain effort to gather up my scattered, broken pieces, I will take advantage of this momentary solitude and paste some of these fragments onto the page. These are stories that contradict the narrative that I desperately want people to believe in. They threaten the outward image that I have spent years constructing in order to be believed and welcomed in. But here I choose to avoid everyone's glares and take this risk in order to attempt something like honesty.
I.
This first memory is fractured and potholed from my numerous retellings of it. But some facts remain: (1) I was accepted to BYU in the early spring of 2020 before the Honor Code change and subsequent reversal; (2) I decided to go to BYU anyway (against the advice of all my family and friends) because I was sure I could change things; and (3) I attended a protest against the reversal at the base of the Church Office Building in Salt Lake City during the first week of April. The number of protesters was small. I was in high school at the time, and the fatigued lines of BYU students gave me one of my first tastes of what I was in for.
Among a tangled jumble of a million blurred memories, one sticks out. One of the organizers, a mother of a queer BYU student, instructed us all to kneel facing the soaring façade in front of us. She then prayed, a simple prayer, that the leaders of the Church would understand us. Tears streamed down my face and I felt in my stomach that deep, physical warmth of knowing and being known. As I looked up at the building, I noticed that several stories up, people were poking their heads out from the outdoor staircase and taking pictures of us, little ragged rainbow dots on the pavement.
It was strange knowing that God, in this moment, knew me and knew us, understood me and understood us. But the leaders that we were pleading with, on our knees, puny at the feet of their massive skyscraper throne, remained, as always, unmoved. I half-expected a giant granite foot to step out from the building and smash us all into pieces, smaller fragments than we already were.
II.
With this story, I want to make it clear that I am not trying to make up excuses. But I probably will because I would like to believe that there are good reasons behind every choice that I make—even when there aren't. On October 31st, 2020, I woke up feeling brave. Controversial, perhaps, would be a better word for it. And Halloween seemed like a pretty good opportunity to make a statement. I rushed over to the cramped sink of my freshman dorm and began applying the eye makeup (shadow, winged liner, mascara) that I had spent months perfecting. After pulling on a skirt, I looked in the mirror. I didn't look queer enough. So, in an act of stupid desperation, I pulled out a piece of cardstock and scrawled the following inscription: “I am the scariest thing at BYU. A faggot.” I pierced the paper with a silver chain necklace, clipped the mess around my neck and rushed to campus.
Once there, I basically got the reaction that I expected. The typical passive-aggressive, uncomfortable, eyes-averted, Mormon response. What shocked me was that I got a similar reaction from queer acquaintances. But I didn't think much of their nervous laughter at the time. About an hour later as I sunned myself in the waning October light on a campus terrace, my friend stuck his phone in my face and pointed to the screen. I saw a picture of myself taken from several yards away, probably an hour previous. Odd. Then I noticed that this picture was on Twitter. And then I noticed what the caption said. Since the tweet has long since been deleted, I can't give an exact quote, but it went something like this: “This is a BYU student's Halloween costume today. I can't believe how openly homophobic people are here!” Frankly, it was probably more acerbic than that, but you get the point.
I opened my own phone and saw that I was tagged multiple times in the comments with people saying, "Wait, is this you?" I quickly commented that it was me, a queer student at BYU trying to be brave, not a homophobic dick trying to make a stupid point. And I stupidly thought that this would clear things up. I thought that if people knew who I was, they would forgive me. But they didn't.
This moment, seeing myself as a monster, confirmed one of my biggest fears about myself: that I would always be an impostor. That I would never be queer enough or queer in the right way. When that person took the photo of me and uploaded it to Twitter, they clearly identified me as someone only dressing up gay. Was my makeup not good enough? Was my outfit not femme enough to make up for my Adam's apple when all I ever wanted was to look genderqueer? That photograph confirmed to me that I wasn't really queer, at least in any way that mattered.
That weekend I drove home to my parents in Salt Lake. They were appalled at what happened to me, which really annoyed me. After all, didn’t I deserve it?
III.
I tried to kill myself in the January of 2021. It was, truthfully, a pitiful attempt. A handful of Tylenol and another larger handful of Advil. I took them, trembling at my reflection in the mirror, in the singular private bathroom in my freshman dorm building. This was also where I would go to masturbate. At the time, it made sense that this is where it would happen, accomplishing an atonement or reckoning of sorts.
As soon as I took the pills, I regretted it. So I went to the ER. I walked in, feeling guilty for how fine I looked, and told the nurse, "Umm, I overdosed." She looked confused, but I didn't want to admit why I had taken too many pills. After a moment of silence, she started checking me in. Somewhere during the intake process it became clear that my visit was due to a suicide attempt and they eventually assigned me a psychologist. As soon as I got settled in my room, I got a call from the telephone attached to the wall: the billing department wanted to know how I was going to pay for all of this. I wondered if my insurance would cover the expenses, considering I didn't swallow enough pills to get my stomach pumped or anything.
After giving them my insurance information, I proceeded to sit in the pearly white sheets in my baby blue gown for over three hours. Doing nothing. Apparently, they were waiting to see if anything bad happened. After the psychologist saw me, they discharged me and my brother picked me up. I asked if we could get In-N-Out because I hadn't eaten all day. It was disgusting. But it didn't matter. Because my brother was, amidst the inescapable inadequacy of the moment, sitting across the emergency break eating cardboard fries with me.
I wanted to die then not because I actually thought there was anything wrong with me. It was because I knew I would never escape the seed of shame that had been planted in me as a child. I knew my self-destruction was eternally in bloom. It just felt too hard and I couldn't see a life much worth living.
And my brother didn't fix any of that. I don't even know how much he knew at the time. He was a returned missionary, newly married, and working tirelessly on his medical school prerequisites. But it didn't seem to matter in that moment. I'm glad he didn't try to fix anything and instead ate shitty fast food outside of my dorm with me and looked at me as I stepped out of the car with a look of fear in his eye that said, "Don't go yet. I would miss you."
**************
Only God can tell you whether you leave or whether you stay…
That was one of the last things that Dr. Pierce told me. I am now a BYU junior and have received no evacuation orders from God. It seems I am supposed to stay put. For now. For now, I have to find places and people that are willing to gather me up in all my fragmentation and hold me close, for a moment. This is a rare thing but I have found that it is worth looking for. Because when I am whole, held together in someone else's hand, I am a vessel that cannot be rent asunder.