A Note to Those Who Love Us
For Family, Friends, and Ecclesiastical Leaders
If someone you love handed you this letter or this book, pause for a moment before you read further and consider what that act of trust cost them.
For many gay Latter-day Saints, sharing their truth with the people they love most is the single most terrifying thing they will ever do. It is more frightening than a mission call to a foreign country, more vulnerable than a temple sealing, more exposed than any testimony they have ever borne over a pulpit. They have likely rehearsed this moment a thousand times — imagined your face, feared your silence, dreaded your tears, and hoped, against every painful precedent, that your love would be bigger than your discomfort.
That they chose you means something. It means they believe you are capable of seeing them — truly seeing them — and loving what you see. Honor that belief. It is, in many ways, an act of faith as profound as any you have witnessed.
Before You Read
This letter and this book will take you into territory that may be deeply unfamiliar. You may encounter experiences of shame, fear, spiritual isolation, and institutional wounding that you may never have considered, and you may find yourself overwhelmed by what you read. That is normal. That is, in fact, a sign that your heart is open.
But we want to be honest with you: some of what you read may be difficult to sit with. You may feel sadness for suffering you did not know was happening. You may feel guilt for things you said or failed to say, for counsel you gave in good faith that you now realize caused harm, for silence you kept when a word would have mattered. You may feel anger — at the institution, at yourself, at the complexity of a situation that resists easy resolution. You may feel the urgent, almost desperate need to fix everything right now.
All of these responses are understandable. None of them need to be acted on immediately.
If you find yourself becoming overwhelmed, set the book down. Take a walk. Pray. Come back to it tomorrow or next week. The person who gave this to you did not carry their burden for months or years or decades so that you could process it all in a single evening. They gave it to you because they want you to understand, and understanding takes time. Give yourself that time. They have been patient with their own journey. You are allowed to be patient with yours.
What Your Loved One Needs from You
More than anything else, your loved one needs to know that your love for them has not changed. Not your love with conditions, not your love despite who they are, not your love pending further doctrinal clarification — your love, full stop, the same love you carried for them before you knew, because they are the same person they were before you knew. You simply know them better now.
They do not need you to have all the answers. They do not need you to resolve the theological tensions overnight. They do not need you to announce your position on church policy or national politics or the eternal implications of their identity. They need you to stay. They need you to show up at Sunday dinner without the air in the room changing. They need you to ask how their week was and actually listen. They need you to say their name the same way you always have.
They may not need you to say much at all. Often, the most healing thing you can offer is presence without agenda — the quiet, steady assurance that they are not losing you.
And if they are not ready to talk, let them be. Do not force the conversation before they are ready to have it. Do not ambush them with questions, articles, conference talks, or well-meaning books from Church distribution. Let them lead. Let them tell you what they need when they are ready to tell you. Your job, right now, is to make sure they know the door is open and that you will be there when they walk through it.
Things That Help
Say their name, and say it with love. Not “my son who struggles with same-sex attraction.” Not “our member who is dealing with that issue.” Their name. They are the same person they have always been.
Follow their language. If they say “gay,” say “gay.” Do not substitute clinical or ecclesiastical euphemisms. The words a person uses to describe themselves are sacred. Respect them.
Listen more than you speak. You will be tempted to share your testimony, your concerns, your doctrinal framework, your fears for their eternal welfare. Resist that temptation, at least at first. They have heard it all. Many of them have spent years, maybe decades, wrestling with every scriptural and doctrinal argument you might offer. What they have not heard enough of is: Tell me more. I want to understand. I love you and that is not going anywhere.
Educate yourself. Read the resources in this book. Learn about minority stress, about the documented mental health impact of rejection, about the research on family acceptance and suicide risk. The more you understand the landscape your loved one has been navigating, the better equipped you will be to walk alongside them. Do not make them your sole educator. That is exhausting work, and they have been carrying enough.
Show up consistently. One good conversation does not undo years of silence or signals of conditional love. Allyship is not a single moment of acceptance. It is a pattern of presence — birthday calls, holiday invitations, ordinary Tuesday texts that say nothing more than thinking of you. The consistency is the message.
Things That Hurt
These are offered not as accusations but as honest guidance. Many of these come from places of genuine love and sincere faith. They still cause harm.
“I love you, but I don’t support your lifestyle.” This phrase, however well-intentioned, communicates conditional love. To a gay Latter-day Saint, it sounds like: I love the version of you I wish you were. Their orientation is not a lifestyle. It is not a choice, a phase, a temptation, or a political position. It is who they are.
