A Mormon Lesbian Love Story - Lena Schwen & Sal Osborne from Hulu’s Mormon No More | Ep. 1502

hello everyone and welcome to another edition of mormon stories podcast i'm your host uh john dolin it is october 25th 2021 and today uh we are super excited to have two wonderful guests in the studio hey guys hey our guests today are uh lena schwinn and schwein and sal osborne is that right did i get that right perfect and uh the the title that we have for today's episode is a mormon lesbian love story and this is i mean i don't know if i should be proud or embarrassed to say that this is the first time in 16 years in the history of mormon stories podcast where we've had a lesbian couple tell their story and it's a mormon slash post-mormon lesbian couple telling their story um both sal and lena kind of uh were active and faithful in the church um in in their let's just say in their adult years uh they have slightly different stories but uh they both ended up marrying um in traditional heterosexual mormon marriages having children and then uh we won't uh we'll we'll wait to tell you kind of what happens next um but i guess i just wanted to begin by saying guys thank you so much gals thank you so much for coming on mormon stories podcast thank you for having us this is this is a privilege i feel it's surreal for me definitely it's a big day yeah we're honored to be here well um i'm so i'm so excited and if that weren't all we also have with us uh writing as co-host the one the only cara burrell hey cara thank you for joining us so excited for this one i gotta spend a little bit of time with these lovely ladies over the weekend at a little party gotta meet sal's younger brother joe right that's right yes so all in all basically a powerhouse family anyway you look at it so it's an honor to have you guys here today we are instant friends we became instant friends with kara she's pretty awesome oh yeah yeah even just via text she's our people yeah we're in you're in your family now yeah we first met this weekend but i already felt like a lifelong friendship already totally yes yeah this is gonna be a good one you guys and john i mean i've been listening to you for many years you your voice is part of my psyche yeah yeah yeah you were a part of of my transition a big part so oh thank you for all the work you do it's really cool it's really like i mean i could talk a lot about that but yeah i'll let you ask the questions okay well that means a lot and never that's something where i'm never like i never get used to that it's always kind of humbling and i'm grateful and that means a lot so thanks for thanks for that all right well i think we should just dive into this uh amazing story and i'm just dying to hear how it all begins now sal you i i as i understand it you were kind of born in the church is that right yeah and lena you are a convert is that right okay and i don't know for some reason i always have the instinct to have the person born in the church go first and then the convert goes second well how does that sound sounds great all right uh okay is there anything you guys want to say as a disclaimer before we jump in sometimes people like to say why they're doing the podcast or why they're not doing the podcast are there any disclaimers you guys want to offer to loved ones or friends or family that that may be like why are they going on mormon stories or do you want to just kind of save that and we should also probably do a content disclaimer as well i would like to say i'm honored to be here and nobody that knows me will be surprised it's it's not a it's not something i keep secret i'm very public we have public we have platforms where we talk about our faith transition i have my own podcast and talking about it and so this is not a surprise it's it's well known also that i'm not a mormon church basher i don't intend to harm any members of the church i still have family members that are active and i have lots of good things to say about the church and also some things that aren't good so i feel great about it yeah i think i mean i'm a lot newer out of the church than she is and i still feel a lot of those like repercussions uh it's only been two and a half years so there may be people that catch this episode that had no idea that i like if they're not on instagram you know that i have made this big life change and and i'm divorced and i'm in this relationship you know surprise like i know there's one particular person that i have not come out to uh which will probably hear this episode and so you're doing this why i think it's important for me to share my story just coming from a converts perspective it's so needed for members to know what happens when you take someone out of their family tradition and excuse me their help environment and just expect them to adapt and conform and then like you should i mean the level of abandonment that i've experienced since leaving the church it's been really really unfortunate so i think for people to just understand more of what that experience is like for a convert is needed yeah and definitely the purpose is to help people i mean if we help somebody with our story then we've we've done our job like that's why we're here yeah i want to i want to do this for me five years ago that's powerful okay and we and carol we try and do content warnings because on the one hand we want mormon stories to not be an echo chamber we want mormon stories to feel as safe as possible or as comfortable as possible to somebody who's either a believer or who's newly questioning the church and at the same time we want to be authentic which means sometimes people might naturally swear or talk about you know maybe even sexual things or other types of things that may feel really uncomfortable or raw to orthodox mormon ears and so if we're going to kind of give our listeners kind of a content warning what do we want to say somewhere between pg and pg-13 is that what we're going to go for here yeah sure pre-g13 yeah at least i mean if we do an after out and after show like a after party show then we can get some rated r stuff with kara yeah yeah yeah maybe cara will do her own uh after there you go after show okay care after dark so so there may be some moderate swearing and maybe some moderate discussion of kind of sexual um your your your sexuality your relationship that's the part of the story and there'll be faith crisis stuff people you know you guys talking about your faith of course but we're gonna not we're gonna try and avoid gratuitous or graphic kind of sure language and or sexual discussion is that okay that's good sounds great and we only say that because we believe in informed consent and we want our viewers and listeners to to not be shocked by anything so that'll be what we shoot for is that cool kara all right all right so let's begin so uh so yeah so sal where does your mormon story begin i was born in utah in ogden utah ogden yep my parents raised me in the church i was born in the covenant as they say my mom has pioneer heritage um heber j grant is in my line and i was always like proud of that and my dad is a convert he grew up in a like a military home his dad ended up at hill air force base and they met on a blind date they're really cute and uh my my dad recently told me actually that he is the reason we were so orthodox because he was a convert and he's like well if this is true then this is true and we gotta do what this guy says the prophet you know like we gotta do this stuff and apparently my mom was more more like she didn't she wasn't raised that way very orthodox like very like letter of the law black and white but because of my dad that's kind of more of how i was raised i was raised true or not true and everything was associated with jesus and would does this make jesus happy and primary songs are the only things i knew no only music like that i remember as a little kid and my parents always had the callings and i was very much a mormon a little mormon kid and proud of it happy and in your mormon home growing up how many siblings and what types of mormon behaviors would have permeated your home i have four brothers my parents got married she was 20 and she had three kids right away boom boom and she was really like overworked and my dad he joined the fbi and so he was like in training and not it was stressful and um so she she thought she was done and then 10 years later when i was 10 she had two more kids with my dad so same parents just a big gap so you were three the four you were third of three i was i was the baby for ten years yeah me and my two older brothers and couple cabooses basically right and so we my mom would make me easter dresses and stuff and put me in my frilly outfits and i did not like that oh at all okay yeah she has really funny stories about how she would put all this work into dressing me up and buy the little patent leather shoes to go with it and then look down at me at church and during sacrament and see that i had switched my shoes and i was wearing like cowboy boots or soccer cleats you know like i was uh very naturally a tomboy and it wasn't they they just chalked it up to me being with brothers and wanting to be like them and that's a really great easy rational way to ration their way out of like thinking that i'm a little lesbian but it's clear now um but to answer your question we did family home evening we had scripture study regularly we said prayers over everything um dad was the patriarch of the home he was you know he was the one in charge my mom of course was you know how it is that she's the engine she's the one who like did most of the rearing of the children he was present but she was you know she was a really really dedicated mother and took that role very seriously so very traditional mormon household an upbringing yep and i mean i think a lot of people that know us would be like you guys weren't very traditional because we were fun and we we did things that we we you know we're they're very accepting of different lifestyles my oldest brother was into skateboarding when skateboarding wasn't uh like okay yet it was like the rebellious but they supported him and so was there a skate park nearby kind of oh we found all the skate parks everywhere fun i broke so many bones growing up oh you skated too ten i did everything i did every i just followed still followed them around yeah i can skate and uh and so my parents you know we were orthodox but also at the same time she wanted us she my mom taught us to be um thinkers and she wanted us to actually have a testimony and not just get in line but she would she would push us to have critical thinking within the box of mormonism you know and i appreciate that because that's why i'm here right now for sure let's make sure and come back to yeah why that's true right okay so do you have like happy memories of growing up mormon for sure yeah as a kid as a kid i i loved um the structure i have adhd and so i thrive with structure when i have like boundaries and so i'm not like kind of going crazy in my mind and i i thrived because i knew what was expected and then i could do that and i knew i was going to be okay it was like very um safe it felt very safe and the warmth of the members of the church it felt like a family it felt like i had we never lived by family actually because we moved around with my dad's job and so the church was my extended family and so that was that was very comforting and it's all i knew you know i didn't know anything different and so it felt really safe and i really didn't have any close friends that weren't mormon so you didn't stay in ogden nope we moved around a lot when i was little we moved to kansas city chicago monterey california where my dad went to the language school over there and then we then we moved to houston texas until i was in sixth grade then the summer before seventh grade we moved to quarterly in idaho and i graduated high school in coeur d'alene okay yeah so you knew bruce willis and demi moore basically i heard they lived there it's a beautiful spot yeah yeah it's also known as like a skinhead like one of the national centers for skinheads right and and uh the first summer we got there there was a parade a kkk literal parade down main street and it was it was pretty crazy and my my dad works like people in hoods like sheets yep oh wow everything it was weird like that they allowed it but i remember my dad's office was down there and we were there and the news like interviewed us because we were like think they were like why are these kids here but my mom she like literally was okay with us seeing the world like seeing things like that or taking us she she was she's super excited about culture and and all that so we were exposed to things and that's fine and um my dad actually worked to um handle that situation and they weren't there they like they're not there anymore so there was no threat i didn't feel scared or anything cool okay so your your main formative years i guess are are in coeur d'alene that's good to know was there a pretty heavy mormon presence i mean i i think of idaho as being pretty densely populated with mormons was that was that the experience yeah um in texas i mean that was six second to sixth grade so yeah what area spring um there's some the ellis elder somebody named ellis he was in our ward and he's in the 70 now okay um and the membership there was really strong like they were really devoted like that's where i grew up in houston oh yeah there you go so yeah i felt very like churchy there and then in idaho was actually a little more laid back um not so high strung like achievement driven like than like less judgy than texas was um i got i got bullied and teased quite a bit there um in idaho in houston oh in houston yeah not in idaho so much oh and houston is texas mean girls or something yeah it was it was uh yeah i'm starting emdr therapy pretty soon and i will have to work through some of those those moments where um i was teased for being a tomboy it was just like really awkward because i didn't fit i didn't fit a mold were these mostly mormon girls or just kids at high school that weren't mormon or both both school friends yeah some mormon girls for sure super mean um and uh yeah it was it was tough it was tough to be somebody that didn't fit the exact thing you know and this was a time when i was not pretending yet like because you hadn't figured figured out anything regarding sexuality it was just me i was just me and and part of my sexuality is the way i present myself and my interests and stuff like i'm i'm um more masculine i was very upset that i couldn't go with the scouts to do stuff so mad my dad was a scout master so many times and my brothers got to go do all the fun things that i wanted to do and i hated all the stupid crap that i had to do with the young women like crafting and uh yeah if it's okay just because i have a child that's transgender and i just this morning went attended a a presentation that adrian gave at the u of u where adrian talked they adrian talked about gender we do a horrible job in society and especially mormonism talking about the difference between sexuality and gender because everything we've been talking about so far hasn't i want to say has nothing to do with sexuality but we've been describing gender presentation in other words how you presented in terms of your gender identity right yeah and we're talking about how tomboy or a little bit more masculine or a little bit more like the boys none of that per se is sexuality it's more just kind of how in society we've formulated these ideas of kind of a rigid gender binary where women have long hair and women play with dolls and wear pink and and boys do sports and have short hair and are athletic and it's a it's a it's a really destructive binary well i mean it's probably useful in some ways it's probably useful to order society in ways that might optimize like number of children or you know members of of you know churches or of society but it but this gender binary really does us a service a disservice but also conflating sexuality with gender presentation or gender identity also does this a disservice because they really are different you can have feminine lesbians that aren't tomboys but right here exactly that's what i'm trying she's a sexy lady that's kind of what yeah what is known as a lipstick lesbian yeah but yeah i agree so so i think my story is a little bit of both it's it feels like a gender thing and it also feels like a sexuality thing because i i feel i identify as a woman i feel like a woman but i don't appreciate the binary like i don't appreciate that i'm expected to be a certain way just because i'm a woman right i want all of the opportunities that men have and i don't want to feel like i'm less than for liking those things or for being better at stuff than the boys you know like that's non-preferred by them and so i you know i i came up against a lot i i worked hard to find my place and to do things that i loved and granted my parents did a good job they they did they supported me in in putting me on the boys little league teams because there wasn't any girls teams for me to play on um they let me dress how i wanted to i cut my hair short and sure that doesn't mean i'm a lesbian but also don't just don't don't just assume i'm gonna like boys just you know like we need to say do you have a boyfriend do you like a boy or a girl or do you like anyone like we have to stop that you know we have to stop that expectation the binary thinking is really damaging i can see how it's helpful for the structure it's very uncomfortable the change like society will have to come a long way to get past that and i can see the benefits i mean i have kids and i can see how it would be a difficult change and just a new way of thinking and take more effort and we don't like to put an effort in anything yeah it's like we just want the easy way we want the the the path that's worn down the most in our brain you know so we can spend our time on other things well the truth is gender is multi-dimensional and it's on a spectrum yeah the dimensions are on a spectrum and sexuality is often multi-dimensional and also on a spectrum for sure and yeah like you say we like to keep it simple have everyone in their box and it's just not helpful and i guess what i'm hearing is is that being being expected to be in a certain box a feminine box as someone who identifies as a girl or as a woman wasn't necessarily you were you were bullied yeah and it was unpleasant for you that that gender binary was was probably something that has led to maybe some trauma for you yes most definitely yeah it has and and i you know i'm very aware now and i've done a lot of uh studying and i feel like a well-read person and i understand everything but like the trauma in my body still exists like my subconscious i can't i can't heal that just because i forgive or because it makes sense to me or any of that so i have i have work to do to to you know are you comfortable sharing maybe a story or two about how you were treated because of your gender presentation or or and and i want you this i want this to be fully consensual if you're not comfortable sharing that's that's perfectly fine too yeah um i remember working really hard and this may be surprising or ironic i worked really hard to save money to buy myself a bike in elementary school and i went to the store and i bought it and and i pulled up to my group of friends and they're like oh sally has a pink bike she bought a pink bike and it was like fuchsia or something like purpley pink and i didn't even think twice about it and i got made fun of because i was having something that didn't fit the mold that they thought a tomboy like i was made fun of because this pink is for feminine yeah and so they're teasing me because of that because like they put me in a certain box and now they have something to say about it and and that was just it felt so unfair to me you know and then you know as a kid with boys i i got i got teased for for always being with the boys and not playing with the girls like i got teased for having short hair i got teased for i think i i remember signing up for a boys baseball team and my name is sally jo and the coach called me called my parents and they're like so we're excited to have joe on the team and they're like no no no it's it's sally and they assumed i was a boy and and then i had to show up to the team where there's no girls and just own it you know so i think i may have disassociated a lot of times and blocked a lot of memories out that that are harmful because i know our brains are smart like that they protect us so i was very averse to all the masculinity in my home that was something that was traumatic for me my dad being an fbi agent and my brothers and stuff i like that oh no i i felt like i didn't fit i felt like they wanted me to be the binary woman and to to just listen to their to just obey and get in line and be the girl that they thought i was supposed to be and i wasn't and so we kind of butted heads you know and you and your dad mostly my dad and my brothers i have okay i have lots of that and and um you know the patriarchy is something that i want to burn to the ground [Laughter] i noticed the inequality from a very young age and i pushed against it until i got worn down you know eventually i got worn down and stopped trying because i could see that it was not gonna work so what does all that bullying in and out of the church do to a kid into a teen it it wears me down i'm very i've worked really hard to not have a protective shield to protect myself and to not be myself to not be my authentic self and and even to the point of not knowing who that is because i did it for so long so your your coping or your reaction to the constant bullying and judgment was to put up was to not really develop a sense for who you were but to put up a shield to not give them me like you don't have access to me i'm going to protect myself i'm going to make myself small in front of you but like when i felt like i was in a safe space i was able to kind of like be more relaxed and be myself i remember in high school i was voted uh i was voted the class clown people thought i was funny and my brother i came home and my brother was like what you're funny like i don't get it because i was such a different person around them because i had to protect myself you know so so humor humor was kind of a way kind of a defense or protection and but it also is just more it's more me don't you think like i wasn't able to be myself at home as much as i was with a safe group of friends at school that i had developed over time to feel safe with what things were you into in high school yeah in high school i was into everything we had a i felt like i was a big fish in a small pond in coeur d'alene um and i did basketball and track and cross country and i was a student body president and seminary all-star and uh what else did i do i was in the play i was the wicked witch of the west in the school play and i was super involved i played the violin i was in a girl band called doll face i played the drums when i got a little older yeah yeah i did i i was i kept myself busy maybe maybe a protective mechanism there too achieving yes maybe hyperachieving achieving and also like um avoiding my sexuality avoiding my pain the pain of repression you know like okay i'll just put my attention here and i'll i'll not think about it you know and i'll just work with what i have got it yeah okay i relate to some of that um just in different ways so uh what was your testimony like you said you attended seminary as as you were kind of going through those high school years did you have doubts did you have questions were you just the full-on believer like what you know did you try and get a testimony of your own i was very much a believer i was definitely um [Music] i don't know i just my brain was was very much molded to to this from infancy you know like i didn't have i didn't feel like there was another way and maybe a few times along my path i had like kind of a fork in the road where i'm where i noticed i'm like i can choose this way or i