Oral History Program Andrew Crookston Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 2 September 2021-16 June 2022 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Andrew Crookston Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 2 September 2021-16 June 2022 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: Crookston, Andrew, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 2 September 2021-16 June 2022, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections & University Archives (SCUA), Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Andrew Crookston conducted on September 2, 2021 and June 16, 2022 by Lorrie Rands. Andrew shares his childhood experiences and what it was like growing up gay in the LDS church. He talks about his mission to Guatemala and his subsequent trips for research. He also discusses his experience in Spain teaching English, getting stuck during the pandemic, and finding love. Also present on September 2, 2021 is Alexis Stokes; present on June 16, 2022 is Kyle Jackson. LR: Today is September 2, 2021. We are in the Stewart Library on the Weber State University campus, interviewing Andrew Crookston for the LGBTQ stories here at the Stewart Library. My name is Lorrie Rands conducting and Alexis Stokes is here as well. To start with, I identify as straight; my pronouns are she/her. AS: Mine are the same. AC: I identify as gay and I am he/him. LR: Okay, thank you so much. I appreciate that. Let's just start with when and where you were born. AC: So I was born at the old McKay-Dee hospital just right across the street here. I'm sorry, when? LR: Yeah. AC: In 1993. LR: And then what day, month and date? AC: September 21st, my birthday's coming up. LR: Yes, it is. Well, happy birthday. AC: Thank you. LR: Were you raised in Ogden? AC: I was. I feel like my life has been very local, but I've also had some opportunities to go elsewhere. I did Ogden schools; I came to Weber State. My educational 1 experience started at Weber State daycare here. So I've lived lots of my life in like a mile radius of here. At the same time, I lived in Guatemala for a couple of years, and then I lived in Spain for the last three years. LR: Oh, wow. AC: Both international but also very, very, very local. LR: Where in Ogden did you grow up? AC: Right here by the institute building at Weber State, so on the East Bench. I would go hiking up here and then I would go to church over on Polk and Kingston, over by Wasatch Elementary. All right here by Weber State. As kids, Weber State’s a pretty fun place to play. We would run around the duck pond, we would play hide and seek around the student services building because there's a lot of hiding spots and stuff. My friends in my neighborhood and I would always be running around over here, and we would set up a lemonade stand by the bus stop by the education building and make money from college students and things like that. So I had a pretty fun childhood. LR: Sounds like it. So talk about your family dynamic, your parents, siblings. AC: My parents were pretty young when they had my siblings and I. I'm the youngest, and I have an older sister and an older brother, and over the years, we've always been really close. My parents both worked at McKay-Dee hospital when I was growing up and they worked a lot of night shifts, so my grandparents would take care of us sometimes. My grandparents lived right next door to us. I was in a very sheltered environment, but my parents have always been pretty conscientious about raising their kids and how they raised us. They were very deliberate, they did ‘love and logic parenting,’ if you've heard of that. They took us a lot to the Ogden Nature Center and the Ogden Tree House and down to Salt Lake, to different 2 museums in different areas and the dinosaur park. I felt pretty lucky as a child to have the opportunities I did. LR: That's awesome. Okay, let's start with elementary school. Where did you go to elementary school? AC: Wasatch Elementary on Polk Avenue. LR: What are some of your memories of that? AC: I loved Wasatch. I think, for example, my kindergarten teacher was with KB, the undergraduate researcher, I forget her name. LR: I know who you're talking about. AC: Yeah, the office assistant. LR: Yeah. We're actually friends, which is sad I'm a friend, but I can't think of her name. But I actually interviewed KB too... that's just a small world. I'm sorry, I'm interjecting, I apologize. AC: No, that's okay, I feel bad that I can't remember her name either. Wasatch has like a forest in the back of scrub oak that they, I think, kept after developing the area. We would be able to do science projects back there. I remember we had chicks in class, and we would learn how to raise the chicks and be soft with them as little kids. I don't know, life was really easy in elementary school. I don't think I had any stress or any worries. Recess was the best thing ever, and I had good friends. My closest childhood friends were a boy named JP and a boy named CJ, and the three of us would run around all the time doing different things. CJ lived by the Manor. I can't remember what its official name is. It's up on the top of 30th Street. It's now assisted living, but it used to be at a hospital. LR: I think that's St. Benz. AC: St. Benz, that's right, St. Benedict's Manor. He lived right there, and so we would play a lot at Mount Ogden Park and run around the golf course and stuff. Then we 3 would go hiking a lot up in the hills. My parents, or my mom, are very protective, but at the same time, I think she saw the value in letting her kids go hiking alone. So at a pretty young age, I was hiking with my cousins and brother up in the hills above our city. I think it’s a very carefree childhood. LR: So during this time, did you ever have any, “I don't quite fit in.” Did you ever feel like that or not quite yet? AC: Yeah, so I noticed strange feelings really early on, I think even before they were like sexual feelings, it was just like a weird kind of attraction. I remember watching movies and I wasn't really interested in the female character. I would be very interested in the male character. My mom would leave us home, they would go on dates and she would leave us with James Bond movies. Then she realizes that, you know, they're not probably the best movies for kids. I don't think that's an indictment towards her at all. But I just remember very vividly being interested in and attracted to James Bond and that idea of masculinity very early, probably seven or so. I remember those feelings. I don't know if I really put much stock in them, I don't ever remember feeling different in elementary school. That started in junior high. LR: Okay. Any other fond memories of elementary school that you can think of that you'd like to share, that just stand out in your mind? AC: I don't know. I just think that Ogden is the place to be. I loved growing up in Ogden. Liked the Ogden Nature Center, the dinosaur park. All of these cool areas and 25th Street wasn't really the place when I was a kid. It was pretty rundown. Over time, that's gotten a lot better. I remember hiking all over the hills, like the Indian Trail from 27th straight to Ogden Canyon, and going camping up in the mountains. My parents also had a camper on this old truck that my dad had. We would go to all these national parks in the summer, so we would go to Yellowstone, and the Tetons, and Bryce Canyon, and Zion, and the Grand Canyon, and we camped in 4 the national parks. I really grew up with my head in those areas. So, yeah, I had a pretty good childhood. LR: So I realized that you were only 6 in 1999. AC: Yeah. LR: But you were the youngest, so I'm curious how, if at all, the shooting at Columbine had any effect on your family, on you personally, if you remember that? AC: I feel like I do remember it, and I don't know if that's a memory I have acquired from other people talking about it. I remember coming home from Wasatch, I remember walking home and my dad would be watching the news a lot. I vividly remember, for example, walking home on September 11 and my dad was watching the news at 3:00 p.m. and just everything had happened, you know. I think with Columbine, I didn't know what was going on, but I definitely knew the effects afterwards. I knew when we started doing lockdowns in schools, that's very odd. This feels like it's a very scary thing, and earthquake drills are scary too, and fire drills. Just the idea, as a young kid, like someone with a gun could come into my school, that's very startling. Even though I don't vividly remember the event of Columbine, I definitely remember all these effects of it. LR: Okay, I appreciate you sharing that. You mentioned 9/11 so let's kind of just move over into that because you were only… AC: I was eight. LR: Eight and at that time, you mentioned that you're coming from school and your dad's watching the news. AC: I do remember. So it's really weird, I had school probably at 8:30 or so, and I think by then, the first tower had already fallen, or was hit or something. I just remember, I would use my parents’ shower in their bedroom, and I had this towel with a hood on it. I remember the TV was on in their bedroom, and I remember coming out of 5 the shower and just watching the smoking tower on TV. They were saying something about how they initially thought that there was an accident with a movie they were filming or something, they were trying to make it more logical than it felt. Then I remember going to school and not really doing school, like we watched the TV. I remember kids at recess saying, like, “Oh, they might attack the Utah State Capitol.” In retrospect, it's like, why would they do that? But I remember feeling afraid and then walking home and seeing my dad watching TV. Then at school they told us to write down our feelings or our thoughts. We had a journal and we kind of wrote down how I felt that day. I don't know if I still have that journal. I should probably look, but I remember sitting. My mom was making dinner in the kitchen and there was kind of this weird desk area in the kitchen where the phone used to be. I remember sitting under that light in the desk and writing down my thoughts. You know how scary it was, and hard to watch. AS: Did your parents try to explain it at all to you? AC: Not that I remember. I was a really talkative kid, so I'm sure that we had some sort of conversation, but I don't really remember them sitting down and talking to me. I don't know if anyone really explained it to us. I think we watched a lot of news reports on it and things that explained it, but I don't remember that. LR: Did it change your school environment at all, or was it go back to school and just a normal, typical day? AC: I definitely remember us talking about it a lot, and then the effects of the War on Terror and different things. I remember being pretty aware of those different things because my parents would talk about them at home and watch the news. I watched the news a lot with my dad, kind of weird for a kid. I saw lots of the things afterwards, but I don't really remember affecting too much of the day-to-day stuff at school. 6 LR: Okay, so let's go ahead and delve into junior high. Everyone's favorite time. AC: Yeah, I am really suspicious of people that say that they like junior high. I'm sorry if that's how either of you feel. LR: No, I hated junior high. AC: I absolutely hated junior high, and I went to four years of junior high because when I left elementary school in fifth grade, I went into sixth grade at Mount Ogden Middle School. Then I did sixth, seventh, eighth at Mount Ogden. Then I had ninth grade at Mount Ogden Junior High, because between eighth grade and ninth grade, they changed the district to have ninth grade at junior high. I got to spend four years at junior high, which I resent. I just remember them as pretty anxious years. That was when I really noticed my sexuality, and it was a rough experience. LR: Are you comfortable talking more about that? AC: Yeah, yeah. LR: You mentioned it's a rough experience, could you just explain that? AC: Academically, I was always a good student at Wasatch. I was never an excellent student. I was always in a way the best of the worst and the worst of the best; I was very just kind of mediocre. I really noticed that in sixth grade, when I wasn't able to keep up with my peers in math, and that was really rough. Then on top of that, I was going through puberty and all the terrible things. With that, I just had this huge realization that I liked boys and I knew that was bad. I had that very ingrained in me from growing up Mormon. I haven't even mentioned the Mormon church, which I should have mentioned in my childhood, that my family was very, very Mormon. I mean, probably like Ogden Mormon, if that means anything to you guys. I think there's a difference between members of the church here in Ogden than in Utah Valley. For example, I had a lot of exposure to people of different beliefs and different 7 situations, but I didn't have anyone in my life that was gay, and that was bad. I heard a lot of church talks about “control your urges” and when I realized that was me, it really became like this deep, dark secret that I had to deal with. That was a lot of turmoil on top of the regular things that a kid in junior high goes through. I felt a lot of added weight because of my sexuality. My parents found out really early on, and my brother did, too, because like a lot of kids in my generation, we had a lot more access to the internet. I don't know, this is probably a little awkward, but my brother found my internet search history. He was shocked and horrified and scared for me. So he told my dad, who was my bishop at the time. My dad told my mom and I remember, this is probably seventh grade. I remember my mom cried all night and I was just very shaken. So seeing that as a kid, it was just a really difficult experience. LR: So out of curiosity, with your mother crying all night long, did you take that as, “I've done something and it's because of me, it's because I'm bad?” AC: Yeah, especially because you're not supposed to look at pornography. So there is the added weight of, “I had definitely done something wrong,” and then also like, “I'm not supposed to be having these feelings. That's not right.” I think the conversation has changed a lot since—when was this, 2006 or 2007?