Oral History Program Carlin Jensen Interviewed by Lorrie Rands August 13 & September 7, 2021 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Carlin Jensen Interviewed by Lorrie Rands August 13 & September 7, 2021 Copyright © 2023 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description Queering the Archives oral history project is a series of oral histories from the LGBTQ+ communities of Weber, Davis and Morgan Counties of Northern Utah. Each interview is a life interview, documenting the interviewee’s unique experiences growing up queer. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Jensen, Carlin, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 13 August & 7 September 2021, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Carlin Jensen which began on August 13, 2021 and was finished on September 7, 2021 over Zoom with Lorrie Rands. Carlin talks about growing up in Colorado, coming to understand her sexuality, and dealing with the deaths of family members at an early age. She shares what brought her to Utah and finding love and acceptance. Also present on Zoom is Michael Thompson. LR: Today is August 13, 2021, and we are in a Zoom call with Carlin Jensen doing a life oral history interview to capture LGBTQ+ stories in our community. Michael Thompson is on the call with us. That being said, thank you, Carlin, for your willingness. Jumping right in, my first question—so that moving throughout the interview, we get everything right—how do you identify relating to your gender and sexual orientation? CJ: So I identify as she/her, and my sexual orientation is lesbian. LR: All right. When and where were you born? CJ: I was born on December 5, 1987 in Fort Collins, Colorado. LR: Did you grow up in Fort Collins? CJ: I did. LR: Growing up in Fort Collins, what was your family dynamic? CJ: I'll give you the progression of my family dynamics. I was born into an older family. So my brothers were almost 16, 15 3/4 and 17 when I was born. My mom was 40 and my dad was 44, so everybody always jokes, ‘accident oops baby’. I came later in life for my parents, and I wasn't planned. In the household, I lived with my brothers for maybe two or three years, and then my younger brother D moved out and went to college. My eldest brother, A, he was born mentally handicapped. When he was born he had the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. I don't want to say this, but he had mental disabilities, and then he also had a seizure disorder. 1 He didn't move out until after D left for college, then he moved out on his own, got his own job. My parents were very adamant about him being independent, so he did that. I just lived with my mom and dad until I was 17. When I was 12 years old, my mom was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease. She had Lou Gehrig's disease for about four years, and when I was almost 17, she passed away. Then it was just me and Dad. LR: All this time, you lived in Fort Collins? CJ: Yes. LR: Going back to when you were younger, it sounds like you were an only child. CJ: Pretty much. LR: What was that like for you as you're navigating your life, and then moving into elementary school? Some of your favorite memories? CJ: There's a lot of good memories. I was really lucky. Like you said, I was an only child, pretty much, so I kind of got the tail end of my parents. Money was never an issue; we would travel in the summer. We had some family that lived in Indiana, family in Pennsylvania, some family in Georgia, and in the summer, we would travel and go visit our family on the East Coast. Those are some of my favorite memories, spending time with our extended family. My mom's sister and her brother-in-law lived in Tennessee. He was a park ranger, so he worked in the Smoky Mountain National Park. We spent a ton of time just traveling out there. More on the home front, when I was born, my mom quit her job to stay at home and take care of me. She was a secretary and she could type over 100 words per minute on a typewriter, the clickity-clickity-click, not the electric kind, but the one you have to adjust it yourself. She was amazing. I would be at home with her during the day, and she needed things to do, not that taking care of me wasn't at the forefront. She also wanted to help my dad out. My dad was a teacher, so she 2 wanted to help Dad out with earning money, so she took typing jobs on the side. She worked with lawyers and graduate students, typing up their dissertations and things like that. Some of my favorite memories, when I was small enough before I started school, I could lay under her desk and just listen to her type away on her typewriter during the day. I can still smell the ink and hear the typewriter and just feel what the carpet feels like. When I think of my childhood, that's what I think of spending those days sitting under the desk, listening to my mom type things out. LR: That's a great memory. CJ: Yeah, it's a really good one. LR: Awesome. So your dad, you said he was a teacher. What did he teach? CJ: He taught everything, he was a junior high teacher. He taught seventh, eighth and ninth graders. He taught Math, English, Geography, Current Events, and PE. He was a coach for a while too, so he coached basketball, football, and track. LR: I'm not familiar with Fort Collins at all, but where did you go to elementary school? CJ: I went to elementary school in a small town just to the east. It's called Timnath in Colorado. When you get more on the eastern side, outside the front range, it's very farm-oriented. It's like you're in Kansas. There's a lot of small towns just dotted around. We lived right on the eastern edge of Fort Collins, right on the outside of the city limits, and so that school was closest for me. LR: What are some of your memories of elementary school, of just growing friendships, that sort of thing? CJ: I made some pretty good friends. I remember I had a neighbor girl who was a year older than me, and she was my best friend until she moved. We went to school together. She came with me on my first day of kindergarten to hang out and be there for me. Then I met a bunch of other kids in my neighborhood, at least six or seven kids in my neighborhood that went to my same elementary school. We all 3 lived pretty close together, so we got to know each other. I made some friends that I had through high school and even beginning into college until our lives just changed, which is fine. I was really able to make some lasting friends. I was shy, but for the most part, and I'm still similar today, I enjoy people. I was friendly and I would want to talk and get to know some of these kids. With adults, I was a little bit hesitant, but not too bad, because I was around adults my whole life growing up. My parents, all of their friends had kids the same age as my brothers, so I was just around adults all my life. LR: As you're going through elementary school, did you ever feel like you didn't quite fit in, or as you look at it, would you just say it was just normal for you? CJ: I did feel like I was a little bit different, and a lot of that came from just me being an only child. It's still something that I have to work through now, but understanding the dynamics of a relationship with another person who's your age, and trying to understand how friendship works and how relationships work and how fights work, that was a little bit weird for me. At the same time, I wasn't interested in the same things that my friends who were girls were interested in. I didn't really care what clothes I wore. I had a bowl cut, because when I went back to school, my mom went back to work, so she had to make it easy for my dad to get me ready in the morning. I had friends when I was in high school, they'd come to me like, “You know what? When I met you when we were little, I didn't know if you were a boy or a girl.” I'm like, "That's a fair statement." I just felt like there was something that I was missing when it came to girls my age. I didn't understand, I didn't want to be girly. I didn't want to be chased by the boys. I was the one chasing the boys, I just didn't understand that dynamic. “What's so great about boys?” It's probably not that odd for that age when you're five, but I just had more interest in getting to know girls who were my age than I was getting to know boys my age. 4 LR: OK, is there any memory that stands out during elementary, that just, top of your head, it's the first thing you think of? We'll move on to junior high if you can't. CJ: There's a lot and when it comes in relation to like me thinking about things that happened in elementary school, that prompted me to think, like, “Oh, I'm definitely not straight.” Is that your question? LR: It wasn't. But if you’re happy to, please share that. CJ: You got it. So I played soccer when I was little. We had a little girls’ soccer team through elementary school. I played every year until it got time for competitive soccer. I remember this one time—I'm going to sound like a creepy little kid—but you know there's those two-sided jerseys. When you show up, it's either red or white. We showed up to our game and we had the wrong jersey on, so everybody had to turn theirs around. Since we're all girls and my dad was the coach, we had this big blanket and we put it over the girls as they would change. I was intrigued to see what the girls looked like. I was like, “Oh, do you look like me? Do we look the same?” It sounds a little bit creepy, but I was interested in learning about them and their bodies and how we're the same and how we're different. As I'm getting older, it kind of hits me like that was like my first little glimpse of like, “I'm a little bit different than other girls my age.” LR: How old were you at the time? CJ: I want to say like seven or eight. LR: You're in that stage where you're still trying to understand, because what I've learned is it's not until seven that we really start to understand who we are. It's almost like you're just trying to figure it all out and find the language to describe yourself, if you will. I'm projecting, sorry. Moving forward, let's jump into junior high. Where did you go to junior high? CJ: I went to junior high at Lesher Middle School in Fort Collins. 5 LR: I'm trying to think of time. So you were born in 1987, so that would have been... MT: Early 2000s. LR: It just hit me. You were in Fort Collins, but if you're not comfortable talking about this, please don't. I remember my older brother lived in that area of Colorado, and it made me think about what happened in 1999, Columbine. How did that affect you and the way school was looked at, moving forward after that? CJ: That's a good question. From a school perspective, it didn't change a whole lot for me. I don't remember things really taking a big change, but personally, after all those shootings, it's something that you think about a lot. To be honest, I was a little bit obsessed about it because it was a big deal. I saved all the newspapers from the actual event and I would read through them. It's not like I saved them and put them away, it's like I saved them and I would read through and revisit them. When they had that issue that went over all the high schoolers that were killed, I went through and I read every single story about the students that were killed. Columbine has actually been something that I've followed my whole life. It's not on this bookshelf, but I have a book on Columbine. I've listened to TED Talks. I don't know Dylan Klebold, but his mom did a TED Talk on what it's like to have a son who was a mass murderer. Impeccable. It's kind of funny that you bring that up. It impacted me, just from the standpoint where I wasn’t scared to be in school, but whenever we had those drills, I just thought that there was going to be a guy that walked through the door with a gun. I thought anytime there's people doing groundwork outside, and if I didn't hear a mower or a trimmer and then I saw someone walk by, I was like, “Oh, my gosh, they're going to come shoot us.” It didn't really affect my school life if we're just looking at classroom time and the way that school felt. Emotionally, it had this effect on me where I was a little bit obsessed with it. I've always been the type. I'm not as 6 eloquent when I speak as I am when I write, so my preferred method of communication is writing, and it has been since I was young. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I didn't have people around to talk to. I just had books and I could write stuff. My preferred method is to write, and so I started writing stories about school shootings. LR: I just realized you were 12 when that happened, so did you have conversations with your parents or your teacher? How were they helping you, as a 12-year-old, cope with this? CJ: It happened in the spring of ‘99, correct? LR: We'll defer to Michael. MT: April 20, 1999. CJ: That's right. It was April of 1999. We didn't talk about it, to be honest, but to give you a little bit of context, that was a busy year for our family. My brother, A, competed in the Special Olympics because he was handicapped. He qualified to go to the Special Olympics World Games, which was that summer in Raleigh, North Carolina. Columbine happened while he was qualifying. Then, in the middle of the summer, he flew to Raleigh and me and my parents drove. While we were on the road, D. had his first son. His name is J, and he was born while we were gone. We got back at the end of July. August 6, A. had a grand mal seizure and passed away. A week later, I started school, so it was crazy from when Columbine happened to when I started sixth grade. It was a mess. I also went to a new elementary school, so there was just a lot going on. I think that yes, I did have a lot of focus on Columbine when it happened, but I think it was also my way of dealing with everything that went on in my life at that time. LR: How was being able to go and see your brother compete in the Special Olympics? What was that like for you personally, to see your older brother just excel? 7 CJ: It was amazing. I don't know if you know about this, but Arnold Schwarzenegger is actually very involved in the Special Olympics. He's not a board member, but he's on the board of Special Olympics nationally. He was in Raleigh, and he went to the weightlifting portion because he's Arnold Schwarzenegger. My brother got to lift right in front of him. Arnold Schwarzenegger was standing right there while he bench-pressed and deadlifted, and every time he finished the lift, Arnold Schwarzenegger shook his hand. Arnold was the one that put the medals around his neck. It was just amazing to see. It was impressive, not only him excelling there, but also seeing that people who ‘don't fit into this world’ still are able to do so many amazing things. I've been around some of his fellow competitors since I was little. I've been going to Special Olympics events since before I can remember. I learned to ski because he was doing downhill skiing and so it was impressive. It's something that I continue to think about because in his mind, he was just, “It's just heavy things. I just pick them up or I push them or I squat ‘em. Why not do it? Who tells me that I can’t do it?” That was just impressive, the way that he approached things. Even when he failed, he was just like, “Whatever, I'll just do better next time, it's fine.” LR: That's really cool. How did the loss affect your family? It’s not a fair question, and I understand that. CJ: I think we learn to make comments about how it's not a big hole in our life. A had a seizure disorder. It's hard on your heart every time you have a seizure, and so they didn't think he would live past 23 or 24. The fact that he lived to be 29 was an immense blessing in and of itself. That's how I learned how to respond, is to just fill it with that. It's not a bad response, but it negated that hole that he left in our family. My parents were more old-school, they got married in 1968. Both of my parents were born in the 1940s. My mom didn't want to talk about it because she didn't want 8 me to see my parents sad, because I was in a part of my life where I was growing and understanding. I couldn't imagine having that strength. Now as I'm older, I'm learning about how big of a hole my older brother truly left in my parents. I have some friends that live down in Saratoga Springs who lost their daughter, who was four. They're really close friends of mine, and they met my dad at my wedding. Listening to both dads talk about losing a child, it was incredibly emotional. It was things that I had never heard my dad say because they didn't want to affect me, they didn't want to show me sadness. At the same time, my wedding was a bit of a realization moment for me. I had been dealing with the loss of A. and my mom by myself; I had to work through all of that within myself. At my wedding, I played some voice clips from Mom and from my older brother, and seeing the effect that it had on my dad and my brother was massive. It was huge because we didn't talk about it, but you can see that it affected all of us. I know how a lot of people say, “When you lose a family member, it brings people closer together,” and it's not that it didn't bring us closer together, but it kind of created these holes. You're missing things. There's something that isn't talked about and isn't resolved, so you just have this space where you don't know what to put. You don't know where things go. LR: Well, thank you. Michael, do you have any questions? MT: Not right now. I've got a few, but they would fit in further on in the interview. LR: That makes sense. Let's go ahead and move on to junior high, just like with elementary—some of your favorite memories. Also, how do you feel like you fit in, how were you trying to find your own space? CJ: When I was in junior high, some of my favorite memories, I played in band. I played the clarinet, and then as I got older, I started learning how to play the saxophone. I just loved that. I enjoyed playing music and just being part of that group. I also 9 played sports. I played softball, basketball, and I learned how to throw the discus, which is great. That was really fun. I also played competitive soccer, so we would travel between Fort Collins and Colorado Springs and play games. Being able to travel and hang out with those girls was a lot of fun. It was a good time. In the sense of trying to fit in, I never really felt like I did, and that's just because it wasn't until I got older that I learned how to actually open up to people. Because I was an only child, I didn't really need to open up. I didn't need to talk about stuff. So I just didn't. I just sat quiet in the back and talked. That doesn't mean that I wasn't friendly or good with my friends, I didn't feel the need to open my mouth unless I needed to. Because I was so quiet, when people would ask me questions, it would be very short, small answers and things like that. I tried to fit in because—this was always the stereotype when I was growing up. The soccer girls were always the popular ones, especially in junior high. It was like if you played soccer, if you played basketball and you were good at either of those, you were popular, hands-down. I wasn't very athletically coordinated when I was younger, and so I wanted to be cool. I wanted to try to fit in and I wanted these popular girls to be my friends, but I was too weird for them. I was that weird band kid who was quiet and odd, so I was trying to be friends with them, but it didn't really happen. I kept trying to be like, “Oh, my gosh, no, this guy is really cute. No, this guy is really cute,” when I didn't find any of them cute. I was more interested in being really good friends with these girls. That was my focus. LR: A little bit of context for you. This is only my second interview within the LGBTQ+ community, and I've never even had these conversations with my oldest, not really. I feel like I'm literally starting from scratch, that I'm learning how to do this all over again. It's not a very fun feeling when you've done a lot of oral history interviews. I'm finding myself struggling with how to ask the right question, and maybe this is 10 something that you might be able to help me with the project, how to relate and how to ask the right questions. I'm trying to form a question in my head and not make it sound offensive, I think I'm overthinking. CJ: I think you are. LR: My question is, it sounds as though, as you're relating to your peers in junior high, you don't quite fit in. You're trying to, but you're already noticing you're just not quite like the other girls. How did you come to understand, or even just figure out how to do day-to-day life? CJ: That's a good question. I think it was something I'd had within me for a long time, and for me, it wasn't something new when I got to junior high. When preparing for today, I spent some time thinking back on times when I can remember feeling differently than other people or feeling differently than other girls that I knew. When I said earlier that I wasn't really looking when I was in elementary school, I wasn't really looking to pursue boys. I still was friends with them because I feel like we related a little bit more, like I understood them more than I did girls. I was more interested in being friends with the girls because I wanted to be around them. Thinking back when I was younger, I used to watch the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers like, heck yeah, 90’s kid all the way. The Pink Ranger was my favorite character because I had a crush on her, but I didn't realize that until I was older. I don't know how much you know about the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, but there was another Power Ranger, he was the White Ranger. The Pink and the White ranger were dating. When I was growing up, the Pink Ranger was my favorite. I didn't want to tell anybody that because if you were a girl, you had to have a crush on the guy Rangers. So I told everybody that I liked the White Ranger. The reason why I liked the white Ranger was because I wanted to be him. Not in a 11 sense I wanted to be a man, but I wanted to be the one that saved the Pink Ranger, that won all of her affection, that got to interact with her. As I got older, I didn't really understand, I didn't get it. I just knew that's how I felt. Up until about when I hit puberty, when I made friends—like my friends from elementary school, all of those girls or boys—I never had any crush feelings for them. I didn't have any of those feelings for my friends there. But after sixth grade, when I got into junior high, any of the girls that I met that I wanted desperately to be friends with were girls that I had crushes on, even though I didn't recognize it. The most popular girl in school and I shared a locker when I was in