can choose that way and i always chose the church and i felt because i felt more safe i really believed in god i believed that i needed to do these things to get to the place to get to heaven i believed that i needed to conform i i remember saying to my mom like i would always have these like philosophical conversations with her we're really we're really really close um because i'm the only girl and and we would get into it and i'd be like i i guess what i'm finding out is that god's he wants us to conform and that's part of the plan on earth we if you love me keep my commandments and that means don't be yourself like don't listen to yourself in and when in doubt go with what the brother and say go with what the book of mormon says so i had plenty of times where i didn't feel like i agreed and my conscience said something different but i thought it was my purpose to shut that down to think like i am a human and that's that's not godly and to choose to choose to to get in line and follow any any examples come to mind of that or just concepts yeah so when i was i think i was a sophomore i was just in that like puberty stage where i was kind of awkward and i realize now that i had crushes on girls a couple times and i didn't realize that at the time but i there was a stirring happening and i think it's because i was going through puberty and i was having those feelings and and i remember and i i remember swearing a few times because i was on the basketball team and and they were not mormon and so i was kind of like had my foot on both sides and i was friends with the non-mormons and the mormons and i i had a pivotal moment where i was like okay i need to make a choice which way i'm going because if i stick if i stick here in the middle road i think i'm going to get tempted to go this way and i think subconsciously i knew that i was a lesbian and that that that would lead me down the road of like having more conflict and being tortured basically because i would be in that world of like people living their life and developing as a normal teenager develops you know like what's healthy and over here i could safely repress and stay in line with the church and so i made that choice and i i lost i i like basically defriended a lot of a lot of my friends at that point and stopped swearing like committed to god and and um you know dated boys and stuff so okay so do you was there like this conscious for for many people there isn't was there this conscious moment like i think i'm lesbian but i'm gonna pack it down or was it not that conscious um it was conscious that i had feelings that i had uh an obsession i thought it was like a fixation of on us two particular girls that were older and they looked like you and and i remember feeling ashamed about that i remember feeling like i never told anybody about it and i remember thinking this is probably not this is weird and probably not okay and they would they would be weirded out these girls would be weirded out if they knew how much i think thought about them or like wanted to be around them and so i shouldn't tell them i didn't tell my mom which is a big deal because i told her everything and i wouldn't allow myself to say like i'm attracted to them or i think i'm gay i wouldn't go there in my mind i don't think my brain would allow it um because of the repercussions of what of what that would mean and so i was conscious though that i that i had a secret like draw to these girls and i i it was it was at the same time was around puberty and once i made that choice i i i think i just pushed it away and and it stopped didn't didn't happen anymore after that and then what about like expectation to date boys and even have romantic experiences with boys men you know high school yeah that's a that's a very student body president's pretty popular right i yeah i mean i was well known like i said a big big fish in a small pond i have a lot of energy i'm comfortable in front of people and i feel like that's kind of like just that's what's meant for me in this life just being like out there i'm not i'm um so so i chose a boy that was not like that i i dated one of my brother's best friends he was not happy about that my brother sorry but um he was very like introverted and like a skater kid and i and i dated him for two years and we didn't do anything more than kiss and he was very much a friend like i look back at it now and i'm like oh we were homies like he was my buddy and i just called it dating because it was safe like this got me out of having to like deal with it because he was fine with it he was he was just like happy to have a girl around that was cool and i snowboarded with him and skated with him and like and then i had my other like person my life at school and stuff in church and he just kind of was like was just convenient and and he was he was awesome i enjoyed our friendship i enjoyed the time i spent with him but it wasn't romantic because i know what that's like and i know that's what what what it wasn't you know now okay i actually have a story i could tell you about my childhood that i forgot about until just now sure i'll i'll throw it in should i tell this one which one the little girl i kissed oh yeah that's a good one when i was uh in kindergarten or second grade in that time i lived in in monterey um i kissed i like i like experimented with my neighbor girl with my friend across the street and it wasn't was super innocent and very much like we saw kissing on the tv and we're like let's try that that looks interesting and so we did and we would it was like a short phase and we we would just like push our faces together you know and i was like five or six you know and and but the thing about this i'm sure this is a common thing the thing that makes it different for me is that i was so guilt-ridden i felt ashamed of it at that age really excuse me a lot of talking i felt really ashamed i was guilty i felt intrinsically like it was a bad thing and i kept it a secret from my mom for several years i remember i finally told her i'm like i had i confessed to her when i was older like i was in elementary school i don't know how old i was but i was in texas after we had moved and i just it one like eventually creeped up i couldn't keep it in anymore was killing me for years and it's so sad to think about that now but i told her and she was like i was crying and and i remember sitting on the bed and she's like sal like it's okay like it's no big deal like kids do that you know she was really kind and i was like so shocked that she wasn't mad at me so relieved and and i felt like a weight lifted off of me but i never forgot i never forgot it and i was always secretly like embarrassed about it and and that's it's the mormon conditioning you know it's definitely be because i didn't think that was okay you know yeah so any other stories you want to tell about you know pre-college life your development your relationship with the church your faith anything else you want to share just that i was um i was very committed i was the laurel class president um i was the one that was always at church like ready to learn i wanted to learn it all um and i see that now as a coping mechanism i see you know i i talked to maddie easton and he has a similar he has a similar experience where he he developed like religious ocd because he was trying to make sure he was going to go to heaven you know like and repress and it's a form it's a it's a way to cope with your shadow self that's like trying to come out and i and i see that now and also i just i wanted to be good i wanted to do what was right i wanted to to choose the right i wanted to please my parents i wanted to please god i felt like i had a real relationship i was very i would have gone to church even if my parents didn't tell me to from pretty young age prob i got my patriarchal blessing when i was like 13 i think did it make any promises yeah yeah made promises like i'll marry a man have kids and be a leader and a teacher and it also had some weird stuff about like um medical condition or something like like you'll be safe even when things happen to you you're gonna you're gonna be okay and i was like oh no what's gonna happen to me that gave me a little bit of a complex and then it also and also talked about my kids your kids will stray but they'll always come back and i was like it's just yeah it was unhealthy for me for sure to like why think about all that because just like it made me like ruminate over my life like superstition a superstition that was unnecessary and and made it so that i chose things differently you know like it really did it did have an impact on like my choices we have a ton of uh never mormons that listen to mormon stories podcast so i'll just briefly just say uh mormons uh orthodox mormons receive what's called a patriarchal blessing by the hand of like let's just say a 75 year old man in the church usually between the ages of 12 and and 18 and basically it's kind of like mormon fortune telling where he that patriarch will tell you you're going to go on a mission or not you're going to get married in the temple you're going to have lots of kids you're going to serve in the church you're going to be a leader in the church and when you receive it you feel like god is is telling you ahead of time through this patriarch what your life is going to be like and it's almost like fortune telling like tarot card reading or prediction it feels like a form of manipulation to me now now because they're they do this and then it like kind of keeps the kids in keeps you going because in your mind when you're receiving it it's like oh my gosh this is this is cool i'm going to find out what my life is going to be about yeah but but if you're looking back now the way it works is what it it's it it made me feel um obligated to what to to marry being that person to marrying following through to marrying men and being a leader and it's american is it is it fair to say to marrying a man and having kids yeah absolutely and staying in the church yeah because you no one ever gets a patriarchal blessing that's like you're going to find out the church isn't true and you're going to leave it and live a happier life of course like that patriarchal blessing has never been given instead whether you're gay or straight you're going to marry someone with the opposite sex it's never like you're never going to have kids that's going to you're going to have kids you know usually yeah and serving the church yeah like yeah my my brother said that um and so it ends up being very manipulative and it closes off exploration and options you might have considered is that what you're saying yes absolutely yeah yeah and it can cause like weird obsessions i'm sure like it's it's uh if something doesn't feel right but you got that blessing yeah yeah what do you do they write it they type it out and they print it and then you keep it and you like have copy in your scriptures and i read it so many times and they encourage you to read it all the time yeah like it's god's plan for you right yep um so that mess with your head yeah totally i remember another story a quick story uh um girls camp i was i loved it i i felt so excited to be outside and doing things outside with like this is yeah uh the mormon girls camp i was there one year my my bestie and i she's still my best friend um we found out we we found a a rope swing and it was out of the boundaries of the camp like we weren't allowed to go past a certain point it was idaho was so rad we were on a lake you know it's beautiful and we were super adventurous girls and we found this this rope swing and we did it and it was a little bit outside the boundaries and somebody found out and they kicked they they they told us not to go i think they gave us a warning and then my friend went again and she got kicked out of girl scam they made her go home because she went on the rope swing again and she brought a non-member with her and they kicked the they they made the non-member go home too which was i mean pretty pretty uh brutal so i remember at that point that was another pivotal point i was like okay which path am i gonna follow am i gonna get in line and not you know break the rules and i remember having this one particular woman really close friend of the family um gave me a really good talking to it and she said sally i know i know you want to make this good choice if you could continue on this path that you're on going on rope swings you're going to go down the wrong path and you're going to have consequences that you don't like and this is not going to be good for you and it was it was really intense and and she's like you you make a choice right now because if you don't you know you're going to end up going home like and getting sent home was a big deal it felt traumatic as a teenager you know it's like everybody all the kids know the parents know yeah yeah now she has a mark on her her name and now she's the bad kid you know and so that's a lot of pressure yeah and i remember just being like okay i guess i'm gonna you know repress it and not be myself i better get online this is what god wants me to do even though it felt really bad to have that woman talk to me that way and i ended up getting the camp rose the freaking they give somebody the camp rose at the end of every camp like saying you were the special one and it's because i because i got in line and i did what they told me to do and and repressed myself and i was rewarded for it so fear and shame is a really effective motivator and then and then rewards are a positive reinforcer for the behavior that the church wants tons of that so much positive reinforcement for for my for my accolades like for my church services and and all that yeah a lot so once call what's high school is wrapping up what was in your mind for you know college less mission you know what was your mormon life yeah good question that you were dreaming about or so yeah i got into byu i was so excited byu by provo yeah i i had good grades um my when my my boyfriend left on his mission i was proud to send him on his mission that that he was worthy to go it was like a it's like a good star you know gold star for me might not have been hard as hard for you to send him worthy on a mission i know i see that now i'm like i don't know why i remember thinking in high school and you have this experience too it's like i don't know why you guys are so obsessed with sex it's not that hard to not do it like just don't do it i was totally like i had no temptation whatsoever and so you you internalize that as you're just so righteous exactly you're so faithful yeah and my friend today is he straight as an arrow i guess we can't out of him but i don't know i don't know because that makes me wonder yeah yeah he's still good friends with my brother he's just he's a nice guy um married to a woman with kids still okay so that's still mormon he's still mormon though we don't so we make assumptions i was married to a man and had kids and look at me now so yeah um so you sent him worthy audition we sent him on a mission i kind of i kind of had a freak out after that because my safety net was gone um and i thought it was because i was in love with him but now i realize it was like i was facing the next phase which was going to college and having to date for real so do there's this term beard you guys know the term a beard so when a when a gay man has a a girlfriend as a cover so that people won't ask or find out yeah i i've understood that term as being called a beard maybe subconsciously but not consciously yeah yeah of course um and i don't know if that term ever is in the lesbian um i don't i don't know i don't i don't know but you're saying he he served that function for you it's like that takes off any scrutiny or yeah it made it easier for me yeah so when he's gone and and not even necessarily for other people but for myself it was a protection of myself for myself yeah oh wow yeah it was definitely like a a mental game yeah you're running from yourself like look i have a boyfriend i'm straight like everything's okay i didn't have to think about it or worry about it yeah um or have that like internal conflict um but then when he left i did so i started dating and when i was a senior i dated a couple of of return missionaries and that was that was a lot of pressure and scary you know i did not like that but i could already feel my parents um they love that i i yeah i could already feel that they that they were gonna um care a lot about who i was dating and who i married and stuff and they wanted me to to date men who were going to provide for me financially and and sure everybody wants that but um and to non-mormon listeners return missionaries you know you all know mormon missionaries when a missionary ends their mission their mission president almost without fail says get married as soon as possible and have as many kids as possible and so if you're dating within a mormon context if you're dating a returned missionary you're you're you're basically on the road to marriage very quickly if you do that so that's why i was stressing you out it was i i was like i'm not ready for this um and also the the i was very very uncomfortable with it um and i felt the sexual energy from these boys in particular and it was very like i towards you not from you but toward me yes of course and they um they pushed me past my comfort zone nothing ever happened but i realized that i part of me like needed the validation from men like the fact that men wanted to date me i was like oh okay like i wanted them to want to date me because it made me feel um it validated me in some way everybody wants attention right from some i've thought i needed attention from the opposite sex because that's what i was supposed to that's what's supposed to be happening so when it did i was accepting of it because it fit the mold even though in my body it felt super stressful and uncomfortable like very non-preferred um but it was confusing because it's like okay is this how it's supposed to feel um yeah if you don't know what anything else feels like yeah no and so um and and recently i realized something sad after talking to somebody that told me she has an eating disorder that like i developed an eating disorder at that time and i believe it feels to me that it was also involved with like my sexuality i was like very worried about my appearance and i felt awkward in my body and i wanted to make sure that boys were gonna like me and so and i was scared about the freshman 15 and so i made myself i mill myself throw up a couple times and then then it turned into like a deprivation thing and my body got messed up i i got ulcers in my stomach and and developed really bad gi issues as a result of that byu provo yep um i'm so sorry thanks uh and so let's think so then i i my my family was moving to to china my family my dad got a job in china so the summer after my senior year of high school we m i moved with them i went with them um and it was really exciting there was a boy there was a boy that summer we spent a little time in san francisco in between china a return missionary who i dated for like a little bit of time and i and then i said i think i'm done here and he it was the first time i i was asked to pray about it i was going out with him for like two weeks and i'm like sorry i don't feel it and he's like i don't know i really think i really think you need to pray about this and you know ask god because it's like a form of patriarchal you know manipulation he was trying to get me not to to cut it off and so that's what that was his his avenue of trying to just get me to stay um but it didn't work luckily and so i moved to china and um can i just i just have to say that again for those who aren't mormon or haven't thought about their mormonism yeah a woman a mormon girl is taught that the men hold the priesthood men you know all they ever see is kind of male leadership in the main positions so the combination of male leadership role models and priesthood means for many girls and women probably that somehow a boy or a man might have more privileged access to god than than a woman might and so this happens all the time where a a girl or a woman's at byu and some return missionary comes and says hey i've been on a mission i've baptized people i have the priesthood i'm elders quorum president and god's telling me that we're supposed to get married is that i i don't mean to be mansplaining to you but is that is that a thing no i appreciate you explaining that um totally totally makes you feel like well i guess you know yeah but i didn't buy it yeah i mean that's cool yeah no i i think i think i'm i was still myself in as much as i wasn't gonna let a guy like mess with me i'm i'm a very confident person and i tend to um stand up for myself when i need to i mean i had brothers that pushed me around so i had to learn that and i wasn't and i think that's big reason why i butted heads with like the patriarchy because i am a confident woman and i and they don't like like that and so you know i came up against that in my dating life as well yeah um and so moved to china and then i i had to go to byu and and i had these little brothers and my mom and stuff and and um my little brothers were six and eight and i i felt like their second mother and it was like so traumatic to move away i felt like i was getting them ripped away from me so i have i had a hard time my freshman year being away from my family my safety net but but i went to byu i i lived in dt and towers yep i i was very excited to be there and i studied hard i made friends it was exciting i still definitely had i had that eating disorder so i would i kind of obsessed over food and i was very rigid about exercising every day i ran five miles every day um and i went to the temple every friday morning and did baptisms i attended all that's pretty intense yeah i know weird now i think about it and for non-mormon listeners she's talking about baptisms for the dead right so you would get baptized in the name of people who had died who weren't baptized as mormons so that they could get to heaven yep right yep yeah it's a little a little creepy now that i'm out for a while to think about that do you want to tell the story right now it's i mean let's take it up too i mean you guys are in charge better there's a cute there's a cute little story between us about about the temple but you can tell when you when it's your turn um i i attended all the tuesday um what do you call them devotionals devotionals yep i went to every single one of those i was just very much like that's when apostles come and general authorities come and do the spiritual thing with like you know 20 000 students at the marriage center yeah i was pretty devoted and um but i was also still fun and i had a great time and i i know that my rigidity was because i was terrified i was terrified of what my life was going to be i was terrified that about marrying a man i was terrified about like like going out on my own you know and having to do this this life and so um yeah i i i did it i did a semester and i met my future husband um your first semester my i think so yeah first or second freshman year let's think because i got married yeah the first semester i met him i met him the first semester he was my older brother friend my another friend of my brothers and um he was a return missionary but um the reason that i was drawn to him is because he was the first like man who didn't dangle his patriarchy over my head he did not feel um pushy he didn't feel like he was i'm better than you because i'm a man and he treated me very kindly and very nicely was softer and he was funny and and he was very like just kind and so i was like oh my gosh i didn't know men could be like this this is amazing you know um and so yeah i i i i dated him but i was i bro i think i broke up with him like two or three times because i was so nervous i'm like i'm too young because i felt like i you either have to get married or you have to break up after a certain amount of time because you can't sleep together you can't move forward in your relationship especially when you're 