— in a massive way. I didn't have any sort of teachers in school talking about it. I didn't have any positive representations of LGBT people in my life. I really did feel like I was condemned to a life of debauchery and sin, which now, doesn't seem that bad. I think now there's a lot of teachers that really try to, even if some students' families tell them one thing, they try to represent different lifestyles in positive ways. I was really given like, “Oh, you're going to die of AIDS, and look at all this terrible gay culture, and you have to be effeminate, and your family will reject you.” That was a lot of what I heard. Then, on top of everything, is, “You're going to not 8 be able to go to the celestial kingdom with your family, basically you're going to be separated from them for eternity.” My family was my favorite thing, so there is a lot of eternal damnation on my mind as a kid. I think really the huge problem is that I was never shown any sort of representation of any LGBTQ person in a positive way as a kid. LR: It's almost as though you're isolated within yourself, no one to talk to. AC: Yeah. LR: No one that you can relate to. What was your coping mechanism? What do you do to just be? AC: I think nature has always been a big coping mechanism for me, partly because I really associated the use of pornography with my sexuality, because that was the only outlet that I could explore my sexuality—though I'm not really certain that's the best way for kids. I really don't think that that's a good thing. I just think that for me, as a kid, when I kept going back to it, it was like dynamite for my brain, so there was a lot of struggle with that for me. My parents were really strict with us about technology and things, so being in nature, there is not that possibility. I could go and just say it was a moment where I didn't have to think about school or my sexuality, and I was able to be away from everything, kind of disconnect. I also think I became really invested in the church, and I really honestly thought that if I was super devout and followed all the rules, that I would wake up one day and be straight, which, spoiler: hasn't happened. I was a really, really good kid, and I did all the seminary stuff and I memorized all the scriptures and I tried to convert my friends, and I kind of gained a lot of solace in that. Like, “Oh, it will all work out,” but it wasn't working out at the same time, so it was very distressing. Outwardly, I think people in my neighborhood, my ward, I would get a lot of compliments about how much of a good 9 boy I was, so I really liked that and I felt good. So I kind of kept going down that path. LR: I know that you kind of were forced out by your brother, but did you ever feel the need to just sit down and have a conversation with your parents? AC: I had no conversations with my parents, but that's the thing, I didn't want to be gay. I thought that that lifestyle was wicked and bad, and that it was a choice in my brain. I could choose my family and the gospel and living with them for eternity, or I could choose sexual gratification or whatnot. I saw that as a very hollow life, a very worldly life. I think the representations of gay culture that I saw as a kid were often very flamboyant. Even though I didn't really quite understand it, I knew that there was a lot of taboo around the sexual kind of lifestyle that lots of gay people had. So I saw it as a choice between these two paths. I could go down this road and choose the right and be happier for eternity, or I could go down this road and maybe it'll feel good. That really became my concrete mindset as I got older. I had a lot of conversations with my parents, especially my dad, because he was my bishop until I was 16 or so. I'd have a lot of conversations with him and he's a very scientific-minded guy. I think he draws a lot of community from church and a lot of comfort and it's what he's always done. But at the same time, as a leader, he told me he had several people that he was seeing that had same-sex desires, which I think is a funny way to put it. So he became involved in these resources for Mormon leaders that were kind of based in science, but kind of not. There was the Evergreen Conference, which I think they might still do. He would come back from that and be like, “Well, I learned at this conference that some people's sexual desires, sexual orientation, changes over their lifetime.” In my mind, that was a scientific verification that I could become straight, or not gay enough to get married and do the thing I have to do to be with my family for eternity. 10 He would read articles, or he would show me stuff about overcoming addiction, but I don't think I was addicted to pornography. I think that I didn't have any other outlet to explore my sexuality, and as I watched my peers dating and getting in stupid junior high school crushes, I would kind of follow along. I would just find girls that I would be really good friends with and think that because I was a really good friend with them, that must mean I like them. I would get really confused about my feelings, and there is no healthy or safe way for me to explore my feelings towards other boys. I had a lot of conversations with my parents and with my mom, when I talked about like sex, that was distressing as it is. I mean, no one likes to talk about sex with their parents. I just remember it was the combination of puberty and being gay. That was just very, very, very traumatic for me, and realizing adults around me in my life have sex and that I feel differently than they do. I think my parents were very good about sitting down and reassuring me or helping me. After the conversations with my dad, I oftentimes feel a lot better. But I think that my sexuality was on my mind, probably like at least three-fourths of the day. Just like, “I'm going to go home, and I have to be careful because my parents won't be home, and maybe I'll have some bad urges.” I think I got so caught up in policing myself that it was a pretty hard experience. I don't know, junior high sucked. LR: Were there any highlights in junior high? That just was the one thing that, okay, this class or this friend made it tolerable? AC: CJ was my really good friend throughout junior high, and Avatar The Last Airbender came out, so that was great. I am a huge Avatar nerd. I just like the culture. I started playing video games, and I got really into playing video games with my brother. I was a pretty big nerd, though I was outdoorsy. I still am, kind of. So there were highlights and I'd go camping a lot with my family. My brother started working at a scout camp between Yellowstone and the Tetons named Camp Loll. I 11 started working there; I volunteered there between my eighth grade and ninth grade year, and I really enjoyed it. That became a really important thing for me. So there were highlights, but I think it was a pretty rough time. High school got better and it's been a continually better trend over time. LR: You mentioned high school, so let's jump to Ogden High School then. AC: High school, I really became defined by my summers in high school. I had a lot of friends, but I didn't have a best friend; CJ started hanging out with other people. I would go spend like 10 weeks of the summer at this scout camp, and that was a really important thing for me. I learned a lot about my personality and how I can do hard things, and I became more self-assured that I was able to live a life that would be good, and I didn't have to be wracked by the weight of eternal damnation. I loved being in nature and the scout camp was right on the end of this beautiful lake in this forested valley. We would go hiking into Yellowstone and then into the backcountry and down into the Tetons. Every single summer of high school, I would spend up in this forest isolated. I would write letters to my friends, but I had a lot of friends up there too, because you're doing a really hard thing. You become really close to these people and then in the year, we wouldn't see each other very much, just every once in a while. So I didn't have a lot of really close friends at high school. I had a lot of friends around me and I always had stuff to do, but I was better at academics in high school, and so I felt kind of more capable. I found out I really liked history. I took an AP Biology class. I took AP Calculus, which I don't even know why I did, but I did well on it. I didn't do well on the test, but I did well in the class because I put a lot of work into it. I thought a lot less about my sexuality in high school than in junior high. I still had a lot of conversations with my dad and I didn't tell anyone. The only people that knew were my brother and my dad and my mom and then my therapist, which I forgot to 12 mention. At the end of junior high, my parents started sending me to a therapist who did late conversion therapy. It wasn't like shock therapy or anything, but it was a lot of me writing down my triggers and then making a plan on how to avoid my triggers, where my triggers were like ‘men and boys’. I was a very, very, very gay kid, and so my triggers are like, everything. So how do I avoid everything? I would spend a lot of time outside, and I learned I liked writing a lot, so I spent a lot of time writing in notebooks and writing down stories and making up magical worlds. I would make maps all the time. I would try plans of houses. By high school, I learned about a lot of activities and I could do that. I didn't have to think about other things, and I was still invested in church a lot. I was doing a lot of that stuff, but I wasn't so much worried about my sexuality by then because I knew that I'd be fine either way, and I could suppress it enough to be normal with my friends and everything. LR: So you talked about the summer in the scout camps, and how you found a lot of self-assurance? Was there something specific about that? A person, or was it just the experience? AC: It was the entire experience. So the scout camp I worked at was very well-run and they had a very defined program. I would go up every summer with the same, or almost the same group of people, so over time, we just became really close. It's kind of a family-style environment. The director and his wife are very warm. Then there's an assistant director and his wife, and they just treat you like family, and you eat family-style in the lodge as a staff member. You have the weekends when there's no scouts; they leave on Saturday morning and then they come on Monday morning, so you have two days to just enjoy this beautiful wilderness camp. If it were a campground that were open to the public, it would be extremely attractive, I think, to people because it's so beautiful. We would hike around a lot, we would 13 swim in the lake and go to do different things, and then the weeks were really stressful, but they were really fun. You're always doing something, so it's nice on the weekend to just relax or enjoy the camp. I think on that note, though, I still got a lot of messages that being gay was bad. There was a waterfront director before I started working there that came out, and he was not able to come back after he came out, because the Boy Scouts at that time had a policy that no leaders could be openly gay and that no boys could be open gay either. One of my friends from one of my first summers came out and he was not invited back either. So I realized that if I did give in to my temptations or whatever, that I wouldn't be able to go up there. So there is still a problem, I think, about not having any sort of positive LGBTQ experience. I didn't have anyone in my life that was LGBTQ in a way that I was able to talk to them or feel like it was a life that I would like to have. I realize now, looking back on it, that it was kind of problematic in that way the Boy Scouts policies were pretty openly homophobic and bad. But I realized as a kid, if I came out or if I was open about my sexuality or my temptations, that I wouldn't be able to go out there in the summer. That would have been really devastating to me. In junior high and high school, I used to tell people I was same-genderattracted and not gay, because gay for me felt like I was giving in to all of this culture. I saw it as a very negative thing. But being same-gender-attracted wasn't negative in the same way. I don't even know what same-gender-attracted means. LR: In high school, did you ever date at all? Did you do any of those normal high school experiences? AC: Yes. Like I mentioned in junior high, I would just find a girl that I thought was really cool and just hang out with them. I remember, as a sophomore, I went on a date with a girl. She was just really cool, very fun to hang out with, and she was also 14 really outgoing and had a pretty fiery personality that I thought was fun. When I realized she liked me, I just stopped 100%. I was like, “Oh, I want to be her friend.” So I just completely withdrew, and that happened a lot when I'd find out that someone liked me; I would just act very naive or be aloof. In junior year, I started dating a girl, like actually, we were dating, which meant that we just hung out a lot and did a lot of fun things. We would go hiking, or we'd go get food; we would go to events at the high school together and we would kind of hold hands. This happened for like six months, we would just hang out a ton. When we'd have talks about our relationship, I'd just be like, “Well, we're not exactly friends, but we're not like boyfriend and girlfriend.” I just didn't want to define what it was. Then one time, I was dropping her off and she said, “Why don't you ever like to kiss me?” It really did cause me to think, “Why don't I have any urge to kiss her?” It hadn't even entered my brain and I was like, “Oh, I just like having fun with you.” Pretty soon after that, she dumped me. I was sad because I couldn't hang out with my friend anymore, but I had no physical attraction to her, so that was bad. As a kid, I was like, “Okay, I need to learn how to kiss girls.” When I was a senior, I went out with a girl, and I think I felt really bad afterwards, and I still feel bad. I just specifically went out with her because I knew that she liked me and I just wanted to prove to myself that I could kiss a girl. So I did, and it was fun, but I wasn't physically attracted to her. I was just really trying to show myself that like, “You can be straight if you want to be.” It was kind of ironic because my takeaway was, “I can't.” So I just kind of stopped trying after that. That was a nice decision. It felt good to not force myself into any of those situations. I would go on dates still, I would go to dances with my friends, and that was always really fun. But I didn't 15 really show any sort of physical affection or anything to anyone. That was nice that I stopped trying. LR: Okay. So as you're getting towards the end of your high school experience, and knowing that you were really enmeshed in the culture of the LDS church, did you feel the need to serve on a mission? AC: I did. I was one of the oldest in my grade, so I knew that I would like to go pretty soon after graduation. Then you had to be 19, so I knew I could go up to camp for the summer, and then coming back from that, I could turn 19 and then go. I mentioned, my parents were pretty devout, but also centered, problematically religious. I remember my mom sitting me down towards the end of my senior year and saying, “Your dad and I do not care if you stay home. If you don't want to go, please don't go. You can go to Weber State or wherever you want to go and just do your thing. We don't want you to go and have this experience if that's not something that you want to do.” That was really nice to have that and know that so many of my friends were shamed by their family for not wanting to go. I had a friend who was kicked out of his home for not going on a mission, and he's not even gay. He just didn't want to go on a mission, so it was really reassuring to me that I knew that I would always have my family. My family would support me no matter what I decided to do. I think that started opening the door to how my parents often talk about, “We were all in the closet together,” because my brother and my dad and mom and I, we're all keeping this secret for probably like 12 or 13 years. This was kind of where things started to change. But I did feel the need to go on a mission, and so I went up to camp. Being 18, I could be a partial adult within the BSA. I could be a leader, but not a full leader, because you have to be 21 to be a full leader. I had a lot more responsibilities and it was a really good summer. I was able to lead some of the backpacking trips into the Tetons and