Oral History Program Michael Thompson Interviewed by Lorrie Rands September 10-October 8, 2021 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Michael Thompson Interviewed by Lorrie Rands September 10-October 8, 2021 Copyright © 2022 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii 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: Thompson, Michael, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, September 10-October 8, 2021, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Michael Thompson conducted on September 10, 2021 and finished on October 8, 2021 in his home in Ogden, Utah by Lorrie Rands. Michael discusses in early years growing up in Utah County, coming to terms with his sexuality and his religion, his marriage, and finding joy in parenthood. He finishes by talking about his time working at Weber State University and the relief he has found in coming out to coworkers, friends, and family. Also present is Alyssa Kammerman. LR: It is September 10, 2021, we are in Ogden, Utah in Michael Thompson's home interviewing him for the LGBTQ+ stories for the Stewart Library. My name is Lorrie Rands, conducting and Alyssa Kammerman is assisting. Michael, thank you for your willingness to share. I appreciate it. I'm going to share and then ask you how you identify. So I identify as straight, my pronouns are she and her. AK: And I identify as straight and my pronouns are she and her as well. LR: So, Michael, if you wouldn't mind sharing. MT: Yeah, I identify as bisexual and my pronouns are he/him. LR: Thank you so much. So let's just start off with when and where you were born. MT: I was born in Provo, Utah, on June 21, 1988, at Utah Valley Hospital. I'm the third of four children and all four of us are miracles. My mom had a kidney transplant at 18 and was told, “You're never going to have kids and don't even try. You'd basically be sentencing yourself to death to even consider getting pregnant.” Yeah, four of us between 1984 and 1990. I didn't find out until just a few years ago that my parents waited four or five months after they found out they were pregnant with me to tell their parents because they were afraid of their reaction. Then my younger sister, it was a month before she was born and they followed it up with, “And we're done. We have two of each.” My grandparents were pretty upset, especially my mom's 2 parents, because she'd been dealing with this since fourth grade, kidney issues, and she's the youngest, so was very protective and all. Also I was told I was born with the cord wrapped around my neck. My dad, he's like, “It was loose. It was loosely wrapped. It wasn't a big deal.” Now having had children, I'm like, “No, if it's wrapped at all, they freak out.” Now I hear about others who have had siblings or children that the cord was wrapped around and the damage it caused. I'm like, yeah, definitely a miracle that I don't have any major issues from that. LR: Did you grow up in Provo? MT: No, I grew up in Spanish Fork. My parents were living in Orem when I was born. Then, three months later, in October, we moved to Spanish Fork, the western edge of Spanish Fork, right across the street from the high school. I want to say, when we moved in, Spanish Fork had just barely annexed the property that my parents moved to. We were literally the edge of Spanish Fork, it was farmland to the west and south of us, which my mom loved, having grown up on a ranch. I have very fond memories of that, being able to just roam free and explore, which was fun. As things started to develop around us, that was kind of bittersweet. It was fun to have more kids in the neighborhood, but sad to see our stomping grounds slowly disappear. The house was originally in a different location in Spanish Fork. It was built in the 1930s and then they moved it to the property that my parents moved to. So it was just sitting on cinder block and really, every time I talk about this house with my wife, Julie, she's like, “This sounds like a scary house.” As I think about it now, yeah, but growing up, I loved it. Lots of fond memories. No real insulation in the house. In fact, once we moved out, the person we sold it to was going to tear it down and build other homes. So we're like, “Can we put holes in the walls? We 3 want to know what this house is like.” We found just like this pebble insulation in there and then at one point there was an empty Red Devil Cement bag, which-there used to be a cement factory in Springville, Red Devil Cement. That's where Springville High gets their mascot from is that company. Okay, and we're like, “Oh, that's nice to know that we just had empty cement bags as insulation.” Yeah, but that was a lot of fun. Every time a train would go by, the house would shake. Every time we used our washer, which they built a family room and carport and laundry room off to the side, it was on a solid foundation made of cinder blocks. But it would shake the entire house every time the washer would run. It was quite an adventure. We had a huge umbrella willow that was right next door to the house in our backyard, shaded most of the backyard. So we enjoyed it because when it started to rain, we could still play outside because the rain would hardly come through the canopy. But it rested a lot on the house. So when storms came through, it would rub against the roof and gave that kind of eerie feeling or sounds. But it's a lot of fun. LR: How long did you live there? MT: So from three months till the start of my ninth grade year. Then we moved to the east side of Spanish Fork, at that point. LR: Where did you go to elementary school? MT: I went to Brockbank Elementary School, which was six or seven blocks north of us. My parents both worked, so I think when we were younger, my mom would drop us off at school and then go into work and then she'd pick us up after. But as we got older, I remember walking the six or seven blocks to and from elementary school every day. It was a lot of fun; interesting walk. We had a crossing guard that was missing a finger and that was fun. I enjoyed Brockbank. It was an interesting school because it was originally built in the fifties, I believe, the main section which became 4 the kindergarten