20s and the guy's like so horny you know like it's it's so intense and it's like where do we go from here um so that's that's why i got married because there was nowhere else to go and um of course but i i i chalked it up too to god telling me that i was supposed to marry him for sure like i went away i actually went to back to china um for a couple months during a summer semester and we were broken up and there was i had a friend a close friend that was going to byu that also had parents in china and she had just broken up with her fiance and her fiance was a real a-hole and she told me about how badly he treated her this mormon i think was a football player and it was devastating to hear her experiences and it made me appreciate him my my former husband a lot more and so i went back and i got back together with them and we were married in december of my sophomore year in between my semesters so there's different types of attraction there's intellectual attraction there's aesthetic attraction which is like how how attractive do they appear to you there's you know intellectual attraction um and there's romantic attraction and sexual attraction and those are all different things right and you are you're an expert you're a therapist so i i love that i'm hearing all this explain to me well honestly my daughter clara who is asexual has taught me most of the stuff so it's just kind of recently that i've been thinking about this but i just want you to describe to us what's it like where you are dating a male mormon returned missionary that's super horny that wants you and to have you know sex with you and is probably romantically attracted to you you know wanting to woo you i don't want to make assumptions and and then you might not be firing on all cylinders on some of those dimensions so i'm just wondering and you don't know any better you've never experienced real romantic fireworks you've never experienced real sexual fireworks as a lesbian closeted maybe uneven unrealized mormon lesbian young woman so what's that like to have that coming at you and you're just you're just like you're experiencing that but also not feeling it in reciprocation good question i was used to it by then okay i was um experienced with the like the male sexuality it was pervasive in my home growing up with my brothers and my dad even i mean like they're sexual beings and i was so uncomfortable with it um but i was also you know i was desensitized i guess um but the cool thing was is that he my former husband was was uh wasn't pressuring me i could feel it from him but he wasn't like taking away the whole patriarchal masculine toxic masculinity thing just made it so much more tolerable i'm not saying that that it was preferred um but it was more tolerable because he was kind um the sexual and romantic attraction was there for him for me it was definitely um emotional connection i liked his personality we got along great he was sweet but yeah the the other stuff it wasn't wasn't uh i mean i didn't really understand that it matters like i thought that it didn't really matter and that it would be okay now i see and totally understand that that's absolutely not true but i was conscious that it wasn't all there i mean i was i was aware that that uh that it wasn't like ideal but i felt vain i felt that if i had not pursued him and married him that i would have been shallow and like not um that god wouldn't have been okay with that and i didn't feel good about that i didn't feel good about oh so maybe it's not like fireworks but that feels like a dumb reason to not marry him because he's a catch you know like he's so nice and he treats me well and stuff almost like it would be selfish yeah totally yeah you cared about if i cared that that um i wasn't like feeling the fireworks with somebody i was going to spend eternity with i mean it's ridiculous yeah it's ridiculous yeah so i i you know i get so disconnected from ourselves yeah and i'm just like focused on the path like am i doing the things i got to do the next thing i gotta you know check the boxes and and it's really sad to think about it now and i've i've mourned that time of my life and i i realized that um it's a i have an ugly cry face so i'm trying to control it don't worry uh i um i feel definitely like a part of me died like and just totally um was like put put to rest when i got married because it was such a betrayal of self um and he is great person and i'm sad that i did that to him too unintentionally and unknowingly but i know for a fact that that my my soul was like so sad and i and i changed like i felt it like i i just said okay this is this is it this is what i have to do this i better be okay with this and i didn't i i didn't let myself feel the pain like i just because i knew like temple marriage is a temple marriage it's done you can't go back on this you know my parents were not happy about me getting married surprisingly um they were worried that it was you know that i was too young or that it was he didn't know what he wanted to do with his life and he was they were worried about that and i think that's that's showing how devote devoted i was to the church even though my parents weren't pressuring me to marry him i thought it was what i was supposed to do so i went forward with it um and and i don't sadly my memories of my marriage um are are like heartbreaking like i can go back there in my body and feel the sadness and and the fear that i had going through that whole experience i was like just you do all of it mom like i didn't want to be involved in the planning i didn't care i didn't care what i wore i didn't care what it looked like i was like i just want to get married and go and like be done you know with this it was and the mother-in-law i was so young like it felt like my parents wedding it felt like his parents and and my parents were getting married and not us um and it was just all about like i didn't even know most of the people that came to our reception you know it was all their friends um there was definitely a quilt hanging at my reception that my mother-in-law made with with camping things on it um and yeah yeah i feel sad i feel sad about that about that whole experience and that's not to say that i didn't love him it's not to say that i didn't uh have a fulfilling relationship or that he did anything wrong because he didn't like he was very loving to me there's different dimensions of love and you were loving him on some dimensions but just you weren't capable of loving him on other dimensions is that right totally yeah and he was actually my safe place like emotionally he was the safest person for me at that time like he he had my back um it's called platonic love yeah platonic love and then you know and then then the sexual side of it began you know um because i was married and and you know we're told that it's supposed to just work out if you if you follow the path i i really did i thought it was going to be fine i thought that the the act of sex was going to solve my problem of of the whole attraction thing and i really did believe that i had never seen a man before never seen the male genitalia before i've never seen what that looked like i didn't know how it worked i didn't know like the mechanics of it um even though i had brothers which is surprising right um but i protected myself so i could feel that he was so attracted and so excited and i didn't want to let him down you know and and um so i just went with it and i and i was um i don't know what word to use but but i i i had a hard time with that and is there another word you were wanting to use i mean trauma [Music] um it was traumatic um but i i don't i didn't know that that's what i was feeling i thought that i was just needed to give it time you know like just give it time it's gonna be okay like you'll you'll just like fall you'll you'll get into a rhythm and it will it will come and you'll be all right and he's so nice and and you love him and this is what god wants this is what god wants oh yes and this is how you have babies um so yeah i i i really it's crazy this the feelings all these feelings were very strong and it's amazing how how much i repress them and didn't give them um i didn't allow them to to to take the forefront of my mind i just kept pushing them back kept pushing them back like nope nope nope it's okay and you know i had practice doing that my whole life so it wasn't that out of the ordinary it was just the gravity of being married now was a lot it was a lot to to for my little you know i was barely 20. i was i just turned 22 weeks before i got married and to hold that responsibility of being in that situation for all eternity was like i mean if i had given it any thought i would have freaked out big time so i protected myself by not doing that what year were you guys married 2005. okay so 16 years ago yep okay all right and um you know sometimes uh a kind of a healthy sex life can be part of what you know it's kind of like can help make of the the difficulties of early marriage kind of palatable or even fun and it can be a real bonding sort of uh source of connection for the couple how was it for you guys yeah no it wasn't that for us uh i was really wanting to make him happy and so and i also knew what i know what you're saying like i knew that we needed to have this part of our relationship to make it work like i i knew that and so i did it because because of that i wanted to make it work um but but yeah it was it was tough it was tough to to feel that disconnect and and because it wasn't working very well and it wasn't what you're saying it's not it wasn't like a fun part of our marriage it was like i could tell he could tell that it was difficult for me it's like not you can't hide that and he's very intuitive and and so i felt i feel sad for him and i know that he was repressing it too he was talking himself out of the knowledge and the seeing that i i was having a hard time he didn't want me to be a lesbian like he didn't he wanted me to want it but he also it was painful to know that your wife is is having a hard time with sex newly wed you know young 20 20 year olds it's like it's hard and sad so we had we connected in lots of ways we were musicians and we were we connected a lot on music so we just um we did things together and had fun and had lots of friends and my brothers were around and we were really into the provo music scene and so we made it work um i can imagine from a mormon male return missionary standpoint if if you can tell that maybe your wife isn't really into you or into sex and you don't want to put the blame on her or have that cause tension in your marriage i imagine you might have thoughts like well that's lust or that's you know that that's you know this is about making babies and and i shouldn't be thinking about that sort of thing i don't know i imagine did you guys ever have talks about that of how he adjusted his expectations was this explicit was he ever questioning your sexuality man let's get him in here yeah i don't i don't i would love to i would no i'd love to hear like his honest truth about that um were you talking about that explicitly no no we didn't we didn't talk about it because it was too painful and we were confused and we didn't know um and i think the way that he rationalized it is um well he i remember him saying i thought it was gonna be different than this like i thought this was i thought it was gonna feel different i thought you were gonna walk around in your lingerie and like we were gonna flirt and stuff and i'm like uh [Laughter] uh sorry no um were you also using the church kind of as a mask at that point as well that you felt like to be a good mormon woman i i don't want to just like jump on the [ __ ] train now like it's not like throughout your youth you were using the church really diving strongly into that to not have to be sexual you're right yeah i i think so yeah i was i was important yeah totally i had purity culture situation for sure and i i was wounded and traumatized by the purity culture growing up witnessing i was so confused about like how i was supposed to allow sexuality to be a part of me and also fit into the church where it's like very taboo to talk about sex at all so confusing and and you know most adults that i was around had a really weird relationship i don't think i was modeled any very healthy super healthy relationships growing up my my parents are great they love each other but like we all got problems you know like so i don't know they're not and they're like this the sexual tension between them and between other people i saw i didn't understand it like i don't it was just like over my head so it was very confusing and i yes i used the church to to be to make him be okay with not being super hyper sexual like i'm i'm valid in not wanting that because because you know we're moral people totally like i i'm pretty sure he just thought i was a prude and he called he he he definitely like he definitely wanted to be more sexual and and i yeah it's a good point i i was just like i was called a prude growing up too that's something that was a wound yeah they made fun of me for not like wanting to not laughing at the sexual jokes and not wanting to watch r-rated movies and like talk about anything like that it was i was very averse to it and i used the church as the reason that that i didn't want it but now it's a it's i realized that that i was um that it definitely had something to do with my repressed sexuality because now i feel it's so beautiful you know i love it so it's so it's it's a little bit complicated and i think i've said things like this before but on the one hand i i don't know many people who aren't sort of in favor of responsible ethical sexual behavior so this isn't me saying sleep with everyone you know this is not what i'm about to say um and i think about this mormon book of mormon idea that you know woe unto them who call good evil and evil good like i so i was raised with that idea and when it comes to the law of chastity what that meant for me is well if someone ever taught that like premarital sex was okay uh that's bad those people would be evil and if anybody ever taught that um having sex before marriage was good that's that's evil now and again not to say that i'm for irresponsible sexual behavior but i'm thinking about how insidious it is to prevent a human from being able to explore their sexuality to the point where they knew what they were about to get into in a decision that was supposed to last for their entire lives and how disconnecting you from yourself not allowing you to figure out what turns you on what gets you excited what makes you want to live and want to have click your heels and jump up and down yeah and feel those fireworks and that excitement not allowing you to go through that experience before you make the most one of the most important decisions of your life feels evil to me now yep here here yeah yeah can i get an amen for sure john preach i i agree i'm gonna i'm gonna i am going to promote premarital sex to my children set it here yep yep not because you want irresponsible of course unethical behavior of course there's studies done where europeans you know they are more sexually uh aware and and active i think but less sexually promiscuous like if you let them and you're open and you talk and stuff then they will be safer and they will be informed and they will be happy and if you try to keep them from it it effs everybody up and and and then this happens you know yeah not to mention just there's what it does to you yeah but now i'm thinking about your former husband yeah and the kids have to go through a divorce of the family all of that would have been prevented if you just could have been that high school girl the experimenting dated other girls and and got to know what it really felt like to fall in love and to have those fireworks when you kiss think of all the lives that would have not been negatively impacted by that what i now think is probably a pernicious teaching that it was evil and wrong for you to explore that as a team i agree totally agree i totally agree and and thinking back to my like sexual experiences with men it was like all about them it was all about the man i was always thinking what is he thinking is he liking this is this does he like me is he approving of me is is my feeling validation it wasn't ever about my pleasure or what i love and and i can talk more about that later because that kind of is what led to me discovering yeah so because mormon women are aren't sexual creatures they're they're the guardians against you don't want to wear something that might turn on a man yeah or even have thoughts or sexual when it when has ever a mormon girl been taught that they're sexual creatures with sexual passions oh my god and that that's a healthy good thing i mean it probably happens but i don't know maybe not that i know of that wasn't your experience no no check out my mormon story from my story yeah yeah yeah when you raise my feminist leaders in provo you get some good messages but i am the anomaly i understand that's awesome yeah happy for you yeah i hope every mormon girl gets cara's upbringing as it relates to sexuality right on that's great all right well um so anything else i want to i want to kind of jump to lina's story but before we do anything else you know we'll kind of we'll kind of come back to you when we talk about things unraveling so is there anything you want to tell us about the the building of your marriage you guys end up having several kids right i have i have a few fun stories so i was in a band me and me and my former husband am i should i say his name or no i mean everybody knows who he is okay named shane okay um uh we were in a band called love you long time and we joined it was my older brother's band and we we joined the band and it was we were like the provo band for like several years we played with neon trees i'm like yeah i'm good friends with those guys me and elaine were like the token girls and we would hang out at the shows and stuff oh you know elaine yeah they they actually would open for us most of the time oh throwing down no let me let me explain let me explain uh they were better than us for sure they have better material it's just like i don't know how that whole thing worked i will say we put on a really good show we were super fun band i played the keytar and i was i had so much fun i love being a performer um i've always loved music and my brother's really talented shane's really talented musician and so we were like just living in that i think that was another protection for us it was something for us to focus on that kept us from having to think about our marriage you know it was like let's put all our efforts there it would bring us joy it would bring it connected us it would bring us something that we had in common um it was really fun and we we were in that scene for a long time and that's how we ended up in california we went on tour one summer and lived in california and then at the end of the summer there the guys got together this is a good story actually the guys got together and decided that we were not going to go back to school that we were going to stay in california and pursue the band and i'm like the responsible mormon girl is like hell no we're not but i didn't say hell but i said no we need to no we need to have we need to get a career this is just a hobby and we are responsible we need to start a family we need to be you know like i was like we need to follow the plan and so what i did he pushed really hard he's like well you can go back to provo if you want and i'm like uh we're married um and so i said okay you need to pray about this because in the temple we say hearken unto your husband as he hearkens unto the lord and even though i really resented that and i thought it was very very not cool i said okay you're supposed to be making the decisions like you you have the final say or whatever right because that's what they say in the temple so i sent him to the temple to pray about it and he came back and of course he's like yeah we're staying in the bank so that's literally how it happened and i didn't go back to school we went on tour i lived in a freaking van i got ready in walmart bathrooms ate fast food stayed up all hours of the night slept in drove hours in a van every day it was it was really really fun and really hard at the same time like being in that position um trying to go to church in whatever city we were in um trying to stay mormon in the music world because it wasn't just the mormon music world once we once we went on tour and kind of moved and did more we were around all the alcohol and all the sleeping around and and so what i would do i would wear my garments on the stage like i was wearing my garments hey they're like hanging out and they would get so i would sweat so bad it was disgusting um and i would uh i would find a place for me and shane to go to sleep and the other guys would go out and party and the bands and stuff and we would go and eat and then we would like go and avoid like all the the nightlife the nightlife uh the debauchery as i would think and um that was a really interesting experience i remember like asking people to stop swearing around me i was devastated if i ever knew like a mormon was involved in that like i i was inherently judgmental i'm sure because of the church i was embarrassed when people thought i was a lesbian i got i got you know people thought i cut my hair short there for a while and people thought i was a lesbian which i was but at the time well at the time i was like how dare you like it felt very uncomfortable you know for that and it was taboo it's like way different now than it was then that was in you know 2006 789 so that was an interesting experience being mormon in that world um and then eventually we were on a show called wipeout me and me and my uh her former husband we were living in la and we were having fun and i'm i'm like he's like let's get on the show so we called them and we cho we totally played up the mormon thing in the in the audition we talked about our mormon garments and stuff and they loved it they were so entertained by us it's hilarious so they cast us on the show we were on the show and we ended up winning we won fifty thousand dollars what is the show it's on abc it's the big red balls it's like an obstacle course like kind of like ninja warrior oh yeah but what's it called i don't think it's on anymore it's called wipeout okay okay it's a family show it's you can find it you can i i can imagine you can see our episode season two episode nine i think oh we'll add that to the show notes okay um and we had a blast season nine season season two episode nine okay season two we're called mr and mrs moose okay because uh he can do this like funny trick with his belly that looks like a moose um we won them we won and um we won money and we were so poor you know and of course he went out and bought some new musical equipment and i was like wait a second like and so then eventually we ended up using the money to start a business in california and we quit the band and that was a hard thing that was devastating was a hard decision for my my husband and we broke up the band i'm like the who's the the beatle wife that broke up the beatles yoko ono yeah i'm the yoko owner of like love you a long time uh so yeah we started a business and then would there be videos of your band on youtube absolutely there's good is it its own channel um maybe the band was called i'll send you some the band love you we played on warp tour we played with uh vanilla ice we played with yeah they did a vanilla ice and mc hammer show at the mckay event center and we we were on that one um we played at saltaire and yeah we had we had i mean we were we were set up to to make it happen and by this time the killers you know with brandon flowers had been popular then imagine dragons and then neon trees and so it's like hey you could you could totally become world world famous coming out of programs yeah and they were the boys they were all about that it was going to happen it was they were very