seventh grade, and so I would do all these little things. I’d write notes or make little trinkets to give to her, because I'm like, “I just want to be your friend.” But it was more than that. In retrospect, I didn't understand because I just thought this is what friends did, but it was more about the emotion behind it than it was my action. LR: Thank you for that. Was there anyone around you that you felt like you could actually have these conversations with, who could help figure out yourself? Or were you just kind of stuck trying to figure this out all by yourself? CJ: I was kind of stuck trying to figure it out by myself at the time. Here’s more of a timeline. The winter of 1999, December, January, that's when my mom was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease. At this time, when I was in seventh grade, she was still able to walk. She could still do most things by herself. She was still driving me around by herself, me and her. When I was in eighth grade, right when school started, she was walking down the hall, tripped on a rug, fell weird, and broke her leg. After that, she wasn't able to walk again. So during this time, junior high, my life really switched. We went from like a family who was really active—my mom played soccer with my dad. She was very active. She would go out and play 12 soccer with me pretty frequently, or basketball, or we'd go and do stuff together—to being very dependent on my dad and I. That was a big flip. While this was going on, I didn't have the time or the mental capacity to really deal with it. I was 11 when my brother passed away, and I was 12 by the time my mom was diagnosed. I didn't fully understand that Mom wouldn't survive it until I was probably 13 or 14. It was this really weird time, where I'm trying to understand what life looks like moving forward, and what my world is going to be like eventually. I went to therapy, but I just didn't really talk to her. I still struggle with that now, being really open about my feelings and what goes on in my head. At that time, I was at a point where I couldn't really share what was happening in my mind with my parents. I didn't want them to feel worse because it was something that couldn't be helped. I didn't want to be like, “This really sucks, this is terrible. This is awful. I hate this.” Some of my parents' friends, who were neighborhood friends, put in the school newsletter that my mom was dying and that we needed money donations. In my mind when I'm a teenager, that was embarrassing for me. I didn't want people to know what was going on. So I just turned into Fort Knox. LR: Which makes sense. This is something that I noticed with my own children. When I had my stroke, they were younger. My youngest was your age when your mom was diagnosed, when I had my stroke, so I noticed how their life changed dramatically when they had to start being more adult-ish, if you will. As you look back at that time, how do you think that affected or helped you? There has to be a positive in it, right? How did that help you become the adult you are today? How did that impact your growing up, if you will? CJ: For me, it really helped me to learn how to put aside my feelings to help other people. At the end of the day, whether it was junior high or high school, I would come home from school, no matter what my day was like, no matter what softball 13 practice or basketball practice was like. Walk in the door, sit down next to my mom, and talk to her about my day. I would always try to just show the positive sides, because the last thing I wanted her to have to deal with is drama from her teenage daughter. I learned how to compartmentalize my emotions. Don't get me wrong, I've had my breakdowns, because after doing that from such a young age, it's not always good. Hiding those emotions and just tamping them down, it's not always a good thing. I had to learn how to manage them better, but that perspective is being able to serve others, no matter how your day is going. As my mom’s disease progressed, my dad had a really hard time because he was the one picking her up, putting her into bed, carrying her around when she had to go to the bathroom, and all this stuff. During the summers, I helped out as a caregiver. I would stay home during the day with Mom while Dad went out and did stuff, while he went and worked in the garden, or he went fishing for the day. He would leave for a weekend so that he could get a break from having to be that servant. I say servant, I don't mean it as bad as it sounds. LR: I understand what you're saying. CJ: Serving to help. I look back on that time and yes, I sometimes get frustrated because I had to grow up a lot sooner than I should have. But in the same sense, it's made me who I am. I care a lot about people, I care a lot about serving them. I care a lot about being kind, no matter what my day has been like. That is thanks to the lessons I learned with my mom's illness. LR: I appreciate your being so open and candid about it. I'm literally progressing chronologically. So you're 13 going on 14, and that's about when 9/11 happened. Did that have an impact on your life, or was it just something that happened? CJ: I remember how I felt when it happened because I was in school. I didn't find out about it until third period. My first class was Spanish, so we didn't talk about it then. 14 Then I had band, and our band teacher didn't have a TV close, so regardless, he wasn't turning on the news. In third period, that's when our teacher had the news on so that we could see what was happening. It was scary because I had never seen anything like that before. I don't know if when there's something big and bad that happens in your life, you get this, but for me, at least, I get this feeling. When I found out that A died, I got this feeling in my stomach. It's hard to describe, but it's just this emptiness and this clench where you feel like you're never going to be able to eat again. I got that same feeling that day. Later that day, I went to soccer practice, and one of the girls that was there was waiting to hear back about her cousin who worked at the World Trade Center, but was a cousin that they didn't know very well. So for me and my immediate world, it didn't affect anything because we didn't know people that lived in New York. It happened, we talked about it a lot, and that was really about it. LR: Do you have any questions yet, Michael? MT: Yes. I don't know if I'm jumping the gun, but at what point did you realize your sexual orientation? Was that in junior high, or was it later? CJ: It was like later on in high school and college. LR: Well, that leads us right into high school. So where did you go to high school? CJ: This is going to sound crazy. My high school is Poudre High School. I can give you the reason why it's called that. Poudre is the French word for powder. We have a river in Fort Collins, it's called the Cache la Poudre River. It means ‘stash of powder.’ We had a lot of French trappers who came in and trapped beaver and whatnot on the rivers, and so they named it. It's French. Everybody gives me so much crap about it. I always have to explain it. 15 LR: Actually, that’s a really fascinating explanation of where the name comes from, so I'm glad that you did. When you were in high school, were you noticing the same social dynamics that you had in junior high, or did they change a little bit? CJ: The beginning part of high school was similar. I was just quiet, I didn't really open up much, and I think a lot of it had to do with my mom. I didn't want to get too deep in conversation with anybody because I didn't want to have to explain anything or talk about it. I was still friends with some girls I knew from elementary school. We would hang out frequently, but we never really talked deeply. I was still quiet, pretty reserved, just kind of there, like an observer type. That's kind of who I am. When I show up somewhere, unless I know people and I know them pretty well, I'm an observer. I sit back and watch and learn. If I know you well, I'm going to walk up and we're just going to have a great conversation and talk and I'm going to be goofy and crazy. It's a bit of a dynamic, but that didn't really start to happen until the end of senior year. I didn't really start becoming that person until I was a senior. LR: Did that coincide with your mother's death, that you felt like you could have more fun? CJ: I think it was a new sense of freedom. Does that make sense? LR: It does. CJ: Not necessarily have more fun. Things were still heavy, life was still heavy, but it was a little bit of liberation, and I don't mean that to sound bad. But having her finally not be in pain and not be sick anymore and not need help for everything was a very freeing thing. I had some friends who had lost parents, too, so I was finally able to talk to them and be like, “Oh, you did?” When I opened up about the fact that my mom died, I had friends that were like, “Oh, yeah, my mom did, too.” I'm like, “What?” Then my other friend was like, “Oh yeah, my dad has terminal cancer.” 16 I'm like, “Whoa, wait.” Finally, I was able to kind of open myself up and have these conversations and understand that there's other people out there that either had or are having similar experiences to what I had. I think a lot of that came after Mom died. At the same time, my relationship with my dad wasn't great, just in the sense that we didn't really talk about stuff, and when we did talk, we usually fought. It was just hard for both of us at the time. LR: It sounds like it. So I started thinking about high school. A lot of people start dating. What was dating like for you? CJ: So it was kind of the same thing, rolled forward from junior high. You have your locker and you have like all of the shirtless dudes in your locker and you're like, “Oh, my gosh, they're so cute.” Open your locker to show your friend. That was the dynamic. That's what my friends did, and so I played along, but that feeling wasn't there. I had a boyfriend right before my mom passed away. He actually broke up with me the week before Mom died. Poor dude, he felt so bad, but he didn't know because I didn't talk about it. I had that boyfriend at the end of my junior year, so right after Mom died and then senior year, I didn't date anybody. I was more excited about the fact that I could say, “Oh, I have a boyfriend,” than I was actually about the guy. I was more excited to be like, “Yeah, look at me. I have a boyfriend. Look at me. Oh, my gosh. I fit in. I'm cool.” I wanted the attention from some of these guys in school. I thought it was an attraction, but it was an attraction to popularity and fitting in. I remember after I graduated from high school, there was this boy. One of my friends was very popular, and she had a crush on this boy, and he asked me out. I was like, “Oh, my gosh, yes.” I was excited about that. Then he kissed me. We made out a few times, and I just remember I called my friend. I actually still talk to her now. I played softball with her and I was like, “Cat, I don't understand. Does it 17 take time to feel something when you kiss a boy? Because he's really cute and I like him a lot, but I don't feel anything when we kiss.” She's like, “Yeah, sometimes it takes time.” When we would get close enough, right to where we would kiss or hug or whatever, and it was just me and this boy, I never really felt anything. There were no feelings, there