On Sunday the popular YouTube channel Jubilee posted a video in their “Middle Ground” series featuring four former members of the LDS church discussing issues with four current members. It was interesting to watch, and there’s been a lot of discussion and debate about it online over the past few days. There are plenty of things to discuss about these conversations from both sides of the aisle, but I want to focus on one specific thing today: why we as a culture and religion seem perfectly content to dismiss female sexuality and sacrifice women (and our pleasure) on the altar of getting gay men to heaven.
There was a homosexual man on the panel of current members who’d chosen to abandon his self-proclaimed “gay lifestyle” in order to marry a woman in the temple. To quote him directly from a follow up interview, he said, “I came into this knowing what the church doctrine was. I chose to marry a woman because I knew that is God’s standard. I say it all the time, I still have my challenges, but this is where I’m happiest.” My immediate thought was, that’s fine for you – but what about the happiness of the woman you married?
I have zero judgement towards his wife choosing to enter this relationship, and I don’t want to mention names or draw unnecessary attention to her private life. However, her husband is very public about his sexual orientation and their mixed orientation marriage, so I don’t feel like she has requested privacy that isn’t being granted to her. They appear to have mutually chosen to be a very public face for this type of relationship.
The gay man was invited onto a follow up podcast with three straight men to discuss the Jubilee episode, and they praised him for his decision to follow the gospel plan and marry his wife. No women were on the panel, and no one in the comments (except for me) were speaking up from the female perspective at the time I read through them.
Before going further, I want to tell a personal story that happened at my gym years ago. An LDS woman got a divorce in her fifties from her husband – who had come out as gay – after decades of a temple marriage, a bunch of kids, and him serving in the stake presidency. She was in a weightlifting class and had just remarried and missed the prior week because she was on her honeymoon with her new, straight husband. She walked in and everyone said, “Welcome back, how was your honeymoon?”. She announced loudly to everyone in earshot, “Oh my gosh, I had the BIGGEST orgasm!”
That woman had spent decades of her life having bad sex with a gay man, but she had no idea there was a problem because she’d never had sex with anyone else but him.
I am a straight woman who has been married to a straight man for twenty-one years. I believe I speak on behalf of many other women with the following statement, which I’m not sure the four men in this follow up podcast seem to be aware of:
Women, just like men, like to have sex.
Teenage girls think endlessly about sex, just like teenage boys. Women want to get married so they can finally have sex for the rest of their lives, just like men do. Women have orgasms. (They can have more orgasms than men do!) Women have fantasies, read romance novels, admire men in tight shirts, confess endlessly to their BYU bishops because keeping female sexuality reined in before marriage is hard for them too, and when they finally get to have sex…it’s amazing.
I also know that my sexual orientation towards men is much more than just physical and sexual. It’s romantic, spiritual, and emotional. Even if we were Barbie and Ken with no genitals, I would still fall in love with a man and want to spend my life with him, because I love (and am very attracted to) maleness and masculinity. I sometimes get frustrated by men and their unrecognized privileges in the church and society and want to stand on a chair and yell at them about it, but I’m still deeply attracted to everything about them because I was born a straight woman.
After talking to many members of the queer community, I fully believe that homosexual orientations feel just like my heterosexual one. People are attracted to who they’re attracted to, and it comes pre-wired in all of us. Even if I wanted to change my orientation, I couldn’t. I embrace my female heterosexualilty with enthusiasm, and am very happy to be married to a heterosexual man who is also very enthusiastic about it.
I try to imagine an alternate universe where I married a gay man who I loved deeply and was personally attracted to. (Gay men are some of the most beautiful creatures on earth, so I’m pretty sure I could find one I wanted to kiss.) Then I imagine this sweet, gentle man trying so, so hard to please me, but just not being able to, because he’s not attracted to me. My teenage girl heart breaks, because it was set on a lifetime of amazing, unlimited sex with my future husband.
