I know what the fear cost you. I know what it means to walk into a marriage carrying a secret so heavy it bends the light around everything you do. I know the quiet violence of lying to yourself in the name of righteousness, of performing a life you were told God required while the truest part of you suffocated in silence.
”I am encompassed about, because of the temptations and the sins which do so easily beset me. And when I desire to rejoice, my heart groaneth because of my sins; nevertheless, I know in whom I have trusted.”
The letter names it directly: the quiet violence of lying to yourself. That phrase—quiet violence—captures something that most recovery language misses. The harm done to gay Latter-day Saint men is not loud. It is not dramatic. It is the slow, daily erosion of selfhood that comes from performing an identity that was never yours. Honesty, in this context, is not just a therapeutic tool. It is the end of a violence that has been committed against you for as long as you can remember.
Every journey begins with the truth, and the truth is this: you did not choose to be gay. You did not wake up one morning and decide to make your life infinitely more complicated within a faith tradition that has no ready place for you. You did not rebel. You did not fall. You simply are who you are, and for most of your life, that simple fact has been the source of an exhausting, consuming war between who you were told to be and who you actually are.
The original twelve-step program asks participants to admit that they are powerless over their addiction and that their lives have become unmanageable. For you, the adaptation is different but no less honest: you are powerless to change your sexual orientation. Not because you have not tried—you have tried with a ferocity that would break most people. You have prayed. You have fasted. You have white-knuckled your way through years of performing straightness, hoping that if you obeyed hard enough, long enough, sincerely enough, God would rewrite the deepest code of your being. He did not. Not because He could not. But because there was nothing to fix.
The unmanageability was never your orientation. The unmanageability was the lie. It was the decades of pretending, the energy spent constructing and maintaining a false self, the relationships damaged by secrets you were told to keep, the spiritual exhaustion of begging God to change something He never intended to change. The unmanageability was the system that told you your heart was broken and then handed you a hammer and said, “Fix it yourself.”
Honesty, in this context, is not a confession of sin. It is a declaration of reality. It is standing before yourself—and perhaps before God, if you are ready—and saying: I am gay. This is not a temptation I have failed to overcome. This is not a trial that will be resolved by more obedience. This is who I am. And I am done pretending otherwise.
This step is terrifying. The Book of Mormon prophet Nephi knew something about being honest in the face of overwhelming circumstances. In his psalm, he cries out about the sins that beset him, the weakness of his flesh, the enemies that surround him. But even in his grief, he names his reality. He does not pretend. He does not perform wellness. He mourns, and in mourning, he finds the beginning of something real. His grief is not the opposite of faith. It is the gateway to it.
For many gay Latter-day Saint men, the first step of honesty begins not in a dramatic coming-out moment, but in the quiet privacy of your own mind. It begins with permission—permission to stop fighting the truth, permission to set down the weapons you have used against yourself, permission to exhale. You may not be ready to tell anyone else. That is fine. But you must tell yourself. The lie cannot survive the light, and the light begins with a single, whispered truth: this is who I am.
The prophet Ammon declared that he would not boast in his own strength or his own wisdom, but that his joy was full because of the mercies of God. This is the paradox of honesty: in admitting what you cannot do—change yourself—you open the door to what God can do—heal the wounds that the attempt created. You do not need to be fixed. But the damage done by years of trying to fix yourself? That damage is real, and its healing begins here, with the truth.
Consider what honesty means in your own life. How long have you carried the weight of performing an identity that was not yours? What has that performance cost you—in relationships, in health, in spiritual vitality? What would it mean to set that burden down, not in defeat, but in liberation?
Honesty does not require you to tell everyone everything at once. It does not require you to blow up your life. It requires you to stop lying to yourself. Everything else—the conversations, the decisions, the next steps—flows from that single act of internal courage.
The letter reminds us: “You are not broken. You are not fallen. You are not a problem to be solved or a trial to be endured.” When you reach the point where you can say those words to yourself and mean them, you have taken the first step. The letter also names the institutional failure with precision: “That marriage did not fail because you were not faithful enough or brave enough or good enough. It failed because it was built on a foundation that the institution laid for you—a foundation of fear and shame dressed up as doctrine.” Honesty means accepting both truths: that you are whole, and that the system was broken. These are not contradictory statements. They are the beginning of freedom.
Write about the first time you knew you were gay. Not the first time someone told you it was wrong—the first time you knew. What did that knowledge feel like before shame entered the picture?
Make a list of the ways the attempt to change or suppress your orientation has made your life unmanageable. Be specific. Be honest. No one is reading this but you.
Write a letter to the version of yourself who first tried to pray the gay away. What would you tell him now?