driven and and we made connections and and i don't know i think i really think it's it's my my mormon um ideals the path that i was supposed to take the band did not fit into that and so um so yeah i didn't i didn't let that um keep me from from moving on and having babies so and i'll just tell my listeners that uh we have interviewed tyler glenn of neon trees on mormon stories and we've interviewed wayne sermon the lead guitarist of imagine dragons on warmer stories check those if you want to know what it's like to do the grind and end up being fortunate enough to make it check out those episodes that's really cool yeah that's really cool they're actually neon trees is playing at uh the arizona pride next month and we're gonna go we're gonna go to that anyway um we started a business quit the band and of course i didn't pursue my career i finished my degree from byu but i let him be the man who ran the business and so i i got a job just to provide for us until the business made money and and it was that was a betrayal of self for sure like i wasn't doing anything that i that that could have made me a career like i i could have started the business i could have done all that but i look back at that now but i didn't i was just following the plan you know this is again where the gender binary having nothing to the sexuality the gender binary does this a disservice because mormon women and not just in mormonism but in traditional gender role households it's the man who's supposed to be the provider and that's even in the proclamation on the family within mormonism and the woman is to stay home and to nurture the children so the the woman doesn't necessarily get the education or develop the skills to support uh the the ability to become a breadwinner or to earn income and that's not just it that puts a lot of pressure on men to be the sole provider and people aren't always doing what they love or what they want to do so they're people are getting underdeveloped and oftentimes stuck in roles that aren't fulfilling or rewarding to them and or they're stuck in roles that don't serve them later right all true absolutely true yeah and i um it's it's just sad because i didn't consider anything differently like i didn't consider it i was just like i'm gonna have um some fun side jobs when i get bored but i'm never really gonna have the career and i i supported him starting the business like i made the money until the business made money and then had the kids and fully was like yep i was pretty like my subconscious mind knew that that was gonna be hard for me too like i got pretty freaked out before i had kids knowing that it was gonna be hard for me to stay home and like not have a much of a life outside of that it was terrifying but i did it anyway mm-hmm so yeah you're on the mormon train yeah i learned how to surf i taught myself how to surf and uh became a surf instructor so that's cool um but other than that you know i i was just on the path and i was i i feel i do feel proud of myself i waited till i was 27 to have my first kid and that was on purpose that's almost like a world record within mormonism yeah kara how old were you when you had your first kid married at 19 first kid at 25. so i waited five or six years yeah pretty good married at 20 waited till 27 and that was on purpose and people in fact people pressured us so much and asked us so much when we're gonna have kids even our family members and stuff that we started saying we don't want kids and they they would like be flabbergasted and feel really awkward and they would leave us alone so like we literally had to tell people to back off you know you both are outside the door mark margie was married at 22 and she was pregnant by 23 and a kid by 24. i think that's a little bit late actually many many mormon women are having kids honeymoon babies yeah for sure so i am proud of myself that i waited i knew that i knew what a commitment having kids was because i had my little brothers you know and so i knew my life would be over as i knew it so i waited but then i had my baby and um i was obsessed i i focused everything on my child at that point like cause you don't have the band yeah know that man and also i see that now as another form of um coping with my sexuality uh i i had something to give love to a kind of love that i had never felt before and and it was like she was my entire universe and i was just i poured everything into that into her and and being a mom and and it made me happy like it really did it helped me to to have more purpose you know um but i remember being in that that gap between 20 and 27 many many times where i was um i i felt like i shouldn't be married like i'm too young like i would see other kids other kids my age living their lives and and think holy crap i'm married and i will have none of those experiences i'm tied down and and and i'm not living a normal life that i'm supposed to be living at this age and i would be sad about that occasionally i wouldn't let it stay but i definitely felt a sense of remorse periodically and and we had bump like a bumpy road too for a while like we had problems like because i think he felt that way too he was a young kid and he wanted to have fun and and we didn't agree on everything and and we had a lot of fun together but it was also it was also hard you know being married that young and not having freedom that that's very developmentally healthy you know what about you know multiple years into you know you not really being super attracted to your husband or attracted at all did that does that wear on the marriage over time for sure yeah um i think we would kind of go in waves where like i would get really stressed out about it and think like i need to go to a sex therapist like i need if i need help um and then other times where i'd be like i like sex what are you talking about like try to convince him and myself that i was fine and and he would he would be he he also went in waves where he was like fighting for himself more like i i'm sad like i i feel like this isn't what we want i feel like we need to like cultivate more sexuality and i'd be like i would feel um guilty about how i felt and i would be like um i would try to be to like please him in in different ways i remember he i remember my first vibrator that i got it was like he was like let's try this like let's try you know and the idea of the vibrator was what was the rationale the rationale was like maybe this will bring you pleasure you know maybe this will help with with you opening up more sexually and being happier and being more free and like helping our sex life you know and and i was talk i was fully like okay i'll try whatever like let's do this you know um even though so it became more of like a personal like okay i can have pleasure but it's not from you it's from this thing but like we can include that in our experiences and and help us you know not be as as dysfunctional you know so uh it was not easy was not easy and you end up having how many children total together three children okay all right two girls and a boy until they tell me differently [Laughter] for now all right uh anything else you want to say about your relationship up until things really started to fray before we move on yeah i let i think we had a great marriage i loved my experience in many many ways as i feel like we did a really good job considering i was a lesbian the whole time like we were really happy for being you know in a mixed orientation marriage and not knowing it like i'm really proud of us we respected each other we um you know we grew as a couple in in you know conflict resolution we raised really adorable children we had many of the same hobbies we had great experiences together um despite me being a lesbian and so i'm proud of us and and as we talk about like the ending of things um that that never changed for me so i i respect him a lot one last question that i probably should have asked earlier uh there's attraction and then there's a version and one of the things that people don't understand one real significant complicating factor in whether a gay or lesbian person is able to marry someone of the opposite sex and whether or not they're able to sort of endure a marriage isn't always just whether or not they're attracted to the opposite sex it's whether they experience aversion yeah with the opposite sex and for me some of the most tragic stories have been when you hear about a man a gay man who's married to a woman or a lesbian woman who's married to a man who actually experienced sexual aversion with their partner and you hear these stories about like they make love or the wedding night or whatever and then the same-sex attractor of the gay or lesbian spouse turns over and weeps because that was such an awful or even revolting experience for them and i just want to call attention to the fact that aversion is its own sort of spectrum separate from attraction and we don't talk about that enough either you were appointed you were so leeda we'll get to your yeah that's definitely lena's experience okay um so for you for you i just wanted to check in with you about that you know it's hard to say um because i was so devoted to the church and i was so practiced at self-betrayal i i i was really good at pushing through being uncomfortable and doing it anyway because i was devoted to god i you know she she was much more um uh take no [ __ ] from anybody type of a person because she wasn't raised in the church and i wasn't like that and i did what i was told and i talked myself into not being like grossed out even though even though i was um and uh so you had a high pain tolerance yeah that's a great way of putting it i had a high i had a high tolerance for being for self betrayal and i don't i don't you know i think that's really sad um and i'm working on on that now and i feel like i i disassociated for sure and that's something common i i don't have a ton of memories of sexual experiences with him you just go to a different place in your mind yeah uh i did and not you know i felt i was very um i restricted myself with that too my my mind was also mormon so i had to be careful with you you weren't thinking of women i mean no i i didn't allow myself to go there when i when i left the church that's a different story um but but no no but i definitely disassociated with what was happening you know um and not not to say like other like he's not an unattractive person and um i i you know um something that's sad that i've realized now is the feeling that i often had um that was a violation of my boundaries um like my bought my body uh and i didn't know that's what i was experiencing i couldn't i didn't have a name for it but that's that's definitely what was happening and i it was really easy to recognize was also almost an instant recognizable feeling after i accepted the fact that that i was a lesbian yeah got it okay well thank you for being willing to share your you know that story style and uh um you've shared a lot of vulnerable things that i know are going to help a lot a lot of people thank you and we're not even done yeah thank you um and i now i have one final final question uh so during that pre-kind of lena era for you while you were married was there ever a point where you're like i'm lesbian or you go to your husband and say i'm lesbian what am i gonna do or like even internally you're saying oh no i'm falling apart because i don't or were you was that just all shut off and can i add to that question did you also have any like female celebrity crushes or were you on any forums had you googled anything i had you like actually like pursued that path yeah that's cute um i i do recognize now that i had feelings for some friends um female married probably married friends mm-hmm and wards or whatever okay yeah um and i i know that i um i held off like i i consciously made boundaries for myself to not get carried away with being too attached to them because i would get i would get very attached to certain friends um and i was aware of that and and honestly like i just rationalized it there were a few moments tiny moments where i was like uh oh this is i shouldn't feel this way you know but then i just like shove it away never mind nope turn it off like a light switch yeah um yeah i recognize that now and so that happened and then um i i just made myself busy with other things i distracted myself um i i just you know i was very everybody's just like wow you do a lot of things all the time and you're praised for that so it's positively reinforced absolutely um as far as like celebrity crushes i i really i definitely know i was like attracted to some women but i didn't let myself think about it um a knight's tale with with uh keira knightley no no um shannon saseman googling so a nice tale with the the guy that's not with us anymore the girl in that movie she had short really short brunette hair all right i just i don't know how i remember that but i remember like saying that it was for heath ledger but it was actually i wanted to watch it because of her um and then but but other than that i like made myself i convinced myself that i was attracted to certain celebrity men and now i realize i just wanted to be them just so that you could date them you could get the leading lady i i saw myself in there like i was really into justin timberlake um and i and the other day and i like justin bieber and zac efron because they were dating women but also i felt similar energy i felt like i i could relate to them in their masculinity in the way that they moved it was a gender thing too and and um the other day i was watching a music video with my little boy a justin bieber music video and he and oh halfway through he's four halfway three goes mom he looks like you like he has a similar energy to you mom like and and um i think i started out live they have women play sometimes justin bieber is there's a whole thing where justin bieber lesbians that look like they're just about to say that from the same level yeah justin bieber.com it's a thing so i think that's part of like how i rationalize like making sense of how i could be attracted to men and all of that you know i just had one more aha moment and thanks for your patience with this the mormon church and christian churches and just the human experience teaches that honesty is really important in addition to the you know calling good evil and evil good thing that the the problem with not allowing a teen to explore their sexuality teach that it's essential to be honest but what you were taught was to lie to yourself and to everyone else for your entire childhood youth and adult life you were taught to be dishonest to yourself and to everyone else yes that's a good point yep just betray yourself what does honesty mean but most of the time so most of the time that i hear i never did this with my bishop but i i did hear when men go in or anybody say i think i'm gay like i have these attractions they're just like no you're not just don't kiss girls and kiss boys you know like you're not gay and so uh they don't they can just rationalize the mormon you know the mental gymnastics and and and they would never admit and say that it's we're teaching them not to be honest but absolutely absolutely like lie to yourself yeah that was tragic yeah i for sure um had a long lot of period of time after i had kids where i was like really really on board with becoming that that cookie cutter mormon mom i grew my hair out i wore very feminine clothes you look back at pictures of me and you're like who is that and i was just trying really hard i was the gospel doctrine teacher um i was well known for giving great talks and being very mormon and uh that's just i think it was just like creeping up on me you know it's getting it was getting more as i got older into my sexual prime and so i had to push more to be more mormon you know it was like oh no i'm running harder faster away from this because this isn't a woman's sexual prime like they're 40 40 yeah yeah and i'm getting older right here i can attest all right sal well this has been so i've loved every minute of this thank you thank you so much for being willing to share so far thanks you're a great interview i feel honored kara how you feeling great and i just wanted to add that we did that retreat last weekend and natasha helfer um that you've done 50 of them with and she has these principles it's like the six principles of uh healthy sex healthy sexuality there's consent and one of them is honesty and being honest to yourself and your partner about what you feel and what's good what's bad and that's funny that you just called that naha moment because i kind of had the same aha moment because that's what i realized when natasha was doing that presentation is how common it is in mormonism to not follow those sexual principles most of them at least we do good on others not so good but honesty about you know being honest with your partner about what your sex drive actually is being honest about what you're attracted to which you're not yes um and that that's really not uh played up value enough in mormon culture and doesn't allow anybody to even express anything other than the norm can you imagine the temper recommend question are you honest in your sexual dealings with others somehow it's only business dealings i mean the the church is full of hypocrisy i mean we all know that there's we could go on and on about how hypocritical the teachings are it's it's a mess really like that's how i feel about it now it's a mess i can't like it's hard for me to like pick pick it apart now because i'm all just i'm just like there's so many problems as natasha did a great job explaining to me in a podcast we did a couple days ago about when you have a church that's born out of a puritanical culture in america and just everything that went into making mormonism what it was when joseph smith started it all the way up through the purity movements of the 80s up through today like it really makes sense why mormonism holds the values that it does and why it doesn't care about other values about honesty and gender expression and actual sexual expression and things i was like it makes sense when you understand like the context of why people do that and so that gives me a little bit more grace for like okay things can change the more that people speak out about how they wanted to pursue the best life that they could in the church they tried so hard to make the pieces fit but they're just put in a box that yeah they physically could not survive within right right it's sad i mean it's disheartening to think about how much the church will need to change and growing pains are real you know like there's just so much harm harm that's done and it's the more aware i become the more painful my past becomes and and i and i try to to take to be to be gracious and have compassion for for everyone in my life and for myself and and just hold a lot of space there all right well uh so far so amazing sal and lena you've been waiting patiently and i am just dying to hear about uh your experience so where where does your story begin and and i know enough about your story to know that your story doesn't begin as a mormon story that's right it doesn't start as a mormon story i grew up in huntington beach california born into a very staunch catholic family and my grandparents are immigrants my mom was born here her brother was born in italy so i'm considered first generation italian american but basically we're all just italian both my mom and my dad we're all just you know quintessential italian americans like you would imagine them okay and so you came so did you you said you were born in italy i was born in um anaheim california near disneyland at a hospital that doesn't exist anymore but i grew up in huntington beach okay yeah and so your your parents their first language was italian is that right yeah okay yeah and so you what languages okay they learned both yeah i learned english growing up in the home your first language my first language was english on purpose they pushed that because we were in the united states and they wanted to make sure i wasn't like you know alienated or couldn't make friends or something but i definitely grew up around italian and the dialect is hilarious like after living in italy and realizing how my family speaks especially my mom's side they're from this like little sheep town it's called shushade their dialect and it's hilarious so it's very different than like traditional tuscan italian you hear on tv and so was there like was it just suburbia was it was there like a little italy kind of you know area in anaheim so in that huntington beach like area that little corner we lived off of and i don't know california at all yeah no it's fine i'll just just imagine this there's a liquor store in my family like after my grandparents came to the united states they opened liquor stores with their siblings and so that was kind of like a way for them to earn their income so it's a liquor store with like a market and a deli you can picture it right before there were gas stations like with liquor source and so uh my family owned that liquor store dk liquor on the corner of ellison beach and the house behind it as well as the car wash behind it and then my dad's side owned the italian restaurant across the street so this cute little corner of italian families my grandparents on both sides had pushed for my dad to marry my mom and my mom to marry my dad even though my dad was most definitely in love with my mom i don't think my mom would say that about him she was trying to just get out of the house and not be at home anymore so yeah i have to say one of my favorite billy joel songs is scenes from an italian restaurant have you ever heard it no but i want to okay [Laughter] all right well that's a that's uh add it to the list add it to the list all right that's the list okay so i love this so you're growing up uh in california yeah with and we're a bunch of your neighbors italian or no uh i think we so really quickly my mom realized she wasn't in love with my dad so they had me like i was a honeymoon baby and they separated when i was nine months old i think so they were only together for less than two years and at that point my mom she became like the black sheep of the family trying to get a divorce especially in catholicism and most especially with my grandmother as her mother it was a really really big deal and so my grandparents employed my dad in the family business like my mom's parents employed my dad who she divorced in the family business and it divided the family pretty intensely for a long time um yeah so i grew up with a single mom and she had a few husbands and my dad has also been married a few times so yeah so probably a lot of family shame and oh first stress yeah absolutely and i grew up i mean my grandmother i would consider her like a huge influence on my personality my character my upbringing my interests because my mom worked so much so i spent a lot more time with my grandmother so when you think about the influence of the catholic church in your early years what what feelings come to mind yeah it's interesting you say that so i've said this to you before but i feel like i grew up in a cemetery like i don't know how familiar you all are with italians but like our ancestors anyone who's passed on is super important and so we would spend one day a week at the cemetery and as a kid especially an only child i would just walk around and read the names and look up at the stars or the clouds and sit there and like i remember being little and swinging my legs off the ledge and not being able to touch the ground yet like i i like truly grew up in a cemetery and we would bring lunch and we would have a picnic there with our ancestors and talk about them and i i think because i wasn't around other kids i just became like this little adult you know and i participated in all the same conversations they did and then when i got bored i'd go off and kind of talk to myself and i gained this very unique relationship with i would call some sort of divinity some sort of like universal energy at the time