Something Rotten

At the end of July each year, my mother and her friend Carolyn spend a girls’ week at a condo in Vancouver’s West End. They watch the fireworks, shop on Granville Island, and walk along the seawall. They also attend the summer musicals at Malkin Bowl in Stanley Park, where the nonprofit Theatre Under the Stars has been producing shows since 1940. 

 

This year TUTS presented two shows in repertory. The first, We Will Rock You, is a British jukebox musical featuring the music of Queen, with a thin plot about a dystopia where music is forbidden. The second show, Something Rotten!, opened on Broadway in 2015. Brothers Nick and Nigel Bottom struggle to find success in an Elizabethan theatre scene dominated by William Shakespeare’s rock star status. Christian Borle won the Best Supporting Actor Tony for his portrayal of Shakespeare as a preening but insecure narcissist. 

Seattle Men’s Chorus singing “A Musical” (2016)

Desperate to get an edge over his rival Shakespeare, Nick Bottom offers his life savings to a soothsayer in return for learning what kind of theatrical production is guaranteed to succeed in the future. The only oracle Nick can afford is Thomas Nostradamus, an undistinguished nephew of the famous French seer. Thomas’s predictions turn out to be accurate but slightly garbled. In Something Rotten!’s show-stopping production number, Thomas convinces Nick he can succeed by introducing the world’s first musical. 

 

In 2016, Seattle Men’s Chorus conductor Dennis Coleman retired after thirty-five years with the baton. That was also my first year in Vancouver Men’s Chorus. Instead of singing with SMC, I drove to Seattle with my daughter Eleanor to see the “Everything Broadway” show. Both of us were riveted by SMC’s performance of “A Musical.”

This summer when my mother mentioned she had tickets to Something Rotten!, Eleanor and I immediately played her the original cast recording of “A Musical,” including this classic excerpt:

 

THOMAS:       Some musicals have no talking at all....
All of the dialogue is sung
In a very dramatic fashion.

NICK:              Um, really?

THOMAS:       Yes, really.
And they often stay on one note for a very long time
So when they change to a different note, [finally changing pitch] you notice.
And it’s supposed to create a dramatic effect
But mostly you just sit there asking yourself
“Why aren’t they talking?”

NICK:              That sounds miserable.

THOMAS:       I believe it’s pronounced Misérable.

Songwriters: Wayne Kirkpatrick / Karey Kirkpatrick        

A Musical lyrics © WB Music Corp., Mad Mother Music

Sure enough, my mother and Carolyn loved Something Rotten. (Mom’s review of We Will Rock You: “It was loud.”) I got a ticket to Something Rotten for the last Wednesday of the summer. As I reported on Facebook, the show was delightful.

The key to surviving Facebook is to remember you’re not the target audience in Facebook’s business model – you’re the company’s product. Facebook’s actual customers are paying advertisers. In a popular and apt metaphor, the rest of us are merely a herd of cattle on display. 

 

I’ve run the numbers, and I’m pretty happy with our bovine arrangement. As far as I can tell, the algorithm has never lured me into buying anything. Instead, Facebook serves as a convenient communication platform and auxiliary memory bank. After posting pictures of children, dogs, and travel for fourteen years, I can now rely on Facebook for daily reminders of happy times.

 

For example, according to Facebook I was at the Saint James Theatre seven years ago waiting to watch the original Broadway cast of Something Rotten!. As I wrote at the time, “Shakespeare has always been my idol.”

I’m lucky I have Facebook to remind me – because I don’t have any memory of being at the theatre in New York. In fact, other than the songs I heard on the original cast album, I didn’t remember anything about the show before I saw it again in Vancouver last month.

The last time I was in New York I was on my way to New Haven for my 25th year law school reunion. This was just a few weeks before my new Bellingham physician told me my weird recent symptoms added up to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and serious codependency. My disability diagnosis changed my life – but not as much as the abusive behaviour of my employers. 

 

PTSD is a disease of memory. As Bessel van der Kolk observes in The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, “traumatized people simultaneously remember too little and too much.” Sometimes trauma results in disassociation or repression, leaving no accessible memories at all. More often, trauma prevents key brain modules like the thalamus and hippocampus from integrating our experiences into “normal” memories. According to Dr. van der Kolk, “the imprints of traumatic experiences are organized not as coherent logical narratives but in fragmented sensory and emotional traces:  images, sounds, and physical sensations.”

When I realized I had no memory of seeing Something Rotten! on Broadway in October 2015 – even Christian Borle’s Tony-winning portrayal of my idol Will Shakespeare – I went back to my collection of Playbills to figure what else was missing. 

 

The only other show I saw on that trip was Fun Home, a musical based on lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s memoir about growing up in a repressed and dysfunctional environment (she was raised in her family’s funeral home). While Bechdel was away at college, her father killed himself rather than come out of the closet. 

In contrast with Something Rotten, I remember seeing Fun Home on Broadway. I’ve also read Bechdel’s graphic memoir. But my memories of both are fragmentary.

