"BYU! BYU! Where the Girls are Girls and the Boys are Too!"

I recently read a quote from the president of Brigham Young University telling all gay students to "leave the University immediately...We do not want others on this campus to be contaminated by your presence."

Good thing I got out of there when I did, huh?

The funny thing is, there are a lot more gay students at BYU than one would think.  Some completely suppress it, some dabble on the side, but all put on their best straight face and march on.  Brian and I have a friend who's mother always chants, "BYU! BYU!  Where the girls are girls and the boys are too!"  She has reason to sing this song.  While she attended BYU she dated a guy there for all four years, with every hope of eternal marriage, until he broke up with her because he was gay.  In fact, he had been dating a man on the side the entire time.  Eventually she found a new man, got married, had children, and enjoyed a happy Mormon life up until her divorce.  You see, her husband was gay.  Not only was he gay, but he had once dated the same guy that her ex-boyfriend had been seeing all those years ago.

While I was attending BYU, I knew of a very pretty girl in her early twenties who was divorced.  When people asked her what happened to her marriage, she usually told them that her husband had a porn addiction.  The truth was that her husband was into gay porn.  Their marriage didn't even last a year.  Looking back, she thought her first clue would have been on her wedding night when he suggested that they check out a nearby outlet mall instead of hitting the sheets.

Stories like these make me all the more grateful in the choice I made to come out.  A gay man simply should not marry a woman.  Period.  It only ends badly!  And though this may seem obvious, church leaders are constantly counseling gay men to just get married, promising that those feelings will go away.  Brian's bishop told him that.  Mine did too.  My bishop even went so far as to tell me just to "pretend" to be straight in order to continue in the Church, stay enrolled at the University, and to not upset my family.  Luckily, I have a fairly supportive family, and enough sense to know that I can't live my life on a pretense.

So BYU, I have left you, but it's so you don't contaminate ME!