and first grade wing. Then they added on to it in the 70s or 80s and that became where second, third and fifth grade was. While I was in elementary school, they added on a brand new section and they moved fourth grade over there. I think they ended up moving third grade as well. It was like three different eras. You've got this orange brick building and then this rock wall looking section, and a brand new modern looking section. But yeah very interesting. LR: What are some of your favorite memories of interacting with your peers in elementary school? MT: I met my best friend. We were best friends almost through high school. My first-grade year, she moved into the school boundaries, and we both loved dinosaurs. Before they added on that final edition, the kindergarten classrooms had doors that led to this hill. There were three huge trees and the roots had grown up out a little bit. So it created this really cool place for us to play with our dinosaurs. So we would bring our dinosaur toys and just play there, and then they tore that down. That was really sad because that's where the addition went. But that was a lot of fun. This friend, she was always one of the tallest in the class, and I was always one of the shortest. In fact, my kindergarten teacher said that she always wanted to just pick me up and cuddle me. She didn't want to teach, she just wanted to sit there and rock me in her rocking chair because I was so small. LR: Are you guys from Utah originally? MT: No, my dad was born in Provo, but when he was three they moved to California. Turlock, near Modesto, and he grew up out there, went to high school out there, and my grandpa actually just barely moved back here to Utah last year. My mom grew up in Nicolaus, California, which is about 30 minutes north of Sacramento. It's halfway between Sacramento and Yuba City. It's this small farming community. She 5 was one of 30 in her graduating class in high school. It's a really small town, but she grew up on a 90-acre ranch, and raised cattle and all that. We would make trips out there at least once a year to see both grandparents because they were both out there and we didn't get to see them. There was a lady who lived a couple blocks east of us in our neighborhood that we adopted as our local grandma because her last name was Thomas and she was really sweet. So we called her Grandma Thomas, even though I don't know how that started. I think one of us accidentally called her Grandma Thomas at church one time and she was like, “Okay, I'll be your local grandma.” My parents both came out to Utah to go to BYU and that's where they met and ended up staying in that area. AK: So as you're going through elementary school, when did you first start noticing, “Okay, I'm a little different.” MT: Fifth grade I think is when I really first noticed, like was perceptive of something being different. I remember like I loved playing with my sister's dolls. My brother was big into sports. He did baseball. He was in little league and all that. I did two years of a little league, didn't really enjoy it. I'd much rather be playing with my sisters. I learned how to braid hair on their Barbie dolls and got really good at braiding. I have pictures of my younger sister and I wearing nightgowns and like we dress up in dresses occasionally. I remember my mom had this red silk fabric that I just loved to play with and I would make togas out of it. My sister and I would pretend we were a dress shop and, like, make a dress out of it or we'd also dance around in our living room to music. I was very much into the more… not feminine, but activities that in the 90s would have been considered female dominated activities. I love to dance. My dad had bought this stereo system with a record player and we loved dancing to the records. I got really good at being able to leap across 6 the room without the record player skipping. That's something I'm still proud of. I can jump very lightly, but yeah, there's a very interesting talent I have, but I can walk very quietly and all that. I love dancing. Surprisingly, the rest of my siblings all did tap. I did not. I'm not sure if I was a shy kid. So I think it was more I didn't want to do it because of my shyness. But I remember going, like I knew the dance teacher and I'd go to the dance class. I did a dance class for a little bit, but I don't recall ever actually performing. I remember going to my sister's recitals and my brother did tap for a little bit. My mom was huge into musicals and loved singing and she just wanted us to be well-rounded. Music was her passion. I want to make sure my kids are involved in that. My sisters have beautiful voices. My brother doesn't really sing. But I was the one that really, like, latched on to that more than my sisters. Like, even though I was shy, I was okay performing in church, like in small groups. I'd go with my mom to ward choir and had a beautiful soprano voice up until seventh grade, and then that dropped down to a tenor. Then towards the end of my ninth-grade year, I dropped clear down to a low bass. That was so sad, like I was really sad that I was a low bass at that point because I loved the tenor parts. Now I'm more a baritone, okay, which makes me happy, there's some good baritone parts. But I remember being in sixth grade performing and some of the primary songs we would sing had that high descant and I would be given that part to sing because none of the other girls in primary could either hit the notes or were too scared to sing. I just remember, like nobody batted an eye, nobody thought differently of it. Looking back, like I can see now, a lot of people in Utah County would probably be like, “Whoa, what's wrong with that kid? Singing high soprano parts.” But yeah, it was fifth grade that I really, to get back to the question, really noticed right around the time that I went through the maturation program. I think it 7 kind of clicked in me that there's something, like there's an attraction there. My parents were, they didn't talk about sex or anything like it was very prim and proper. Not that it was a taboo subject, but I think it was just an awkward subject for them to talk about. I remember there were definite