Theatre Under the Stars

Early in his career, Sigmund Freud successfully treated hysteria patients who had PTSD-like symptoms. Freud reported his patients could not access traumatic memories because of the “severely paralyzing” effect of strong emotions like fright and shame. Freud concluded “the ultimate cause of hysteria is always the seduction of the child by an adult.” 

 

However, as Bessel van der Kolk observes, when “faced with his own evidence of an epidemic of abuse in the best families of Vienna – one, he noted, that would implicate his own father – he quickly began to retreat.” Freud shifted his emphasis from real-world childhood trauma to “unconscious wishes and fantasies” like Oedipus complexes and penis envy. A century later, the leading psychiatry textbook in 1974 stated that “incest is extremely rare,” while opining it probably “allows for a better adjustment to the external world,” leaving “the vast majority” of underaged victims “none the worse for wear.” 

 

Since then, we’ve learned PTSD is very real, and that it’s not just a soldier’s disease. Here is Dr. van der Kolk’s call to action in The Body Keeps the Score after four decades treating trauma victims:  “Child abuse and neglect is the single most preventable cause of mental illness, the single most common cause of drug and alcohol abuse, and a significant contributor to leading causes of death such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, and suicide.”

 

My childhood best friend Paul killed himself a few months after he was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. In a pioneering study by Dr. van der Kolk and his Harvard colleague Dr. Judith Herman, 81 percent of patients diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder also had histories of severe child abuse. On my way to see Something Rotten!, sitting in line at the Peace Arch border crossing, I read more details about the study in The Body Keeps the Score. And I remembered various odd things Paul said or did over the years. Suddenly I made the horrifying connection – my friend Paul likely endured abuse while we were in elementary school together.

Christian Borle and "Will Power" on Broadway

When I visited New York in October 2015, my PTSD diagnosis was still a few weeks away. But I was well on the way to rock bottom. Even after Theatre Under the Stars refreshed my recollection, I still can’t remember seeing Something Rotten!.

 

I can think of several explanations for the memory gap. The first is the general effect of my disability. As a wrote in “Better-ish,” although many of my fuzzy memories from that period finally snapped into place, others never did. Instead my brain concluded the simplest way to adjust my internal clock was to delete two years from the timeline. It was like switching to Daylight Savings Time. Or like when England converted from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar, and eleven days were dropped from September 1752. Nevertheless, there’s a silver lining:  I remember half as much Donald Trump presidency as everyone else.

 

Another possible explanation for erasing Something Rotten! is my obsessive relationship with Shakespeare. For example, the best class I took at Yale Law School was Hal Bloom’s graduate Shakespeare seminar. My bardolatry goes beyond ordinary English Major fervor. I was born exactly four hundred years after William Shakespeare. (To the day, after adjusting for the switch to Gregorian calendar). All my life, or at least from 1964 to 2015, I could easily compare myself to where Will was at a particular age:  having his three kids in Stratford during the ’80s, writing classics like Hamlet in the ’90s, retiring to the country in the aughts, and dealing with poor health in the teens. Shakespeare died in 1616, on what would have been his 52nd birthday. On that date four hundred years later, senior managing lawyers at the Attorney General’s Office realized the State’s employment lawyers and their investigator had broken the law and discriminated against me. Rather than correct their errors, they hastily terminated my employment and embarked on the triggering coverup that continues today. My life stalled at age 51. As my health and career unraveled in 2015-16, I felt more doomed that Will Shakespeare. Now it feels like the clock has started again.

But there’s a third explanation for my memory blocking out Something Rotten!. As I sat in Malkin Bowl last month, I recognized some of the characters and plot developments from listening to the original cast album. For example, during Act I, Will Shakespeare’s rock-star narcissism was predictably charming. I was also prepared to see Nick Bottom weave his soothsayer’s misleading fragments of prophecy into the fiasco of Omelette: The Musical. (It’s no Springtime for Hitler, but it’s no Hamlet, either.) What surprised me was Shakespeare’s pathetic efforts during Act II to re-ignite own creative fire. Eventually Will is so desperate he steals Nigel Bottom’s brilliant draft script of Hamlet. After Omelette: The Musical bombs, Shakespeare conspires with the authorities to banish Nick, Nigel, their wives, and the soothsayer to America in order to cover up his own plagiarism.

 

Why did my memory block out the entire show, including the fact I saw it on Broadway? Because Something Rotten! centers on writer’s block. And finding your own voice. Which turns out to be how I finally worked my way through complex PTSD over the last few years. I still don’t remember anything from the first time I saw Something Rotten!. But I’m happy so many of the other rotten things from that time in my life are finally beginning to heal.

Daniel Curalli as Will at Theatre Under The Stars

SEEKING

We live next door to Washington’s third largest university. Unsurprisingly, on our walks Bear and I frequently encounter nerds.