then into 16 Yellowstone, and I already had my mission call. I got my mission call in June of 2012, and it was to Retalhuleu, Guatemala. I started learning a little bit about that and the culture, and it was exciting for me to be going out of the country. I did not want to stay in the country. I was excited about how there were a lot of Maya people in Guatemala, and I didn't have to learn a Mayan language in my mission. I was learning Spanish. It was like, “Yeah, it's really exciting for me.” I had my farewell in September. I had my birthday, and then I left on October 3rd. It's a bad birthday if it's before your mission, because then people just give you scriptures and stuff and, “Oh, thanks.” I like all this stuff for my mission, which is fine. I think at that time I was happy about it, fine with it, but it didn't ever feel like a birthday. My grandma gave me a church book and I was like, “Thanks.” I left on October 3rd, 2012, and I went to the Provo MTC. They used to have this big parting ceremony where the families would go in with them and then everyone's crying and they go their separate ways. But by then, they just threw us out at the curb and, “Bye.” That was kind of nice because it removed this emotional aspect and I didn't cry. Even my mom was really sad. I was happy. I was excited and sad that I wouldn't see my family. I was particularly worried about my grandpa because I thought he was going to, you know; he was getting pretty old by then. When I said goodbye to him, he had these rental houses on Harrison and Capital, which were kind of a black hole of improvement projects. He was always over there, even like 90 years old, so we went over there to find him. I could say goodbye to him. He said something like, he would come down to see me, or he'd be there with me at some point. I was like, “Okay,” so I was really worried that he was going to die, but he didn't while I was on my mission. I'm kind of rambling now. 17 LR: No, you're not rambling at all. Being on your mission, how was that for you, knowing that, “This is who I am, and yet I can't be myself. I have to just kind of walk the straight and narrow here.” AC: Well, I didn't really think of it that way. I didn't want to be gay, and so it was something I was actively rejecting still. I was learning how to reject even more by this pure form of Mormonism than I was learning and then teaching. If you have experience with a mission, it really excites you about the religion and teaches you the very doctrinal, correct, form of it to the point where my family would always be so annoying. They just keep talking about the church, even though we were members; something you really notice is how someone during or after their mission really stands. I don't know if that's an experience you've had. I spent three weeks in Provo and I had a really good group of missionaries in my district in the MTC. It was two or three companionships of elders, and then two companionships of sisters and sister missionaries were going to Florida, and then between four of us boys, two were going to Guatemala and two were going to El Salvador. We were all learning Spanish together. After three weeks, I didn't really like the Provo MTC because I could see the mountains and I felt very enclosed. I just really wanted to go hiking. I had these coping mechanisms that I learned in high school of being out in nature, but I was unable to access that and it got even worse. After three weeks, we went down to the MTC in Guatemala City, and it was so crazy for me. We had a night flight through LA, and then we got to Guatemala City at like 6 AM, right as the city’s waking up and everyone's going to work. It's this huge metropolis that's kind of sprawled out throughout this valley, and I could see how green it was. I was in this crazy painted bus that they picked us up at the airport, and they took us in, and it was this building with this fence around it, and it had like a basketball court and things. We weren't allowed to leave, and we went to 18 the temple twice, which was next door. We went to a shopping mall once, which was across the city. I don't want to go to a shopping mall, I want to go do other things, so it felt very isolating to be in this environment. I was really happy to leave the Guatemala City MTC and go to Retalhuleu, which is on the Pacific coast, and it's a coastal plain. It's like an hour away from the actual sea, but it's only like 30 meters or 30 feet above sea level, and it's just this really long, flat coastal plain that's very tropical and humid. It butts up against these really tall mountains that are like 11,000 feet tall, and then after that, you're in the highlands of Guatemala, and that's a completely different environment. I spent the entire two years there as a part of our mission in the mountains, and I really wanted to go there, but the mission president never sent me there. I was always on this coastal plain. I did notice my sexuality a lot in my mission. It feels like I was repressing it as best as I could. But I was like a 19, 20, or 21-year-old; I realized that was generally attracted to lots of the people I saw in Guatemala, lots of the men I saw. It's a very hot environment; lots of times people don't wear much clothing. So over time on my mission, generally, there were a lot of impure thoughts, which meant that I was just like, “Oh, that guy is really attractive.” That became really hard, and I never told any of my companions about it at all. I was really afraid that they would find out. One of the worst things that happened on my mission: I was about like three months away from coming home, so I had done almost my entire mission. I was in my last area in a city called Mazatenango, and my companion was a guy from Mexico, and he was just really hostile with me, very rude. Eventually, we had a companionship inventory, which meant we just sat down and I was like, “What is wrong with this? What's going on that you're so mean to me?” He's like, “Nothing.” 19 I was like, “Okay, we're not getting up from these chairs until you tell me about what I've done and how I can be a better companion to you.” He just said, like, “I see the way you look at people.” I was like, “What?” He's like, “I see the way you look at men.” I was like, “Oh, he's my first companion who’s actually noticed.” We had this big conversation about how this was something I had to root out of myself and repress my great spiritual burden. Ironically, I have now found out that he's also gay. Maybe he had his gaydar that he could tell that I was gay as well, but he didn't tell me that at that time, and we haven't really talked since our missions. But someone else from my mission told me that he's gay, so that was the irony in the whole story. I think also, one of the not logical, but outcomes of being gay and whatnot, is oftentimes that internalized homophobia and really loathing other people who are gay, trying to reject that. I think that was the situation, but it had gone on for a while. LR: Did you ever mention it to your mission president, or did you tell anyone on your mission? AC: Yeah, that got really bad. At the end of my mission, I had repressed everything for so long and it became increasingly hard, and we would write home on Mondays. We could only call home twice a week. I'm really angry that they changed their rules now because the church has become much more tolerant or lenient with missionaries, and they were so strict with us, especially on my mission. Presidents were so strict, we could only call home twice a year, and we could write home to email every Monday. Because the time zones are very similar, I was able to just chat with my mom on email. You're in these internet cafes, and lots of them are very divided up, so the computers do have their own kind of private space. I succumbed 20 to temptation, and I had to tell my mission president about that because I felt very guilty. So I told him that I'd looked at some images in the computer internet cafe. It was like two or three weeks before I was going to go home. My entire group that was going to go home at that time, I knew every single one of them, and I was pretty close to lots of them. They were all going to the temple, which is up in the mountains in Quetzaltenango. They were all going to go to the temple, and we hadn't been able to go to the temple our entire mission. It's just like a day trip. It's really fun and you go up and you're in the mountains, and it's a completely different climate than down on the coastal plain. It's like 7,000 feet, very green and colder, and it's also a very indigenous part of Guatemala, so there's a lot of Maya groups that live up there. I was really excited to go. I had gone once before or twice before, but I hadn't gone in several months, and he told me I couldn't go and I should stay home and do normal missionary work. That felt very ostracizing, and I had a lot of my group asking me why I couldn't go. I told them I had to help out with a problem in the zone because my companion was also going. The mission president just said that he didn't want both zone leaders to go and leave the zone, which I think lots of them knew something was wrong. I was just wracked with guilt, and really sad that I couldn't go and spend that time with my peers who I spent two years with, or 18 months, if they were the sister missionaries. I kind of resent that. I really disliked my mission president, and I was very frustrated even coming home. I stopped contacting him very quickly. I had him on Facebook, and I unfriended him because I just felt like his response was very cruel, in a way, especially after I spent two years in a foreign country for the church. It felt like he was trying to teach me a lesson through some kind of unjust way and means. AS: I have a question. LR: Yes, please. 21 AS: What was it like coming home after this because it was close to you coming home? AC: Yeah, so I knew I wanted to go to Weber State. My entire family had gone here. I remember asking permission to go home three weeks early so I could start the semester because I had left in October. Then there was this weird change in the dates, so they were sending us home three weeks earlier, so I was coming home in the middle of September. I just asked if I could go home like six weeks before I start college, and this mission president was like, “No, you have to do it all.” So I came home and I did ACCUPLACER math sort of stuff, and I did a lot of gardening. I was really excited to be home and I really loved to be back with my parents. I did not miss my mission at all. I missed speaking Spanish with people. I missed the people, the situations I was in in Guatemala, and the food and stuff. I did not miss the mission organization at all, and I came away kind of very frustrated with that because I felt I had a lot of frustrating experiences over my mission with different companions and being kind of attached at the elbow to them. I'm the kind of person that I really like to have alone time. You don't get any of that in the mission. So I loved being home and I loved being back with my parents, but they would go to work and I did a lot of yard work for them and I would listen to audiobooks that I wasn't able to listen to for two years. I started drawing maps again and doing just the things that I did as a kid that I really loved. It was really good for me to be back in my environment. Back in Weber State, I was able to test out of all my math in the semester that I wasn't going to school, but I was getting ready to go back. I went back in January of 2015, but very quickly after I came home, I had complete freedom from my parents. “You're an adult, so we're not going to parent you so much.” I very quickly started exploring my sexuality again through the internet, and my parents realized and had like this sit-down conversation. My mom was like, "I really hoped 22 that you put this behind you and be done with this by now. You just need to figure your things out and decide what you want and then let us know." She was very angry that I was kind of stepping back into these old roles, these old behaviors. But after two years of trying to repent, I had all sorts of pent-up feelings and emotions. So I was like, “Okay. I need to try harder,” so I tried to be super obedient. By then, I wasn't the same-gender attracted, I decided I was same-sex attracted because gender and sex aren't the same thing. I learned that in college. I was going to the singles ward a lot, and I told my bishop that I was same sex-attracted. My bishop, actually, he works on campus; he runs the bookstore, so I'd see him all over the place and then down at the singles. My singles ward would meet at the institute building, so I was back in this very small radius that I had lived in my whole life. I was back with my grandparents now. Neither of them had died on my mission, which was very good. My bishop's response, he was very kind, very reassuring. He didn't really care that I was looking at pornography. He was just like, “You're a good person. I love you,” and he was very reassuring and made me feel very good. But he also gave me a calling as a ward secretary, working with him very closely. After I came out, I would go on dates with people who had left the church as well, and lots of them were executive secretaries. I think it's like, “Do they all come to the same conclusion that they should put the gay kids as the executive secretary?” It was very suspicious. I was at church all day on Sunday; I had activities through the week. I spent a lot of time in the singles ward, and I was, at the same time, peeling away from it because I started studying history and I was studying social systems. I was like, “This whole thing feels like social control.” At the same time, I was becoming more and more frustrated with my sexuality because I came home from my mission. I 23 should have mentioned that after my whole debacle with the mission president and my companion, I wrote myself a letter in the last week of my mission, and I sent it to myself through the mail. Mail from Guatemala takes like three weeks or longer to get here, if it ever arrives. So I sent it to myself through the mail. It was a letter just pleading with myself to reject my sexual temptations and stay on that path. I had this kind of idea of how I needed to be. In the letter, I say, “You can be whatever you want to be,” which we say to a lot of people, which I don't know is always the best message we give to kids because I had been trying to be straight at this point for ten years or so. It wasn't working out for me. I really tried to date, very hard. After I got home, I went out with a girl from high school that was also my neighbor who was just really cool and I felt very awkward. It was a double date with two other kids that went to high school with us, and she was really cool, but I was kind of distant the whole night. I went on similar double dates with people; I was in the honors program here at Weber, and there was a girl in one of my classes that clearly liked me. I tried to go out with her and she was very physically affectionate and I kind of ghosted her. I was very frustrated and my family dealt with a lot of grumpy Andrew over those years. So the conclusion I came to over the course of a year was that I was not going to date, but not pursue my sexuality. I was going to be a good brother and son and friend and uncle, because my sister had kids by now. I came out to my sister and told her kind of my plan. She was kept in the dark for a very long time, unfortunately, and she felt