and i felt like i was communicating with my ancestors you know like uh conversations back and forth especially if i knew them before they died like mine you think yes yes i love coco such a great movie yeah yeah i feel like if i had to guess it's mostly like that if i had to guess anything about like the afterlife i feel like coco is like coco's got it yeah that's good to me yeah i mean we're yeah it's different like to the dead stuff obviously but like italians are similar they're still latinas you know there's a for sure influence of this like passion that exists within the family line and the names we're all named after each other and i mean everybody's got a cousin vito and a cousin vince and yeah yeah so did you did you do catholic things were you raised catholic basically yeah i was raised catholic i went to catechism i went to sunday school i got my first holy communion i like went through the whole the whole process my mom taught catechism actually so there was definitely a lot of pressure there to be a good catholic girl i mean i was kneeling and standing all the time and so since the whole bit so you're upbringing your catholic upbringing your in your childhood and even your teen years overall how do you positive i mean the the nice thing about not being mormon is that religion doesn't take up your whole life you know it was it was a part of our life it was our re it was our like sunday practice but during the week my family like my mom was living with a boyfriend and my grandparents fought like hell my grandpa was drank a little too much and there was you know just a lot of like unhealthy behaviors that one would not necessarily classify with being like a christian or a good christian anyway so and yeah it's just an it's an interesting dynamic coming from that space in my fundamental years to then go into a fundamental religion and see it from the other side yeah yeah okay so i i kind of want to ask you about dating yeah um but you know anything you want to say about your i don't want to shoehorn that so anything you want to say about your childhood or adult adult childhood or youth that then will lead to kind of dating another and eventually your conversion i guess sure and your interests and what you were into yeah i mean i i was definitely very feminine from the get-go like right out the gate the barbies and the frilly skirts and dresses like the more tulle the better like and bows and and all the patent leather shoes i probably had like 10 pair your mom would have loved dressing me and we uh my grandma would take me to church we'd go get cappuccino every sunday after mass and i don't know i feel like my childhood from what i remember like if i really think back it was a positive experience you know i didn't necessarily see my dad very often after he left my my mom's side's family business he went and joined his dad's business up north in like paso robles san luis obispo area and he's been on the vineyard ever since so he uh he makes wine and he does a great job at it and i'm super proud of him our relationship has evolved a lot but when i was little i didn't get to see him the traffic on the 405 is not convenient when you're trying to get your kid every other weekend in rush hour so i made a lot of excuses why i couldn't see him or why he didn't show up but i like i wanted that relationship you know and i i didn't have access to him so that was hard and my mom worked all the time all the time and you were an only child and i was an only child until i was 14. my mom's second husband uh in huntington beach they uh met and got married we lived with him for a while before they got married and then she had my sister when i was 14. he's the best human on the planet oh good yes it feels very cultural like your parents of immigrant parents of kids of immigrants feel like they need to work really hard to to be grateful for everything that their parents did to get them there and it feels like a very cultural thing how her parents raised her for sure i think that's why i have such a like strong work ethic myself it's been passed down it's generational my great-grandparents my grandparents my dad is like i don't think he's been on vacation in 30 years my mom and in the last 10 years or so has started to loosen up a little bit but still still like works all the time so she's an rn she's a great nurse cara is this reminding you of the laura schnell interview at all yeah yeah just like busting your ass to provide for your kids yeah yeah and it's like i totally respect it i understand where they're coming from i think there were moments in my childhood where i was frustrated and i saw other people's mom and dad sitting at a dinner table and i just like wanted that which is one of the reasons obviously that led me to mormonism it was very attractive yeah so well before we jump into that just tell us what what what your relationship was with with kind of boys or girls or whatever in terms of just normal dating in those teen years yeah so it was interesting as a cheerleader for so many years i was like very different than the other girls who were always talking about boys and who wanted to like look a certain way at school to attract a certain boy like oh my gosh did you see brian today he totally looked at me and my whatever bow i was wearing and i'm like like it just seemed so petty to me um not that i felt like i was better than them i just looked at them and recognized that i was different and that it seemed a little weird their behavior you know and at times i thought about like why am i not like that is there something wrong with me but that thought was so fast and so fleeting like my mom just raised me with a ton of confidence and so i don't know i just i felt fine with the fact that i wasn't i did feel like i had to conform there were occasions in elementary school where i like i remember having not necessarily sexual feelings towards a girl but feelings you know like a little bit of butterflies like a crush and i asked my mom i was probably like 11 if i can really pinpoint the age but um and just kind of listen to her talk about her perception of homosexuality and people who were gay and finocchio's how you say in italian so you can imagine like the conversation is that a slur yeah basically yeah it's not not a healthy way to to call someone gay in italian um and so i just felt like they had no reason to lie to me like they were my elders my mom has been honest with me my whole life why would she lie to me about this and i would overhear my grandmother talking about it with other family members and i heard that rhetoric and adopted it as my own like oh that's what we're supposed to think of you know homosexuals or black people even like just the language around anyone that was different was so harmful to me and internalized internalized for sure and so i squashed it down and i didn't think about it again for a really really really long time and i had plenty of unhealthy relationships with boys throughout high school like not not healthy you know just like ridiculous um like seeking approval like you were saying you know like a boy that would hang out at my locker in between classes and i just didn't give two shits about what he thought of me and i kind of felt like i was playing all these guys does that make sense like i wasn't giving in to it i was just like oh yeah i know i'm cute but like i'm not into you you know she would make the boys frustrated yeah i remember this like specific i actually took her to my 20-year high school reunion a couple years ago it's really funny because there's a particular football player on the football team who all the girls had a crush on every single girl at durango high school in las vegas because that's where i moved for high school is was in love with this boy and he sat next to me in several of my classes over the years and was just so like he couldn't he didn't understand it it was peculiar to him that i wasn't attracted to him and like didn't flirt with him and so he called me a lesbian all the time and i remember lesbian meaning you're not attracted to me so you must be you must be a lesbian like there's something wrong with you because i'm the cat's meow you know and so uh funny enough i got to introduce sally to this gentleman at my 20th high school reunion and i was like you were right [Laughter] it was really funny but i was for sure confused i i like have always been attracted to people with hair like sally um this probably sounds vain but like maybe it's because i grew up in huntington beach too but just that sun-kissed hair with the roots you know and like like platinum colored and so if even if it was a boy that was feminine like i found myself wanting to hang out with him because i was drawn to this like look you know and it was just innate it was in my body i could i couldn't help it and that's called aesthetic attraction there you go yeah there you go yeah and and you've said to me my daughter claire this taught me all this just to be clear you said to me too that all the girls you thought you had a crush on were like short and brunette which is pretty weird which is funny type i guess we're all like we're just looking for each other but yeah so i uh i lost my train of thought no so you was in high school yeah yeah so this this kid at the 20 year high school reunion was just blown away and it was funny it was really fulfilling to me to just say like oh my god you were right the whole time so did you date boys yeah i did date boys i did what was that um i dated mormon boys because they were safe were they safe well i mean there was that like understanding that they weren't supposed to have sex before they were married in vegas this is invasive yeah this is in vegas and i um [Music] i liked that they were gentlemen and that they didn't have to drink to have a good time because all of my non-mormon friends drank we all drank and so they didn't do drugs they were just like cool and fun and like what was that thing straight edge they were straight edge yeah yeah and they like wore the bracelets and everything but um yeah it was just i liked being around them they seemed to have more drive they were way more into academics and athletics and like didn't sleep in for practice because they were so you know driven by we're not hungover yeah they weren't hungover exactly or hi so yeah and then did you like fall in love with boys did you you know have steady serious boyfriends yes i had a couple of boyfriends um sophomore year for about six months senior year for the entire year and both of them were mormon the first one has come out he's gay the second one married to a woman um i we were we were so homies like we loved music we went to what was that big cd store very well or um it was like i think it was called wow okay is that a store you guys have ever heard of like you walk in and it's just like this massive cd store and we used to go there at least once a week his parents were well off and he would buy like he was a sneaker guy he was your sugar daddy for sure he was just so nice and kind and i don't know i really enjoyed his company she's like kissing them um that's confusing i think for me because i didn't know that i was gay i just knew that i was a teenager with hormones and it was a form of like sexual expression to make out with people you know so i wouldn't say that i was like repulsed by making out with him i think had it been anything else like with body parts i don't think i would have been able to handle that you know because aft i mean down the line in the story where penises get involved it ain't pretty so okay so yeah does that make sense yeah yeah yeah yeah okay so yeah okay so i was gonna ask about a version but that comes later so you so you would date boys kissing was somehow okay yeah but but uh he kissed a few yeah okay you got around [Laughter] and what were you into in high school just cheerleading yeah i cheered in high school i like i don't know i mean yeah i was on student council a couple of years i loved photography i was on the yearbook club i was voted ready most likely to be out of dress code that was me to be out of dress code most likely to be out she wasn't a dress code that was one of my superlatives we're not dressing modestly correct okay no okay explain the explain that well las vegas is [ __ ] hot you know like nobody's in vegas with like a sweater so you know you're wearing like spaghetti straps and skirts and i was so confident in my body like i didn't ever care what a boy thought of my body and so i didn't try to hide myself and so because i was like confident and didn't give two shits about what these kids were thinking of me i just was comfortable i was comfortable wearing whatever felt good yeah you know yeah and were you were you uh practicing as a catholic in high school or well let's talk about what a practicing high school catholic girl looks like shall we or acts like or acts like or acts like yeah i mean the the perception of that is so funny because the catholic school in town was where all of the drugs and the promiscuity and i mean there was a lot of drama that came out of that catholic school in vegas but i for sure went to church absolutely um like i said first holy communion i was confirmed later which is what you do in your teenage years it's like a big huge sacrament in the catholic church to be confirmed and i participated in mass i did like a bunch of youth activities we like pretended we were homeless and had a big homeless uh retreat where we had to like beg for food and it was really humbling experience and then we went and fed the homeless and i mean there were a lot of service opportunities in catholicism but outside of sunday i mean we were all partying it up real hard and my mom trusted me a lot so i got away with everything okay yeah no curfew so it sounds like you had a healthy fun yeah high school totally experienced totally had a healthy fun high school experience until yeah i did have there was a tragic thing that happened that leads into my uh conversion story so i don't know if you want to go there if you feel ready everything was healthy and fun except for you were a repressed lesbian i think you hung out with boys and did stuff with boys to benefit you in other ways yeah and so healthy healthy is not not a word i would describe it as but my my experience yeah i think what he means is like it was well-rounded there wasn't a lot of oppression you know other than my own sexuality was rigid like a mormon yeah and i definitely did not know i was a lesbian like i truly believe that my sexuality was turned off my entire life you know like until recently yeah 37 was my sexual awakening wow yeah yeah we just jumped ahead okay let's go no it's okay no it's fine okay so so it sounds like you're about to go someplace tender yeah it's a it's a horrific experience that i don't wish upon any human ever to have to go through but you know as kids do they drink and they do stupid things and what is it like the prefrontal cortex of the brain isn't developed till they're like 20 something 25 26. i mean why put a car like in the hands of a 16 year old who is like it's a it's a it's a moving it's a moving like weapon you know you can hurt people and um this is where the story gets really interesting because i feel i i believe so strongly in intuition i know the church likes to take ownership of that and call it the holy ghost [ __ ] that it's my intuition it always has been what careful with efforts oh is it too many pg-13 i mean i want you to be authentic oh sorry no it's okay be authentic there's only one we're trying to keep a pizza there's only one f word allowed in a pg-13 movie but but but can i can i be honest let me just i want you to be authentic so audience if if you know if lena's authentic expression offends you i guess turn it off but i don't want you to have to censor yourself so let's just let's just let people know there may be some swearing because that's how lena grew up you know just are you what do you what did that make you feel even i'm just thinking about what happened yeah okay okay so be talk how you want to talk um so there was like a fork in the road my family after the rodney king riots was like up in arms about living in california and so we moved to vegas we just happened to move like right by the mormon temple i'd never even heard the word mormon before so i was 12 or 13 and it was the first time i'd heard that word um looking back i had a friend named lehi when i was like in kindergarten and i'm like i wonder if leah was more anyway i just i'd never heard of it and and the word lds was or the acronym lds was new to me too and so when i was at school middle school and they're all these like really happy spunky kids that like didn't say [ __ ] you know they were all just like really happy all the time i was like what is going on with these kids and someone's like oh they're lds and in my mind i thought oh they do lsd like that's where they're happy they're just like always high acid dropping acid yes like i i'm young but i still knew what that was i grew up in orange county it's like i mean i went to the beach by myself all the time and witnessed witnessed it so i knew what it was but i had never heard of that term before and so i befriended one of them and she kind of like took me under her wing and asked me to go to this steak dance with her that was kind of like my first mormon exposure and she like she had at least two sizes small shoes but she forced me to wear some heels of hers and a dress i had never worn a dress that long in my life like it went to like my ankles or something and i uh i thought it was adorable that these people just like gathered in a gym and like danced with each other and i just danced with the girls and you know drank punch and had a good time and and i didn't think anything of it until it didn't stop you know mormonism is not something you just like see in passing if you make friends with a mormon especially as a kid most likely missionary work's gonna come up and they're gonna like be after you and so that's what happened i was i i feel i don't blame any of them but i do feel like i was like manipulated for sure you know there's a form of manipulation because they're telling you that something in your body is coming from this book of mormon being true but like it's just my body you know telling me i'm safe i'm in good company these people aren't going to harm me you know what i mean yeah so i don't know where i was going so as you developed these mormon friendships yeah i developed these mormon friendships and um my mom was disheartened by the fact that i wanted to keep going with my friends to like seminary and all these other things and so she sold our house and we moved 40 minutes across town to escape to escape the mormons because i kept asking her like they want me to take the discussions like i should just do it you know and she's like not while you live in this house it's not going to happen and so going to this new school my brand new cheer squad my very first friend was mormon and i didn't know it she was she was asian she's japanese and i had no idea that mormons could be japanese because the only mormons i'd ever known were like blonde and blue-eyed and this cute girl was like the sweetest thing on the planet and i got to her house and it said choose the right above her door and i was like no way you're a mormon and she was like yeah i'm like but you're japanese she's like mormons are everywhere i'm like oh i had no idea so um so that was funny and i took the discussions at our house quite a few times not knowingly the missionaries just happened to be there every time i went over for dinner or like a hangout with her and her mom and obachan so those were good good times and my mom had like no idea what was going on behind the scenes so leading up to junior year i was kind of on this like open-minded quest like i don't really feel like there's one true anything but like sure i'll sit and listen to you if you want to talk to me about jesus you know when it got to joseph smith that's when things got foggy and i was like hey that's bs like i didn't go there but my um my best friend and i junior year of high school had gotten into a little bit of a tiff and she wanted me to come to this party on a friday night february 28th to um go kind of like drink it out and just like flush out all the drama and be you know cleansed of any bad beef you know and i got invited to this mormon girl ashley's party her birthday party and something in my intuition was just like go be with the mormons like i was pulled there this feeling of safety and that's the night she died my best friend died in a car accident on her way home from that party so the driver of the car was supposed to be the designated driver and she she was not she wanted to see how fast her sister's car could go on the freeway and she killed two people in that car yeah and it it defined the rest of my life for sure and where were you i was at ashley's birthday party and when i went home so you made the choice to be with the mormons yeah i went mormon friends we were dancing with music and drinking punch like there was no no nothing no hoodlums at that party right it was all clean fun in their garage and you could have been in the car oh absolutely i would have been she would have yeah i would have been in that car yeah 100 so what was that like for you so i mean there's survivors remorse like i'm sure a lot of people understand that and i those beginning like few days were terrible you know going to her bedroom and like thinking of all the sleepovers and stupid conversations we'd had and like at 16 like people aren't supposed to die you know life got real really fast i couldn't drive on the freeway for years after that it was tough so when i got to school i skipped school for a while to like allow myself to heal and when i went back i mean there were people at my locker just like lined up to hug me and like support me but they were mormon all of them and instead of being um sad they were giving me hope they were saying things like we know exactly where she is you know and and this is what happens when you die and i was really curious about that i wanted to know like i went to my priest i went to a greek orthodox church to a baptist church to a born-again church do different organizations to find truth to find like answers and obviously hindsight's 20 like we don't need answers but back then that's all i craved was just like i just want to know and i went to her cemetery which now i understand why i was so obsessed with going to visit her grave is because i grew up at a cemetery you know i was very comfortable in that space and so i would go there by myself every week with carl's jr because we always ate girls junior together and i would eat with her and i would bring her some like the same meal with fries and shake and like sit and talk to her i felt really close with her like connected to the other side um of this life like whatever happens when we die like i felt connected to that energy and i don't feel like it was made up like i felt her presence there for sure so when um this all happened and the mormons were like so persistent with having all the answers the plan of salvation when you look at it all laid out it's it's magic it's like that's ideal that sounds like a great plan let's do that and it tried i mean i don't know i tried to not give it too much credit to make it not as real as it felt but with every time i tried to like move myself further away from mormons or like create friends in other groups because i was friends with everyone at my high school and all the different groups i was very much a chameleon the mormons were just persistent you know and loving so kind and loving and welcoming and i was supposed to go to san diego state university and cheer and be in a sorority and i was convinced that provo was where i needed to go so that's where i went but did you was there baptism somewhere in there at byu okay so if it's okay first of all thank you for sharing something so difficult and i can't imagine what that would be like to have a friend that you're that close to die and to escape