 

The other day we ran into a young man on campus in obvious need of a dog fix. As he gave Bear a glorious tummy rub, the student exclaimed “He has heterochromia!” That’s an impressive nerd word – Bear was indeed born with two different colored eyes. My kids picked Bear out of the litter because of his soulful blue eye and his earnest brown eye.

 

After the Western student finally tore himself away from his canine cuddle, he asked whether Bear is an Aussiedoodle. Another remarkable nerd display. When I ask how he guessed the correct breed, he said it was because he observed Bear exploring the world. 

Heterochromia is less noticeable with Tina Turner bangs

In her book Animals Make Us Human, autistic animal husbandry expert Temple Grandin reminds us humans are animals too, with brains that evolved over millions of years. Grandin uses the model of brain function described by neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp four decades ago in his research on the neural bases of emotion. Panksepp identified seven primal emotions. Grandin follows Panksepp’s custom of labeling each in allcaps:  CARE, FEAR, LUST, PANIC, PLAY, RAGE, and SEEKING.

 

CARE is the emotion underlying parental love. LUST fuels sex and sexual desire. PANIC (or GRIEF) signals distress to an animal’s “social attachment system,” and “probably evolved from physical pain.” The separate emotion of RAGE evolved from animals’ experience of being captured and held immobile by a predator. According to Grandin, “frustration is a mild form of RAGE that is sparked by mental restraint when you can’t do something you’re trying to do.” 

In contrast with PANIC and RAGE, the core emotion PLAY “produces feelings of joy.” As I wrote in “PLAY On!,” the same neural pathways that inspire Bear and Buster to boisterously frolic at the off-leash park became the foundation for quintessentially human urges like art and music. All seven of Panksepp’s categories represent very human emotions whose effects can also be observed in other animals. 

In Panksepp’s model of animal brain evolution, SEEKING is the core emotion associated with curiosity and novelty. It’s the aspect of Bear’s Australian shepherd heritage that drives him to explore the world.

 

An animal’s SEEKING impulse may be in tension with FEAR, another primal emotion that is necessary for survival in a dangerous and mysterious world. According to Grandin, “at least a portion of the healthy amygdala acts as if it has an anxiety disorder – searching for threat in response to uncertainty…. The single most important factor determining whether a new thing is more interesting than scary is whether the animal has control over whether to approach the subject.”

Grandin suggests FEAR and SEEKING “may operate like different-sized weights put on the opposite ends of a balance scale.” I agree that personality statistics for human or animal populations would probably show an inverse correlation between curiosity and dread. Nevertheless, FEAR and SEEKING represent separate emotional drives. For example, Buster is much too dim-witted for sophisticated FEAR or SEEKING behavior. (Instead, Buster is a bundle of the tics and awkwardness associated with PANIC disorders.) Buster invariably leaps out of the car into traffic, yet seldom strays far from his human monitor.

In contrast, Bear is smart enough to balance both caution and curiosity.

Last year I read several excellent books about how our brains process probabilities, choices, disappointment, and uncertainty. My upcoming blog essay “How Lucky Can You Get?” dives into these topics, including some of the insights from my favourite book of 2021, What are the Chances? Why We Believe in Luck, by neuroscientist and statistician Barbara Blatchley. According to Blatchley,

 

Luck is the way you face the randomness in the world. If we are open to it, accepting, not anxious or afraid, willing to learn from mistakes and to change a losing game, we can benefit from randomness. We can gain a modicum of control over this aspect of life, even if we can't control the universe on a large scale. Randomness will happen no matter what we do—chaos theory rules in our universe. Knowing how to roll with the punches; now that's lucky.

 

Blatchley analyzes four kinds of luck originally identified by Zen Buddhist neurologist James Austin in his 1978 book Chase, Chance, and Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty. Dr. Austin’s first type of luck occurs by pure chance. Type I or blind luck is “random and accidental; it occurs through no effort of our own and against all odds.”  

 

In contrast with Type I luck, Dr. Austin’s second type of chance, “luck in motion,” is exemplified by Bear’s SEEKING attitude. According to Dr. Austin, Type II luck “favors those who have a persistent curiosity about many things coupled with an energetic willingness to experiment and explore.”

Last month Sehome High School put on its annual “24-Hour Play Festival.” On Friday night at 7 pm, four teams of writers arrived at the school to create new one-act plays overnight. The playwrights were assigned the same theme – “Keeping a secret” – and the same location – “The Wilds.” At midnight the producers added a random twist:  “All plays must include the word serendipity and a trophy.”

 

The tech crew, directors, and actors arrived Saturday morning and spent all day putting the four plays together before performing them Saturday evening. Eleanor was both a writer and an actor, which meant she stayed up for 46 hours straight. Their play “Crash Landing” presented a Lost-style jungle island mystery.

 

“Serendip” is the ancient Sanskrit name of the island of Sri Lanka. The English word “serendipity” first appeared in a 1754 letter by novelist Horace Walpole, and referred to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip. According to Walpole, the three princes were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” They deserved trophies for their discoveries. 

