If you let bitterness consume you, if you let the institution’s failures define your relationship with divinity, then those promises of joy and blessings that extend beyond your greatest hope will be nullified. Not by God. By you. Do not give the others that power. Do your best. Live a righteous life.
“I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men.”
Forgiveness is the most dangerous word in the vocabulary of a gay Latter-day Saint man. It has been weaponized against you in ways both obvious and subtle. You have been told to forgive the people who hurt you, as though the ongoing harm were in the past. You have been asked to forgive the institution that continues to reject you, as though forgiveness required you to pretend the rejection is not happening. And most perniciously, you have been told that God needs to forgive you—implying that your orientation is itself an offense requiring pardon.
Let me be clear: God does not need to forgive you for being gay. There is nothing to forgive. Your orientation is not a sin, a transgression, or a misstep. It is a feature, not a bug. If forgiveness from God is needed, it is for the same ordinary human failings that every mortal carries—moments of unkindness, times when fear overrode love, decisions made from pain rather than principle. These are universal. They are not unique to your orientation.
The forgiveness work of this step moves in three directions: toward yourself, toward others, and toward the past.
Forgiving yourself may be the hardest of the three. You have internalized decades of messaging that taught you to hate yourself, and that internalization has created patterns of self-punishment that feel almost reflexive. You may punish yourself for being gay. You may punish yourself for not being gay enough or straight enough. You may punish yourself for the years you spent in a marriage that hurt both you and your spouse. You may punish yourself for the time you wasted trying to be someone you were not. All of this self-punishment must be named, examined, and released. Not because it does not matter, but because it is killing you. And the God who sent His Son to carry your burdens did not do so in order to watch you carry them anyway.
Forgiving others is complicated. You may need to forgive parents who could not accept you. You may need to forgive bishops who gave you harmful counsel. You may need to forgive a former spouse who is also a victim of the system. You may need to forgive friends who withdrew when you told the truth. Forgiveness does not mean reconciliation. It does not mean pretending the harm did not happen. It does not mean allowing the harmful behavior to continue. It means releasing your grip on the anger so that the anger stops defining your relationship with yourself and with God. You can forgive someone and still maintain a boundary. You can forgive someone and still name what they did as wrong. Forgiveness is not surrender. It is liberation.
Forgiving the past means accepting that you cannot change it. The marriage happened. The years of suppression happened. The pain happened. You cannot unlive those experiences. But you can stop allowing them to dictate your future. You can honor the pain without being consumed by it. You can acknowledge the loss without being defined by it. And you can trust—as a matter of faith, if not yet of feeling—that God is able to make something beautiful from the wreckage, that no experience is wasted in His economy, and that the road ahead is still a road worth walking.
Write a list of everyone who has been harmed by the closet—including yourself. For each person, write one sentence about the specific harm done.
Write a letter of forgiveness to yourself. Address the specific things you have punished yourself for. Be thorough. Be kind.
Is there anyone you need to forgive who has not asked for it? Write about what it would mean to forgive them anyway—not for their sake, but for yours.
I forgive myself for the years I spent trying to be someone I was not. I forgive those who harmed me, not to excuse them, but to free myself. I release the past and walk into the future with open hands.
At some point in your journey, you will face the question of whether to forgive the Church itself. This is perhaps the most complex forgiveness challenge you will encounter, because the institution is not a person. It does not feel remorse. It does not apologize. It does not, in most cases, even acknowledge the specific harm it has caused to gay members. Forgiving an entity that neither seeks nor acknowledges the need for forgiveness is a theological and psychological puzzle that has no easy answer.
Here is what I can offer: you do not need to forgive the institution in order to heal. Forgiveness of the institution is not a prerequisite for your spiritual health. If you can forgive, and if forgiveness brings you peace, then forgive. But if the institution’s ongoing policies continue to cause harm to you and to people you love, you are under no obligation to pretend that harm is in the past. Forgiveness does not require you to be silent about injustice. The prophets of the Book of Mormon forgave freely and also spoke truth to power without apology. You can do both.
What matters is that the anger does not consume you. There is a difference between righteous anger—the kind that motivates advocacy, service, and change—and corrosive bitterness, which eats you from the inside and gives the institution more power over your life than it deserves. If your anger is propelling you toward constructive action, honor it. If it is keeping you awake at night, replaying conversations, fantasizing about confrontations, consuming your energy and your joy—then it has crossed the line from righteous to corrosive, and it is time to seek help in processing it.
A therapist who understands religious trauma can be invaluable in navigating this distinction. So can a community of people who share your experience. You do not have to process institutional harm alone, and you do not have to resolve it all at once. Give yourself permission to hold the question of institutional forgiveness loosely, returning to it as your healing progresses, and trusting that the God who asks you to forgive all men is patient enough to wait while you figure out what that means in practice.
Self-forgiveness is not a single act. It is a practice—something you will need to do repeatedly, perhaps daily, as old patterns of self-punishment resurface. Here is a simple framework that many people find helpful:
Name the specific thing you are punishing yourself for. Be concrete. Not “I feel bad about everything.” Something specific: “I am punishing myself for the years I spent lying to my wife.” Or: “I am punishing myself for not coming out sooner.” Or: “I am punishing myself for the damage my children experienced because of the divorce.”
Acknowledge the context. You made those choices within a system that gave you no good options. You lied because the truth was not safe. You stayed closeted because coming out meant losing everything. You married because every authority figure in your life told you it was God’s will. The choices were yours, but the context was not.
Offer yourself the compassion you would offer a friend. If your best friend came to you and described the same situation—the same pressures, the same impossible choices, the same consequences—would you condemn him? Or would you hold him and tell him he did the best he could with what he had? Treat yourself with the same kindness you would offer someone you love.
Release the punishment. Say it out loud if you can: “I release this. I have carried it long enough. It is not helping me, and it is not helping anyone I harmed. I choose to set it down.” You may need to say this dozens of times before you feel it. Say it anyway. The feeling will follow the practice.