were no sparks. I was like, “I don't want to do this. Why am I doing this? It doesn't feel good. No, I don't want to.” LR: You said this was towards the end of high school that this was happening? CJ: When I asked someone about it, it was after I graduated. But I felt that way with these other boys that I dated or went to homecoming with or whatever. LR: As you were in high school, did it ever occur to you that perhaps you were attracted to women? Was that thought ever in your mind? CJ: It was. But I was terrified, because I grew up Catholic, so you're taught that being gay is wrong. When you think of Colorado, it's a little bit more liberal, which is great, but my parents were conservative, my friends were conservative, and it wasn't something that I had seen in a positive way. There was a gay club in Fort Collins, and I remember learning about it. I can't remember how I ended up meeting someone or whatever, but I met some of the lesbians that went to the club and they were not nice. In my teenage judgment, they were gross, like, “I don't want to be associated with that kind of person,” like butch lesbians. I don't mean that in a derogatory way. When I was a teenager, my lack of understanding and my lack of seeing women who looked like me who were gay, that was not even in the question. We had a couple of lesbians in my high school, but they were girls I couldn't relate to. They were like the goth girls—black makeup, pants with chains, the big old chunky shoes. So I'm like, “That's what a lesbian is? I'm not that.” 18 I'm sure there were other gay people at school, but nobody really talked about it. We had one kid, his name was DW. I'm never going to forget him. He had a messenger bag for his backpack, and he had a pink boa as his little messenger bag strap. He was very flamboyant, very in-your-face, very loud. I just never really saw it and wasn’t able to relate to gay culture when I was that young. Looking back on it, I had crushes on girls. I played basketball, I liked girls I was in class with, and some of my female teachers. I didn't have language or trust in myself to be able to admit that. I just kept labeling it as, “I just really want to be your friend, and I want to be really close friends with you.” LR: After you graduated from high school, were you set to go to college? Where did you go to college? CJ: I went to the University of Northern Colorado for three years. LR: Did you know what you wanted to do? CJ: I started out as a pre-physical therapy major, but it didn't work out. When I started my senior year, I had a really good friend of mine. She played rugby for the high school, and I really wanted to play because it sounded cool and fun. I wanted to play, but I couldn't because rugby season was during my track season, and I was set to go to state for track, so I was focusing on that instead. When I got to college, I was walking around campus and found the women's team for UNC. I joined the women's team and I started playing rugby and I loved it. It kind of went from focusing on becoming a physical therapist and playing rugby as something fun to do to keep me entertained, to playing rugby. I got an invitation to try for the national team, and school was down here, so it switched. I liked school and I wanted to be a physical therapist, until it got to be too much and I wanted to focus more on rugby than school. LR: Fair enough. With your rugby, did you end up trying out for the national team? 19 CJ: I did. Didn't make it. LR: Did you want to go back and do more schooling or find a new path? CJ: I went to UNC for three years, and at the end of my junior year they told me that if I came back to school, I would probably be kicked out because my grades were so bad after I finished my junior year. That summer is when I tried out for the national team and didn't make it and I had enrolled to get my associate's degree at a community college. We're getting into a lot of craziness right here, so just throwing that out there. When I went back to school, I was starting to get involved in the LDS church. At the time, I stepped away from rugby because rugby was a lot of drinking, a lot of lesbians, and a lot of just not great environment for someone who's trying to become more religious. So I'd stepped away from playing rugby at that point. After I didn't make the USA team that fall, I played for a professional women's league out of Denver for four months. I quit the team because it just wasn't a good environment for me. So I played for those four months, I quit the team, and then in January, I moved to Utah. LR: Did your interest in the LDS church happen because you moved to Utah, or was it before you moved? CJ: It was before I moved. LR: What prompted that? CJ: Like I said, this is going to be a mess. I met a girl on a dating site, and she was interested in me and I was interested in her, outside of friendship. She was a member of the LDS Church. I was like, “OK, cool. Maybe I'll be Mormon too. If it gets me to be with this girl, then great.” But if you're ignorant to Mormon culture, you don't really know how big of a deal that is. I started taking the missionary discussions and learning more about the church. Then I moved out here and I got baptized and I lived with her for seven years. 20 LR: Let's go back a little bit. I think I've let us get ahead of ourselves. During this time that you're in college, were you able to finally come to terms with your sexuality? It kind of sounds like you did, but I'm curious to hear that story. CJ: When I graduated high school, I'd kind of been toying with this idea that I was maybe a lesbian because I just didn't connect the way that my friends did with boys, in a romantic way or otherwise. Because it was so taboo with my family and with some of my friends, I was like, "No, I'm not." You know how teenagers are, they're going to give you a lot of crap for whatever, they'd give me a hard time. I had a crush on my best friend at the time, so if she called me, I would drop whatever I was doing and go. Whatever she needed, I was there. I ran half a mile to go help her when she got in a car wreck, things like that. My friends would give me a hard time and I'd be like, "No, no, no. Screw you. That’s not me," and similar things. I never really met gay people who were like me. I knew about gay people. I worked with a girl who was a lesbian during my summer job, and she scared the crap out of me because she was just way too over the top. She'd hit on me way too much and made me very uncomfortable. I had these constructs around gay people that I didn’t understand. When I started playing rugby, there's a lot of lesbians that play rugby, and so in my freshman year, I started seeing some of these girls that I could relate to. They weren't butch, they didn't look like men, they weren't creepy, they didn't hit on me all the time. They were just girls like me, but who happened to like women and who wanted to be with women. My freshman year, I still had a boyfriend for a minute, but same thing. I just didn't feel it. I just wasn't excited. I think the telling moment was when I was over at his house at night, we were watching a show or whatever. One of my friends, this girl that I had a crush on that I was talking to—she was gay, so it was an interesting 21 relationship that we started. At that time, she called me and she was like, "Hey, do you want to come over and have a sleepover?" I'm like, "Yeah, sure." I just ditched my boyfriend at the time, and I was like, “Yeah, let's go hang out." At that moment I was like, “I don't think I'm straight. I just can't relate.” I would rather go hang out with her and spend time with her than I would with him. I'm like, “Okay, there's a thing there.” From that point, I started to understand. I started to be like, “These feelings that I'm having where I'm like, ‘No, I just really want to be your friend.’ That's attraction.” I started seeing some of these girls playing rugby who weren't super feminine, but they had long hair, they cared about how they looked. They dressed really cute. I started to be like, “Oh, no, no, no, I am gay. I'm a lesbian and I like you.” I got to that point. Halfway through my sophomore year, I started dating girls. I had a lot of friends. All of us rugby players, regardless of what school we played for, we're pretty tight knit, you know everyone. I'd go down to Denver and party with them, and they were mostly lesbians, so they hung out with other lesbians. I got to be around that. It was eye-opening and empowering for me, because then I'm just like, “No, this is where I'm meant to be. This is where I need to be to grow.” So I started dating women. For our era, you start getting on dating websites to meet other women. I'm sorry, I feel like I might have gone a little bit off. LR: No, that was great. Let me ask you this. Did you feel the need to come out, and if you did, how was that experience for you? CJ: I didn't, because at the time, I knew I wasn't going to tell my dad. Like I said, our relationship wasn't great. We're just very similar, my dad and I. When I was a teenager living at home, we butted heads constantly. He was very invasive in the fact where he’s like, "Hey, Carlin, why aren't you up yet? It's 9 AM on a Saturday.” 22 I'm like, "Dad. I am 16 years old. Leave me alone. Let me sleep until 2 PM or whatever, right?" He had a lack of boundaries, and he'd just push my buttons. “Hey, what are you doing?” “I'm going to go hang out.” “What does that mean? What do you mean you're going to hang out?” “I don't know, Dad. I'm going to go hang out with my friends.” “What does that mean?” “I don't know, Dad!” There’s this back and forth where there's such an age gap between us. When I was 16, he was–what, 60? We just lost a lot in that gap, and it was really frustrating for me, because I'm like, “What have I ever done? I don't sneak out. I don't drink. I don't do anything. Why do you have to know everything?” It just really eroded our relationship. I didn't really feel the need to come out to him. His little sister, my aunt, she's very open. We had conversations, and she was like, "Oh yeah, my daughter M, she experimented with women for a few years in college. She’s bisexual." I'm like, "Oh, cool, okay." Then I was like, "Oh, well, I'm dating women." If there was anybody that I told, coming out, it was her, because she had kind of opened the door to make it okay. LR: Makes sense. So let's go back a little bit to after rugby. You get your associate's degree. When in that time did you meet this woman that you then decided to change religions for and move to Utah? CJ: I was still playing rugby. I met her in the fall of my junior year. I met her online, and we started talking and she explained Mormonism to me. I met her before I turned 21, because I remember she didn't want to talk to me on my twenty-first birthday because she knew I was going to be drinking. I was still living my life the way that I 23 had been, playing rugby and partying with my friends. I was still kind of dating other girls because she was in Utah, and I'm like, "You're far away. Why would I?" We talked for a while and she would tell me a little bit about her religion, what she believed. There are parts of it that made sense to me. I kind of gave up on religion after my mom died and then I needed something to blame. I read The DaVinci Code and it talks about the Council of Nicaea and how they changed a bunch of the stuff about