That’s the difference between serendipity and mere fortuity: it is precisely because the Princes of Serendip were on a quest for something that they found something else.

“Bear, you are just like my father. And me.”

 

My Apple Watch transcribes my dialogues with Bear as we walk. That recent quotation came as Bear sniffed his way along the trail from the off-leash park to the beach. Bear enjoys playing catch and frolicking at the park. But soon it’s time to move on.

 

My father turned 82 last month. He regularly golfs, bowls on multiple teams, and plays bridge several times a week. Dad is endlessly curious, and always busy with something. I’ve never understood the attraction of golf, the alleged sport that is often described as “a good walk spoiled.” I don’t need a pretext to be outdoors. I can just go for an unspoiled walk. But like my father and Bear, I have to keep going.

In the Mormon church, the children’s program is called “Primary.” When I was growing up, “Blazers” was the class for the oldest boys, just before turning twelve and graduating to Boy Scouts. You earned a glass medallion for your personal Blazer banner by memorizing and reciting each of the thirteen Articles of Faith, which are like a catechism of Mormons’ most basic beliefs. Obviously I had to earn every one. The most coveted medallion was for memorizing the Thirteenth Article of Faith, which was much longer than the other twelve. 

 

In 1976, I was the only boy in our class who could make it by memory all the way to the end of the Thirteen Article of Faith. I still can. It happens to be what I believe:

 

We believe in being honest, true,
chaste, benevolent, virtuous,
and in doing good to all men;
indeed, we may say that we follow
the admonition of Paul—
We believe all things,
we hope all things,
we have endured many things,
and hope to be able to endure all things.
If there is anything virtuous,
lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy,
we seek after these things.

 

Serendipity is the process of looking for something and finding something else. Nevertheless, what you’re seeking matters.

Calligraphy by 1980s Roger for the family room at his parents' house

Living with a Disability

The summer after high school graduation I went to Switzerland on a foreign exchange scholarship. I lived with a family near Geneva who had a son near my age. We bought rail passes and traveled all over his charming compact country, staying with his relatives in Zurich, Basel, and Lucerne. I toured castles and practiced my French. We visited Iseltwald, the picturesque town that my non-Scottish ancestors abandoned when they met the Mormon missionaries in the 1850s. 

 

One of my most vivid memories from Switzerland at age seventeen came after a trilingual dinner at a home in Geneva. As I looked around the table, I noticed our hostess was holding her coffee cup oddly. Then I noticed the woman sitting next to her was also gripping her cup with a twisted thumb. So was the person next to her. And everyone else at the table. Except me. I suddenly realized I’d been holding things “wrong” my whole life – because I was born without the middle joint in each of my thumbs. 

Even before I officially became an English Major, I always was a voracious reader. As a child I would read for hours under the bedcovers or sitting on the heater vent in the living room. I once negotiated with the Tooth Fairy to get the next installment of my favorite Enid Blyton series instead of cash. Reading infused me with the fantasy worlds of Narnia and Middle Earth, and the almost-fantasy worlds of L.M. Montgomery, Enid Blyton, and E. Nesbit. 

 

Growing up in Canada means you have a world of books to choose from. I was a devotee of the Brits:  C.S. Lewis, Joan Aiken, J.R.R. Tolkien, Roald Dahl, Lloyd Alexander, Malcolm Saville….  If you asked me what I expected junior high school to be like, I would probably have described something resembling English boarding school with Tom Brown, Billy Bunter, and the Pevensie children.  

 

The Pevensies are the English school children who travel to Narnia in the classic series by C.S. Lewis. As an earnest Mormon youth, I also devoured his Christian apologetics, literary criticism, and other works. In his memoir Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis wrote that both he and his brother Warren shared the same mild thumb deformity. Ironically, I’d probably read this passage a dozen times without making the connection to myself.

Doctors and lawyers use various definitions of “disability” for different purposes, from longterm disability insurance and Social Security payments to eligibility for particular treatments or accommodations. Here’s the definition in the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibition of discrimination in employment and public accommodations: 

 

“any physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities of an individual” 

 

The ADA’s nonexhaustive list of “major life activities” includes “caring for oneself, performing manual tasks, seeing, hearing, eating, sleeping, walking, standing, lifting, bending, speaking, breathing, learning, reading, concentrating, thinking, communicating, and working,” as well as “major bodily functions.” Some impairments might be an ADA disability for one person but not another. For example, Carpal tunnel syndrome occasionally interferes with my writing. But for my ASL sign language interpreter friend Steve, chronic Carpal tunnel meant finding a whole new career.

 

Four decades after my deformed thumb discovery, what have I learned about the various ways the quirky disability I share with C.S. Lewis interferes with my major and minor life functions?

In his memoir, C.S. Lewis blames his defective thumbs for the fact that he was terrible at sports in school. I would embrace his explanation – if hadn’t already graduated from high school before I noticed my thumbs diverged from the norm. 

 

Maybe both the thumbs and the sports aversion are caused by an English Major gene mutation. 