I frequently see the gay man in this scenario as a total victim – he was likely advised incorrectly by leaders and friends that things would work out fine in a mixed orientation marriage. Unfortunately, he couldn’t test run anything pre-wedding and still get married in the temple, so he’d only find out his true incompatibility with women after he was sealed to his wife for eternity.
Where I begin to feel anger towards men is when they know that their sexual orientation is never going to be towards women, yet they make an informed decision to marry a straight woman as a stepping stone to church prominence, biological children, and a spot in the Celestial Kingdom. She becomes an object he needs as a means to an end, not a full human being with desires and passions. It’s one thing that he willingly chooses a life that doesn’t match his biological desires, but it’s another when he asks a woman to do the same so that he can reach exaltation.
It’s then infuriating to me when straight men (with their enormous privilege of being able to marry a woman that they can effortlessly perform sexually for) applaud these gay men for their decision to enter a mixed orientation marriage.
In the afterlife, I want these types of straight men to receive a two-part exercise in compassion and empathy (I originally said “punishment” here and changed it in response to a comment) before they can gain exaltation.
Part One: They should be forced to have sex with a man for fifty years.
Part Two: They should be married to a lesbian for another fifty years, who can only stand to have sex with them on rare occasions, and by closing her eyes and pretending he’s actually a beautiful woman.
After that hundred year period, I would hope these straight men will have gained enough empathy and compassion for the people they applauded in these mixed orientation marriages that they beg their forgiveness.
Women are not a device that men use to reach heaven. Female sexuality is not unnecessary and frivolous. And no woman, anywhere, should have to wait until her second honeymoon in her mid-fifties to have the best orgasm of her life. We need to do so much better as a church about including women’s happiness in these complicated decisions about queer men.
Same with being married to an asexual man
100 percent. It’s another type of mixed orientation marriage and so painful. 💔
This was a great read! Thank you!
I mean, it’s basically Church doctrine that women are stepping stones to men’s salvation. We exist for that and to have babies.
The church has discouraged mixed orientation marriages many times. President Hinckley was very vocal about it. As far as “stepping stones”, we need men just as much as they need us. Both sexes have the same guidelines for eventual exaltation.
In 1982, I had a friend who was a PhD psychologist, and his daughter was thinking about getting engaged to a guy who wanted to marry to see if it would make him feel attracted to women, like the church promised. My friend, who was as believing a Mormon as Mormons come, advised her strongly against it. He said that psychology had proven 20 years before, so about 1960, that it doesn’t work and leads to a miserable marriage or divorce. The whole of the marriage the woman is wondering what is wrong with her that her husband doesn’t love her. Even when she knows that he is gay, if she is promised that marriage will cure him, then she has no choice but to blame herself. After all, she wasn’t enough of a woman to fix him.
So, you know how we doubters and apostates joke about the church being 50 years behind the times, that’s about right. Or maybe 60, since we are still discussing gays marrying straights to fix the gays in 2024.
Eighteen years ago I read Carol Lynn Pearson’s book, “Goodbye, I Love You” and it changed the entire trajectory of my life. (For anyone reading this unfamiliar with her story, she married a gay man at the advice of church leaders (in the 70s?), and although they loved each other very much he finally left the marriage after ten years and four children – because he was still gay. He contracted HIV and Carol Lynn took him back into her home and cared for him until he passed away from AIDS, at a time when the disease was so new and unknown that everyone else was terrified to be around anyone with it.) I had been taught by a seminary teacher in the nineties that God sent AIDS to wipe out the gay community and didn’t question it at the time, only to realize the man who died in this book was nothing like what I’d been told about gay people.
That’s was literally the first time in my life it occurred to me that the church could be wrong about something.
I think her story is partially why I feel so strongly about this topic and my heart hurts for every person entering a mixed orientation marriage with the belief that sexuality is not an extremely important part of a long term relationship or love. Carol Lynn and her husband loved each other very much, but that wasn’t enough in the end.
I’m really confused. I have never heard a church leader or anyone in the church say or encourage a straight person to marry a gay person. President Hinckley was very vocal about this. I dated a gay man in my 20s and no one encouraged a marriage out of it.