religion. Jesus was born in the summer, but they put it on the winter solstice because it made sense for Pagans. I was just like, “No. Bye.” She started explaining stuff about Mormonism and it resonated with me, so I started investigating the church. We were still talking in a relationship fashion. We would flirt with each other. We would talk about what would happen if we met up. We planned to meet once and it fell through, she just kind of canceled it. We were kind of in a long-distance relationship, but I was still investigating the church. I was learning about Mormonism, wanting to become a Mormon, and taking the missionary discussions while still talking and having this ‘long distance relationship’ with a woman in Utah. It was very interesting. LR: I'll bet. I'm trying to understand what prompted you to join the LDS, to be baptized, knowing that you're gay. How did you reconcile that? CJ: I kind of didn't. On the outside, I was interested in the church and started going to church in Colorado. I met a boy and we dated for a little bit. Outside of that, I still talked with this girl. We still had this relationship-style conversation, and she would be so mad at me when I would go on a date with this boy or when I would go on a date with any boy. She was super jealous when I told her, “Me and the guys just went to go play basketball.” I would be the same way with her, you know. She'd tell me, like, “Oh yeah, I have a boyfriend now.” 24 I'd be like, “What the heck is going on, you know?” It was a very dichotomous time in my life because I was trying to be Mormon, but at the same time, I knew I was gay. I had feelings for this girl, and we had a relationship, kind of, and we called it a friendship, but it was more than that. We were both dating guys, but we both called and flirted with each other all the time. I put myself back in the closet to everybody else, but at the same time, nobody knew that I was gay except for the girls that I dated, my friends on the rugby team, and my aunt. Nobody else knew. LR: When you decided to move to Utah, was it just for this girl that you met, or did you have a job opportunity or school? What led you to Utah? CJ: She actually got me a job and she had an apartment that we can live in, so it was a good opportunity. At the time, I didn't make the USA team and I was just really in this rut where my friends weren't treating me great, at least I didn't feel like they were. You know how we kind of manifest things where it's like, “Okay, I need to change, my friends are not being great, and so on.” Whereas, I wanted to move because I wanted to do something new. She had a job, and she had a place for me to live and I was like, “All right, let's do it.” So I moved. LR: Where in Utah did you move to? CJ: The first place we lived was in Herriman. LR: Okay. That's down in Utah County? MT: Salt Lake County. LR: You said that you were in that relationship for seven years, or lived with her for seven years. CJ: Yes. LR: I'm really starting to struggle. We can do one of two things. I can have Michael step in and finish the interview, or we can set up another time and finish. I'm going to leave it up to you. 25 CJ: Why don't we set up another time? That way, we can all interact. LR: Okay. Part 2– September 7, 2021 LR: Today is September 7, and we are meeting again with Carlin Jensen over Zoom. Michael Thompson is here as well. We left off at the point where you were living in Utah. I don't think you'd broken up with the woman you were dating. You talked a little bit about how you met your wife. Even if we're backtracking a little bit, let's just start with you moving to Ogden and kind of just go from there. CJ: The reason that I moved to Ogden was because I met M, who's my wife. We met on a dating app and at the time I was living with my ex. We owned a condo together, so it wasn't necessarily the best living situation. I was just starting to get really tired of the back-and-forth and the jealousy and all of that stuff. So at the time, M and I had talked and she was just like, "I'm kind of tired of this, too. Why don't you just move in with me?" I was like, "Okay." I was up in Ogden every other weekend anyway, so it was a pretty easy shift into that move. LR: So you weren't really dating M at the time you decided to move in? CJ: No, I was. We'd been dating for three or four months. LR: So you had finally broken up with the woman that you had been dating and living with? CJ: I have to make this distinction. It wasn't me. We had been kind of on-and-off-andon-and-off-and-on-and-off. She had introduced me to the LDS church. I had gotten baptized and I was a member for about five years. Then I had an experience that I was not happy with and decided that I was done, and so I left the church. [To Lorrie] Her name is S. She was still, quote-unquote, ‘LDS’, just because her family is very active and so she kept up that front. Later that year, we decided we would try dating 26 officially, because before, we were kind of dating, but not really. It was almost like friends-with-benefits-style stuff. We would go on dates with Mormon boys and then we would make out with each other before or after, and it was just a really weird situation. It was not healthy. I'm going to throw that out there, it was not a healthy situation. I had actually got a quote-unquote ‘boyfriend’. I started dating this boy who wasn't Mormon and he was a great dude. He was awesome, in my opinion. A stand-up guy, really sweet, really kind, but just wasn't there for me. After I broke up with him, that was when S and I started officially dating. We weren't going to start going out with boys to save face, but it's not like we talked about it. We said it to each other, and her mom and sister, and that was it. I wasn't supposed to tell anybody else, so it was like we were playing this weird game. We were dating, but still not really. We worked at the same place, so nobody could know that we were together, but we were together. That was an interesting balance. As time kind of went on, she struggled with being Mormon and being gay. She would go back and forth all the time, just constantly like, "I can't do this. My family is going to be so upset. They’re not going to be able to handle this. This is the end of my life," that kind of talk. It was probably every two weeks for eighteen months, that would happen. For me, I'm just like, "Okay, I don't know. What do you want? What do you need?" She would always be like, "We have to break up. We're going to break up." I'm like, "Okay, whatever,” and then I’d wait it out. Finally, she said it to me and I was done. I was like, "Okay, we're done then. There's no going back. You say this, we're over, and I'm going to move forward because I can't keep having this conversation back and forth where you're saying, ‘No, we can't be together. No, we 27 can't do this.' This is it. This is done. I'm not coming back. You realize that, right? I am not going to come back." She was like, "Okay, we're done. This is over." I was like, "All right, bye." It sounds terrible, but I'd been so desensitized to the conversation that I just didn't care. I was always the one being like, "Okay, I'm here. We'll work this out together." Then again, like clockwork, every two weeks, it was like, "No, we're done, we're over. I can't do this." We broke up in May, but we still owned our condo together. I still lived with her. I had to. At the time we had a bed that we shared, we bought together, so I had gotten rid of my bed. I didn't have a place to sleep. Those are random details. I was sleeping on a futon in my bedroom, which is kind of sad, but then I started dating and going out, and that's when I met M. We met virtually, probably in late July, early August. On September 3rd, we met in person and started officially dating. LR: So during this time you were working, I'm assuming you had graduated from college by this point? CJ: Yes. LR: We talked about what your degree was. So where were you working? CJ: At this time? LR: Yeah. CJ: I was working at a swim school teaching. I basically managed all of the swim instructors and maintained the pool at a swim school. I was also coaching crossfit, and I was teaching tumbling as well. LR: Okay. For some reason, I thought your degree was in physical therapy. CJ: My degree is in history, and I got my minor in creative writing. When I was in Colorado, when I first started school, I was going as a physical therapy major. 28 LR: I knew I wrote it down for a reason. But your major was history. What was your minor? CJ: Creative writing. LR: Creative writing. So you're not really working in your field? CJ: Nope. I just have a passion for history and also writing. Was it the smartest choice? Probably not, but I was able to do well and I graduated summa cum laude. Because I love it, it was easy to do. But it doesn't serve me. I learned a lot of really good skills, like how to research and how to write well. That has served me in the long run, and I can pick up information quickly. If someone says, “Hey, I need you to find out about X, Y and Z.” I'm like, "Okay, I know how to research things so that I can get information quickly." But, no, I haven't worked in my field at all, ever. LR: It's hard to find jobs in history. I am the first to admit, it is not an easy thing to do. Michael, do you have any questions? MT: You said it was three to four months after you started dating M that you then moved in with her. CJ: Correct. MT: What was the difference between living with S and then moving in with M? CJ: It was like night and day. M travels for work, she still does. She had gotten her traveling job right before we met, in the beginning of summer, and we met in September. She was gone during the week. I technically lived at the apartment she rented from her parents, but I still stayed at our condo during the week because the crossfit gym and the tumbling gym that I taught at were down south in Saratoga Springs. I would stay the night at our condo because I could throw a rock and hit the gym from where our condo was. I would go down, coach, and then go and stay at our condo. 