The first time I noticed my thumb impairment interfering with an activity was when I tried to sign the letter B. I don’t bend that way. 

 

My daughter Rosalind studies ASL in high school. We’ve tried to identify other examples of sign language that are beyond my ability. I’m not sure whether I have the deaf equivalent of a lisp, a stammer, or a sexy accent.

When I was in law school, my dormmates and I mingled with townies at weekly Midnight Bowling. I discovered I could only bowl one game before it was all gutter balls. 

I surmised that my thumbs and missing tendon only had so much mileage in them. My theory was corroborated by my increasingly sore hands as the night went on, something I subsequently observed in other intense manual tasks. However, my ableist classmates still blamed the pitchers of beer.

Although I’ve never smoked a cigarette, over the years I’ve had various occasions to operate a lighter or torch. They never work for me. 

 

This summer a visiting smoker friend asked for a light. I showed him the utility drawer where I’d tossed the various defective lighters that had found their way to the house over the years. They all worked for him. Apparently the engineers who design torches are willing to accommodate both left- and right-handers, but not people with semi-opposable thumbs.

As I recently wrote in “Dr. Heuristic, Foot Whisperer,” debilitating plantar fasciitis has prevented me from enjoying my daily walks with Bear. Ordinarily we average over ten miles a day. That much exercise is good for our physical health. It’s also essential for my mental health as well as my productivity as a writer. 

 

Several years ago I realized my big toes have the same missing knuckle and tendon as my thumbs. The foot exercises my doctor assigned to treat my plantar fasciitis require me to plant my heel on one end of a towel and pull the other end with my toes. I can’t do it. My big toes are too feeble.

 

Unless you count smoking pot, until now I had never identified a major life function that is limited by my deformity. But because the ADA includes both “walking” and “working” in its disability definition, I can now fit within the definition of a physical impairment. Maybe lawyers who don’t believe in mental illness will finally give me some respect.

September 25

Move On

When I was a young litigation associate at my first law firm in Seattle, I came out of the closet and embarked on a lifetime of adventure as an advocate for LGBT dignity and equality. Eventually I quit my day job to spend five years with the ACLU of Illinois as the Director of the LGBT Rights/AIDS & Civil Liberty Project. I continued my advocacy pro bono when I returned to private practice back home in the Pacific Northwest, where I was the ACLU’s co-counsel in Washington’s marriage equality litigation, and argued other important civil rights cases in the Washington and Alaska Supreme Courts. 

 

In 2014, I attended Lavender Law, the annual conference of LGBT attorneys, not as an activist speaker but rather as a legal recruiter at what had become a mammoth job fair. My interview partner was a young gay litigation associate from our firm’s Portland office, Paul Carlos Southwick. Like me, Paul endured ecclesiastical abuse growing up in a fundamentalist church and going to a homophobic religious college.

 

I’ve attended Lavender Law numerous times over the years, but 2014 in New York is the only keynote session I vividly remember. We had recently won stunning marriage equality victories in the courts and before voters in multiple states, including Washington, and successfully challenged the odious federal “Defense of Marriage of Act.” The plenary panel’s topic was “What Next?,” and their answer was clear:  Queer Youth. LGBT kids are coming out younger than ever, at an average age of thirteen. As one speaker put it, “We’ve made it possible for them to come out, but we haven’t made it safe.” Each speaker challenged us to return to our communities and work both individually and systemically on behalf of the disproportionately at-risk queer youth in schools, homeless shelters, foster care, and the juvenile justice and mental health systems.

 

In 2020, Paul Southwick left private practice to become a full-time LGBT advocate. Paul founded REAP – the Religious Exemption Accountability Project, a program sponsored by the nonprofit Soulforce. REAP is currently litigating a nationwide class action that challenges federal rules permitting institutions of higher learning to accept federal funds without complying with the laws prohibiting discrimination that must be followed by every other accredited educational institution. Three of REAP’s plaintiff class representatives are from Brigham Young University, my alma mater.

Several years ago I wrote about the challenge of explaining BYU to normal people. Brigham Young University is the Mormon church’s flagship educational institution, and the largest private university in the United States. The Y attracts talented faculty and students with top credentials from around the world. BYU offers excellent programs in many areas, including a respected law school. It looks just like a real university, except with creepily immaculate landscaping. (I once saw a groundskeeper climb a tree to vacuum leaves before they could fall.) But the university’s actual mission is to facilitate youthful heterosexual marriages within the faith. BYU helps God join together each generation of recently returned Mormon missionaries with their blushing virgin brides. 

 

BYU was in the news last week because its former president Jeffrey Holland, now the fourth-ranking official in the Mormon church, delivered a homophobic and self-pitying speech to the University’s assembled faculty and staff. As the Salt Lake Tribune reported, “On the same day that Brigham Young University announced the creation of an ‘Office of Belonging’ to combat ‘prejudice of any kind, including that based on race and sexual orientation,’ Latter-day Saint apostle Jeffrey R. Holland sharply criticized faculty members and students who challenge the faith’s teachings on same-sex marriage. He also questioned why a BYU valedictorian would choose his 2019 commencement address to come out as gay.” [In hindsight I wish I had enough insight and courage to come out during my own BYU valedictory address in 1986.]