really bad about that. I wish I had the courage to tell her earlier when I was younger. I just decided to not worry about it, which was another point that was very liberating for me. I didn't have to date and I didn't have to think about my sexuality, and it was fine, and I was going to therapy and stuff, and I was heavily involved in the single ward. I also was in different 24 departments here at Weber and that's when I started to get different exposures to LGBT people and lifestyles that I was like, “That couple looks really happy and I'm not happy.” I mean, I was happier than I have ever been, but at the same time, I was still pretty frustrated with different things in my life. My brother was doing a graduate program back east, and he would call me and just talk to me and just slowly introduce ideas like, “Hey, what if you just decided to come out?” I would get really angry with him, like, “How dare you suggest that, that’s so bad.” At this point, my brother had left the church and in talking to him about it, his big catalyst to really question the church was my sexuality, which was interesting to me. That wasn't my decision right off the bat, but it was his, to the point of questioning the church. People just started slowly planting seeds, but I really held on and I was like, “I'm going to keep doing everything I have to do in the church.” I just stayed in this weird middle ground area for a long time. I remember, I think it's October 13th, like National Coming-Out Day, this was probably 2016 or so. My mom came up to me in the kitchen and she was like, “Hey, babe, just own it. Just come out.” I was so angry with her and I remember being really upset that she would suggest that, but my whole family saw that I was just miserable and not living a life that was healthy for me. All these catalysts, all these things started to get me thinking. One of the big things was, after my mission, I went back to work at the Scout camp, and I was now old enough to be one of the program directors. I was over the nature staff and I was teaching my junior staff members. I had like 25 junior staff members and then a codirector, and we were training them on how to teach merit badges and how to do nature walks and showed them plants and animals, all these things I loved. The camp director, I was really close with him. His son, who was one of my directors as a kid, had come out while I was on my mission and got married. He and his 25 husband invited me and my family to the wedding. I went to the wedding and I saw S, who I had known as a kid and really looked up to, in this environment where they seemed really happy. Their dogs were the ring bearers and I was like, “This is so cool.” I knew that I could talk to my camp director, who is S’s dad, about this. We were in the car, camp hadn't started yet; we drove up to check the snow levels in June and we were driving back and we dropped off some of the other people in Logan. Then it was just me and him from Logan down to Ogden, when he dropped me off. I told him, “I'm same-sex attracted, and I don't know what to do about it.” It was a really beneficial conversation because he was saying, “For me, sin is physically, emotionally or mentally harming another person or myself. If you love someone, how is that harming them? How could it be sin?” That started changing the definitions I had about what it meant to be evil or bad. Then combined with lots of what I was learning here at Weber State, I just gradually felt over time, the lifestyle I was living or the decisions I had come to were no longer good for me, even though at one point it felt very liberating. I held on to that from June all the way into November or December. I was at a very low point and very frustrated. My college job, I was a tutormentor at the Ogden School District. I was back at Ogden High with a group of students, and one of my students asked me to proofread her essay for a scholarship. It was about her experience coming out in junior high and her family's reaction and just how proud she was to be gay and how she was excited to live her life openly. I was like, “Man, my student at 17 years old is braver than I am at 23.” I told her, "Wow, this is really impressive." I helped her with her essay, and then around February, I finally got enough courage to just finally come out. 26 I had decided to be really good and do the church thing until I didn't want to. Lots of people lead kind of a double life, which I don't think is particularly bad, and I think that might be a solution for them. But I didn't want to feel the guilt of going out and living and wearing my sexuality on Saturday and then going to church on Sunday. I was really, really devout until the moment I came out. I started telling people, and I would tell people one-on-one. I didn't really want to post anything on social media, but I would just tell people about my experience, a more condensed version of the entire story I just told you. But I started telling friends and family members, and the majority of them were very, very supportive and loving and kind. I do have two negative experiences, but my bishop, who wasn't the same bishop as the guy that runs the bookstore here. He was actually this new bishop, who was my family practice doctor, which is fun. He was extremely supportive and he was like, "Well, you don't have to do this calling anymore.” I was like, “Great, I don't want to.” He's like, “You're always welcome to come back in and come to church.” He called me like two weeks after I had this discussion with him. His first question was, "Have you been on any good dates?" I was like, “No.” But he was just so reassuring to me, to have this ecclesiastical leader who is completely interested in my well-being and very supportive of my decision to start dating. I came out in February and I did start dating, and that was a big whirlwind of emotions. It was hard for me to go through experiences at 23 that lots of people have at 16. I would get really frustrated when people would ghost me or not reciprocate my feelings, and I had to learn how to handle that. Then, when I knew 27 someone liked me, but I didn't like them, my old method was to be aloof, but that didn't really work at 23. I had to learn how to tell people, “No, thank you.” It was a very liberating experience, but at the same time, it was an extremely anxious time in my life. My studies in the history department were getting more intense, and I had to do a lot of homework. I ended up going part-time that semester, and my professors were very understanding and very kind and even shared with me, on a personal level, lots of their experiences. I think it was a very exciting time and it was very good, but just the anxiety is completely changing my worldview or opening my mind to these things that I had always repressed. It was very difficult. I didn't sleep very well. I had a hard time just taking care of myself. I don't know if that's a shared experience, but that was like a very hard time. I don't know if that happens to like lots of LGBT people when they come out, but I had so much anxiety. I was just so worried about what people would think about me and my family and friends that I didn't tell them face-to-face. I knew that if I told my aunt, that she would maybe tell my other aunts. I was worried about what my mission friends would think of me. So I limited my Facebook to very select things. In person, everyone was so supportive and kind. But I was so worried about what people would say or think of me that I lost a lot of sleep over it, and I really worried a lot about it. In the end, if I lost some friends, I think that's probably a good thing. I don't want to be friends with people who aren't willing to accept my life decisions and love me for who I am. I worried a lot about the dynamic changing and things changing. I just talked for a long time, so I'm sorry. LR: No, please don't be, I just don't want to go over time. I have a few more questions, and I don't really want to rush through this last part, because I probably have 28 another 45 minutes left. How would you feel if we just set up another time to finish this up? AC: Yeah, that sounds great. Part 2- June 16, 2022 LR: Today is June 16, 2022. We are in the Stewart Library with Andrew Crookston finishing his oral history interview for the Queering the Archives Project here at Weber State. I'm Lorrie Rands conducting and Kyle Jackson is with me as well. Andrew, when we left off, you were just coming out to your family and friends and still trying to decide who to tell. AC: Yes. LR: I'd like to pick up there because I know that leads to going to Spain. Let's just start there. AC: Reading through my transcripts this morning, I had talked about how, at first, I would tell people I was ‘same-gender attracted’, and then changing that after my mission to ‘same-sex attracted’, but I wouldn't tell anyone. The only case in which I would say that is to a therapist or a church leader who I felt like I had to confess to. Nobody, none of my friends, my sister didn't know. It was a very small group of my brother, my parents, and then therapists and bishops that I would talk about this to. I had over ten years to really lock it down. This was my big secret and I didn't want anyone to know. Last time, I was mentioning how I was in the singles ward. I was, again, in a very small radius of Ogden. I had a calling in the singles ward, so I was at church a lot and I was at activities throughout the week. That took up a lot of my time. Then I got a job through Ogden School District as a tutor and mentor through a grant called Gear Up. So I worked at Ogden High over the time I was coming out, and I ended up working at Ogden High as long as I went to high school there, which 29 has changed a lot of my experience with the high school itself. Sometimes I can't remember: was that experience something that I had as a student, or as a staff member later? I do have to preface this, and I don't know if you want to cut this or not, I had a pretty bad bout of COVID in May and I have brain fog, pretty bad. Sometimes it's hard for me to get my thoughts together. LR: It's okay. That's something I have dealt with, with my stroke. I understand. AC: It's terrible. LR: It is frustrating, and so I understand. AC: Thanks. So this interview might be a bit more scattered. LR: It's okay. AC: This phase of my life took a long time to come to the conclusions that I came to, and a lot of work with different therapists. I was seeing a therapist after my mission while I was in my first or second year here at Weber State, through LDS Family Services, which is interesting because it's mental health under the lens of the church. Surprisingly, the therapist made some suggestions that I didn't think she would make, like, "Why don't you just come out?" I was like, “Cause that's not an option.” I felt like that would be the end, completely giving in my whole effort and things I had built up in my mind. Until then, that wasn't an option. It didn't make sense. But I did have a lot of breakthroughs through counseling and seeing a therapist, things now that I'm like, “Oh yeah, that's basic. Like, it's okay to…” Well, the big one is “It's okay to be gay,” but there are a lot of little ones leading up to that. So I saw a therapist there for a while. I would get informal counseling from my singles ward bishop a lot. One of the small breakthroughs was like, “I don't have to date, and that's okay.” Dating women was a very terrible experience for me. Now 30 I hang out, like lots of my friends are women. That's not a terrible situation, to go and hang out with my friends. It was just the context that I was trying to do what straight people do on dates. I don't know what that exactly is, but my friend group was changing at the time, too. I decided to study history here. I love history, and I met some faculty members that I felt very supported by. One of my friends from high school, who was not really a close friend in high school, we reconnected. I can't even remember the context now, but we started hanging out a lot. She is not Mormon. She grew up in Michigan, I think, until she was like 14 and then she moved out here. By the time we were 21 and 22, she understood the climate a lot, and so she would hang out with me and listen to me. I still had a very religious mindset, very Mormon mindset, but we would talk in my car until like 2 a.m. about different things. She identifies as LGBTQ in some ways and is a very outspoken feminist. She helped me see a lot of things in different ways. I'm trying to think what year it was. Elections were kind of ramping up, towards the 2016 election, so we would talk about that a lot. My whole viewpoint was shifting a little bit to be more open-minded, both in terms of history and our society as well as religion, and then as well as different identities. In general, the atmosphere on campus for me—now, as a staff member, I recognize that this is not everyone's experience, but as a white male, I felt very comfortable on campus. I was confused about my sexuality, but lots of what I was learning in class helped me put different things into perspective. For the first time in my life, I was meeting people who are openly LGBTQ-identifying in a positive way, and hearing about that in a positive experience, so there was a huge shift there. I've met some staff members who were LGBTQ-identifying and helped me see that in a positive way. This was a theme when I was reading the transcript from last time that I think is really important, because up until then, there wasn't anyone in my life that 31 was openly gay or otherwise-identifying that I could see as a positive lifestyle. That was always framed to me as a negative thing, and in religious terms, like ‘eternal damning’ sort of way. There is this huge progression over time. I then identified as ‘same-sexattracted’, and made a distinction between sex and gender, thanks to probably some of my social science classes. I started coming out to people that weren't in this core group of people. My brother and my parents felt like they were in the closet with me for ten years because it was also a secret. I found out later that my brother did tell his best friend. Under that context, my brother's best friend, who is also my friend in many ways, I realized that for a lot of my childhood, he knew I was gay, which is sweet now. It's like, “Oh, he was nice to me, and this wasn't a problem.” It was a problem for my brother. He struggled with my sexuality in ways that I didn't struggle with my sexuality. He went on a mission to Russia and it was dark and cold and hard. He had a mission president that I think was abusive in many ways, so he started questioning a lot of things about the church. A lot of the root of it was the church's treatment of LGBT people. This is my brother thinking: “How could my brother, who's a really good person, somehow be excluded or denied something because of a decision he didn't make?” At this period of my life, after my mission, my brother had already left the church. It was kind of funny because I was still so devout. It's funny now, not then. I was still so devout, and the reason my brother left was because of something that was my problem, not his problem. He didn't live with us then. He was attending Harvard, so I would visit him sometimes and he was really good about respecting my decisions, but also just kind of planting some seeds, like “Oh, mentioned to my friend so-and-so that you are same-sex attracted and they just said that they love you.” 32 “Oh, well, my brother's