29 But to answer your question, living with M was exponentially better than living with S ever was. She's a lot more kind hearted; she's a lot more understanding. That doesn't mean that we haven't had our arguments. I wouldn't say ‘fights’ because we don't really like flat-out fight, we have disagreements and we talk through it. My experience with S was, what's the best way to put this? She was very demeaning and selfish. Everything I did was criticized, and I was put down for pretty much everything I did. Whenever I would do something, like, "Why are you doing it like that? Normal people don't do it like that. Why do you think this way? Why would you say something like that? Why would you not do this?" It was very difficult, even when we were together, even when I first moved out there. You look back on stuff and you're like, "Man, why did I put up with that?" The best example of it is when I moved out there. It had been exactly a month since I moved. This is like, beginning of 2010, and I was just excited. I was like, "Oh my gosh, we've been living together for a month. She was not in a great mood, so I wrote a little note and shoved it under her door. She came out and she was like, "Why wouldn't you talk to me? Why would you write me this note? What is this anyway? Who cares? Why do you care so much about this?" “Woah, okay, all right.” "Normal people don't care about this stuff, Carlin. Why do you?" In contrast, M is a lot more loving and caring. She has things that she wants to do a certain way, but the feelings when she expresses that to me is completely different. She doesn't lash out at all like S did, so living with her was like a dream from a nightmare. LR: So out of curiosity, it almost sounded like S was not quite out with her family, and even with herself, in a way. How do you think that affected you in the relationship? It 30 seems like you were, “This is who I am,” or at least you were really trying to be more authentically yourself. How much effect did that have on the relationship? CJ: I think it had a pretty big effect, I would say, because I wasn't necessarily scared to tell people, and I think the big difference was when I was like 19, 20, 21, I dated women. I hadn't told my family, but I dated women. My comfort level with telling people was pretty high, and my lack of understanding of growing up LDS—even now, even with my relationship with M, my lack of understanding there has opened me up more, because I didn't have that conditioning from a young age. LR: That makes sense. So you're living with M. When did you change jobs or find a job closer to Ogden? How did you finally make the transition to living in Ogden completely? CJ: When I first met M, like I said, I was teaching at a pool. Then my manager was not great and he was forcing me out, so I just quit instead. Then I got a job working restoration, cutting drywall and cleaning up floods and all that fun stuff. To be honest with you, I've had a lot of jobs, so I bounced around a lot during this time because I was still trying to figure everything out. So I did that, and then I moved to a previous company that I'd worked at, a multilevel marketing company. I was working in customer service. I went and got that job again, and that was in Draper, so I was commuting from Ogden to Draper. But I got into a car accident. I totaled my car, and then I got a concussion and I quit because I didn't have a way to drive down there. M had a car, but it was not in good shape, it was a beater that you drove around town. So I didn't really have a car to drive, I couldn't make it down to Draper, and I basically didn't have a job for like three months. I just kind of hung around the house and tried to make some money by selling some stuff on eBay. Then I got a job in Clearfield. I was working for a company called NuvoH2O, they 31 sell water softeners. That was more or less my full transition to working in Ogden and actually being up here more. LR: So you said September 30, you met M in person for the first time. What year was that? CJ: 2017. LR: So you were with S for seven years? That's a long time. CJ: It is a long time. LR: I'm realizing I'm asking more touchy-feely questions, so I apologize, but it’s kind of just the way it’s going. CJ: Don't apologize. That’s fine. LR: How do you think those seven years with S prepared you for meeting someone as open and loving as M, to actually move into a long-term relationship with her? CJ: It's a really good question. So being with S for that long, I hadn't really had that long term-relationship part until I met her. I never really understood how relationships worked up until that point. Looking back on it, even after S and I broke up, I took some time to look back and really see what happened and what went wrong, that I didn't want to do again. What I noticed was that I let S kind of rule my emotions and rule what I was. She did kind of rule what I did, in the sense that she didn't like it when I hung out with other people outside of our relationship unless she was there, too. She was not very supportive of me. I really enjoy fitness and I really enjoy crossfit and coaching, and she was not very supportive of that and would put me down constantly about that. As I looked back on the relationship, I actually had a conversation with my Dad. Not really letting him know, because I hadn't told him that S and I were in a relationship. I just kind of asked him, “So Dad, tell me what made your relationship with Mom so successful?” Growing up, I never heard them fight. I never heard them 32 raise their voices. Whenever they had an argument, it was a discussion where they both brought up their sides of the story. You can still get emotional, but neither of them got overly emotional or overly rude. He just told me, “It's just about respect, it was about having respect for that other person, that whatever they were feeling and whatever they were saying was valid, regardless if I agreed or if I disagree. We would both bring up our feelings and thoughts and discuss them and respect each other and find a solution regardless of what it was.” I was like, “Okay, awesome.” Taking that information and looking back on my relationship with S, there was no respect. She did not respect me at all in any sense. Coming into this relationship with M, we had pretty deep conversations in the beginning of our relationship. I just kind of expressed to her, “Hey, I respect you and your opinions. How do you feel? Do you respect me and what are your thoughts on that?” We would have those discussions. So I think from my relationship with S, I kind of knew the warning signs of things that I did not want to happen again. I was able to share those with M at the get-go. We talked about this, “If you're mad at me, I need you to tell me. I need you to not attack me. I need you to tell me that you're upset. Let me talk through what I have done and how I can fix it.” S would talk to me and she would come at me and be like, "This is what you did. Why did you do it? That's not a valid answer,” just attacking me or anything that I'd done wrong. Whatever my response, it was always wrong. No matter what happened, she would attack me, and so I don't respond well to that. Then I just stop talking because if you're not listening to what I have to say and you keep coming at me, I'm just going to keep my mouth shut. At least that's how I work. It was not conducive for a relationship. I told M about that. “Look, if you have something that's going on, talk to me. Don't accuse me, don't fight with me. Tell me what's going on.” 33 From the beginning, we've had really good communication. Honestly, the biggest part of our relationship is just our communication. “If you're uncomfortable with something, tell me about it.” Or, “If you're mad at me about something, tell me about it. Let's talk about it.” Or, “If you want to start adding God into our relationship, talk to me about it. Let's talk about it.” I think overall, that's been the biggest learning experience is how I've learned how to communicate what I need so that we can both get what we need. LR: I'm curious. I know that M grew up in the LDS church, correct? CJ: Correct. LR: When you met, where was she at in regards to the church, and what role did that play initially in your relationship? CJ: To be honest, that's been a turbulent part of our relationship, even today. The LDS church has been very prominent in our relationship and also very turbulent. When we met, M had come out a year and a half-ish previously to us meeting. She was dating a girl, so she had finally met a woman that she wanted to date, actually wanted to be with, and who she fell in love with. She didn't really have a conversation with her family, she just came out on Facebook. “I'm in a relationship with Natalie,” and they're like, “Oh, okay.” Here's the thing, I don't want to say too much because I feel like this section of it is part of her story to tell. She had a rocky relationship with the church because she's kind of rebellious. That’s the nicest way I can put that. It's endearing to me. She just likes to be rebellious and I love it. That's how she was as a kid, always offand-on with the church. She has deep rooted faith, but when it comes to other types of church doctrine, she's quite rebellious. She'd always had this back-and-forth relationship with the church, and she had always known that she'd been attracted to women. 34 She got into a relationship with Natalie. I think they dated for five or six months, maybe eight, if you tack on the end-of-relationship hookups. After that, made this big turn, decided she wanted to get back into the church full-time and just really dove in headfirst. She got more involved, started reading her scriptures, and started getting more prepared to go back into the temple. She met this guy named Preston and they dated for like three months and they thought they were going to get married, but it just didn't really work out. I give this background information, because for M and for a lot of LDS people who grew up in the church, that pressure—I call it Mormon guilt, but I don't really know if that's the technical term for it—Mormon guilt is put on you from such a young age. It's not just you, so it's not just me, but her family and all that stuff. She had this relationship with Natalie, and they'd only been together eight months. They didn't really talk about marriage, so it wasn't that full commitment piece. But she struggled a lot because there was no religion and there was no God in their relationship. Same thing, back and forth, like, "I'm not doing the right thing. My family is going to be disgraced. I'm not going to be able to see my family in the next life." All this guilt. "I'm losing favor with God because of who I am." Then she moved and started dating Preston, and so she felt better about it, but there were some hang-ups with their relationship. Her standing with the church because she'd been dating women and just because of a few other things, that just made it difficult. They wanted to get married. M wasn't comfortable with only dating someone for three months before you get married. Finally, they just broke up. It wasn't an awesome breakup because it was kind of church-related, because she wasn't in good standing with the church. He was frustrated and they just didn't click very well because she's not straight. She identifies as bisexual. She prefers men, she likes men sexually. She doesn't like men emotionally in a relationship in that 35 way. There was just a lot of this back-and-forth because they just didn't click emotionally and then they broke up. I met M eight months after she broke up with Preston. It's been really hard because we were good, we had a good rapport, our relationship was great. Every once in a while, she would just get so depressed thinking about the future and thinking about things like, “If we have kids, what are we going to teach our kids? If we have, like, how are we going to incorporate family? What are we going to do in the afterlife?” Her conditioning being Mormon just sent her into a depressive spiral, and it would last about a week. I don't know what would happen, but then she would start coming out of it and she would be okay. We'd go a few months and it would happen again. As we got closer to getting married, it got worse. Every other week she would have a depressive episode and just spiral because she's like, “I'm not doing the right things with God. I'm not doing the right things for my family.” All of this stuff. We got married, and then we went on our honeymoon, and we were in Hawaii. She just wanted to stay in the hotel room; she was depressed on our honeymoon. It's been really hard. I feel like it's my fault, and I feel like I'm deprived of my happiness because she hasn't reconciled herself with her religion. It's been a very hard place to go. I don't know if we've ever really talked about it since, but I think what she had to do is block it out. She just had to say, “I'm not religious, I don't believe in God. I don't do this because if I even go down that path a little bit, then I realize that I am not doing right by the laws I have been taught as a Mormon to satisfy God.” I think the beginning of 2020 is when she started being okay about our relationship, after we'd been married for four months. Does that answer your question? 