 

Elder Holland told BYU’s faculty and staff they should be taking up their “muskets” to defend the Church, especially “the doctrine of the family and marriage as the union of a man and a woman” as applied to the purely secular institution of legal marriage. According to Elder Holland, BYU professors who instead speak out on behalf of their LGBT students are attacking the Mormon church from within with “friendly fire — and from time to time the church, its leaders and some of our colleagues within the university community have taken such fire on this campus. And sometimes it isn’t friendly — wounding students and the parents of students who are confused about what so much recent flag-waving and parade-holding on this issue means.” 

Elder Holland urged BYU’s faculty and staff to “stay in harmony with the Lord’s anointed,” rather than questioning the Mormon hierarchy’s pronouncements about human sexuality. He quoted an earlier speech at BYU by the senior Apostle, Dallin Oaks, who said “I would like to hear a little more musket fire from this temple of learning,” especially “defending marriage as the union of a man and a woman.”

Violence and violent language directed at gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals are nothing new for BYU and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

 

Other than the Brethren in Salt Lake City, there are no paid clergy among the Mormons. Instead, every worthy male member is eligible to hold the priesthood and to participate in voluntary church leadership. I was ordained a deacon in 1976 when I turned twelve years old. Twice a year the men all gather for a Priesthood General Conference, beamed by satellite from the Tabernacle. I attended for the first time in October 1976, just a few weeks after my family moved from Vancouver to a small town in Utah. It was a memorable session.

 

Apostle Boyd K. Packer delivered a notorious address about the Law of Chastity. The name of the sermon was “To Young Men Only,” although it’s generally referred to as the “little factory” speech because of Elder Packer’s extended metaphor about the risks of masturbation revving up hormone production. Like every other church spokesman then and now, Elder Packer recklessly dismissed the reality of sexual orientation as “a falsehood that some are born with an attraction to their own kind.” One horrifying passage stood out:

 

It was intended that we use this power only with our partner in marriage. I repeat, very plainly, physical mischief with another man is forbidden. It is forbidden by the Lord. There are some men who entice young men to join them in these immoral acts. If you are ever approached to participate in anything like that, it is time to vigorously resist.

While I was in a mission on one occasion, a missionary said he had something to confess. I was very worried because he just could not get himself to tell me what he had done.

After patient encouragement he finally blurted out, “I hit my companion.”

“Oh, is that all,” I said in great relief.

“But I floored him,” he said.

After learning a little more, my response was “Well, thanks. Somebody had to do it, and it wouldn’t be well for a General Authority to solve the problem that way.”

I am not recommending that course to you, but I am not omitting it. You must protect yourself.

 

Elder Packer’s message was so important the church distributed it in pamphlet form for the next forty years – only to boys, of course. These words terrorized generations of young Mormon men, especially the queer ones. 

The church finally stopped printing the “To Young Men Only” pamphlet in 2016. The transcript of Elder Packer’s original sermon was silently scrubbed from the church’s official General Conference archive in July 2020, but his harmful message can still be found online. More importantly, it lives on in the words and deeds of today’s Mormon leaders.

 

1981 Kimball Scholar finalists at BYU. Can you believe only John, Bill, and I turned out to be gay?

I first met Jeffrey Holland in January 1981, when he was in his first year as BYU president. I was visiting campus as a finalist for BYU’s prestigious Spencer W. Kimball Scholarship. Mormon youth from around the world apply for the university’s top honor, named for the current president of the church. BYU flew the finalists to Utah for an intense long weekend of competitive bonding before they selected twelve winners and two alternates. (The girl finalists had their turn the following week – God forbid the sexes should intermingle before marriage.) Being chosen as a Spencer W. Kimball Scholar remains one of the great honors of my life.

President Kimball served as the Mormon Prophet from 1973 until his death in November 1985. He bore a strong resemblance to his contemporary Yoda – short and ancient, with a croaking voice that could move mountains. He was one of the most godly individuals I’ve ever encountered.  

 

In the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, Elder Price’s big number is “I Believe.” The song is a catalogue of accurate yet outlandish-sounding tenets of the Mormon faith – such as “I believe … that in 1978, God changed his mind about black people.” 

 

That’s President Kimball’s legacy. During the nineteenth century, the Mormons picked up a lot of racist myths and folk theology. As a result, no one with a “drop” of African blood could be ordained to the priesthood, or participate in the Church’s most sacred rites. After this purportedly essential doctrine became increasingly untenable in the 1960s and 70s, President Kimball was the one who finally had the vision to open the temple doors to everyone, regardless of race.