I am honest about who I am. My orientation is not a sin, a sickness, or a mistake. I release the need to perform an identity that was never mine, and I trust that the truth will set me free.
Throughout your life in the Church, you may have heard your orientation described as “same-sex attraction” or “SSA.” This term deserves examination. It was not created by psychologists. It was not developed through clinical research. It was invented within conservative religious communities as a way to describe homosexuality without using the word “gay”—because “gay” implies an identity, and the institution prefers to frame your orientation as a condition, a temptation, or a trial rather than a fundamental aspect of who you are.
The difference is not semantic. It is theological. If you have “same-sex attraction,” you have a problem that might be solved. If you are gay, you are a person who was made a particular way, and the question shifts from “how do we fix this?” to “how do we honor this?” The language of SSA keeps you in the position of patient. The language of identity puts you in the position of person.
No major medical or psychological organization uses the term “same-sex attraction” as a clinical designation. The American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the World Health Organization, and every other mainstream body that studies human sexuality recognizes homosexuality as a normal, natural variation of human sexuality—not a disorder, not an attraction pattern, not a challenge to be managed, but an orientation as innate and morally neutral as left-handedness.
Part of the honesty of this first step is reclaiming the language you use to describe yourself. You are not a person who “experiences same-sex attraction.” You are gay. That word belongs to you, and using it is an act of honesty that this step requires.
If you entered a heterosexual marriage as a gay man—whether at the counsel of a bishop, a therapist, a parent, or your own desperate hope—this step has particular weight for you. The honesty required here includes acknowledging that the marriage was built on an incomplete truth, and that the incompleteness was not entirely your fault. You were working with the information and the counsel you were given, within a system that insisted marriage would heal you.
Many gay Latter-day Saint men describe their mixed-orientation marriages as an experience of profound loneliness—present in the house but absent from the relationship, performing love without feeling it fully, watching their spouse reach across a distance they could never close. If this was your experience, naming it honestly is part of this step. Not to assign blame, but to tell the truth about what happened and what it cost.
If you are still in a mixed-orientation marriage, this step does not tell you what to do. That decision belongs to you, your spouse, and God—and it is one of the most complex decisions any human being can face. What this step does tell you is that whatever you decide, it must begin with honesty. The performance cannot continue indefinitely. The truth will surface, because truth always does. And the sooner it surfaces, the more options everyone involved will have for building a life that is real.
In 2003, psychologist Ilan Meyer published a landmark study describing the Minority Stress Model—a framework for understanding the unique, chronic stressors experienced by sexual minorities. Meyer identified identity concealment as one of the most psychologically damaging proximal stressors: the constant monitoring of behavior, language, and presentation that consumes cognitive resources otherwise available for creativity, connection, and growth. Pachankis (2007) found that concealment creates chronic cognitive burden associated with increased anxiety, depression, and decreased self-esteem.
For LGBTQ Latter-day Saints, concealment operates on two simultaneous levels: hiding your sexuality from the faith community, and hiding your faith from the LGBTQ community. Both are exhausting. Both are measurably harmful. Hatzenbuehler (2009) demonstrated that structural stigma—living in environments where your identity is institutionally devalued—produces measurable increases in psychiatric morbidity. For Latter-day Saints, the structural stigma is woven into the fabric of eternal theology: the Family Proclamation, the temple recommend interview, the plan of salvation itself.
Doctrine and Covenants 93:24 defines truth as “knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come.” Self-knowledge is a form of truth. To know yourself—your full self, including your sexuality—is not a departure from gospel truth but an expression of it. And 2 Nephi 2:25 adds the crucial second layer: “Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy.” The entire architecture of the plan of salvation was constructed so that human beings could experience joy. Not grim endurance. Not decades of performing. Joy.
Latter-day Saint theology is distinctive in its assertion that personal identity is eternal—not created at birth but organized before the foundation of the world. Abraham 3:22–23 describes God standing among “the intelligences that were organized before the world was” and declaring them good. Jeremiah 1:5 adds: “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee.” If God knew you before you were born—knew you, not a hypothetical heterosexual version of you—then your sexual orientation is not an accident of mortality. It is part of the self that God knew and sanctified.
The research quantifies what lived experience already knows. Dehlin et al. (2015) surveyed 1,612 Latter-day Saints who attempted sexual orientation change, finding that marriage was one of the most common methods attempted, with negligible success and significant psychological harm. The dissolution rate for mixed-orientation marriages among respondents was dramatically higher than the general LDS population. The concept of disenfranchised grief (Doka, 1989, 2002) describes what follows: grief that is not socially recognized, publicly mourned, or validated by the community. The dissolution of a mixed-orientation marriage produces grief that is disenfranchised on multiple levels—the person grieves the loss, but the institution treats the marriage’s failure as the person’s failure.