36 MT: Follow up on that. Do you feel like your five years being a member of the LDS church helped you understand what she was going through a little bit? I mean, you didn't grow up with the church, so you don't have that ingrained. But do you feel like you understood the doctrine enough to be there and support her as she went through these depressive periods? CJ: Yes, I do feel like that helped. For me, I chose to be Mormon; for her, it wasn't a choice. I don't want to say she wasn't forced into it, but that's how she was raised, Mormon. I was raised Catholic, so not a high-demand religion. Mormons are very high-demand. So it helped a little bit. At the same time, the religion that I grew up with was incredibly different than the religion that she grew up with, and some of the unspoken things were a lot of the things that I didn't get right. For example, I can recite Hail Mary, the Lord's Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed for the most part, just because that's what I grew up with. When I hear it, it just happens. It's just inherent. Whereas LDS people, they don't know that, unless they've read that psalm, or if they've experienced Catholic mass before. There's just things that are inherent when you grow up in a certain place and you have a certain habit. To a point, I understood, but there was just so much that I just didn't get. For example, just the level of pressure and the level of guilt that is associated with doing and/or being something outside of what the LDS culture dictates. It's just incredible. I don't know what that feels like because I didn't experience it. For her, I think the big thing is, she's related to Hyrum Smith. Mormonism goes way deep. She looks at it and it's so difficult because for her, she's like, “I am letting so many people down.” That's unfathomable for me because the difference just in life, in culture, is so extreme. I grew up where I went to church on Sunday. I did like an hour of Sunday school on Sunday, either after church or later in the day. That was it. Maybe I went to Bible camp on Wednesdays during the summer, 37 depending on how old I was. But after that, religion wasn't a big part of my day-today life. When you're LDS, it is a massive portion of your day-to-day life. It's your community, it's your friends, it's your family, it's your livelihood, really. That was something I didn't understand fully. Sorry, that was a long-winded answer. MT: Oh, no, it was an excellent answer. LR: It really was good. Speaking of marriage, what was your thought when marriage became legal for everyone? How did that affect when you started talking about marriage with M? I'm just trying to understand how, in 2015 when it became legal for anyone to marry, that affected you when you were dating M? CJ: How did marriage equality affect my decision to get married? LR: Yeah. CJ: I think it was legal to get married in Colorado before 2015. In college, I had friends and I knew lesbian couples who were either life partners or they were married. That was a normal experience for me. But I learned that in your community, the norms aren't always everybody else's norms. I was playing rugby, I was deeply involved, and there's a high lesbian population when you play rugby. I knew a bunch of lesbian couples who had kids and they had a family, and so that was normal. I was like, "Oh, okay, this is a normal thing." I didn't realize that it wasn't. You're 20, you don't really know a whole lot. I just thought that it was okay. As long as you weren't in the military, I knew that it was okay to be gay and to have a wife. Then, learning about Prop XIII and learning about all of this other stuff, I was like, "Whoa, okay, so it's not." That was like a big, mind-blowing moment for me. I'm like, "Okay, so there's people out there that don't support it, but why not? I don't understand." I was just learning how to understand it. To answer that question, I always wanted to get married regardless. That’s how my brain was at the time. Whether I was going to be married to a woman, 38 whether I was going to be married to a man, I wanted to be a wife. That's what I wanted. I wanted to have that lifelong commitment, build that relationship with one person. That was what I wanted, that's what I desired. My parents had a great marriage. I wanted the same thing. I wanted to invest my emotions and put work into someone else so that I could lift them up. I just think about my parents, and not to say that their relationship didn't have its points. I just didn't see it. I understand that, but they just had a great relationship, and that's what everybody said, and I wanted that. For me, the ruling in 2015, I was like, "Okay, cool, so we don't have to go out of state to get married!" It was going to happen for me either way. Regardless if it was legal in Utah or not, I knew that I was going to get married, and if it wasn't legal, then I was going to go somewhere where it was. LR: All right. How long after you met M and started dating did you guys decide to get married? CJ: I think we had started talking about it from a very early stage in our relationship. Like I said, we met online. So before we met in person, we talked, either through the dating app or we started texting. My wife was very smooth, and this is the smoothest she's ever been. We were messaging on the app and she's like, "Hey, so the app won't let me send long messages. Why don't you give me your phone number?" I'm like, "Hey, look at you." I just have to throw that plug in because I always joke with her, "Honey, you know that's the smoothest you've ever been, right?" We started talking, we texted, and then we met in person. There was just this moment. I'm not sure what had gotten into me because like I'm shy, being relative. I'm pretty friendly and I like to talk to people, but I'm usually not the one getting asked questions, I'm usually the one that asks the questions. So I'm really good at 39 deflecting attention because I don't like attention. But we had these talks and these discussions and the day that we met. Our date was eight hours long. Actually, it was longer than that. It was like a day. I stayed the night. We were together for a long time. I got up here, we had coffee, we hung out all day, went up to Blues, Brews, and BBQs. I came home with her. I stayed the night. We went to the gym together in the morning and then I drove home. But that whole time when I was with her, I just had this overarching feeling like, “This is my last first date. This is my last first kiss, this is my last first everything,” and it made me excited. Wasn't a bad feeling, it was an amazing, good feeling and I was incredibly open with her. I told her, "I don't know how you feel about this, but I felt like last week was my last first date." She felt the same, like we both had the same feeling. I don't know if it was ever a one-time conversation, but it was reiterated pretty frequently. “You know, I feel like you're my person. I know that you are my person and I don't need anybody else. I want to be with you forever," kind of a conversation. I think it was the second or third week we'd been together, we told each other we loved each other. I think a big portion of it is because she was gone a lot. We really learned how to communicate with each other and talk on the phone, via text, FaceTime, because we couldn't be together all the time. I think that that kind of set us up, and pretty much we'd talked about marriage since our first month of dating. That was, again, a long-winded answer. LR: It's all good. So you met in 2017 and got married in 2019? CJ: Yes. LR: So you dated for two years. That’s pretty good. Talk a little bit about your wedding and then we can move into the end. CJ: Sure, I'd love to. Our wedding was the best day of my life. I still look back on it and I'm just so happy. I look a lot different now than I did then; I had really long hair and 40 now I don't. But it was just the best day. It was such a great experience and everything was just perfect. We got married in Midway, at Zermatt Resort. My family came out to visit to be there, and M's family was there, too, obviously. It was just perfect, it was exactly the day that we wanted. We stressed out about it so much, but it turned out to be one hundred percent worth it. We got our room. We woke up, we weren't in a hurry. We had room service for breakfast. M's friend came and did our makeup. My friend came and curled my hair for me. My cousin and I are six weeks apart, we're the same age, so we basically grew up together. She came and hung out with me while we were getting ready. It was just wonderful, the whole day was just perfect, my dad was amazing. He's just the coolest man. I have so much love and admiration and adoration for him. Our ceremony went off without a hitch. M's brother-in-law, her sister's husband, officiated our wedding. He looks like Prince Charming, he's got great hair, got a great voice, just like an all-star. So perfect. In between the ceremony and the reception, while M and I were signing our marriage license and doing all that stuff, my dad took my friends up to the bar upstairs and bought them all shots of fireball for an hour. Crazy old guy, just like the cool stuff. Then M and I went up there just to say hey and saw everyone, like, got to love on all of our friends and family. The reception was perfect. It was just what we wanted. We spent the first forty-five minutes doing the normal stuff. We didn't have a wedding party, but I asked some friends and family to give a little speech. Same with M. We did like the couples’ game, ‘Who's more likely to clean the house,’ and ‘Who's more likely to whatever. Then it was just a party, which is what we wanted. We just played a lot of music, had a lot of dancing, it was just a huge party. So grateful for everyone that came because they're the ones that made it, and that's what matters. Gosh, it was so fun and that's what we wanted. We didn't want it to be like this big focus on the 41 two of us. We wanted it to be everyone that's part of our lives. This is like a big thank-you for them, and that's what we got. It was absolutely perfect. LR: He was at your wedding, so obviously you were able to come out to your father. How was that experience for you? CJ: It was amazing. LR: Will you talk about it? CJ: You bet. When I officially came out to my dad, I had been dating my wife for not even a month, but I knew that I wanted to be with her forever. I drove home. It's about an eight-hour drive. In September, we do the ALS walk and we used to do it with my mom, so we've done it for twenty years. I drove home to do the ALS walk with my dad and my family, and I just walked in and was just like, "So Dad, you know what? I have something I need to tell you. I am dating someone, and I'm in love. It's something that I want you to be part