6/17/07
Dear Journal,
It’s Father’s Day 2007. My brother and I got him a salt shaker and a pepper mill combo, since he needed a nice set that he could put on the dining room table. My brother got a double wide butter dish, since Dad broke his old one.
My brother didn’t feel up to going to church this week, so now I’m sitting alone on Father’s day with a a lot on my mind. I really wonder where my father is, and where I am, especially considering our own unique problems and issues. I do feel this church has truths, for example, I know pornography is destructive and a sin. It’s exploitative, vulgar, and makes light of something sacred. However, masterbation seems so innocent. It’s a way provided by our loving God to keep us from committing some more grave sin from sexual frustration and weakness.
But it also could just be rationalization of sinful behavior.
I have been struggling with same-gender attraction since, oh, I don’t know, 5th grade or so, maybe 1997 or 1996. 10 years. More than 10 years I’ve been hiding and suppressing what I really feel inside and it’s destroying me. Crushing me under guilt and sadness and suicidal thoughts. Since I started working with Bishop O. this spring, the suicidal thoughts have stopped (mostly). I masturbate a 1/10th of the times I used to, and for a time I even stopped viewing pornography. However, even when I was doing all those things, there was still so much I wasn’t doing—scriptures, prayer, etc. And through it all, the best I got was not thinking homosexual thoughts. But I never felt or feel attracted to a girl, and I still fantasized about guys. Basically I think almost all my energy and physical ailments stem from this lack of love, lack of expression and companionship. I am an actor, and I have played the role of a lifetime. Playing a happy, well-adjusted hetero-male, when I’m not. I want to come out, abandon this church and get all new-agey like Dad. But I’m so scared that I will be wrong, that I’ll disappoint people. Disappoint God. Besides, I’m fat and I don’t want to be gay. I do want a family and someone to be with so I won’t have to live my life alone.
Here in St. George, every time I see one of those cute tanned blond Mormon boys I cry because I worry that maybe I’d have been one of them if I’d had a different family of stayed in Utah. I meet people at checkout registers and wish I could ask them to be my friend without being super creepy and scary.
I had a brilliant idea the other day about being in a play—that way I could socialize, act and have some fun without being creepy.
Anyway, I’m also kinda sick. So that sucks, and hopefully will clear up.
Love yourself, since no one else will.
Ezra
Here in St. George, every time I see one of those cute tanned blond Mormon boys I cry because I worry that maybe I’d have been one of them if I’d had a different family of stayed in Utah. I meet people at checkout registers and wish I could ask them to be my friend without being super creepy and scary.
ReplyDeletePeople in St. George are normal, and you're the 'creepy and scary' one, eh?
Ha Ha Ha! You're a laugh riot Ezra.
St. George is the one place on earth I've ever been which is demonstrably less healthy than Los Angeles. Really, be glad you aren't one of those cute blonde Mormon boys, and fer gawd's sake, don't ever hook up with one. They've got a lot of problems, those people.