friend in Boston loves me, that's nice.” I came out to my friend MK, who's the girl that grew up in Michigan that I mentioned. I should use names. It's very helpful in telling a story. I came out to my sister. I mentioned this in the last interview. I came out to lots of people in my car and I found out this is kind of a common theme in talking with other LGBT people. I think it's because you don't have to make eye contact with anyone because you're driving or you're sitting. We would go get shakes from Jake's Over the Top and go sit on Skyline with a nice view. Then we didn't have to look at each other, I could just talk, but look at the city. I mean, they're awkward conversations, or have the potential to be awkward. My sister cried, and I probably cried too. My sister was a music major here and then she ended up doing a BIS in Music, English and Communications. Being in the arts, I think she was around a lot of LGBTQ-identifying people and had some friends that identified that way. So she, in college, was also able to kind of adapt her views, and while still being a really devout LDS person, had adopted this sort of nuance when it came to gay people that I hadn't even adopted. She just felt bad that she didn't know. I feel bad now. I felt bad at the time, too. It was just supposed to work itself out. I wasn't going to have to tell her because one day I was going to wake up and be straight, which didn't happen, hasn't happened. She told her husband—she was married at the time—and they did a lot of research and searching. They intentionally wanted to raise their kids… at this time, they had one kid, now they have three, but they wanted to raise their kids in an environment different from the environment I was raised in, where LGBT people are talked about in positive ways. You know the thing where parents or people ask kids, like, “Do you have a girlfriend?” or “You have a boyfriend?” They didn't want to do 33 that. They wanted to leave space open for their kids to see their future with many different possibilities, and that these possibilities were okay. I mentioned my friend CJ a couple of times in the last interview. CJ and I were really close friends through elementary school and junior high, and then we kind of drifted apart in high school. CJ didn't go on a mission, and he had suffered some really harsh treatment by his family because of it. He ended up getting married to his college girlfriend, who also became my friend later on, and joined the Navy. CJ and I reconnected after my mission. He was still stationed, I think, in South Carolina—I always get it wrong—and then the Navy gave him an opportunity to get a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, so he decided to come to the U. For quite a few years while I was in college, he was here with his wife. They were both studying. I became really good friends with his wife, and CJ and I became close again. I went out with MK, my friend from Weber State. CJ and MK knew each other from high school, so the four of us went out on New Year's Eve. I was the DD; I did not drink at the time. We went out and we stayed out pretty late into the night. and then we went back to MK’s house. My friends were pretty drunk at the time, but I came out to them and their drunken reactions were perfect. They were just really loving and supporting. The next day, they did remember that I had come out to them, and we joke about it now, but I found this group of friends that was extremely supportive of me. I think I framed it at the time like, “I'm same-sex attracted. I'm still trying to figure it out.” I think I knew that eventually I would probably come out to everyone, but it was really scary to think about. I had built this huge wall of repressing my feelings. I think, in 2010 to 2020, there was like a huge change in how we viewed LGBT people societally within the LDS church. At this period in my life, my parents 34 were also getting involved in a lot of groups for parents of LGBT Mormon youth. They knew that a lot of LGBT Mormon kids were committing suicide or taking their own lives, and there were a lot of groups trying to get the LDS church to recognize that and make any sort of statement that would help kids stick around. I don't think their response was adequate, and that made me very angry. We would talk about these things at dinner, and my parents were also really frustrated. It was increasingly hard for me to reconcile my faith with my sexuality and my justifications for why I was gay. Under this context, I was kind of torn in many different directions, but steadily kind of coming to the point where I felt like I couldn't stay in the closet any longer. A big thing that happened to me at this time was, in my job at Ogden High, there was a student that I had worked with for two or three years. She wanted me to read a scholarship essay that she wrote, because at this point, the students were starting to do college scholarships and admission sort of things. It was about her experience in junior high, realizing that she was attracted to other girls. She really beautifully talked about that experience and how her parents were really terrified and didn't want her. They even transferred her schools because she had a crush on this girl. Even though her experience was really based around—I don't know if she was religious—but the Hispanic background and the context of her experience, it was very similar and reminded me a lot of my experience. She’d come out and worked with her parents to reach a point where she could be openly gay and came back to Ogden schools. It was a cool experience where I was supposed to be helping her with this essay, but it really, I think, impacted me more than it impacted her. I was like, “Well if a 17-year-old can be this brave and bold about herself, why can't I, at 23?” So that really got me going. This was a really low point. I struggled a 35 lot with depression and anxiety at different times throughout this period because it was hard for me to feel good about the future. Last time, I also talked a lot about my experience at a scout camp working and how that really shaped me in very positive ways, though there was the backdrop as well of the Boy Scouts being homophobic and having bad policies. When I got back from my mission, I wanted to keep working at this scout camp. Now, as an adult, I could be a director. I decided to be the nature director, which meant I had a huge staff of boys that were 15 to 17, and we were in charge of a ton of merit badges. I was increasingly interested in teaching in both of my jobs at Ogden schools, but also doing this in the summer, as I learned how to design curriculum around the merit badges we were supposed to do. I mentioned there's this really close family dynamic at the scout camp, and the camp director always felt kind of like a father figure to me. We worked really closely together at that time. While I was on my mission, his son came out and I watched how they handled that—and handled it very well, as a kid would hope. There was a moment where we were in the car together, driving back from the scout camp, and there were some other people in the car, but we dropped them off in Logan. From Logan to Ogden, where he dropped me off, we had a good chance to talk, so I came out to him. He's kind of a philosopher in many ways, and it's very good. He reasons a lot and so he talked a bit about his son's experience and his experience and his wife's experience with his son coming out. His son, at this point, had found someone, and he was getting married that summer, I believe, so they were welcoming their new son-in-law into the family. He said some things that really changed the way I thought. He talked about, even if from a religious standpoint, if sin is harming yourself or someone else physically, mentally, emotionally, or in any other way, how can loving someone be a 36 sin then? Why would God punish you for loving someone? How can something that you didn't choose be held against you? He made me feel very good about my decision to come out and it really impacted the way I thought. I was really grateful that I had decided to come out to him. He also told me to go talk to his son and his son-in-law. I'm getting the timeline kind of mixed up. So I talked to my friend, who's the camp director, and then the whole summer happened, and then I was helping the student with the scholarship letter around December. I can't remember if it was that Christmas time or New Year's Eve or the one before when I came out to CJ and MK. Then around February, I finally decided to go meet with my camp director's son, S, and his husband, M. So I messaged him on Facebook and it was like a whole big wordy text, because I was a history student, so I had to explain all the context and all the feelings. But I messaged him on Facebook, and he wrote me a really nice thing back and said, “Why don't you come over for Family Home Evening?” I was really worried because at that time, I knew that I didn't want to reconcile my faith with my sexuality any longer. I knew that a decision to come out would be a decision to leave the church. I didn't want to do what I saw a lot of people doing in my singles ward, which was like, go out on a date on Saturday night and then feel guilty about it and go to the bishop's office on Sunday. I went on a date with a man and it was great. I really wanted to do it. I didn't want to try to sit on the fence any longer, so I was worried when I was going to S’s house that him and his husband were doing some sort of Mormonism, but also like gay Mormons. I don't know, that's not a thing. I went over on a Monday night and we had pizza and we talked for a really long time. There was nothing to do with Family Home Evening. It was just on a 37 Monday night, so I don't know why he called it that—because it's relatable or something. They shared their experiences with me. Their experiences were different. My friend S didn't even realize that he had any sort of feelings towards other men until pretty late in college or high school or something. I was painfully aware of my sexuality at 12, and his husband M was more similar to being aware of being gay very early on. But he came out and his parents more or less accepted it, and he stopped going to church as a teenager and had a completely different trajectory. It was cool to hear all these different experiences. I was gathering in my mind: “Oh, well, this student that I work with had this experience, and this guy that I have known for a lot of my life had this experience, and then his husband had this experience.” So understanding my place in all this, putting myself into the context of my LGBT experiences in Utah. Also, my friend S is a drag queen, and at this time he performed quite regularly. I'm not aware if he still performs, but this was in 2017. Speaking back in the past, I think City Weekly out of Salt Lake named him as Drag Queen of the Year. I don't remember the title exactly, but he won some competition. He had a show in Salt Lake that Friday and Saturday. We were meeting on a Monday and he told me, “You need to come to this show.” I said I would, but it made me feel really nervous to do something so gay. It was in a bar, and I had gone to bars and stuff. It was actually a club, and I had been to those with my friends CJ and MI and MK, so I invited them and they said they would go with me. This was like my first gay outing. That was the day I decided to actually come out, February 6, 2017. It was kind of a very important date. It still is a very important date for me, and it's something that I kind of remember every year like, “I've been out for five years.” I can't do math. So CJ and MI and MK and I went down to my friend S’s show. His drag name is RH. Do you know him? 38 KJ: We did an interview with him. AC: No way, that's cool. LR: That is cool. AC: Yeah. So it was a great show. My friend jumped from the floor up under this railing. He's always done acrobats and been in gymnastics and things. It was really fun. I tried alcohol for the first time. I was on a completely new path, and it felt very exciting. At the same time, it was like I had so much anxiety, I thought I was going to die. I wasn't depressed anymore, but I was just completely anxiety-ridden, and when I have really high anxiety, I get insomnia. So I wasn't sleeping, which makes me have more anxiety. It was, at the same time, a very exciting time in my life and also a very unhealthy time in my life physically, because I was dealing with overcoming all of these barriers I had created throughout my life. I called everyone and told them, “I'm out now and I'm just gay. You can stop saying that I'm same-sex attracted or whatever.” I told my brother and sister that they could tell people and my parents as well because I didn't want to have the conversation with everyone, but I did want to have the conversation with certain close friends and family. I think that semester, I was full-time, and I was trying to keep up with my classes, but dealing with a lot of stuff and coming out to lots of friends and family. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it was a positive experience. In general, even when I was in the closet, I chose to surround myself with pretty open-minded and kind people, so nobody was a jerk. At this point, my grandpa had passed away, and my grandpa was very homophobic in many ways. 2015 is when DOMA was repealed, is that right? Marriage equality? LR: Yes, 2015. The court case was in 2015. AC: The decision came down. I was in his kitchen around that time and my grandpa was like, “How can nine people decide something that's so atrocious and bad?” I'm glad 39 I didn't have to come out to my grandpa. I don't think he would have understood. I think he would have said a lot of things that maybe would have hurt. My grandma, on the other hand, listened really intently and just told me that she loves me and that she doesn't understand everything, but she was super faithful in the church and just like, “Oh, well, God's going to make this work out. Just don't distance yourself from us.” That was really meaningful to me. My parents did most of the coming-out to the rest of the family. I'm not super close to my grandparents on my mom's side, so she called them for me. I equally think my grandparents on my mom's side are pretty homophobic. If they ever watch this stuff, I'm sorry for saying that, but I just heard a lot of things throughout the years that I feel like informed a lot of the decision to stay in the closet for so long. My uncle on my mom's side lived with us at the time because he had lived in Idaho my whole life, but he got a job down here in Ogden, and was in the process of moving his family down to Ogden. He lived with us, and a lot of heteronormative behaviors that I didn't even see from my dad were very apparent with my uncle. Whenever I was going out, he's like, “Are you going on a date with a hot chick?” I was like, “No, I'm not,” because at the time I wasn't dating. I would often ask my parents, “Can you tell Uncle B not to ask me if I'm going on a date?” because my parents weren't asking me those questions. They knew that was distressing to me and frustrating. So my parents had that conversation with him, and he didn't ask me at all anymore if I was going out on a date. The irony was, after I decided to come out on February 6, I was going on dates sometimes, and there was no interest in finding out about that. He didn't ask me anything about where I was going anymore, and that made me mad. There was one cousin on my dad's side that I