of, too." I had a picture of her up, and I turned it around and I showed him. I was like, "This is M, and she's my girlfriend." He just kind of looked at me and he was like, "Are you happy?" I said, "Yeah, I am. I'm very happy. She's an amazing person." He's like, "Well, good, I'm happy for you." He just looked at me and he was like, "I love you regardless." I was like, "All right." Since my mom passed away, I've always just wanted to make sure that I would be the woman that made her happy, so she would be proud of me. I don't have that confirmation, I can't just be like, “so, Mom, what do you think?” So I talk to my dad constantly about things like, “What was mom like? What did she feel?” I was in the car with him one time, I think I was visiting home. So I just asked, “You know, to be honest, I was a little bit surprised at how well you took me coming out to you. I don't know if you know this, Dad, but a lot of times when people come 42 out, it's hard for their family. You were fantastic with me. Nothing negative about the fact that I'm gay or that I'm different or that I'm marrying a woman. Nothing. There's no question from you at all." He looks at me and he just goes, “You know what, your mom taught me something a long time ago.” He goes, “So your brother, D, he failed out of college and he just didn't care.” He didn't care about education, which is fine. He just wanted to make money, which is great, good for him. But my dad was very frustrated because he is an educator, so he was upset that D was failing out of college. They would just bash heads and just fight, blowout arguments, between the two of them. My mom came to him after one of these blowout fights and said, “What do you care more about? Do you care more about the fact that D is failing out of school, or do you care about having a relationship with your son? Because no matter what he does, he's always going to be your son. But if you don't love him for whatever he does, you're not going to have a relationship with him. If you want to have a relationship with your son, you need to let this go. You need to let him live, and you need to love him regardless of what he does, because in the end, it doesn't matter. What matters is how you love him and how you care about him.” He said, “I've taken that advice to heart from then on, and that's how I feel. I'm going to love you regardless of what you do, and M makes you happy. I know that, I see that. There's no reason for me to be upset with what you do. I want to be part of your life. Whatever you decide to do, I'm going to love you through it, and I'm going to support you in it because you're my daughter. That's it. I love you.” I'm like, "Okay." Of course, at this time, I'm bawling. Talk about long-reaching advice. That made a big difference for me. 43 LR: Wow, that’s amazing. I literally have four questions left. Something I wanted to ask from our conversation the first time: how did your brother's example through all that he accomplished helped you to be more authentic? CJ: That's a really good question. He taught me that regardless of who you are and what you do, you can find your people. Knowing that, and understanding that, has really helped me to find my passion and find people to share that passion. By finding those people, then I don't have to play, I don't have to pretend, I don't have to fake things. Using his example has really put me in the places that I am, knowing there are people out there that are like me and act like me and love like me and think like me. It has helped me to be more open about myself and how I feel. I don't know if that effectively answers your question. LR: There's no wrong way to answer, it's so personal. CJ: To be honest with you, you know how they say it is. Like in your twenties, you're just trying to figure out who you are. Then in your thirties, you're trying to figure out what happened to you and how you can use that. A passed away when I was almost twelve, and it's been a process for me to think back on what has happened and what he did and how that has shaped my opinions and my perspective. I think the biggest thing, as I'm thinking about it right now, is that no matter what you want to do, you can do it. He lived on his own. He had seizures, he had about the mental capacity of a twelve-to-fourteen-year-old, but he lived on his own. He had a job. If you want to do it, you will find a way and you will do it. I think that's just how I've always looked at life. The more that I think about it, he really showed me that whatever you want, you can do. LR: Awesome, thank you. How did you make your way through the pandemic, and what was that like for you when it first hit? 44 CJ: Well, I kind of survived, I guess? When the pandemic hit, I was working for a software company in sales, so I was doing cold calls and cold emails, all the fun. I just dealt with it, “It is what it is.” Pandemic showed up, I was like, “Cool, I can stay home. I don't have to go into the office.” The downside of that was like, if you think about it, when the pandemic hit, everything shut down, but we still had our quota to hit. It was incredibly stressful because I had to figure out how to manage being home all the time and also how to separate work from home, which was very difficult. When you work in an office, it's pretty much, “This is when I start, I'm not going to answer emails until this time, and then I have lunch, and then I end here.” But when you're at home, there's no real beginning and end. It's just always. That was incredibly stressful. Like I said, we still had a quota to hit, and that's how I got paid. I think I made like twelve or thirteen dollars an hour, and then I got a commission on top of it based on how many appointments I set up. But people weren't answering their phones because they weren't there. Then I had to shift my whole routine, because now people weren't picking up the phones, they weren't open, so they weren't answering emails. They didn't have budgets to purchase what we had to offer, and it wasn't a necessity, we were just extra stuff, so that was incredibly stressful. M didn’t have to travel for work for about a month when the pandemic first hit. That was difficult. It's actually still a struggle. To be honest, working at home with her is very hard, because for her, when she's home, it means she's not working. She likes to play, and her response is, “Hey, you're home, let's play.” I'm like, “I can't. I have to work.” Even if I take a step away from my computer and go get food or go on a walk or get some fresh air, she's like, “Hey, let's play, let's go. Can you help me with this? Can you help me with that?” 45 I'm like, “Hey, I have to work. I have to get my stuff done. I can't just do whatever.” That was difficult, and it still is very hard, to the point where sometimes I just go into the office when she's here because it's hard. At the time, my job was crappy. It was hard and it was not very good for me. I was not very healthy, mentally or physically. I still worked out and stuff, but I drank a lot and I didn't eat very well, and it was just hard. We were supposed to go to Italy that year. That was rough. The week before we were supposed to go to Italy is when they sent everybody home and everything closed down. I think this is similar for everybody, but even now, it's very hard to really go on a vacation. Since we started dating, with the exception of one year, we went on international trips every year. We went to Peru; we went to Greece. I went to the Dominican Republic with my family. We went to Mexico at the beginning of this year, but outside of those, we hadn't really taken international trips. At least for me, it's hard to disconnect from your job when it's on your phone. If you aren't international, that's really hard to do. It's been hard because there hasn't really been a break from work, even with my new position. LR: Yeah. So you obviously didn't stay doing sales for very long? CJ: I was there for about 18 months. LR: I mean, after the pandemic hit. CJ: No. I left that job in February of this year. LR: Of this year? You were there for almost an entire year with the pandemic. CJ: I just hadn't found anything. There was a lot of drama that went down with that job ‘cause I was looking to move up in position. Some stuff happened and it wasn't great, and then I found this job and it was the best choice I've ever made. LR: Cool, and what are you doing now? 46 CJ: It's a curriculum company. We have a reading methodology that we teach teachers, and it helps them teach their students how to read. I work with our strategic customers, big districts, and I'm their point person. I'm like, “Okay, if you need something, you come to me.” I am also the one that talks strategy and long-term goals with the district. When someone calls me when they're doing training, like the call I just took, it's a big district that's purchased a lot. My limit is $750,000 worth of materials and trainings. They're big customers. I'm not a big deal, but my customers are a big deal. LR: Okay. Michael, did you have any questions before I ask the last two questions? MT: Not that I can think of. LR: First off, how does your experience in northern Utah compare with other places you have lived, within the LGBTQ experience? CJ: I think the lack of normalcy has been a big part of it. It's not normalized; it's rare to see. It's getting better, it's gotten better even since I've lived up here, but from a young age when I lived in Colorado, I knew and saw members of the LGBTQ community. There is a gay bar right across the street from the mini golf course that I would go to as a kid. I knew it was a gay bar, and I knew what that meant ,and there was more frequency of it. It was more normal. Here, it's not as normal. My wife and I joke, “My gosh, we see other gay couples, this is amazing.” We love the farmer's market because you see a lot of gay couples around, both ways, lesbians, gays, all that stuff. I think that is one of the big differences between living in Northern Colorado and living in northern Utah. It's just not as normalized, not as widely known. At least from my knowledge, whenever people would ask you questions in Colorado, it was more like, “Who are you dating?” Not, “Who's your boyfriend?” 47 LR: I had to think about that for a minute. That's interesting. Before I ask my last question, is there any other story or memory or anything you want to share? CJ: Nope, not that I can think of. LR: What advice would you give to young people growing up today who identify within the LGBTQ+ community? CJ: It's a great question. I think the first part, and the biggest part for me, was realizing that outside of whatever label the world wants to put on me, and outside of anything else, I am Carlin. The one thing that I can truly identify as is myself. Regardless of feminine, masculine, straight, bi, gay, anything else, I am me, without a label. That's been one of the things that I have worked on, for me to be just myself, regardless of what that means, regardless if that means in five years that I am something different. I'm not just a lesbian, but I am just authentic to myself. In the end, that's all that matters, because the more authentic I am with myself, the more authentic I can be with other people. LR: I love that. Thank you. CJ: It’s a very simple answer. LR: It's a great way to end this. I can't think of a better way. I appreciate your willingness to share. 48