“We all have our trials.” Equating someone’s core identity with a trial to be endured reduces their humanity to a theological problem. They are not an object lesson. They are your son, your daughter, your brother, your sister, your ward member, your friend.
“Have you prayed about it?” They have. More than you can imagine. Many of them have prayed with the kind of desperation that leaves bruises on knees and salt stains on pillowcases. Do not assume that their arrival at self-acceptance means they have abandoned their faith. For many, it is the fruit of the most rigorous spiritual wrestling of their lives.
“What about your eternal family?” This question, often asked by parents, carries enormous weight and almost always causes pain. It communicates that their worth to the family is contingent on a specific set of outcomes. It is also a question they cannot answer for you, because the institution has not provided them with answers that honor both their faith and their identity. Asking it places an impossible burden on their shoulders.
“I know someone who used to be gay.” No, you don’t. Conversion therapy has been discredited by every major medical and psychological organization. Suggesting it — even gently, even as a passing reference — tells your loved one that you believe they are broken and need to be fixed. They are not broken.
Treating their coming out as your crisis. Your feelings matter, and you are entitled to them, but your loved one’s coming out is not primarily about you. If you need to grieve, process, or work through your own emotions — and you may — do that work with a trusted friend, a therapist, or a support group, not with the person who just made themselves deeply vulnerable to you. They cannot carry your grief and their own at the same time.
Silence. Sometimes the most damaging response is no response at all. If someone trusts you with their truth and you go quiet — you stop calling, you change the subject every time, you act as though the conversation never happened — that silence communicates rejection as loudly as any words could.
A Word to Ecclesiastical Leaders
You hold an extraordinary amount of influence in the lives of your members. For a gay Latter-day Saint sitting across from you in your office, you may represent the voice of God in that moment, whether you intend to or not. That is a weight worth feeling.
Many of the men and women who will come to you have spent years building up the courage to speak. Some of them are teenagers who have never said the words aloud. Some are returned missionaries who have carried this in silence through their entire service. Some are married, with children, and the structure of their entire lives trembles around this conversation. All of them are watching your face for the first signal of whether they are safe.
You do not need to have a perfect doctrinal response. You do not need to reconcile every tension between policy and conscience in a single interview. What you need to do is make sure the person in front of you leaves your office knowing that they are loved, that they belong, and that their relationship with God is intact. Everything else is secondary to that.
If you are unsure what to say, say this: Thank you for trusting me with this. I love you. God loves you. I want to understand, and I am here for you. Then listen. That alone may be the most Christlike ministry you ever perform.
Be cautious with counsel. Well-meaning advice about fasting, dating the opposite sex, serving harder, or praying away their feelings has caused immeasurable harm in the past. If you are not trained in LGBTQ-affirming pastoral care, acknowledge that honestly and offer to connect them with someone who is. Humility in that moment is not weakness. It is wisdom.
When You Are Struggling
If this process surfaces difficult emotions in you — and it may — please take care of yourself. You matter in this story too. Loving someone through a journey you did not anticipate can be disorienting, exhausting, and lonely, especially if your own community does not yet know how to talk about these things.
The final chapter of this book includes a guide to finding LGBTQ-affirming therapists, and those resources are not only for your loved one. They are for you. A good therapist can help you process your own grief, fear, and questions in a space where you do not have to perform certainty you do not feel.
If at any point you are worried about your loved one’s safety — if they express hopelessness, withdraw from the people and activities they love, or say things that suggest they are thinking about ending their life — please do not wait.
Call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline).
Text HOME to 741741 (Crisis Text Line).
Call 1-866-488-7386 (Trevor Project, for LGBTQ youth under 25).
Anyone can reach out to these services. You do not need to be sure. If something feels wrong, trust that feeling and make the call. It is always better to reach out and be wrong than to stay silent and be right.
The Ministry of Staying
There is a moment in 3 Nephi when the Savior appears to the Nephites at Bountiful. He does not begin with doctrine. He does not begin with commandments or correction. He begins by inviting them to come forward, one by one, and know for themselves that He is real. He lets them touch His hands and His side. He meets them where they are.
That is your ministry now. Not to fix, not to solve, not to theologize, not to rescue. To stay. To see. To touch the wound without flinching. To say, with your presence as much as your words: I am here. I am not going anywhere. And I love you exactly as you are.
Your loved one did not choose to be gay any more than you chose the color of your eyes. But they are choosing, right now, to trust you with the truth of who they are. That is a gift. Receive it with the reverence it deserves.
And if you do nothing else — if the theology remains unresolved, if the conversations are halting, if you stumble over words and get things wrong and feel hopelessly out of your depth — just love them. Love them the way Christ loves them: completely, presently, without reservation.
Everything else will follow from that.