wanted to come out to. Actually, I think several cousins, but this one cousin in particular, we're both pretty 40 close in age and we've always been close to each other. She was student-teaching at Ogden High at the same time I was mentor, so I would see her a lot, and her reaction was pretty okay. I actually went down a rabbit hole of talking maybe too much about my frustrations with the church, which she was still very devout about. But her mother is also a collector of information and pretty freely shares that information, so I didn't really think about, like, “Oh, coming out to her is going to be coming out to her mother, and then everyone is going to know.” Her mom is like Facebook friends with all of Ogden and all of Northern Utah, and that was kind of a low point in coming out. My cousin interpreted lots of what I said as being hostile towards the church—which maybe it was, I don't know, but there was a little bit of a lack of understanding, I think. Also, it was compounded by her mother getting a report of everything I said to my cousin, and then disseminating that to everyone in a way that I didn't want my view to be represented. On the other hand, on my dad's side still, I have another cousin I was really close to, and I came out to him, and he just was super loving. We had gone camping all the time, so I was like, “Let's just go camping and do all the normal things.” He helped me be distracted a lot from my anxiety. His mom hasn't been active in the church my whole life, and she was amazing and very loving. So it was a mixed bag of experiences and just a ton of anxiety. I remember the period pretty well. It was very exciting. I think I had to go through that time, but I don't think I would do it again. I started dating at the time. I'm trying to think of all the things I should say. Dating sucks, even if you're dating the right people. I had a lot of experiences and it was fun because of everything I had experienced. I had bad experiences dating women, and then dating men, I felt very comfortable overall, depending on who I was with. Things just clicked. It was like, “Oh, yep, I'm gay.” 41 Some of my experiences were pretty bad. I think that we should raise LGBT kids to understand the context of dating. They need to be aware of people who are bad. I have some friends here at Weber State that I think kind of prepared me for that. I didn't have absolutely terrible experiences, but there were a couple of people that I needed to set boundaries with or I just blocked. Blocking is okay. The way I was raised, I felt like, “Blocking people? That's so mean.” Definitely, some people deserve it. It was cool just to meet tons of people from similar backgrounds and different backgrounds and really affirm my decision to come out. I think from not dating for… at this point, like seven years, I had a lot of pent up energy, so I went on a lot of dates and I probably gave it more energy than I should have at the time. I think it was just so new and exciting for me that I would go on like several dates a week, meeting many different people throughout the week. It slowed down over time. I realized that, like, “Maybe going on this many dates is not the best for my personality or for my wallet.” I feel like I'm kind of rambling. LR: You're not. You’re actually making sense. I do have a question about your last little comment about, “We need to teach the LGBTQ about the context of dating and be prepared.” My question is, do you think from your own experiences, because it's so different here in northern Utah when it comes to dating. We expect—I hate to say the word ‘we’—but there's this expectation that we're going to teach our children how to date ‘normal’. AC: Yeah. LR: I say ‘normal’ like this [air quotes]. So when you say we need to teach the LGBTQ, well, exactly what do you mean by that? AC: So I mentioned early on that my parents practice parenting from love and logic. It's like, “Oh, you don't want to eat your dinner, but you can either eat your dinner or 42 you're going to go to bed without dinner, and that’s going to be really hard.” So it's setting a boundary or a circumstance and then having someone live the logical consequence, but then also practicing love. It's not sending your kid to dinner hungry, it's when they're complaining at 9 PM about being hungry, it's like, “Well, we had a chance to eat dinner, remember, and I'm going to give you a snack, but next time you actually need to eat your dinner at dinnertime.” I felt like I grew up understanding that my actions have consequences, both for my parents, but also for the wider church context. After coming out, I removed some of those supposed consequences. I no longer thought I was going to go to hell for being on a date with someone, which was positive. At this point, I was seeing a therapist here at Weber State and she was helping me process experiences. She explained it in a way that in an organized religion, especially one as strict as the Mormon Church, that maps your life out from the pre-earth life to eternity, they've got it all planned out for you. They set these limits, these guardrails, really strictly about what's good and what's okay behavior and what's not, and the social consequences, as well as the supposed eternal consequences of breaking certain rules, or whatever they call them. My therapist was like, “Now that you're in uncharted territory for yourself, maybe these boundaries that used to exist in your mind, or however they were set for you— maybe you have an experience that goes past those boundaries, and something works for you and you realize, ‘Oh, actually, I think my boundaries are there, this way.’ Or maybe you have an experience where you realize that your boundaries are closer to where someone set them. Maybe not exactly where someone set them, but that's okay to have boundaries and find out what works for you. That can change over time, but keep yourself safe and make sure that people aren't pushing past your boundaries.” 43 I think that, first of all, we have terrible sex ed in Utah, so I wasn't given good straight sex ed, but I definitely wasn't given good gay sex ed. Anything that I understood about gay sex was through the Internet, which is not generally a good resource. I wasn't looking at a health organization's page about how to practice safe sex or anything. So a lot of my journey, I think, would have been made easier if someone had explained this to me earlier on. I think the kids these days seem pretty aware of the environment they live in, and so I'm helping kids understand a little bit about realities and some of the consequences of those realities. I do think my parents raised me pretty okay, too. I don't know if this was from a conversation my mom had with me, but at the time, my mom had come back to Weber State for her bachelor's degree. She was doing public health, so she would talk to me a little bit about things like, “Are you being safe?” That translated to me contacting a friend from high school who worked at the Utah AIDS Foundation, and I had seen her post on social media about handing out condoms in different places. I knew there were resources out there for me, and I was at least smart enough to go to those resources. So I went to coffee with this friend from high school. Her name is MA. We went to this tiny cafe in the Avenues, and we were ordering, and the person that we were ordering from was someone we both knew from high school. She was a couple of years older than us and she actually dated my brother for a while, but then she came out and was, at that time, dating a woman. I think they might be married now. So I was kind of torn because I was going to sit down with MA and tell her the whole story and come out to her. But then MR, this other person that we both knew, was in front of me, and I wasn't going to explain the whole thing to MR. The way she came out on Facebook was like, “Hey, guys, I'm gay,” and that was not my style, but I admire it. 44 So I said to MR, and also MA, because she was right there, like, “Hey, MR, I'm gay.” MA was like, “I knew it.” I was like, “What, how do you know?” MR jumped over the counter and gave me a big hug. Then for like three hours, MA and I talked in the cafe, which was not a loud environment, but she— very detailed—talked about sex and STIs and different things that I need to understand about the gay male community in Utah. I think the whole cafe got gay sex ed from that conversation. There were definitely some teenagers nearby that seemed to be listening. I was like, “Well, it's probably good for them.” I informed myself pretty well and I knew the consequences of unsafe sex could be an STI that's treatable, but not curable. So I think that we could increase visibility of certain resources that do understand the context that LGBTQ+ people are dating in. I was lucky to find out about resources and information—and also look for information, but why is it hard to find? Why are we keeping the information over here? Everyone should know these things, whether or not they're LGBTQ+. Does that answer your question? LR: Yes, actually it does. Thank you, that makes a lot of sense. So when did you decide to go to Spain? Was it something you did through Weber State or was that just a whim? “I'm gonna go to Spain just because.” AC: No. So I got more involved during my senior year. I actually joined the diversity board and I was the LGBTQ+ awareness chair and I was doing programming for LGBTQ+ identifying students on campus. I did a gay sex ed event. It was very well attended, and MA came up, and a couple of other people came and were on the panel. So I was really involved during my senior year and I got a grant from the Office of Undergraduate Research to do historical research at an archive and then 45 also oral interviews in Guatemala. I went in January of 2018 to do that, and then I went back in May of 2018. That was fun because I was able to go back to Guatemala, where I had spent two years as a missionary, but under the context of being out now. I will say, too, I did a study abroad in the summer of 2017, right after I came out, for six weeks in Guatemala. It wasn't offered through Weber State, but it was offered through an institution that let other people come on their study abroad. I think Tulane and UT-Austin and Vanderbilt were coordinating this. So I went to Guatemala then, in the context of being out and gay, and that was really cool to see. I understand this society from a religious perspective, from two years being here. Now I'm coming back, several trips back to Guatemala, and met a lot of awesome people there. There's actually kind of a gay bar, not quite with that label, but it's like the bar where all the gay people hang out. I didn't know that as a missionary. So I was getting near the end of my degree, and I had worked really hard to do well in my degree and did my own research and then wrote my thesis, which took a lot of energy. I felt kind of burned out academically. I didn't really want to go on to grad school at that time, and I didn't really want to get a job here in Utah. I really wanted to get out of Utah because I was sick of living there. At some point, IS from the Spanish department—she's now the department head of the Foreign Languages Department—I was in a class that she was teaching and she said, “What are your plans after graduating?” I said, “I have no clue.” She said, “You should teach English in Spain,” and she sent me all the resources. Because I needed to turn in my application by February of 2018, I had decided to go to Spain after graduating pretty early on in my senior year. I did all the 46 applications, and I didn't want to go alone. I went alone with all my research trips to Guatemala, and I realized that traveling alone is not always a really fun experience for me. So I convinced my friend MK to also apply, and we applied as a couple because we wanted to be placed in the same area. That was kind of ironic and funny, that I was now out and open, but then I was applying for the program as a straight couple. The program is through the Spanish Ministry of Education, kind of federal. They have a Nationwide Ministry of Education, and each community of Spain has their own Ministry of Education. So I applied to that national one and that was approved. Let me think about how it went. So around June of 2018, I had already graduated, I found out that I had been placed in a Valencian community on the East Coast. There’re three regions of Spain, and Valencia is the third biggest city in Spain, but there's like 700,000 people. The two biggest cities are Madrid and Barcelona, and those each have like 5 million people. I was really excited, and I talked to people who had been to Spain before. I had friends and such and they said really good things about Valencia, but I wasn't placed in Valencia itself. I was placed in a town called Orihuela—has a sneaky H in there. That's so far south in the region of Alicante in the Valencia community that it's almost in a region called Murcia, which is its own region and community. I was learning about these regions and MK and I had a couple of months to do all our paperwork. Then we flew to Spain in September. Our jobs are in elementary school, and technically the program, it's an educational program. So the money we got each month was a stipend and it wasn't a paycheck. It wasn't a job, it was an internship or educational opportunity for the set purposes of the program. We were in this really pretty small town, and it was the last town before you got to Murcia. I wanted to stay in Utah for my birthday, my 47 birthday's end of September, so we left four days after my birthday on September 25th, and our job started on October 1st. For this one year with this program, we had to go and request a student visa at the Spanish Consulate in Los Angeles, which Utah is lumped into. There's a couple of Spanish consulates around the US, and they're divided up geographically. I would have preferred to go to the one in San Francisco—my brother was at Stanford at this time—and gone and stayed with him, but we had to actually apply for the visa and go to an interview in L.A. So we flew down and stayed with my aunt in Long Beach, and my aunt is very fun and not Mormon and took us out and we had a really good time. That was like July. Then we had to fly back for our visas before going to Spain, and so it was really tricky. We were very worried about the timing of all of this because if anything went wrong, we wouldn't have made it in time. So we flew to L.A., picked up our passports. It worked like clockwork, except we were really tired. Then we flew from L.A. to Madrid; it was a really long flight. We missed one high-speed train, so we took the last high-speed train to Alicante, and we stayed in an Airbnb in the city of Alicante. Alicante is right on the coast and it's a huge tourist city, so it was really cool. It was also very hot. Spain in the summer is very, very hot, and at the end of September is less hot, but for us, we were dying. It was really cool. We got to see the Mediterranean. I'm generally very attracted to Hispanic men, and so in Spain, I felt like I was entering a whole new world. Europe is, of course, a very welcoming or gay part of the world. Statistically, Spain has a lot more LGBT people than the rest of Europe. It was funny, the apps I would use to date in Utah, not really, but I felt like I got to know every gay man in Ogden, or at least I talked to them on an app or whatnot. But when I got to Spain, it was just so many more people. There were tourists. It 48 was really crazy. Then we took a train to the city we were going to live in, which was an hour south of Alicante, like I mentioned, right next to the region of Murcia. It was way different. It was like going from Salt Lake to Tooele. I don't know if that's a good analogy, but Orihuela was kind of in the middle of nowhere. I would get on the apps and there was nobody nearby. It reminded me a lot more of being in Ogden. We started our jobs. The elementary I worked at sucked. There was kind of a weird working culture. The teacher I was with wasn't the best to work with. The director was kind of crazy, and also either closeted gay or openly gay, but not in an appropriate way. It was a weird environment to go into, so I didn't really love living in Orihuela. The best thing about Orihuela was I could get back on the train because it was on the train line and go to Murcia, which was 20 minutes away and a bigger city. More open, which is surprising. This part of Spain in general was very kind of conservative, more religious, kind of more agricultural. I sometimes call it like the Idaho of Spain, and it's beautiful, like the beaches nearby, the Mediterranean, there's mountains, there's forests. It's pretty dry in general. My first year in Spain was kind of hard. The first couple of months, I did date a little bit and I met some really cool people. It was cool to be in an environment where no one knew my family or who I was. No one knew what it meant to be Mormon. When I was coming out, some people kind of advised me to maybe date other gay Mormons, because they would know what my experience is like, so I did that for a while here in Utah. Going to Spain, then my current-held beliefs were like, “Well if you're dating someone, they should try to understand your background because they want to.” I think it's nice to date someone that doesn't have the same baggage as you. There were a couple of people I really liked in Spain and I was again, dating a lot of people very often. 