In very recent years encouraging people to enter into mixed orientation marriages has died down, and gay members are more likely to be encouraged to live celibate lives instead. But from my own experience talking to friends who are in these relationships over the years, local priesthood leaders have frequently been very encouraging to the couples to marry this way. There has never been strong leadership from the top that bishops and stake presidents should discourage anyone, only a quote or two over the decades saying homosexual people shouldn’t expect marriage (to a straight person) to change their orientation or to use it as a therapeutic step to do so.
David Archuleta reported just within the past couple of years that he met with an apostle right before stepping away from the church and was told, “We just need to find you a good girl” to cure his being gay. David refused, because he didn’t want to do that to a woman.
There are always going to be exceptions to the rule, but overall many, many people have been encouraged to enter mixed orientation marriages by their leaders over the years. The story I told above happened back in the early seventies, before any top leaders had really said anything on the topic at all.
Forced sex as punishment? Do you hear what you said there?
Yes, I hear what I said (and I think you’re right to call out the poor word choice). There are a lot of people (especially women) in marriages who feel pressured to have sex with their partner (and who frequently acquiesce for the comfort of that partner), even if they would rather not. It’s called “duty sex”, and I’ve actually been hoping to get a guest post about it from a sex therapist I’ve become acquainted with through my work at Exponent II. Women have a similar response to years of duty sex with their spouse as do victims of other sexual traumas.
The straight men on the podcast I linked to were very supportive of gay men marrying straight women in order to secure exaltation. This type of marriage would lead to a lifetime of duty sex (for the gay man in this scenario), and a partner who knows she is always being given duty sex. If those straight men spent fifty years exclusively giving duty sex to someone they were not attracted to (another man) or being the knowing receiver of duty sex (from a lesbian woman), I think it would give them some much needed compassion for those in mixed orientation marriages.
Perhaps instead of “punishment” I should have said, “as an exercise in compassion and empathy”. I wrote this when I was frustrated and posted it the same day. I agree, the second wording is better.
I made an edit in the post, if you’d like to check it out. I’m always happy to be corrected!
“Why we as a culture and religion seem perfectly content to dismiss female sexuality and sacrifice women (and our pleasure) on the altar of getting gay men to heaven.”
Mic drop.
Years ago, Feminist Mormon Housewives did a series about Mixed Orientation Marriage called “A Look Inside Your Neighbor’s Window”.
You can find the stories here: https://www.feministmormonhousewives.org/?s=a+look+inside+your+neighbor%27s+window
This story in particular is about a woman who learned years into her marriage that her husband was a gay man, and details how she was thrown under the bus by him and their church leaders: https://www.feministmormonhousewives.org/2012/05/a-look-inside-your-neighbors-window-a-different-fairy-tale/
I read this account years ago and saw red. I saw even more when I saw a comment from a man who had actively deceived his ex-wife in that way and was demanding sympathy.
No. These men – the men who deceive women and the male leaders who encourage it – do not deserve our sympathy. They know exactly what they’re doing.
I’ll for sure read these. I loved the FMH blog! (Also, I read your initials and thought, “Jesus Christ? Do you read my blog posts?”) Ha ha. Just kidding!
Nah, not Jesus Christ 😂 – but part of my initials (not necessarily in that order).
Though I highly doubt Jesus Christ would condone the behavior going on here, RE: the blatant neglect the wives of gay men suffer when church leaders and members either affirm the gay husband or try to cure him. It’s really disgusting how there’s no support for the wife whose entire world – and life – has been upended whenever that happens.
I loved the FMH blog too! It’s been dormant for years and it looks like the founder plans on laying it to rest for good according to this post: https://www.feministmormonhousewives.org/2023/08/fmh-anniversary/
But hopefully she’ll keep the archives up for rereading! There are a lot of gems there.
I even have some old blog posts up there. The Facebook group was very healing for me, too. May FMH forever rest in peace.