it and have the survivor's guilt and to try and make sense of the fact that she died and you didn't and was there a mormon connection involved and i'm sitting here you know i'm someone who still hasn't tried beer like i've never tried weed or anything you know still have you know traditional lob chastity kind of stuff pretty much my whole life uh so i'm still very mormon even as an ex-mormon i'm still very mormon and when i hear you talk about the good clean living the kind of stuff that the south park all about the mormons episode kind of highlights right donnie donnie maria yeah perfect hair yeah shiny smiley smiley teethy smiles good clean living yeah i love that about mormons sure i love it yeah totally and i'm like of course it's the way so of course you should have been drawn to that so on the one hand i'm thinking man i love mormons and men i love who we were and i love who i am and and i love good clean living that's how half my brain is thinking and feeling and then yeah lucky for you that you made mormon friends it maybe it did save your life and and then you know lucky for you that mormons brought you into the truth because now you're gonna get good clean living for the rest of your life so that's half my brain right and and of course the mormons were just teaching you their beliefs what's wrong with that everybody's got beliefs and they were just teaching you but now as i've got this other half of my brain i'm also thinking like oh there's a part of me that feels like that might even be predatory or grooming or and these are awful words to say because from a mormon perspective those words don't fit it's love from a mormon perspective yes but if i'm thinking about the fact that you had these experiences right they could mean all sorts of things it could just be luck it could just be like bad luck for your friend and good luck for you and just random decisions but if you're surrounded by mormons that are going to help you interpret these experiences they're going to have you interpret it in a certain way that then if you're in a very vulnerable state leads you to make a bunch of decisions in your life oh yeah that are going to be very monumental for you and again a therapist would never try and persuade you and interpret things in a way that would be so influential to you but because they're friends and because it's religion it's okay and so i'm struggling with what what that means for the for the your life after that wow yeah that's big i mean all of that the words you just said carry a lot of weight for me process it through your words because i didn't mean to like prime you and no no i i i was trying to come up with a way of saying it i mean you probably saw that i was like struggling to find the word and i said manipulative but really it was grooming and i think like yeah i did i did wonder if you were thinking yeah i was trying to think were you thinking that yes i was thinking of that word and and i know i know in my heart of hearts that these friends were doing it with good intentions sincere beliefs none of them wouldn't want any malicious thing to happen to me they were all just great people well after i became a member i did do that yeah of course i would have too yeah absolutely and and you know it's it's hard to think back to that time in this extremely vulnerable state 17 years old being convinced that i need to like abandon my family and join this what i now consider a cult um join this other religion to somehow find truth and happiness and that's gonna be like my saving grace you know that's gonna that's gonna allow me to be in the driver's seat and be in control of my life because it's already all laid out for me all the steps i remember the missionaries drawing it out this is the first one you gotta hop over this gotta get baptized the second one jesus provides the way then you go up the little ladder and this is where you endure to the end you know or the idea of the holy ghost like coming and going they used a pen i don't know if you've ever seen that demonstration and the pen how the how the ink the ink vessels inside the pen and that's your spirit and then the the pen shell is your body yeah and the spirit is the cap like the holy ghost is the cap of the pen oh okay and so the cap visits you when you're here at church that's why you feel like this but when you leave you don't get to have that gift anymore so if you get baptized you get to have the cap all the time but then you can't write with the freaking pen and then the pen is closed and then your life is over no just kidding boring boring so you had the discussions after your friend had died and they were they were contextualizing your friend's death in the mormon plan of salvation yes right where she is we know where she is and we know how you can see her again yeah yeah what does that do to your i mean emotions oh i mean i was primed perfectly i was eating it up like you know like a kid in a candy store i was so enthralled with what they were sharing that in so much that everything they shared with me about joseph smith that made my gut go inside out and turn into a pretzel i just ignored that because i was like well the plan of salvation is real so i guess joseph smith was a prophet you know like i guess i guess that happened to him when he was 14 like i didn't i truly did not have a testimony of joseph smith until i was on my mission yeah yeah and and it seems so often you know non-mormons see these mormon missionaries running around and they probably wonder what they're doing and so many converts to mormon missionaries are either super poor people in third you know in in countries like central south america or africa or the philippines super poor yeah or people who had really rough upbringings who just feel lost and need something or people that have had real tragic things happen or have hit rock bottom in some way and again i'm conflicted because on the one hand if it helps people get out of a funk or get out of a depression or get over an addiction or if they're super depressed and this gives them community if they're super lonely oh yeah on the one hand that's awesome totally on the other hand it could be interpreted as kind of predatory because you're praying missionaries are almost like and and mormons oh while they're really suffering this is an opportunity to bring them the gospel you know what i mean and and there's i guess i'm saying there's some undue influence there because if you're in a really vulnerable state then the plan of salvation can sound amazing and then if you don't couple that with all the information about what really happened with joseph smith and polygamy and yeah the book of mormon problems and all if you don't happen to mention that it's just this amazing story yeah it's just this amazing story that's like everything you've been waiting for right yeah yeah and it sounds like that's kind of what happened i mean back then when there were six discussions and these colloquy we had to like as a missionary follow i mean the elders taught me exactly what the book said and they had a little flip flip like booklet chart flip chart very specific things and and i always thought it was so strange that the flip chart was like had very minimal information yeah word of wisdom boom boom boom heavenly father loves you jesus died yeah it's it's like so simple you could be with your family again someday families are eternal right joseph smith restored the truth on the earth right yes with the same pictures yes yeah it's not the love i don't know yeah so i like left in the middle of the night my mom did not approve and i packed up my car and like drove to provo utah yeah okay that's the other thing is there's the parental yes consent and influence because they're they're kinda and i don't mean to be hijacking this but i'm just processing it like and i don't mean to make it sound nefarious because i was this we were all this at one point totally but there's this like parents are responsible for their kids teenage years are a time that's known to develop many developmentally for rebellion yeah and so if you just happen to be rebelling against your upbringing yeah maybe that's towards good clean living potentially especially if you've been terrorized by the death of death of a friend right then this this can become undue influence and and wedge between you and your relationship with your mom oh my goodness who raised you right yes and this is something we talk about on our podcast this like idea that the church celebrates the family the church everything about the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints is about the family it's fundamentally based on eternal families okay but why at byu was i celebrated like a freaking celebrity for leaving my family and for a mormon the worst thing you can do is try and take someone out of mormonism and the best thing you can do is try and take someone out of their own religious tradition there's something super hypocritical it's elitism you know it's we have something you don't you know we're we're better off you need this thing is the great abominable church but mormonism is god's one true church right i know i used to hear that you were you were born into the great abominable church i'm like oh wow okay but it's like when you um it's like a testimony builder to other people that if you're willing to give up your family for the true church it just confirms to other people that people would only do this for the true church uh luke 14 26 if any man come to me hate not his father and his mother his wife and his children and brethren and sisters yay even his own life also he cannot be my disciple that's right i used to give like uh big uh talks in my word in santa monica um about that scripture that i thought that was beautiful like if you are so devoted to christ you'll do anything for it right and how great is it that people have to stand outside your temple wedding i used to preach that because i thought that was a beautiful principle yeah that you would do that because of your devotion to christ right we had it kind of flipped yeah okay thanks karen for so long i thought well you can't ever touch jesus jesus was perfect but like now when i think about that scripture jesus is basically saying leave your family religion over family and that's coming from jesus the man himself right yes yeah and and that gives mormons the permission the license totally to alienate kids potentially from parents yeah my my dad would totally say that that the church saved him yeah i i feel that in some ways i mean had i gone to san diego state and been in a sorority guaranteed i would have figured out i was a lesbian a long time ago you know like that my life would look very different um [Laughter] a good joke we think you're funny john yeah you are okay oh well okay so but that's not what happened so you're you sneak off to provo your mom didn't know you had applied to byu so it was too late to apply to byu so i went to utah valley state college first semester first year against your mom's wedding yes well she she had she had been okay with the idea to the point of like um we'd had conversations and i could tell she was very uncomfortable but i was persistent and she knew i was about to turn 18 and what could she do i was extremely independent i applied for my own fafsa and applied to all the calls like i was i did it all by myself and so i didn't need her approval you know i worked three jobs in bravo wow for a long time yeah that's a quick question yeah so as you're going through this and mourning the stuff of your friend and you're said that you were trying to look for answers wherever you could find them and i'm sure your mom could see all the distress was she trying to give you like the catholic church has the answers and they just weren't sufficient for you because i'm sure she had to go through her own mourning process of you losing your friend and trying to figure out what that means so what were the kind of conversations that you had insufficient that's a good question i think coming from all three of you have had mormon upbringings correct okay so coming from mormon backgrounds that's a question you would ask someone it seems like oh yeah like the people in your life would want to tell you why this church was true but i'm telling you from a non-mormon upbringing that's not an idea that goes through someone's mind they're not thinking like oh if you go to talk to the priest he's going to tell you where she is they're just they're just going to say like i don't know she's in purgatory or she's wherever you know they didn't know nobody talks about truth the way that the mormon church talks about truth and they i say they former me as well uh just like they live on that it's like so foundational it's this thing it's a crux it's the crux of of everyone's testimony that this is the one true church yeah there's this idea of epistemic humility which is yeah i've got my beliefs but like i don't know for sure i imagine a lot of people catholics or protestants are just like i don't care if we knew for sure it was like we were just going to church to gather and commune with one another and like be in a space with people who believed in god it had nothing to do with the afterlife nothing yeah and mormons might call that weak sauce no but but but others might call that epistemic humility and then the flip side is mormon mormon is just mormonism's wrapped around the axle of certainty they know everything about everyone by the time you're 18 or 19 you know everything about everyone that matters in the world and everybody else needs to learn from you and that's why you become a missionary because you know everything and now you get to teach the world right all the things they don't know right i mean oh my god yeah that that's triggering too but yes definitely yeah so you that was like that was like water to a thirsty soul that was music two years oh absolutely yeah and the idea of like having a picture perfect family yeah like i could create my own family someday and it didn't have to be uh you know i came from this broken home as much as i hate saying that it was that's the truth and so i thought well i i can marry a mormon guy because he'll be faithful and he'll be good to me and he'll be kind you know thinking about the law of chastity i wasn't threatened by going up to byu i was very excited about the fact that i wouldn't be uh you know hit on in that way like advanced you know in in unwillingly and um my yeah my experience was very unique and then there's the missionary discussion about the word of wisdom which is that uh you know no tea alcohol tobacco or coffee but yeah that alcohol prohibition must have also been music to your ears knowing that your friend had died i gave it all up and from the moment she died i never drank again until i left the church so a church that prohibits alcohol you're like sign me up for that yes wow yeah yeah i uh i drink coffee up until my baptism but everything else i gave up and i did not drink coffee for 20 years wow after knowing yeah yeah yeah the joys of coffee i know that would be hard i would have a hard time giving up coffee now yeah i don't know how we did it yeah i don't know how we didn't know we did children for so many years without coffee they didn't make sense we didn't know better we didn't know any better yeah the love of jesus i used to say that yeah truly yeah all right so you're at uvsc in provo what was that a culture shock and then three jobs it was such a culture shock it's funny i lived in byu housing and you know i lived within the byu like culture very much so i think i was in like the 800th ward or something and uh you know i went to church i had a calling nobody knew i wasn't a member i like played it off really good and then one day somebody found out he got ordained as the ward mission leader in the ward and i just like thought i was gonna be incognito you know and just get away with it but when he said when he was ordained a ward mission leader i was like oh maybe he's a missionary maybe he's like those those boys in las vegas like he could teach me more about this or maybe he could baptize me and um we didn't have any missionaries in our award at byu and so he loved my roommate he was like infatuated with her and came over to visit one sunday and i was like hey so you're a ward mission leader what does that mean like are you a missionary like a a practicing active mormon person would know what that calling is but at the time as an outsider i had no idea what that was like what do you lead missionaries like are you a missionary and he was like no you know we do missionary work with the with the elders in this area but there aren't any non-members here so we're pretty bored and i i said oh so everyone in this area is mormon and he's like yeah i was like well not me and he was like what and so i asked him to baptize me and he did that's called a golden convert that's called missionaries call that a golden investigator because they didn't have to track you out and persuade you you're like hey i want to what i want to join how do i join me yeah yeah i was ready to give it all up like any quote unquote sin you know that i had previously uh participated in or anything that i had done contrary to what god wanted me to do i just wanted it all to wash away i wanted to start fresh and just be a brand new person and i got baptized in the joseph smith building on campus at byu just like right there in the middle of a classroom you open the closet there's a font it's quite hilarious and when i was given the gift of the holy ghost i wrote in my journal that night how i felt because that's what i was advised to do your experience of being baptized and what it felt like to receive the gift of the holy ghost it felt like i was being myself you know like i was me i was cleansing myself of of whatever grief and and past i had and walking into this new space as a newer cleaner version of myself but i didn't feel any sort of gift of the holy ghost in any regard yeah i just felt a feeling that felt like me you know and i'm also torn by the fact that you're sort of taught that you are being made clean but there's a rub to that because it means that you were dirty that's right to begin with that's right and that i i see that as an insidious teaching now but what's wrong at the time of feeling like whoa all those bad things and sad things i'm going to be made clean like that sounds so appetizing yeah and i mean the whole interview process of getting baptized was traumatizing was that how so um we had sam young on the podcast and it was it was hard just his whole movement is beautiful and transformative and it would have been nice to have someone like that in my corner back then in 1999 when i was getting baptized because the questions they asked me were extremely invasive i'd never talked about anything like that with anyone other than like a friend you know i'd never talk to an adult even about my vagina you know so and they were asking sexually explicit questions about your past sexual behavior yes now you you gave us the sense and i'm not prying but you've given us a sense you just kind of kissed yeah were there things that you felt like you needed to disclose i think there were boys that took advantage of me okay yes i do okay yeah so then you're in that position so then i felt the guilt of that so you're sitting alone in a room yeah with some 30 40 year old guy who's asking who is asking you what he was asking me you know did i have an orgasm did i um the the word climax i didn't even know what that was you know i was just this girl trying to be like more spiritual and i'm walking into this room where these men are expecting me to answer these sexually explicit questions about things i'd never even thought about in my entire life yeah you know using words like petting i'm like what the hell is that like i don't know i like i said i just i didn't grow up mormon and so we didn't talk about like the law of chastity or anything i just went with what my body felt was appropriate at the time and my mom she taught me safety and not abstinence i mean i was a virgin when i got married but i still like had messed around for sure sure yeah yeah which is for many healthy normal developmental behavior but now that you're in a mormon context you've got these i felt silly yeah it made you dirty that now you need a a church or even jesus yeah to cleanse you i remember one of the questions was did i give him a boner what through his pants like we were standing and dancing and this bishop asked me if i gave him a boner every girl gives every guy a boner when they're in high school and asking me and asking me like you know because again i had just been voted most likely to be out of dress code so i'm coming to provo with those clothes right and and the the lord is like a little flabbergasted but i um i think he brought that up to me because i was like drawing attention you know what i mean just by who i was they assumed she was promiscuous right yeah so yeah because if you show your shoulders or your legs yeah you in mormonism god forbid yeah you're what kara you are on the first ticket to whoretown that's right and not to mention that such a funny question funny is not even a good enough description because you're trying to like confess of your sins and i love that we're like actually narrowing down of like what sin is giving somebody else the like ability to achieve a boner like what does that have to do with you i was like do i need to confess that he pitched a tent really that's up to me because we're dancing because we're dancing i don't know that's [Music] that's the who needs repenting yeah right now in your trousers [Laughter] oh i mean we're laughing but yeah i think there are a lot of people that feel like these bishops plenty of bishops that probably don't but there's got to be some that are aroused by having an 18 year old young woman talking to them about sexually explicit things yeah we know what happens because we know yes they're mormon bishops that have sexually abused right you know young and older women or boys you know yeah in that process it happens yeah it may not be common but it absolutely happens truly slippery slope i would say yeah did you like it would you like me to show you what that looks like it's a position of power oh yeah it's a piece of paper they know that they are a bishop and they can nobody's gonna believe somebody else well they're in joseph smith's church who was the originator of grooming young women yeah and that was makes a lot of sense that's in the scriptures yeah sam young came to my home this weekend and i got to hang out with him yeah what up sam shout out to sam young in the protect children movement i told sam i've never seen one individual in such a short time make such explicit policy change within the church because of those efforts and even though the church has a billion years to go in this regard at least the conversation about parents having the option of accompanying their children into these interviews at least that's now codified and on the table even though i'm sure most parents don't take advantage of it at least it's on the table thank you sam young and all the people that supported you yeah yeah anyway i'm sorry yeah he's he's episode one season two of podcast that's great yeah yeah anyway i uh the culture of byu was extremely like new to me you know ward prayer every opportunity they had to get together and be spiritual like they took that they made it happen and i think our word had like 100 home teaching and visiting teaching like we always were just like connected you know and i during that time was ready to get out like i applied for a study abroad program in italy and i just left and it was the best thing i ever did for myself to like be alone and explore and walk the lands of my ancestors and like the apostles you know and rome and florence and stuff and and that's what led me to go on a mission just being there in italy and experiencing the joy of being somewhere outside of my life like it was a really beautiful escape to go study abroad for a year and not fall in love with an italian man that should