49 MK and I would work Monday through Thursday, 9 to 1. We worked 16 hours a week, we didn't get other jobs. Sometimes people would get jobs on top of that, but the stipend we got was pretty good, plus we lived in a pretty cheap area of Spain. We would travel on the weekends, we would go to different cities. We rented cars and we went to the beach, or we would take the bus to the beach. It was really fun. At this point, I really wanted to be in a relationship. Despite being out for two years at the time, I had never really found someone to date more than a couple of times, kind of be in a relationship. So I really wanted to be in a relationship with someone. I met some really cool people. In general—I think sometimes this can happen here, too—lots of the people I met were pretty noncommittal and that was really frustrating to me. From my background, I can decide pretty easily on things and then commit to them, for better or for worse. Around December, my friends CJ and MI came to Spain, and the four of us— with one of MI’s friends, so five total—traveled around Spain. We went to Valencia City, which was the capital of this community I lived in, and very different. I love the feeling in Valencia, and by then I had traveled there a couple of times. Bigger city, people are really nice in the region that I lived in. Down by Murcia, their accent is really hard to understand, even today. With the experience I have, it's still hard for me to understand the accent sometimes, but especially when I first got there. So in other parts of Spain, I could understand people better and speak more clearly with people. We went to Barcelona, which is very similar culturally and linguistically to Valencia, just like 5 million people instead of 700,000. Then we went to Ireland for a week, and while we were doing this trip, I was complaining to MI about boys and the boys I liked. MI was like, "You'll find someone, I know you." We talked a lot about it, 50 but she reassured me that I would find someone to date and I didn't really believe her. I was like, "No, I think I'm just going to be like this forever." I'm generally a pretty dramatic person. MK and I got back to Spain from Ireland on the 3rd or 4th of January. In winter in Spain, you get like three weeks of vacation around Christmas and New Year, so we didn't start working until like the 7th of January. I still had a couple of days, and I tried to get in touch with people that I had liked and wanted to keep seeing, and that still didn't go anywhere. I met some new people, and I was using Tinder, and I just generally liked dating people my age or older. But for some reason, in Spain, there's a lot of younger guys that can grow a beard. I lowered my age on Tinder that I was seeing to like 21 or something, and I was swiping away, and there was this really nice, handsome guy who had beautiful, long hair and this nice beard. I didn't even look at his age. There was this picture of him in front of the subway. The subway was moving behind him, and he was just amazingly handsome. So I swiped on him and we started talking and we exchanged numbers and we talked all night. I was starting work the next day, which was only four hours. I could fake four hours of being sleep deprived. He was a university student in Murcia, the town that I would go to a lot on the train, and we had a lot of similar taste in music. He spoke English really, really well and I spoke Spanish very well. Though I mentioned the accent was kind of hard for me to understand sometimes. He would talk a lot in Spanglish throughout this conversation, and we got to know each other pretty well over a couple of days, but we couldn't see each other until, I think, a Friday or Saturday night. [To Lorrie and Kyle] I'm going to tell you his name. His name is MO. Have you guys seen Encanto? There's a character named MO that I sometimes tell people here in Utah to place his name, which is a little bit of a spoiler. 51 We went out. The first time we met was in the historic medieval part of Murcia, which is a town that's existed for thousands of years. There's a narrow street and there's a lot of shops and things on it in the summer. They cover it with this canopy to keep the sun off it, but at this time there were flowers over the top of this street. It was really beautiful. It was pretty cold because winter in Spain can be cold. I saw this guy walking down the street and I was like, “Oh my gosh, that guy is so handsome,” and I was like, “Oh, that's MO.” I was on the other side of the street. It wasn't a super wide street, but there was a moment where I was like, “That's the guy I'm going on a date with.” We went to this place and we got a beer and we talked for a long time. He was generally just very cool and calm. I probably talked way too much and he talked a little bit too little, but we went to dinner. I missed the last train, so I stayed in Murcia with him and it was just an amazing experience and. He was like, "We should see each other again." I said, "I'd really like that." I left his house thinking that this is like 10,000 other experiences I had before, where I meet someone really cool and I like them and I'll never see them again because something will happen. We were chatting throughout the rest of the weekend and he had some family things to do that next day. His family lived in an even smaller town outside of Murcia. I was like, “Well, can I see you next weekend?” He was like, “I don't know, my sister has some things.” I don't remember how I said it, but I was like, "Hey, if you want to date me, you gotta commit to see me at some point in the next week." I don't think I was that rude about it; I hope I wasn't rude about it. He was like, “Okay, great.” We set a time, we saw each other, and then for the next two months, we saw each other like three times a week. I stopped looking 52 at the apps because he was a really cool guy and from a very different background than myself, but just his capacity to listen and hear about my past and try to understand it, though I think it's really hard to understand that super-religious background if you're not from a religious background. The relationship developed. A couple of weeks in, he was like, “I'm going to see a friend in Germany,” because he had friends all over Europe from doing a study-abroad for a year. He was going to Berlin. He had told me really cool things about Berlin and he was going with a friend from his hometown. He was like, “You should come with me.” So I got a 30-euro plane ticket to Berlin, and my friends from the English teaching program were like, “What if it doesn't work out? What if he's a weirdo?” I was like, “Well, it's a 30-euro plane ticket. I'll take the hit.” But we went to Berlin and that was really cool, and we started going on more trips with each other. Then my assignment was up in Orihuela in May, and I did not want to repeat there. I did not like living in the small town, and I wanted to be reassigned to Valencia. They prioritize your first reassignment, so you can kind of pick wherever you want to go within the same community. So I said, “I want to be in Valencia City.” I told MO, like, “Why don't you come to Valencia with me and my wife?” Because we applied as a couple, MK and I, she wasn't my wife, for the record. By this time, MK and MO knew each other really well and were also friends. I came home for summer of 2019. MO couldn't come to Utah. I wish he could have. He had some final exams in Spain—the university exams are either in the summer or right after winter break, terribly placed—so he had to study for those. We stayed in contact throughout the summer, and he started looking for an apartment in Valencia, for the three of us in August. We found one on the outskirts of the city. MO and I moved in in August, eight months after meeting each other, 53 which I wouldn't recommend. For the record, I think it's okay to take some more time, but we were both moving to the same city. It worked out right. MK came in September. August in Spain is super hot, except for northern Spain. But the apartment we got didn't have AC, so we spent all of August baking in the apartment and going to the beach and getting some relief, at least by getting out of the house in different ways. That's my story. Now I'm gay. [Laughs] We lived in Valencia for a year. COVID happened, but three years later, MO and I are still dating. I came back in May of last year for this job, and I convinced him somehow to move back to Ogden with me. He's at Ogden High right now because he's actually doing the same job I had at Ogden High. Now he's in that position independently. He found the position and applied; that was kind of cool. That is not the end of the story by any means, but at least as far as being comfortable being gay and wanting to be in a relationship for a long time and not feeling like that was an opportunity for me. The result has been really great. I hope it doesn't sound like I intentionally made this story seem simple, but meeting MO was extremely simple. We just met, it worked, we started dating, we kept seeing each other. There’re things we have had to work out, especially with cultural and linguistic differences. We've had a lot of long conversations about different things. When at any point friends or family talk about dating or seem to ask any sort of advice, it’s just like, “Well, just find someone that it works with,” but that's too simplistic. After a really long time of things being very complicated, the last couple of years have been really great, a reprieve from a complicated lifestyle. I don't know what questions you have. LR: Thank you for sharing. Just actually just have a couple of questions left, if that's okay time-wise. 54 AC: Yeah, I'm good. LR: Okay. [To Ky] Are you good, time-wise? KJ: Yep. LR: So kind of two finishing questions. Were you still in Spain when COVID started? AC: Yes. Yeah. MO and MK and I lived in this apartment without AC on the outskirts of the city. MO and I did an English teaching certificate through Cambridge English, which was not an affiliate of Cambridge University. In Spain and the rest of Europe, if you want to become certified in English, both as an English language learner or as a teacher, you can go through TOEFL. Cambridge exams are really difficult and very, very British-regimented and formulated. But we heard about this opportunity to become official English Cambridge-certified teachers and so we took that experience in September of 2019. We did a month-long intensive course that gave us so many hours of teaching experience plus certification. That year, on top of working in the elementary school, both of us were working in English academies on the side and making a little bit of extra money, which we were using to travel, both with MK and other friends at that point. We went on a lot of trips around Spain, and we should have gone out to Europe while we could, but we just kind of focused on saving money and being around. The apartment we lived in sucked. It was this old lady’s apartment that they cleared out and did not remodel. They repainted some walls and the rest were dusty, just producing so much dust and filth and things. It was rented through the old lady's son through a rental agency, and the rental agency was terrible. We were really anxious for our contract to expire. We worked and traveled through 2019 to the beginning of 2020. We started hearing about COVID. When Italy shut down, we realized that we were next. I think at this time, it was very confusing and hard to understand what was going to 55 happen. Because Valencia is on the east coast of Spain and there's cheap flights over to Italy, there's a lot of traffic between the two places. Coronavirus had kind of entered Italy through Milan, I think, up in the northern part of Italy. The Valencia City soccer team had played Milan sometime in February, right before Italy shut down, and a ton of people flew over because you can get like 30-euro flights over to Italy. We were just like, “This is going to be bad.” MO's dad kind of said something similar, like, “Hey, if you guys haven't already, maybe you should buy some food storage and things.” As you may know, it's not super common to buy in bulk in Europe; you go to the grocery store several times a week, you buy what you need, it's fresh. That was kind of our methodology. But we took several trips to the grocery store by our house and loaded up on dried goods and freezer stuff and alcohol and anything we thought we might need in case Spain locked down, which it did on March 15. My mom called on March 13 and was like, “I can get you home for like 200 euro,” or bucks, I can't remember. That's unheard of, that flights would be so cheap. I asked MK, “Well, should we fly home? This is just going to be two weeks, and then we'll be back to normal.” We just were like, “No, it's fine. We'll just deal with it here.” I also didn't want to leave MO. I had visa trouble quite regularly in Spain, even though I was working through the Spanish government. The bureaucracy is not easy to navigate, neither here nor there. I was worried about leaving and then having trouble coming back into Spain. The weekend started and things got really weird. The internet and the news made it seem like the world was ending. MK booked a flight on Saturday evening, and they announced then that Spain would go into lockdown on Sunday night. The whole atmosphere in the city was just crazy. On a normal weekend, there would be 56 people out and about all evening and all night. Spain knows how to party, and generally, I think people are pretty