Spencer W. Kimball (1895 - 1985)

One of the great tragedies of my life is that my personal hero was also one of my first abusers. President Kimball single-handedly did more damage to me and countless other LGBT Mormons than anyone or anything before the church's shameful role in the Prop 8 campaign. As Bryce Cook wrote in his comprehensive history of the divide between the Mormons and the gays:

 

Spencer W. Kimball’s popular book, The Miracle of Forgiveness, first published in 1969, devoted an entire chapter to homosexuality, entitled “Crime Against Nature.” As one LDS historian explained, “[This chapter] is the earliest and most comprehensive treatment on homosexuality by an apostle, and the foundation from which Mormon thought, policy and political action on homosexuality grew for the past 45 years.” 

 

Kimball described homosexuality and homosexuals using terms such as, “ugly,” “repugnant,” “ever-deepening degeneracy,” “evil,” “pervert,” deviant,” and “weaklings.” He taught that it was a spiritual disease that could be “cured,” and to those who felt otherwise, he responded: “How can you say the door cannot be opened until your knuckles are bloody, till your head is bruised, till your muscles are sore? It can be done.” 

 

This “curable-disease” mindset – based on obsolete psychological thought from the 1950s and 1960s – was embraced by Kimball and other church leaders because it aligned with their spiritual views of homosexuality. They believed that homosexuality was a psychological or spiritual malady that could be cured through intense repentance, self-mastery and even marriage to the opposite sex. This belief informed the church’s ecclesiastical approach and training of leaders, as well as Mormon mental-health therapists, for years to come – and it was probably the most psychologically and spiritually damaging of all the church’s teachings on homosexuality. 

 

I read The Miracle of Forgiveness multiple times when I was a teenager. I carried the book around for years, before finally throwing it out when the kids and I moved into our current house. Nevertheless, I don’t remember a word of what President Kimball said about gay people, in his book or anywhere else.

 

I had to have known. But I couldn’t associate the man I loved and admired with this ignorant and hateful message. So I repressed or disassociated my memories of the Prophet as homophobe. No doubt that made the experience all the more traumatic.

Unlike the Mormons’ ban on ordaining blacks, finally lifted in 1978, the Mormon church’s anti-LGBT bias is no relic of the past. I’m living proof. Mormon church leaders not only caused my original trauma three decades ago, but they also helped trigger the strange new PTSD symptoms that disabled me and ended my legal career five years ago.

 

In November 2015, just as I was struggling to understand my body’s excruciating reaction to a toxic work environment, news reports emerged of the Mormon church’s vindictive response to the Supreme Court’s marriage equality rulings. Mormons don’t believe in infant baptism. Instead, they place the “age of accountability” at eight years old. Getting baptized is a big deal for any Mormon child. Nevertheless, the church issued a policy denying baptism to all children of married gay couples. Just the legally married ones – not gay single dads or couples living in sin, as we used to call cohabitation.

 

In a Washington Post op-ed commentary about the new Mormon policy, my longtime civil rights colleague and former Utah neighbor Kate Kendell, Executive Director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, called it “repugnant and deeply stigmatizing.” Like Kate, I thought I had made my peace with the Mormons long ago. Nevertheless, family and friends remarked at my over-the-top reaction when news broke about the church’s new baptism policy. Even after deleting all the original ranting, my own PTSD-fueled Facebook response at the time was pretty damning:

 

The Gospel of Matthew describes an occasion when Jesus’ disciples, like paparazzi-weary security guards, attempted to block a group of little children from coming to hear the Master. Jesus rebuked his own disciples, saying with uncharacteristic harshness that “whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” Matt. 18:6.

 

In their public statement defending the leaked policy of denying baptism to the children of married gay couples, the Mormon Church said “We regard same-sex marriage as a particularly grievous or particularly significant, serious kind of sin.” Because of this stance, they refuse to allow children with approving but married gay parents to follow Christ into the waters of baptism – out of a “desire to protect children in their innocence.” 

 

The ludicrousness of the assertion that a couple’s public affirmation of commitment to each other is a more grievous sin than murder, rape, or child abuse speaks for itself. In the face of Christ’s actual statements about children, it is breathtaking.

 

I was thirty years old before my parents and I finally had our coming out chat. I drove up from Seattle to confess I was gay, I’d quit my law firm job, and I was moving to Chicago with my boyfriend to be an LGBT rights lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. (We agreed on a cover story to tell my fathers’ Republican friends:  I’d been disbarred and gone away to prison.)

My daughter Rosalind represents the new generation. She came out in middle school, in a text. Actually two texts:

#1:  “Papa, I just wanted to let you know I’ve been going to the Queer Student Alliance after school.”

#2:  “Don’t make a big deal about it.”

For her sixteenth birthday this summer, Rosalind requested a pair of Converse custom Pride hightops. Last week she confidently wore her big gay shoes on the first day back at in-person high school.

I will never forget the Lavender Law speakers’ challenge to do whatever we can to make the world safe for every child. In hindsight, perhaps the most important action I’ve taken personally has been to keep my own children as far away as possible from the unrepentantly sexist, racist, and homophobic Brethren in Salt Lake.  

