"I don't pray."

Six of us sat around the dinner table in a farmhouse in the middle of rural Maryland. Across for me were the married couple. They are service missionaries and occasionally wear black name tags that read "the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." To my right sat the cowboy from Utah who has probably spent more time with sheep than with people and is rarely spotted without a cattleman's hat atop his head. The remaining three of us have been on this farm longer than the others, but not by much, and despite the fact that we were all from different decades, we came out of the closet in the same one...

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Be F*cking Brave

Earlier in the week, during a phone call with my mother about how things are going for me in this new life, she commented that she admired my bravery— that I took risks. This comment got me thinking a lot about bravery. It isn’t that I hadn’t been called brave before. After going through the coming out process and being vocal about it, I had many people suggest that I was brave. But I’ve never, never-ever, thought myself to be brave. Cautious feels more like me. So when my own mother made that remark, I was taken a little aback by it...


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Underneath This Skin There’s a Human

When I was 12 years old, my family moved to another city. Many would agree that Middle school is awkward enough all by itself, without throwing in a move to a different school half way through seventh grade. Up until then it proved to be the worst year of my short life. The new house was only 30 minutes away from the Orange County neighborhood where I grew up, but for a twelve year old, it might as well have been the other side of the planet...

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A Church Without God - The Excommunication of John Dehlin

Since leaving Mormonism in 2010, and subsequently resigning my membership in 2012, I have kept watch and remained interested in the progressive Mormon movement within the religion of my youth. It has been a grassroots movement led by intellectuals, historians, feminists, LGBT-allies, and those that yearn for greater equality and diversity. They are believers in “big-tent” Mormonism and want their church to be a refuge for all that are weary, despised, rejected, and disenfranchised rather than a church that welcomes only the few “elect” who step in line and embrace the status quo...

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This Belongs to You, and Always Will

When you fall in love, you don’t do it with an expiration date in mind. Minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, you just begin to build a life around another person. Pretty soon months and years go by and you’ve created a pretty remarkable thing and you look over to find a person that knows you better than anyone. A person you trust enough to guard the deepest most vulnerable pieces of your heart. He's the last person you see before you close your eyes, and the first when you wake. Not too long after falling in love, hardly a memory is made that is void of him and life fails to take on a definition independent of this, the most significant person in it. 

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LDS Leadership Calls for Right to Discriminate Under Guise of “Religious Freedom”

I am trying hard to disassociate from my old religion. It is really difficult for me to do, however, because the Mormon Church has taken such a spotlight role in the anti-LGBT movement. So here I am, with two identities I had no choice in which are in constant turmoil with each other. I was devoted to my religion for the first 25 years of my life. I was born into it. I am also gay, and always have been. Its hard to move on when the organization that I was devoted to for so long has been so insistent on striping me of dignity. First, by trying to prevent me from the right to marry...

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Reclaiming My Power

I am not a victim. This is something I’ve tried hard to remind myself a lot lately. Being raised in a religion that taught me to hate such an essential piece of myself took a toll on me. It has defined many of my life’s struggles. But I’ve made very intentional decisions to help me reclaim my power and to become the author the life I wish to live rather than to be consumed and paralyzed by feelings of guilt, anger, and shame.

“Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.”

-Brené Brown

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