nocturnal. But MK booked a flight for the next day. We rode the subway with her. We walked around Valencia for the last time on Saturday night. [To Lorrie] Can we take a break? LR: Yeah, we can take a break. [Recording pauses for a break.] [Recording resumes.] LR: All right, you were talking about how MK had a flight on that Saturday night. AC: I do want to mention, too, that Valencia has their city festival in March. The biggest day of the festival is always March 19th, because it's a Catholic country and that's the day of San Jose or Saint Joseph. This festival is called Fallas. In Valencia, they speak Valencian, which is a dialect of Catalan. Fallas is rooted in, even preChristianity, traditions of people creating these statues out of wood or anything on their farm and having these festivals and then burning the statues at the end of the festival. All over Valencia they have these artists create these wood, styrofoam, cloth figures that are really beautiful and very professionally done. You walk around for several days seeing all these. Sometimes they're 50 feet or 60 feet tall. Every day at 2 PM, they have a giant firework thing, and they have one at 10 PM, which is actually fireworks with light. It's just really loud for the entire month of March. So to keep this in the context, COVID was happening, getting really intense and picking up right before Fallas was going to happen. The year before, our first year in Spain, we went to Fallas. We were living in Orihuela, but we went to Fallas to visit and we stayed at an Airbnb or something. But now we had a house in the city, and we could see the festival in all of its glory. We had the time off, which we didn't in Alicante. But things were getting bad. We had so many friends that were going to come stay at our house because it was a bigger house and people would sleep on the floor or whatever, but like we were getting really nervous. The city, 57 midway through preparing for Fallas, gets these lockdown restrictions from the central government. We walked around on Saturday night. MK already had her flight. She was leaving Sunday morning, and we were walking around the city, and for some reason, some of the street lights were off and there was no one out, when generally it should have been lots of people. I think people were already kind of worried about the virus, for good reason. So typically, on a Saturday night, there'd be people all around the city. It was fairly late, but we did a whole big circuit of the city. We probably walked five miles around, and there were partially built Fallas all over the city. Funny enough, in the city square, there was this Falla of a woman doing a yoga pose. It’s supposed to be calm, and they built this huge mask to put over her face as a kind of nod to what was going on. Her head was in one place and her body was over here. We were kind of wary of anyone that was out because no one was out, so probably just teenagers or youth walking around like us. We tried not to be in the same alleyways as them. The whole atmosphere of the city was panicked and odd, and it was so weird that the weekend before was this festival that should have been massive. People from all over Spain and other parts of Europe come to Valencia during this festival. It was dead. We took MK to the subway. We took her to the airport the next day, and then we were home alone when the lockdown started. We've coped in many ways. MO is the person that I've been alone with for the longest amount of time, hands down. There's nobody in my life that I've been alone with longer than MO because we were home alone for half of March, all of April, half of May. Then they started relaxing the lockdown protocols and we could start going out on walks again, but we couldn't go out on the sidewalk. We could go to the grocery store or the pharmacy if 58 we needed to; those stayed open. We had them both very close to our house. We had a pharmacy and grocery store. We were in this house for like eight weeks and we didn't have any outside space, which was a bummer. We had a balcony which was partially enclosed even. Even with my experience growing up gay, I tend to rewrite things to make them seem more positive in my head. We definitely didn't have as bad of an experience as some. I know for certain that we were very lucky, and it still sucked. In the summer we could go out more. We were able to travel, so we were able to go back to Murcia. MO's family has a house on the beach which we were able to visit in the summer. We were able to see friends, go to some restaurants and things. We moved out of our terrible apartment in May. We got a COVID discount on an apartment because this guy owned an entire building, which I can't even imagine, like two minutes away from the cathedral in the historic part of the city. Even for Europeans, most people live in a newer development or newer buildings on the edges of cities in Spain. To live in the city center, your family has to have an apartment there, intergenerational wealth or you're wealthy. But this guy had rented out his apartments as Airbnbs, so he didn't have any business and it didn't look like anything would come up. He listed this apartment and we were the first people to call on it. We got an appointment. He liked us and he offered it to us for much cheaper than we were renting outside the city center. It was an attic apartment with a cool loft area and a rooftop area that was shared with the building, but we ended up being the only ones that used it. The next year in Valencia was a lot more fun, but there were varying degrees of lockdown. Sometimes we could leave the city, sometimes we couldn't. Sometimes we could travel to other parts of Spain and sometimes we couldn't. The cool thing was there was less tourism in Valencia during the end of 2020 and 59 beginning of 2021. We had the city center of this ancient city to ourselves, and we would go to museums and we'd be the only ones in the museums. We would go to restaurants and we never had to wait for a table. It was kind of a cool aspect of the pandemic. We were pretty lucky in the second year. It was much better. But I hadn't seen my family in two years; a lot of calls on FaceTime or whatever. I told MO, he hadn't met my family in person after two years of dating. We talked virtually, but I just said, “I really want to move home for a while. Do you want to come with me to the US, to Utah?” He somehow agreed. He's always liked traveling and he's always wanted to see the US. I think when he thought of seeing in the US, it was like L.A. and New York and Florida, definitely not Ogden, Utah. I started looking for jobs in the school district and also at Weber State, and I saw something in a program called Wildcat Scholars. I had a lot of contacts here on campus, so I knew a couple of people in the hiring committee. I was returning to an environment that I'm really comfortable in, but I was also returning to that place where I had felt a lot of anxiety and depression and frustration. It was interesting moving back, and I'm now under the context of being in a stable gay relationship. It's been really interesting to see neighbors and be like, “This is my partner, MO.” Everyone calls him something else, they can't get the last syllable. That's kind of a full circle. I've been working in that position for a year now. We've been to Yellowstone, parts of California, Florida. I still haven't been to New York or L.A. or San Francisco, but it's been cool to be back. Who knows what's next? LR: That's awesome. How does Northern Utah, living in the LGBTQ community, relate to other places you've lived? AC: So without knowing exactly the perspective of friends and the people I've met outside of Utah, but trying to understand them: in Guatemala, a lot of people that I met were very closeted. Even though they were dating or hooking up with other 60 people, they definitely didn't want their family to know. Whatever city I was doing research in, they would come to where I was, and we would go out to eat or whatever. It was always like, I didn't want to put people in a situation where they would feel outed or whatnot. The situation in Guatemala can be really tricky, and in some ways, I think LGBT people have gained a lot of visibility and a lot of freedom to be themselves, but especially for trans Guatemalans. I think they face a lot of hard situations, including violence. I remember doing research in an indigenous community. I remember seeing someone that seemed to be a trans woman, and I was unable to really talk to them very in-depth, but they seemed to be pretty openly genderfluid in their contexts. I wondered a little bit how that was possible. As a researcher, I was like, “Oh, what's going on,” but unable to really delve into that at the time. For non-Indigenous Guatemalans—I think most Guatemalans have Indigenous ancestry, but whether or not they demonstrate that or practice customs or speak other languages other than Spanish makes them either. So non-indigenous Guatemalans are Ladino with a D, and then indigenous Guatemalans are K’iche, Kaqchikel, and a whole bunch of different groups. For indigenous Guatemalans, usually they're very religious. The Catholic Church has shaped a lot of views around sexuality, whereas preColombian beliefs—from what we know, because some records were burned, and it's hard to know concretely, but it seemed like Mayan groups had a much more nuanced view of gender roles and sexuality and some fluidity for sexuality. Then a Christian ideology was forced on them. I did talk to some indigenous researchers who identify as LGBTQ+ who lamented a little bit about the loss of a different tradition, how Catholicism was a harder context to be LGBT-identifying. Guatemala's issues are largely brought by Spain in the history of colonialism. There's some Spanish efforts to create some 61 sense of like, “We're sorry. Let us help you out or fix some of what we've done.” I can't remember what they’re called, there's these agencies all throughout Guatemala run by members of the Spanish government that come over and run these cultural centers. I was there in June doing research, and the cultural center had pride flags. All over in other parts of the city there were pride flags as well, but not as much as Spain was, really. These Spanish buildings were kind of emulating pride month and trying to drive a little bit of social change in Guatemala. I mentioned that I lived in a really kind of conservative agrarian part of Spain at first, Orihuela. There I noticed when I would meet older people who were LGBTidentifying, they held some antiquated notions about things. It'd be like, “Well, I'm gay, but I don't appreciate trans people, or I don't appreciate the gender fluidity,” or some LGBT ideologies that are held by youth more in Spain or other parts of Europe. Spain was a dictatorship until 1980-something, so different parts of the population were persecuted under the dictatorship. I don't know if some of those mentalities come out of that. Also, older generations in Spain are much more religious. MO is not religious and his family is. His parents aren't super religious, but his grandparents are. Some of his aunts and uncles are super religious, very Catholic. Younger generations in Spain are much more receptive to LGBT identities. There’re efforts within Spain and other parts of Latin America to create a system of Spanish that wouldn't have masculine and feminine adjectives and pronouns. That's a really common thing in Spain and in other parts of Latin America. Academically, we've adopted the term ‘Latinx’. That's coming out of academic circles. But in Hispanic society in general, the use of the vowel ‘e’ instead of ‘a’ or ‘o’ is more commonly accepted. Instead of saying estoy contento with an ‘o’ at the end, estoy contente. Instead of saying mi 62 prima, my cousin, you'd say mi prime, which doesn't tell you the gender identity of the person. So I think that things are changing, but there's always a feeling of battle. I noticed as a member of the LDS church, too, that religious groups feel like they are embattled, and LGBT organizations feel like they're embattled. My mindset has changed a lot in these sorts of things. I think that there are people that want to pass legislation that would harm LGBT people, which I feel very strongly about. I think despite the great advances we as a community have made in different parts of the world, there's always a chance of it being taken away. LR: Okay. Before I ask my final question, is there a story you'd like to add? Something that you forgot, or you feel like you've covered pretty much everything you wanted to? AC: I can't think of anything. LR: So, the final question that we've kind of asked everyone is: if you had an opportunity to talk to your younger self or to younger generations within the LGBTQ+ community, what would you say? What advice would you give them? AC: I mentioned last time that I wrote myself a letter after my mission and I was imploring myself to stay on the path and not succumb to temptation. I read that letter a couple of years later, right when I was graduating with my degree here at Weber State, very involved in different LGBT organizations and very much out of the closet. I still agreed with like 90% of what I told myself, because I told myself to stay true to myself and I could be anything I wanted. I still agree with that. I was being true to myself and I can be anything I want. So, I think if I could sit down with my younger self, I would say, “Don't worry about it. Just enjoy your childhood.” I spent so much of my life, especially in junior high school, worried about some imagined, horrible future where I was going to be 63 gay. I think I would sit down with my parents, too, and tell them that your son's going to be okay, and that you’re good parents and that just stop taking him to therapy. The therapy I went to as a kid was almost conversion therapy. Not quite shock therapy. If I could talk to kids today, I would tell them, “I see you, and I love you, and lots of people love you.” People who don't love you, it can hurt a lot, especially if it's a family member or a friend that you really care about. But there are many people that want to care about you, and if you're in an unsafe situation, reach out to me.” If anyone reaches out to me today and tells me that they need help, I want to help them. I think all this fear we have about ‘kids these days’, I think we should trust in our children. If my kid wants to use gender-neutral pronouns or or identifies in a different way, that's great. I was so focused throughout most of my life on keeping my family together for eternity, and my family is still really strong. Nothing I have done has destroyed my family dynamic, yet. If a parent really does want to support their children, listen to them and look for resources or information about LGBT lifestyles and understand those. Understand that yes, there are different lifestyles that have different risks, but that most people just want to find someone to love. Circling back to talking to myself, I would tell myself, “There's people out there that you can spend your life with. It's a wonderful, loving relationship. Don’t be afraid that you're going to be alone your whole life.” I really did think for most of my life that I was going to be alone, and that's a terrible thing for a kid in high school to resign themselves to. I would say a lot more, but that's a great start. LR: Well, thank you so much for your willingness to sit down and share your story. I appreciate it, and I know that others will. 64