have been my first clue like i didn't date a single person not kiss a single person no no no yeah yeah and i was with them all the time my classmates oh wow i went to like a full italian immersion school so yeah okay so you decide to go on a mission and is that before the age change and the big 21. wow yeah so i that's kind of hardcore too yeah i mean for back then for a woman 21 decided to go on a mission yeah i um i actually became endowed pretty young because i received my endowment in the temple young because my patriarch will bless me blessing freshman or sophomore year at byu my patriarchal blessing said i was a descendant from the tribe of levi and the levites are known to give like an offer give give up an offering of righteousness unto the lord as it says in doctrine covenants and so when i like went deeper into the doctrine and covenants manual it said that these levites their main job is temple work and so i felt this responsibility to be a temple worker from the age of 19. i think i was just turned 20. and i know our mormon non-mormon listeners are like tribe of levi yeah dark blessing lineage what like yeah joseph smith was really into people's lineage and he was always thinking about the 12 tribes of israel and the last 10 tribes and the you know and so part of a patriarchal blessing within mormonism is not just to predict your fear or foretell your future right which is another word for tell you how the church wants you to live right but it's also to declare your blood lineage or your spiritual where i came from blood lineage and so you i was i was declared to be from the tribe of ephraim me too and and other siblings native americans and i think pacific islanders are told they're from the tribe of manasseh yeah which is all like this is all like i mean now that i'm thinking about it's like hobbit elves i know level what's up hogwarts hogwarts i'm gryffindor and you're like hufflepuff yeah but but you were told i was like you were the tribe it was like the special one i came from the tribe of levi and that mean meant what to you so common so the thing about being a descendant of levi is that i had this responsibility to be offering up righteousness which basically means the levites the original levites were the ones that sacrificed the lambs you know and so i was also told there'd be a full restoration of all things and that there would be a sacrifice of animals during this during the second coming that i would be there at the temple performing that with with them and then if i ever had a son and my son was from the tribe of levi that he would automatically be a bishop and that he would not need to be called to be a bishop so weird i know it's weird these are just relics of mormon doctrine and theology but we but they like but it's undue influence because like you're told this is god and now it's your lineage and now you're told what that means and you're told this is the rest of your life you're gonna be serving the church that's how it works out for the church is they get a bunch of people to go all right church i'm giving you my life because you told me that's what my life's going to be based on this patriarchal blessing yep yeah totally yeah yeah they had me in your mind they had me hook line and sinker with my patriarchal blessing i ate up every single word of that document front and back yeah i mean it was like for sure my oracle sounds like you in high school you were living life too fast and then you convert to the church and then you slow it way down because there's nothing like living in a temple that is just boring and monotonous yeah and repetitive yeah but if you styled it way back but if you've had a friend die and you've seen what life in the fast lane can be like yeah you want to slow it down totally yeah yes and i had told myself that when she passed away like she doesn't get to have these experiences so i'm going to do it for her like i'm going to live my life to the fullest and enjoy and like be present um but yeah so what year was your first year at byu 2004. okay after so after my mission so i went on my mission to rome italy and it's a like very extreme special time of my life like i don't i don't have anything bad to say about my mission it was more than amazing like i um loved being in italy i loved being with my people i didn't have to tell them how to pronounce my name everybody got it i served in my same ward that i lived in branch actually i started my same branch that i lived in when i was a student in florence so they all knew me anyways wow and florence is where like you know michelangelo or leonardo da vinci david like that's yes i've been to florence yes my cousin is currently the mayor of florida which is pretty hilarious that they say like oh we're inspired by the lord to send these people to these certain places but it's it's obvious that you were sent there because that's where you're from you're from and you studied abroad there yeah she's a convert so we better keep her comfortable and happy yeah i absolutely loved my mission president i didn't have a male father figure especially like male spiritual father figure like in my entire life and so he became that for me and we were very close and i love him and admire him and we went back to the rome temple dedication together a couple years ago and i just i find that my mission gave me a lot of um my gifts that i have now the things that i've leaned into that i'm really good at i think came from serving on lds mission yeah yeah so complex yeah like like a part of me is think part of my brain is like oh father figure righteous priesthood holder caring about you looking after you making you feel good about yourself maybe even healing childhood wounds oh yeah and helping you feel good about yourself again what's wrong with that right yeah nothing nothing's binary though that's why that's why like the church's idea of binary thinking is just not realistic nothing is black and white there's good and bad everywhere yeah and we all put meaning on it and i apprec i can appreciate about my mission that i coming from a catholic background because i did serve in rome and vatican city as well but i can appreciate that i i believe that i never could say the words that this was the only true church i think that i always felt nuanced in that way like there were a lot of things i finally eventually gave into but but that particular thing like being in italy and serving people and like knocking on their door and eating lunch with 100 different people a week and i literally got fat for god like it was it was crazy um but like i loved every minute of it and i wouldn't take it back the only thing that's hard to think about is the fact that i thought i had something that they didn't and that somehow i was better off than they were and that i would give them this gift that would change their life forever so if you take that part out of it it was magical yeah so and did you find yourself piling on to the catholics as the great and abominable church because it's right there in the book of mormon or did you find yourself defending the catholics and telling missionaries to back off oh um good question very good question i think i was able to come to terms with that relationship because pope john paul who was the pope when i was there had a really healthy relationship with president hinckley and so there was this like this like unwritten like law of love that the sister missionaries could be on on vatican square and be fine like we didn't get kicked off obviously after pope john paul died like things changed but i was in like the priest quarters i baptized a nun like i i definitely was um sharing you baptize a nun i did yeah what the headline on youtube lesbian mormon story and also baptizing yeah so um did i get her in trouble well i mean she had to move back home she couldn't like live the law of consecration at the vatican anymore obviously so you know nuns they like give up everything where did you get access to even like yeah so it's funny people people don't realize like when you're in rome especially where i was living that's all we were around like on buses at the grocery store priests and nuns prisoners because they go there there's like a a seminary you know a gigantic um center for all religious learning for the catholics it's like right there you know it's the epicenter and so yeah i was around them all the time are in fact the guy that wrote the italian hymns is a former priest he was in my ward in my realm ward fascinating i know was the temple even envisioned yet yeah yeah as soon as they got off the plane we went and claimed the land the church has owned it forever but we had to go like claim a piece of it and like dedicate our hearts to the soil and these olive grove trees and where the temple was to be built exactly their mission president would take the missionaries there when they got there every every single missionary that went to italy ritual yeah and so did you see a lot of baptismal success as a missionary i had a lot more success than the average missionary that goes to italy let's just say that there is um something to be said about being a convert like i can relate to them you know and they're catholic yeah i was raised catholic and i could speak to like the things that the specific things in catholicism that were lacking the specific things in mormonism that filled in those gaps tricky so i mean i trained a lot of sisters i was a very very dedicated sister missionary and made a lot of friends so this is kind of the i mean i don't know if you've felt this but some people do feel this you were kind of pulled out of your cultural tradition and then you turned around and kind of pulled other people out of there yeah absolutely tradition yeah it's hard for me to like think about that you know do you keep in contact with anyone yeah um well i saw a lot of them a couple of years ago so almost three years ago uh when the rome temple was dedicated and so many of their lives have changed and their kids have gone on missions and like it's been a lot has happened you know i don't think well a couple of them have left as well but for the most part like those families i worked with are like that's that's their life you know yeah and i i don't want people to think we're just hating on because i loved my mission and yeah a lot of who i am is because my mission and like like you said sal there's it's good and bad can it be both good and bad yes you know can it be good and bad yeah and that means there's good my mission president coincidentally is the only person i haven't come out to he's about to find out yes [Laughter] word gets around no hiding now babe i love him sorry president jensen okay so you had an amazing mission yeah i did um it it was more than i could have asked for the hardest part of serving a mission was going home period wow yeah and would you have said you had a what was your how would you have described your testimony by the end of your mission put it this way when i got home and started dating um [Music] every person that i dated would go like on splits with me like i was knocking doors in provo utah all the time what yeah i was leaving flyers and pass along cards and bearing my testimony in the grocery store oh yeah i was i mean you can ask paul that's we believe you yeah i mean wow like you he'll tell you no no my former husband and sally are very good friends and so it's a conversation you can have with him because i think he will he'll talk your ear off so your testimony was what very established extremely established i didn't have any doubts that what because you said it wasn't that the church was the only church right it's not that it was the only true church this right that this organization was the best way to happiness you know like you could find more of who you were here than you could in any other church i'd ever gone to like i actually went to like scientology and like jehovah's witness when i was on my mission because i wanted to see these people who are so dedicated and say hey come over here like this is the one thing you're missing you know and and to be able to see other religions and how they practice and recognize that mormonism is not a religion it's a lifestyle and i said it earlier in the podcast it's it's a cult you know and so it is every minute of every day well cult the root of cult i mean culture the root of culture is cult it's just basically a way of life yes it's a way of life exactly and it was not uh a sunday activity no no no or this part-time identity yeah it is your identity i served as the first counselor and second counselor in the relief society three or four different times in my adult life what was it like for your mom to have you become a mormon missionary oh that was that was a conversation that was that was tough um i had an incredible award back home in las vegas that i went to uh to like when i would go home in the summer you know like i didn't ever go to church in a consistent space when i was in high school but after i got baptized at byu and i'd go home and work in vegas for the summer i would attend this this ward and they they supported me my entire mission you know my friend financially my mom didn't um need to worry about that and i think that helped her feel less pain like knowing that like i'm taking care of but she did say if i got called to russia or mexico she wouldn't let me on the plane so when i got called to italy you guys i was like the church is so true you know that's what i'm saying because but i did take a picture in front of an italian flag you know you have to send in a picture when you like apply to go on a mission and i did it in front of an italian flag how they know plus my name is so like so italian yep anyway um did your italian family members connect the dots that you were going to italy to deconvert people from that shared religious tradition into mormonism do you think your mom or your aunts or uncles or cousins or grandparents or whoever yeah understood that that's what you were doing yes they did and that was hard my mission president was so kind and so loving that he i mean now missionaries can call him all the time but back then you could only call your family for mother's day and christmas and he encouraged me to call home often you know to connect with my grandmother and to connect with my mom and to like reach out to them and let them know i'm safe because what like what normal person wouldn't be able to talk to their family for that long like it doesn't make any sense at all so coming from someone outside the church inside of the church it was a cultural thing everybody knew like get together on mother's day and christmas missionaries are going to call but for my family that would be ludicrous to not be able to talk to me the entire year so you got exceptions so i got exceptions yeah and so they were accepting of that and honestly like i wasn't saying to them like my purpose in being on a mission is to take people out take people no i didn't say that until my homecoming talk they they didn't really know any of that until my homecoming talk so on my mission they just thought i was serving like doing service teaching english and bringing people to jesus bringing people love and jesus yes yes yeah okay i think my mom actually gained a lot of respect for me for giving up my life to like go and dedicate myself to god you know yeah because you hear about and i don't know what it's like to go to college as not a mormon somewhere outside of utah but you know there's the whole girl's gone wild kind of like spring break party yeah you know sorority and fraternity kind of lifestyle you know that's what a parent might have their kids choose but in your case for your mom mm-hmm her daughter's choosing to go serve people and and to be selfless for two years a year and a half but i think she would say that to everyone yeah you're so proud of my daughter she's sacrificing yeah especially when she would meet mormon people like at work yeah they would be like oh my gosh so she um secretly invited my grandparents to my homecoming talk and they had never seen me in that space before like at a podium with a thousand people in the audience and i'm like recounting my experience in italy for the last while and then i spend the last couple minutes bearing my testimony in italian and my grandparents are just bawling their eyes out you know like they don't understand that this is not um like at the core of that experience for them i think they were just really proud to see me up there speaking italian and talking about my experience there in service and not so much about the specifics you know my grandpa when i got off the stage he was just like i didn't know you could do this this is a marvelous you know he was just like so impressed that i could like speak so confidently in front of all these people and not sweat about it you know yeah yeah there's so much good there yeah oh okay so i mean like there's part of me that's kind of thinking wow you know mormonism has just been this huge blessing to you you you know you had got a father figure you got all this confidence you got to return to your homeland you uh had you became a person who is selfless and who's serving others you found meaning and purpose and a sense of security after a friend had died mormonism for years up till after your mission was this huge incredible positive blessing in your life absolutely or you wouldn't have chosen it yeah for sure yeah yeah it was a safe space and i wanted that certainty and i got it i got exactly what i wanted yeah so what happens next what happens next interesting i uh married my former husband in 2005 just a couple of months before sal married her husband former husband and the year mormon stories was formed hey 2005. an important year it was a very good year yeah talk about your courtship though in dating yeah so that year that we dated was my last year in provo and it was sally's first year in provo so we're four years apart you overlapped yeah and we overlapped and her friday activity every morning was to do baptisms for the dead at the provo temple in my friday morning activity every friday in the morning session i worked in the baptistry and so sal and i were in the same room of 20 to 30 people for an entire school year two semesters i believe that there was some sort of energetic exchange like just figured out this okay talking yeah like when we first got together we were like oh my gosh that's so crazy but honestly i for sure remember like this girl who was had her head down in her scriptures the whole time didn't look at anybody and like rarely smiled me yeah like you were just like very serious from my from my memory yeah like very focused not there to be mingling but you were there like for god you know and i had other things i could have been doing well that's what i'm saying all the other girls that came with their ward in the morning were like oh they want to sit by the boys and like make their hair look cute and you just didn't give a crap and i loved that so in my mind that's who she is i don't know if that was her but it's a pretty cool little it's almost like a lesbian postmortem version of saturday's warrior you know i've seen that smile somewhere before yeah i've heard that voice before oh my gosh i mean is this so sad though it's a small yeah it's super small like for sure we saw each other the best part for me is if i like close my eyes and try to time travel i i picture myself while she's exiting the baptismal font wet drenched in soaking wet with a white little outfit and her pre-baby boobs which she always talks about and my towel i'm just like giving her a towel and she's soaking wet that's what i i think i saw that one on the website that no just kidding is there a mormon porn website oh god um okay yeah so so our courtship was that year i i had this gentleman you and your ex not us yeah sorry my former husband and i dated that year that i was working at the temple um got married the summer of 2005 but through that experience in dating him there were other like i was just so excited when i got home from my mission to be with people you know like humans and and not be so giving of my time to everything else but like be able to have a conversation with someone that wasn't about god or jesus you know and so when i got home i went on a date every night with someone different for the first couple of months like i i asked boys out all the time i'm like oh you sing in the play want to go to a movie tonight or whatever like i just wanted to see people and get to know them and be excited never did i have any sort of physical attraction or affection toward any of them we never kissed nothing no holding hands none of that it was just seeing like i was just so interested in like humanity and getting back into to life and what happened while i was gone and so there was this boy who we kind of dated before i mean we definitely dated before my mission and he um he asked me before i left what what i would think or what i would do if he got married while it was gone and i was like well like i'll find somebody else like i wasn't i wasn't head over heels like in love obviously because i would have been really sad if he was taken off the market but when i got home he said he didn't date anybody and he was waiting you know like he's like no one was good enough and now you're home and we can date and it was just maybe one or two dates before uh i think he and i both realized like this is not healthy like you haven't been out with anybody i haven't been out with anybody we're super young like let's go explore and then come back and talk about it and figure out like if we have a connection and i met my future husband and he met his future wife that next week like we both had a very similar experience and got married just a couple days apart so um when paul and i got married in 2005 i he and i had made a contract and he lived off of byu campus like in off-campus housing or whatever so he didn't have the honor code like that he was living up to and so and he had just gotten home from iraq or afghanistan or somewhere he's gone to both he's a former marine um pinned up in his apartment a contract like one through ten or something of the bylines like this is what we will do in our relationship and this is what we won't do and making out and like petting and all of that was on there so he and i like never made out before we were married like we kissed with our tongue a few times you know obviously but like there was no like making out and um to think about a 20 what was i 20 almost 24 at the time like my hormones would have been raging like if i knew her when i was 24 holy f word like you know i can't even imagine what that experience would have been like you can imagine if you want i'm trying to but it's like too much goodness all at once in my mind and i can't take it so so the wedding night even like we got married in the vegas temple and we go to the bellagio he like carries me over the threshold or whatever and kid you not like when i saw his pack what i was terrible like i was actually terrified like that has to go where oh my god and i remember having this feeling of like fear immense fear that that was not gonna work i'm looking at that and i'm like that's not gonna work and it took us a long time to get it to work and it really like was hard and painful and like you said i i cried a lot a lot a lot not knowing that i was repressing my sexuality i think like i said before i think i was just asleep like my sexuality was just completely gone like i gave in to the thing because i knew i had to i knew i had to have sex with my husband you know that that was what like people did but within the first week i knew i was in for it like i was in trouble so the male form was aversive to you yes yes yes and you had no way of knowing that before no i was astonished you didn't expect that no no i didn't you didn't choose it no i didn't yeah cause who chooses it nobody like i didn't like get presented with the opposite female former male form i think well okay i'll go with you no it's just you you know you're wired that way right right yeah and you have no you have no