By Mister Curie
After coming out to my immediate family about no longer believing in the church and also about being attracted to men, I have noticed some interesting changes in my life. Many of these changes are due to the relatively positive response I received from my family when I came out. First, coming out has created some space in my life to be myself without worrying about the response of others and that has removed a good deal of angst and urgency, both of which were contributing to my need to blog. Second, I have been able to work on decompartmentalizing much of my life and thus have been posting more on facebook, broadcasting my lack of Mormon beliefs and interest in LGBT themes in a non-anonymous fashion. Third, with outing myself to those that matter most in my life, gay and Mormon issues have taken a backseat in my life as of late and other aspects of my life that I was ignoring have demanded attention after their long neglect (essentially, I had a meeting with my PhD thesis committee and they feel I am ready to graduate, which means I need to finish up my research ASAP and write hundreds of pages for my thesis before May. My research has also become very interesting lately with obtaining some knock-out mice of the gene I am studying and having multiple avenues of my research all beginning to converge). Things are going well and my list of topics to blog about keeps getting longer and longer, but I have not had the time to address them in an adequate manner. As I often found when I regularly kept a journal, right when there are things to write about, I am doing so many things that I don't have time to write about them.
Thus, I am happy to have a place to blog to process through things and I am not going away, but I can't guarantee that blog posts will be regular and/or frequent. If you would like more frequent updates on my life, I encourage you to 'friend' me on facebook. I have added a facebook widget on the sidebar. Also, rather than holding on to the list of things I have done that each deserve a blog post waiting for enough time to do each one justice, I will list them in this update and perhaps future blog posts will expand on some of them, although I am sure there will be future things to blog about in addition, so no guarantees.
In chronological order, some important events since coming out to my family:
1. One of my younger brothers came to visit and we took a trip to NYC, where we saw Wicked, had an enjoyable dinner with
Horizon, and stayed overnight at his apartment.
2. Summer trip to Rehoboth, an LGBT-friendly area, and took a stroll down to the gay beach
3. Family trip to the Catholic Marianist retreat center which further confirmed my agnostic/atheist belief system
4. MoHo East party at
Horizon's apartment over Labor Day weekend, where I first met
David Baker,
Clark,
Michael, and several other MoHos.
5. Watched some of Clark's YouTube
videos. I want to watch more.
6. Also watched some of the MorMen
videos. Again, there are more of these that I'd love to watch.
7. OutFest 2010 party in Philadelphia, National Coming Out Day
8. General Conference - Boyd K. Packer, need I say more?
9. Read several LGBT nonfiction books from the University library,definitely want to do some book reviews on my blog.
10. Trip to Washington DC, where I spent more time with
David Baker and also met
Sean.
11. Bollywood parties at our place - Some of the Indian boys in those movies are so cute!
12. Missionaries in the area are persistent, so we share our church concerns with them, dumping it all on them without filtering for their sake. Missionaries sit dumbfounded with deer in headlights look on their faces, not knowing how to respond. As I go off on church history concerns, missionaries no doubt confuse cognitive dissonance for "spirit of Satan" and suddenly need to leave for "another appointment".
13. Bishop and First Counselor pay a visit to our home. We anticipated a visit expressing concern for our eternal welfare, instead they do not express any interest in our concerns or in attempting to resolve them, but rather wish to "protect the good name of the church". They just want to make sure we aren't part of an organized anti-Mormon group trying to take down the church. We feel they certainly overestimate our influence and they leave reassured that we aren't systematically trying to take the church down. We feel emboldened and empowered after the visit, realizing how little power the church has over us now.
14. Thanksgiving - stayed in Philadelphia, but some minor family drama in Idaho when one of my younger brothers outed me to all the extended family and forced my mom to make a family-wide announcement
15. In response to #11, I emailed the letter I wrote for my parents to all the adults on that side of the family so they would know I am not ashamed and to let them know I am up for a dialogue on the topic.
16. Hanukkah - Jewish boys can be so cute.