"What's a Mama Dragon?"

When Paul Southwick and his colleagues organized the Religious Exemption Accountability Project, they chose an acronym for the organization – REAP – that intentionally invokes a familiar New Testament metaphor. The hopeful motto on REAP’s homepage comes from sixth chapter of the Epistle to the Galations: “And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.” As the Apostle Paul warns in the previous verse “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.”

 

REAP’s imagery also resonates with another Biblical metaphor, from the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus told the multitude

 

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

 

Matthew 7:15-17, 20 (King James Version).

When I first heard about Jeff Holland’s recent speech at BYU, I didn’t want to rush to judgment. Fortunately, both the church and the Salt Lake Tribune made the complete transcript available. It turns out Elder Holland’s actual words are even worse than their description in the press.

 

First, his violent imagery in asking the faculty to take up “muskets” against proponents of LGBTQ inclusion was not a misplaced or misunderstood metaphor. My BYU classmate and fellow Student Review alumnus Michael Austin, now the academic vice president of a Methodist university in Indiana, was quoted in the original Salt Lake Tribune article about Elder Holland’s speech. As Mike subsequently wrote, 

 

The nature of our metaphors is important because words are important. Language has enormous power to wound and to heal. Using a martial metaphor to describe discussion and disagreement introduces an unnecessary level of violence into the discourse. It makes it harder, not easier, for us to understand each other and work together in love to solve conflicts.

 

Elder Holland’s call to arms was at the center of the entire speech. Chillingly, he justified his choice of words with an explicit appeal to the authority of even more senior Mormon apostles who had previously used the same violent language. (“My brethren have made the case for the metaphor of musket fire, which I have endorsed yet again today.”) And he demanded “loyalty to prophetic leadership and devotion to revealed doctrine.”

 

Second, like so many abusers, Elder Holland insists on wrapping himself in the mantle of victimhood. He complained about the Brethren’s “scar tissue” from being criticized about their position on “the whole same-sex topic.” Elder Holland acknowledged with crocodile tears that “Too often the world has been unkind, in many instances crushingly cruel, to these our brothers and sisters.” Yet not once has Elder Holland or his gerontocratic brethren ever publicly acknowledged responsibility for the crushing cruelty they have inflicted on LGBT Mormons and their families, or for the impact of the church’s relentless political and legal campaigns against purely secular rights for LGBT citizens.

 

Finally, you will search the text of Elder Holland’s speech in vain for words like “gay,” “lesbian,” “bisexual,” “transgender,” or “LGBTQ.” Instead, he refers to “those who live with this same-sex challenge.” His odious homophobic dog-whistle is painfully familiar to survivors of discredited reparative therapy and traumatizing “pray-the-gay-away” preaching. Nevertheless, just like Spencer W. Kimball, Boyd Packer, and pathologically legalistic senior apostle Dallin Oaks, Elder Holland is so blinded by bad science and worse dogma that he is incapable of acknowledging the existence of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender children of God – recognizing only weak sinners who struggle with what the Mormons insist on calling “same-sex attraction.”

 

Jeffrey Holland should know better, both as an English Major and as an apostle charged with proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I urge Elder Holland to ponder his own words at the conclusion of his disastrous recent speech to the BYU faculty:

 

“Light conquers darkness. Truth triumphs against error. Goodness is victorious over evil in the end.”

Like the out-of-touch Brethren who lead the Mormon church, I’m fond an ancient Middle Eastern proverb:  “The dog barks, but the caravan moves on.” (It rhymes in both Turkish and Armenian.)

After I left the Mormon church thirty years ago, Elder Holland sent me a sincere and thoughtful private letter in which he described me as perhaps the “biggest disappointment” of all his students and friends at BYU. 

 

When I first read Elder Holland’s letter three decades ago, I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. That’s the same way I used to feel every time I heard the Mormons’ message that gay, lesbian, and transgender youth are hopelessly broken and unworthy of love. Despite the progress I’ve made, the church’s ugly attack on gay families five years ago once again triggered debilitating PTSD symptoms.

 

Fortunately, it gets better. This month as I read Elder Holland’s speech and observed the justifiably outraged response, I felt only pity – for the queer youth subjected to the Brethren’s hateful, violent, and dishonest message; for the countless lives lost to suicide, loneliness, and self-destruction; for the parents forced to choose between their children and their faith; for the deluded couples pressured into doomed heterosexual marriages, and for the children of their broken homes; for the abuse victims who believed the false promise they could pray the gay away; and for the BYU students and faculty who thought they were investing in an academic degree, and instead find themselves on the road to pariah status as the Mormon version of Bob Jones University. 

 

I even pity the blind old men in Salt Lake who cannot see any way to untangle the knot they’ve tied themselves in. Nevertheless, today I can say that Jeffrey Holland is definitely the biggest disappointment of all my professors at BYU, Yale, and the University of Washington.