like way to figure that out no experience at all because even if you just think about it like you can't you can't figure it out without real lived experience in my opinion like i had never seen porn like i had i was very like yeah you did it all right yeah all it was all brand new and i'm also and tell me if i'm just projecting or if i'm totally got this wrong but another area where the gender binary misleads us is that if someone would look at your appearance they would not stereotype you as stereotypically lesbian which which is a dumb thing to begin with but that's how we think right yeah and so you wouldn't have even thought about that as a possibility for yourself because you would see someone like ellen or whoever wrote i don't know who what or what are public i used to say like pe teachers and police officers yeah that's it you would see them and you would say well that's not me me i didn't so you wouldn't even it wouldn't have even occurred to you that that this might be your orientation not at all not in the least because you are stereotypically feminine right in your gender presentation correct yeah right and that's not stereotypically feminine gender presenting individuals are attracted to men right right and if we're not something's going on right yeah yeah so this is where the gender binary does this a disservice yeah again yeah right for sure because it didn't give you a chance to even consider that as a possibility for yourself because you didn't present as butch correct or mask more masculine or whatever that means correct yeah i had had moments in my youth where i sat in bed late at night questioning my sexuality just kind of like in passing you know the thought would cross my mind like am i gay and then my body would be like no you're not gay of course you're not gay and then i'd go phew you know and i had these conversations over the years when i realized what i realized which is so insanely ironic is that people who ask themselves that question especially over and over again like you're gay you know like if you have to keep going back to that space and wondering yeah you're probably not totally sure you're probably never once did i ask myself that question ever in my life yeah i'm not trying to like be super no but i'm just saying i never did yeah it proves the point for sure i had dreams about like unsolicited like i had dreams that i was so that i had a girlfriend in high school but i didn't give any thought to it like i would wake up and i'd be like oh i don't like that that makes me uncomfortable geez why did i have to have that dream then i'd try to forget about it and i was dreaming about ginger and marianne on gilgamesh that's funny okay so that must have been an awful week and then what does that set you up for and how's your husband responding to that yeah how does that set up your marriage yeah my former husband had been divorced he like was got married really fast in the military and then his wife left him when he was deployed which is horrific and terrible that that happened to him and so he wasn't new to the whole sex game like he he knew what he was doing and so i think that instead of bringing it up with me and making me feel bad about it we just avoided it and this is something that her and i have deconstructed together that her and her former husband had this communicative relationship about their sex life like constant over the years you know like it's not working what should we do oh it's you know and for for my former husband and i it just was not that we just pretended ignored it yeah and we were best friends like we got along so well those first five years we didn't have kids like we just traveled and we're silly and stupid together and there was nothing like i didn't like about him he was fun and hilarious and smart and why would i not want to hang out with him we never like made out you know like we never like went to town at some like airport bathroom or something like that just we just were platonic you know we just loved each other we didn't i didn't know that there was a difference i truly did not know there was a difference between loving someone and being in love with someone and when i watched the bachelor i used to get so confused when like the last day they're they love one and they're in love with the other and i'd be like this is such bs how do they know this like what is the difference there's no difference yeah until i experienced it for the first time and then it was like oh my gosh like this is what it's been this is what i've been missing my whole life yeah so usually a marriage settles into a certain frequency of sexual activity once a week or twice a week you know for sometimes it's every day like it just sure and then sometimes it's once a month or you know yeah so how how did it work out for you guys yeah i would say in the beginning it was more it tapered off um in the last year i think it was last couple years like once a year once a year yeah and in those early years yeah like a few times a month okay yeah so you would you would figure out a way to grin and bear it for that's exactly how i describe it i'm sorry i didn't mean to put words no that's exactly how it feels yes but you um had more respect for yourself than i think i did because i was raised mormon you're like i don't like it so i'm not going to do it very much you would tell him that or just to herself yeah i think he and i just like had this unspoken agreement that like we were fine without it my mom used to like send me lingerie because she was so worried about our relationship like are you guys having sex i'm like mom we're fine i said i thought i was so righteous i would say you know relationships are not all about physical affection like he and i trust each other there's nothing that's gonna happen we're fine but because she from this outside perspective outside of mormonism didn't have that like spiritual foundation of being equally yoked that somehow she wouldn't get that concept so i thought my inconsistency and like lack of sexuality was just me being righteous and honestly i think you guys value different things because you both came from broken homes yeah so you're like we get along we're solid there's no problems here we don't want to we don't want to get divorced we don't want it right we don't want to mess this up yeah because we're going to have a solid stable home for our family yeah and so that was like very low on on the values yeah because he comes from a broken home too and then there's the there and there's three other dimensions there's the libido dimension so like in my mind i'm thinking well it's possible that your husband might have been lower libido and so then it wasn't as important to him that's one dimension of a possibility yeah then there's as you described it sal pain tolerance or ability to just do what's painful or hard yeah um but then there's a third dimension which is like resentment building and frustration where he's like he's just suppressing and building resentment and anger for you and any of those you know any of those things are possibilities yeah in your situation i mean i would say they probably all three apply in some way or fashion uh i encouraged him to masturbate again i grew up outside of the church and so masturbation was never anything i looked down upon oh so he had that release well i don't know if he did or didn't do it frequently or whatever but when we went through in vitro and he was like asked to do it i throughout the next six seven eight years was like not available sexually and i would just say go take care of it like i'm good you're good yeah so it's just one of those things that like we you know we didn't connect on so okay yeah but we had everything else going for us for the most part yeah so it in some marriages that becomes a real source of tension where if it's the high libido husband he's angry and resentful and bitter at the wife or vice versa if it's the high libido woman but it sounds like in your case there wasn't that no tension or resentment there really was that's nice yeah it was so nice i mean obviously it prolonged the process of figuring out my sexuality yeah um but i wouldn't take a single day away from how long it took to get to sal like this experience and the remainder of my life season two chapter two 2.0 it's all like it's all worth it to be here you know wow yeah okay love you i love you that's so darling and beautiful okay so what else do you want to say about your marriage and and child rearing and yeah i i had four children in four years oh my goodness it was a circus but in vitro so yeah so the first three were in vitro and the last one was a surprise so is that expensive uh-huh we sold our house in south jordan and moved into a little place to afford everything in murray um and we were working off my teacher's salary but i had really good insurance so it just made a lot of sense to like grow our family i was getting older i was 29 31 and 33 when i had my kids so and he was he went back to school he went to law school we moved to washington dc and i was a housewife and had this in the thick of motherhood in a place where i had no family and just making new friends it was a very dark time for me why dark because when you are in the thick of motherhood like those diapers and piled high and sleepless nights your mental health suffers you know and thankfully my former husband is a feminist and so he pushed me out the door all the time he was never one to be like let me watch the children for you like that was not a thing he's like i'm their dad go have fun you know um and so i've i'd i've always worked in the relationship and that's something my mom instilled in me a long time ago get an education don't ever rely on a man so i did and i was a high school teacher for a long time and then started my own business in 2015. what was the law school he went to american university okay yeah yeah cool yeah and then what was your mormon lie what were your mormon lives like throughout i mean it's funny now hindsight's always hilarious he says i drug him to church i didn't know that like i didn't know that it was my testimony that he was like leaning on i just thought he was in for it with me he was a high priest group leader like he occasionally did his home teaching and i just thought it was this i thought we were the same you know but when i came out and left the church he never went back but but while you were yeah while we were living um you know our 14 13 almost 14 years years of marriage we were extremely active every sunday and devout and believing very devout tithe payers the whole thing yeah okay okay yeah i was nuanced i mean a convert so the lgbtq issues were always a problem for me my business partner co-worker is a member of the queer community and i like it sickened me to think about christianity thinking any less of him or making him feel like there's something innately wrong and so there were a lot of issues within the church that and the patriarchy that really really affected me yeah yeah yeah so you were struggling with uh with maybe prop 8 and oh yes that was that disgusted me yeah yeah i think that was the beginning probably of like some cracks yeah the cracks yeah for sure and i mean you didn't even know maybe you didn't even fully know why no i didn't but it was in there like way deep down whispering to my conscious mind but like the whisper was so uh faint i didn't hear it yet and for listeners who don't know what i mean by prop 8 this is when the mormon church in 2008 decided to try and uh take away gay marriage which was legalized in california they fought to take away same-sex marriage from the citizens of a sovereign state through using their money and influence and they succeeded and they got mormons to do it along with catholics and evangelical christians before they formed this huge coalition to take same-sex marriage away from the citizens of california yeah to preserve the family you know like i worked with this amazing woman and mentor um at the high school i taught at who said it so beautifully like the lgbtq community is not what's bringing down the church it's not what's harmful to the church it's the access that we have towards um like well i don't necessarily believe what she said but she did say like it's pornography it's uh you know people having an affair and things like that that really take a toll on families and not people who are queer yeah um i don't necessarily think that pornography is i don't think it's a problem i don't watch it but i still don't think like my i don't judge it is what i'm saying you know sure yeah back when i was a member of the church i for sure did i just see i see that prop 8 is a like just they're just trying to control you know they didn't want to lose their control yeah lose their religious right to exclude well there there was this perception that as goes california so goes the nation and the church was paranoid that if gay marriage was allowed to stand in california yeah that that would then there would be all these marriages and then these californians would move to other states and then the states would have to figure out well do we recognize the marriages or not do we give same-sex benefits because now we've got these queer couples that came from california and that was horrible right yeah yeah no no really that was the logic if we could take it away from california right we're going to at least slow down accepting the children if if you know oh and then that's another thing adoption we don't want queer people all over the country adopting children and because children deserve a mother and a father in the home and so for all those reasons the church needed to take away same-sex marriage and they did and then there was huge backlash yeah yeah and they've lost so many so many members and and super damaged the mormon church has super damaged this reputation by by what it did at prop 8. not to mention that it told all the members that it didn't use any tithe payer funds or any of its own money to run prop 8 and it totally lied and it did and it was found out as having lied right to the world and he was even prosecuted for lying um so anyway what a huge disaster for the church and you're saying that was that was a crack in your inner testimony absolutely yeah i think that was the beginning for sure just because i i mean as a high school teacher i was accommodating all types of people in my classroom and i didn't think anyone in the classroom was less than another just because they weren't mormon or they were queer like that was very disturbing to me yeah yeah yeah so what uh so tell i guess take us through to the point where right before things start to fall apart anything else you want to say about sure eventually you must have moved to california yeah yeah um it's interesting because after i had children in my 30s like almost mid-30s i can pinpoint and recognize certain moments in time that i was attracted to a woman and i think my body was starting to wake up like i said i think i was asleep for so many years and after i had kids there's there was something that changed in me and hormonally i have no idea but whether i was at the gym or wherever like i would there are specific people i can pinpoint that i had an attraction towards um and i remember consciously repressing it wasn't an unconscious repression it was a conscious repression i can't be friends with this person i don't want to go to that space anymore because that's where this person's going gonna be you know and i knew that there was something wrong with that at least that's what my mormon brain thought there was something really wrong with that that feeling coming up in me and it scared me and it made me feel not that i was afraid um that i would catch the gay because so many people have said that you know like oh be aware of sally you know she if you be friends with her she's gonna lead you astray like there's no no you can't persuade me to do something like in in that way like i'm i have a very strong inner knowing and it doesn't ever lead me in a direction that feels like i'm being persuaded by someone else like i do it because my body is telling me i should do that thing and i believe mormonism is how i got to my truth it carried me for so many years and kept me safe in this box and then once i graduated from those experiences and i didn't need the church to like define anything or give me security and i was secure like in myself then i left you know it was much easier to figure out my sexuality when my testimony started to break down so before that point though you did you started to experience and recognize attraction to women yeah i did this before after your testimony marrying a boy in the temple um and that's not i'm not yeah you can say or not say i'm just yeah well uh yeah our one of our sons was like very curious about um his gender and his i mean how do you say like sexual identity of a toddler but he was just very curious about things and that curiosity led my ex and i to just like say like this isn't necessarily a safe place for him and we need to transition out of this space you know we knew that our time in the church was limited like it was running out because the hypocrisy kept increasing like if if we feel like in primary you're learning something and when you get in the car on the way home we have to undo all the things you just learned at some point like why keep wasting our time undoing these stories like why put ourselves in this situation where we have to undo so much learning for our kids you know so so i think do you do you and sal end up losing your faith around the same time when you're when you're physically together or did one of you because i want to kind of there's some point where i think the story we're going to start telling your stories together and so i just want to make sure we wrap up anything about your story lina that that there's a that is important to say before it merges so what i've heard you say is super mormon faithful for at least what 10 12 years but but starting with prop 8 and then you're starting to feel some attraction to women and then you have a child that's maybe starting to make you wonder whether they might be gen you know normal quote normal gender wise or whatever any other thing you want to say about just but before things really fall apart any other thing you want to tell about your story um you know before the time where things really start falling apart what about kundalini for you yeah i was gonna say that um my washington dc award was extremely nuanced virginia or maryland or we were in alexandria okay yeah and so my experience there was really good like the different church in many ways so different so so different our bishop was the same age and he was a good friend of ours and there were people with callings who were inactive and like i don't know i just really appreciated the um christ-centered atmosphere there it didn't feel like there was judgment even for my son and so that's what was hard was like why would we leave this community that is so accepting and loving of him you know but that changed going to california but my like initial reaction when i started to feel this crack in the veneer was like i need to find my own truth i need to go inside and feel more of who i am and the completeness of me outside of the church before the religious conditioning and so i signed up for um like women's retreats in the dc area i started practicing kundalini yoga and all different forms of meditation and it was not long for me to realize that there was vast knowledge that existed here that was so much greater than um religion that was keeping me inside of a box and making me feel small and taking ownership of my gifts and and my intuition and i just i could feel this this hunger like i i wanted it back i wanted to take my life back um interesting yeah so you start to have an awakening absolutely okay and then what leads you to move to chelsea my twins are on the autism spectrum and they're darling and wonderful but they're also very difficult and i was by myself and my family is out in california all of my family and so it made sense to move closer to home and um we moved in 2018 the fall no this this end of summer 2018 back to california just like less than a mile away from my childhood home yeah yeah and the weather and the weather is beautiful my kids like i always went back home in the summers to visit my mom sometimes for an extended period of time with the kids we just hang out in newport or huntington all summer and so my twins found so much peace and comfort in the sand like i think the consistency of the waves it's like the heartbeat of mother earth you know they just it's it soothes their anxiety it makes me feel like they don't have any disability at all when we're at the beach you know so i wanted them to have the ocean to heal them and it was in california where you guys met for the first time i'm gonna i'm gonna take it not to not to steal the thunder yeah okay all right all right well i think maybe it makes sense to sort of have this be part one so so lena thank you so much for being willing to share your very very vulnerable and interesting and fascinating story just that whole mormon convert italy italian mission stranger in a strange land but but you know positive and problematic mormon experience is just it's a great it's a great value add to the mormon stories library right cara yeah super fascinating multi-faceted not black and white that's what we like here yeah and sal in your own way that everything about your mormon upbringing and repressing those things i think you put a really articulate voice to so many people who are going to listen to this and feel like they went through similar things and feel very validated thank you so much i appreciate you she didn't say the f word until you were held oh yeah uh 31 yeah and never celebrated our movie i was like good little mormon yeah and we're not done because this is just part one so we're gonna end this now for those of you listening or on youtube or facebook wherever you consume this podcast this is just part one so part one is going to be kind of trying to live the mormon life when inside you are lesbian basically and that's kind of what part one is and don't go away come right back uh if if you're watching this on a live stream for example tomorrow most likely we're going to be live streaming part two of this episode on youtube if you're listening we will have been we will have released these simultaneously you can just go right to part two but part two is gonna be how your marriages end and slash also what's that in our faith how your yeah how your faith ends and then how you find each other and then your love story yeah and then what uh you know where you are now and how that's all progressed so that's the beautiful inspiring part two of this story and it's it's coming right up so so thank you both for for sharing your amazing story with us so far can't wait for part two what's that thank you for having us can't have a lesbian love story without at least a kiss okay right okay okay we'll give you as many i told them i said do you guys want the chairs together or separate they're like together of course like okay can we be pretzeled on like a little sofa love seat i know i know and inspiring and beautiful and come right back for part two where we're gonna just get to experience this amazing love story so thanks everyone for tuning in kara thanks so much for being with us it's so great to have you thank you the bomb it's going to be another fun episode as soon as we wrap up this one i'm ready for the next one and viewers and listeners thanks for supporting mormon stories podcast thanks for your chats thanks for your comments please share this with with everyone and stay tuned for part two of this amazing story with sal and lena and a mormon lesbian love story see you guys uh see you guys all back really soon thanks everybody you

Channel: Mormon Stories Podcast

Views: 130,476

Keywords: lds, mormon, mormon no more, lesbian mormons, lds lesbians

Id: 30ZS_dN_6Ck

Length: 222min 34sec (13354 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 08 2021