The recent 2014
Fair Conference, held Aug. 7-8, 2014 in Provo, offers a great
selection of faith-strengthening perspectives from a broad mix of speakers.
Topics include same-sex attraction, the Book of Abraham, the CES Letter, the role of women in the Church, the authorship of the Book of Mormon, etc. 

In this post I’ll call attention to Ty Mansfield’s excellent presentation on same-sex attraction and the LDS experience. His talk, “‘Mormons
can be gay, they just can’t do gay’? Deconstructing
Sexuality and Identity from an LDS Perspective,” discusses the
complexity of sexual attraction and reminds us to be careful about thinking we
know things that still puzzle the experts:

So much of the
controversy happens around unexamined premises and conclusions drawn, often
simply accepted without any real critical thought at all. Once we can
understand how these have harmed our understanding, we can then move to a
better place to articulate a reasonable response to those who question or
criticize the Church’s teachings….

The popular
cultural myths that either people are “born gay” or that they chose to be
homosexual or that their homosexuality is caused by parental nurturing (or lack
thereof) are all reductionistic and cannot explain much, if anything, about the
development of sexuality and sexual desire.

It’s interesting to
me that our popular and media culture seems to be so sure about something that
science and the academy are not. The American Psychological Association’s
official pamphlet addressing sexual orientation concedes this point, noting
that ultimately, “There is no consensus among scientists about the exact
reasons that an individual develops a heterosexual, bisexual, gay or lesbian
orientation. Although much research has examined the possible genetic,
hormonal, developmental, social, and cultural influences on sexual orientation,
no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual
orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors. Many think that
nature and nurture both play complex roles.” Some researchers have postured that
there is no such thing as “homosexuality,” but rather “homosexualities”—that there are multiple sub-populations with
different etiologies making for qualitatively different experiences of
sexuality that all lay within a broad and diverse umbrella we call
“homosexuality” or “same-sex attraction.”

He also addresses issues of identity and the shackles (my
term) that we can impose on ourselves or others with terminology that
pigeonholes people into an “identity” based on the attractions they
feel.

In an LDS context,
people often express concern about words that are used—whether they be
“same-sex attraction,” which some feel denies the realities of the gay
experience, or “gay,” “lesbian,” or “LGBT,” which some feels speaks more to
specific lifestyle choices. What’s important to understand, however, is that
identity isn’t just about the words we use but the paradigms and worldviews and
perceptions of or beliefs about the “self” and “self-hood” through which we
interpret and integrate our various experiences into a sense of personal
identity, sexual or otherwise. And identity is highly fluid and subject to
modification with change in personal values or socio-cultural context. The
terms “gay,” “lesbian,” and “bisexual” aren’t uniformly understood or
experienced in the same way by everyone who may use or adopt those terms, so
it’s the way those terms or labels are incorporated into self-hood that
accounts for identity. One person might identify as “gay” simply as shorthand
for the mouthful “son or daughter of God who happens to experience romantic,
sexual or other desire for persons of the same sex for causes unknown and for
the short duration of mortality,” while another person experiences themselves
as “gay” as a sort of eternal identity and state of being….

As a final note
here, however one chooses to self-identify here in a fallen, temporal world
limited by human culture and human language, I firmly believe that, like
Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in which all social and
political constructs were swallowed up in the gospel stone that rolled forth to
consume the nations, so will the spiritual ideals and identities of the kingdom
of God and the Celestial nature swallow up all of our social identity
constructs that blur eternal identity (see Daniel 2:31-45).

While I identified
as gay for a time, at one point I had a very strong spiritual prompting that if
I continued to identify as gay, it would limit my progression. I believe that
the more deeply we understand and feel spiritually connected to eternal
realities and our eternal identity, the less meaningful any proximate, mortal
identities feel to us. If others refer to me as gay, I typically tolerate it
for practical purposes, but it’s not how I see myself, and occasionally it can
feel particularly oppressive when others seem to insist on projecting and LGBT
identity construct on me even after I’ve specified that that is not how I see
myself. It’s not a construct that adequately captures who I am, what I believe,
or how I feel.

He then explores the issues of chastity and consecration,
and the speculation of others that Church will change regarding its stance on
same-sex issues. See the transcript at FairMormon.org.