At first blush, an article from the Salt Lake Tribune by Peggy Fletcher Stack reads like something you might find on TheOnion.com: Gay men – or in Mormon parlance ‘same-sex attracted’ – who marry heterosexual woman are two-to-three times more likely than opposite couples to call it quits. It’s tempting to shrug it off with a ‘duh’ and move onto more serious matters. But with Sunday’s airing of the controversial special My Husband’s Not Gay on TLC, the matter has taken on a degree of seriousness reserved only for our voracious cultural appetite.
But the statistics are far from late night talk show fodder. The reality is, for many men trapped inside marriages that try to strike a balance between their faith in and loyalty to the Mormon Church and being true to themselves, divorce is just as much their reality. According to a study conducted by John Dehlin, a doctoral student at Utah State University, and Bill Bradshaw, a retired Brigham Young University professor, with help from Renee Galliher, also of USU, their studies show an alarming – though probably not altogether surprising – rate of collateral damage.
• Between 51 percent and 69 percent of mixed-orientation Mormon marriages end in divorce, well above the roughly 25 percent of LDS couples who split up.
• More than 70 percent of LGBT/same-sex attracted Mormons leave the LDS Church.
• 80 percent of respondents reported undergoing efforts to change their sexual orientation — 85 percent of which were religious and private efforts, 31 percent were private efforts only, 40 percent therapist-led and 21 percent group efforts.
• 53 percent rejected their religious identity; 37 percent compartmentalized their sexual and religious identities; 6 percent rejected their LGBT identity; 4 percent integrated the two.
The study relied on participants in 48 states (45 percent in Utah) and 22 countries; 75 percent were male, 22 percent female; 91 percent were white; 7 percent were excommunicated from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 25 percent had resigned, 36 percent were inactive, 29 percent were active, and 3 percent had been disfellowshipped. (Even the term ‘disfellowshpped’ has an Onion.com-like hint of sarcasm to it.)
Finally, 42 percent were single, 35 percent were in committed same-sex relationships, and 16 percent were married in a heterosexual relationship.
But divorce hardly seems like the worst of the issues confronting men in this predicament. Once a divorce is final, or, perhaps, even the act of considering it depending on one’s religiosity, it incites damage on several levels. It manifest in shame the individual has for having same-sex attractions, the lives they destroy through the act of marriage – but let’s not absolve those women who do enter into these type of relationships – and the spiritual despondency same-sex may feel. “The survey also concluded that many more LDS gays try “personal righteousness” efforts — prayer, fasting, church activity, temple worship and strict observance of the LDS health code — as a way to change their orientation than those who seek psychological interventions such as the discredited “reparative therapy.”
None of it worked, Dehlin says. “Zero percent of participants were able to eliminate same-sex attraction.” And they were psychologically damaged by trying.”
