“A what now?”
I’m bisexual, meaning I am attracted to men, women, and non-binary people. I’m married; my husband and I were sealed in the Gilbert Temple almost a year ago. I’ve been a member of the Church my whole life, held multiple callings, served a mission, worked in the temple, and now teach nursery. We exist!
“How is your marriage? Is your husband okay that you like women too?”
My husband and I are best friends, and he has always been my biggest supporter. We deeply love each other and have such a fulfilling life together, and that fulfillment has come as I’ve become more authentic in my identity. The more I show up as my true self, the easier it is for our marriage to grow. If anything, the fact that I still choose him every day, even though I had so many options for romance, is a boost to his self-esteem.
“But how did he react to finding out that you’re bisexual?”
He knew I was bi before I even told him. The week that I finally accepted my identity, after many long talks with God and a revelatory moment in the temple, my then-boyfriend had a dream that I was dating a woman. He texted me the next morning, “Congrats on coming out,” and I replied, “How did you know?”
We established that I still loved him, and I told him that I wasn’t planning on breaking up with him to date girls, and that was that. So essentially, God came out to him for me.
“So, it didn’t change your relationship?”
It changed everything. I was suffering through so much self-loathing until I finally accepted that I’m bi. Once I received that confirmation from the Lord that I am still loved and still worthy even while being bi, my confidence and my ability to be happy grew exponentially.
My husband went from being a therapist, merely helping me through each crisis I faced as I danced around the root cause – my own self-denial and self-hatred surrounding my same-sex attraction – and became my partner, helping me embrace my identity and live my life to the fullest.
“But embracing your identity isn’t what the prophets have said to do. Your identity is as a child of God, not as bisexual.”
The prophets also have said to follow personal revelation, and I’ve never been prompted to keep quiet or to hide. Those impulses all been fear or anxiety, not peace from the Spirit. There’s never been a prompting to shy away from my identity or to stop being both a disciple of Christ and bisexual.
We have a lot of identities as human beings. A child of God is one of them, and the most important, as it is eternal and unchanging. My identity as a child of God is important to me most of all because it is as God’s child that I ask Him for help.
Other identities are important to me as well because they inform how I interact with this world God created. My identity as bisexual has blessed me in many ways: more empathy towards other people who experience similar things; increased awareness of my capacity for love in all its forms; intentionality about my romantic life and my marriage; being more in tune with the Spirit.
None of those blessings is at odds with being a child of God. If anything, these blessings enhance my identity as a child of God. I connect with my divinity, my divine nature, my Godliness, by connecting with myself on deeper and deeper levels. The more I know about myself, the more I know about God, and the more I can differentiate between what God needs me to keep and what He can help me discard.
I hope you can see that our identities are expansive, not restrictive. Being one thing doesn’t preclude you from being another.
“Are you sure that it’s coming from God? I don’t think He would tell you to embrace being bisexual. That sounds like endorsing sin.”
Have I mentioned sinning?
“No… but do you keep the law of chastity?”
That’s a deeply personal question that you shouldn’t ask strangers, but yes.
“That’s good. God still wouldn’t tell you that you’re bisexual though.”
I can testify that He has. He continually supports my experiences and my identity. Every Sunday as I take the sacrament, I’m reminded of His love and acceptance. And rest assured, I know what God’s chastisement is like. I’ve been called out by Him for not reading my scriptures or praying like I should, or for being too judgmental. I’ve never felt those same promptings regarding my identity as bisexual.
I’m sure that God confirmed that I’m bisexual, just as much as I’m sure that God confirmed to me that the Book of Mormon is His word, that President Nelson is His prophet, and that I need to be a member of His Church. It’s been the same Spirit each time. I was promised the gift of discernment, and I’m aware of what the devil sounds like. When I feel peace and reassurance and hope and light, that is God.
The real question is, why do you doubt that God would know that about me and want to communicate with me, His child, about something so fundamental to my divinity?
“Sexuality isn’t fundamental to our divinity.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. I’d agree that sexuality isn’t necessarily fundamental to divinity, people can have high or low or nonexistent libido without being broken or less divine.
However, I believe that sexuality is tied to my divine nature, and if you tell me to separate that and split up my identity, and only be either sexual or divine, it’s going to hurt my soul. There’s no comfort in trying to separate my spirituality from my sexuality. That’s true for being straight or gay, and trying to force that separation hurts people.
Even if sexuality isn’t inherently divine, creation is. Connection is. Love is. And those are the blessings associated with sexuality.
We refer to sex as “the sacred and holy powers of procreation.” It’s a divine act of creation. Christ has commanded us to ask, to seek, to knock. Our Heavenly Parents give us scripture and prayer and prophets so that we can talk to Them. We seal each other to our families to remain connected through the eternities. God is love.
So naturally, creation, connection, and love are divine attributes.
“There are right and wrong ways to create and connect and love though.”
“Render unto Caesar’s that which is Caesar’s and render unto God that which is God’s” applies to more than just taxes and tithing. If God has established boundaries for us, in this mortal existence, on our access to our own divinity, that’s fair. Our divinity came from Him after all.
But note the word “boundaries.” Not right and wrong, forever, but boundaries, for now. There’s a boundary around the food and drink we consume. There’s a slew of boundaries around the exercise of priesthood power. And there are boundaries around the expression of sexuality.
Violating God’s boundaries around sexuality won’t help us connect to divinity, but denying the divinity of our sexuality, whatever it may be, won’t help us connect to divinity either.
“Well, why are you still a member if you just want to talk about being bisexual? That’s not what the Church teaches.”
I’m not in the habit of allowing myself to be bullied out of places where I can feel God’s love, where I can access priesthood power, and where I can serve others. Those are the things that the Church teaches that matter to me, and that’s why I stay.
I share my experiences and talk about my perspective because we all do. People talk about their straightness all the time at church. They talk about awkward dates and chastity and having kids and their marriages. I should be able to do the same.
“But why does it matter to be different and come out as bisexual if you’re just going to live the same way that straight members of the Church live?”
I don’t live the same way.
I don’t experience the world the same way. I’ve had different conversations with people, my marriage is different, I hear different messages from the Spirit, and I even read the scriptures differently because of my identity.
When I read the story of the brother of Jared, I see an analogy to my own situation, following revelation from God regarding my identity one step at a time. He prays, “O Lord, behold I have done even as thou hast commanded me; and I have prepared the vessels for my people, and behold, there is no light in them. Behold, O Lord, wilt thou suffer that we shall cross this great water in darkness?”
In that verse I see the courage it took to be willing to travel in darkness, trusting the Lord. I see myself moving forward with what the Lord commanded me, marrying my husband and advocating for LGBTQ+ causes, and remaining in the Church. I see myself prepared to go and do but crying to God for some sort of guidance.
When I read Moroni 7:11, “a bitter fountain cannot bring forth good water, neither can a good fountain bring forth bitter water,” I’m comforted that my bisexuality hasn’t corrupted me somehow. I’m reminded that I cannot be an inherently evil person because I do so much good, so my identity must be good too. I learn to love myself with this verse.
The Come, Follow Me lesson in August of last year included the sentence, “Even if we can’t grasp all of what the Lord is teaching us, we can at least sense that there’s far more to eternity than what we now comprehend.” I read that and rejoice that one day, my experiences will make sense, and I will understand why I was created bisexual.
These are not the perspectives of a straight person. I came out so that I could share my perspectives with others. And those perspectives matter so that other people like me will know they’re not alone.
“I guess that makes sense.”
All I ask is that you listen, without judgment and with an open heart.