moments, as I look back, where like, oh, yeah, that was definitely a sign that I was attracted to men. A few months ago, I had an epiphany that, I think it was in third grade that I like, remembered some memory and I was like, “Oh, that's when I first had, like, a crush on a boy.” But I can't remember exactly when the memory came and went really quick. But yeah, fifth grade. I just remember being fascinated about the changes that would be happening, but also noticed that it also excited me. It's hard to explain, but is noticing a slight sexual attraction. Middle school came, and that's when I first stumbled upon pornography. We had the internet in our house. But I remember I had been at the library with some friends and they showed me this website, it was really cool, had tons of games you could play and all that. I remember going home and I wanted to get back on the website, but I couldn't remember the exact Web address. I think I just got the ending wrong, like it was .org or something, and I think I put .com or .net and it brought up the pornography website. I just remember being like, “Oh my gosh. Like, that's not the site I wanted.” That was like the start of the pornography addiction that I've struggled with since. I noticed with the pornography addiction that I felt gross looking at pictures of naked women. Pictures of naked men, it was like no big deal to me. I just remember thinking in my head like, “I can't look at pictures of naked women because that's derogatory.” It's not like it goes against what the church teaches. I was born into the LDS church, still very active in the church, and I just remember, like the first few sites I came across were heterosexual porn, and it just 8 quickly morphed into gay porn, and that was one of the thoughts I just remember is, “I can't look at this because it's derogatory towards women. Why would I want to treat women that way?” But I didn't have that thought of men. It was like, “Oh, they're attractive. I'm attracted to them. I'm getting aroused by this and that.” That's when I think I really started to somewhat put the label of gay on myself in the back of my head. It was not until 2013 or 2014 that I felt comfortable actually saying I am gay, so that was a good 10 plus years. LR: You're noticing these things that you're feeling this way. Did your parents notice anything? Did they ever talk to you about it? Did you have anyone you could talk to that you could just, “I don't understand,” or anything? MT: No. When they first discovered the pornography, I think they asked why I was looking at men and not women, and I told them it's because I don't feel it's right to look at pictures of naked women. I think a lot of that was just things I've been taught in church, like showing respect to women and things that way. Again, totally messed up view because it's totally wrong to sit there and objectify men as well. They just kind of were like,” Okay, well, don't view pornography. It's bad for you.” But I never felt like I could open up to them about my feelings. It just felt like this dark secret I was keeping and it was connected to the pornography. I felt like, “Okay, well, I need to repent. Go talk to the bishop and go through the repentance process.” In the back of my head, I felt like, “If I repent and overcome this, then the attraction is going to go away and it'd be fine.” Like I think in my head, it was connected that way, the attraction was connected to the pornography. It took me a while to realize that, no, the attraction is separate from the pornography and one's an addiction and the others just part of who I am. So it was difficult. Even my friends, I had the same group of friends up until my sophomore year of high school. Then I completely changed my group of friends, like I still said 9 hi to them, still hung out with them occasionally, but they were swearing a lot and they'd become less active at church. I just didn't want to be around that. I remember we used to eat lunch by one part of the high school. I decided, I think because I had seminary right after lunch, so I was like, I'm just going to go to seminary and just spend lunch there. I hadn't brought a lunch and I discovered that there were some people I knew there that hadn't really hung out with a lot that would eat lunch. Apparently, the seminary building allowed students to come in and eat lunch there. So I started eating lunch there and they became my group of high school friends. But even these other friends that I feel like probably would have been very accepting and understanding, I didn't feel like I could open up to them. It was very, very interesting. Not lonely, but just felt different. LR: Going back a little bit, let's see, so you were in sixth grade or just starting seventh grade when Columbine happened. MT: Let's see, I would have been, was it ninety-nine that that happened, so I was finishing up my fifth-grade year. LR: Okay, so I'm just curious what you remember about that, how things changed in your school or if they did or how that affected you going to school. MT: In elementary school? I didn't really recognize, I think it was seventh and eighth grade that I really noticed anything. I don't think the schools really changed much, but there was definitely more of a caution. I could feel like there was a…Columbine happened then another one happened a year or two later. I just remember thinking, like there would be conversations occasionally, especially on the anniversary of Columbine. In fact, I want to say in eighth grade, we actually did an assignment on the anniversary of Columbine, and I remember reading about Columbine in eighth grade and learning more of the details. But outside of that, I don't have many 10 memories of Columbine. I oddly have more memories of the Oklahoma City bombing. LR: Really? MT: Yeah, but I just remember being terrified of Ryder trucks because I had heard a Ryder truck had exploded and I didn't know any of the details. I didn't know where it was, but I just remember seeing them around town and being scared of them. LR: Interesting. MT: But Columbine, it wasn't until like we actually did an assignment and discussed and I think we were kind of looking at bullying and all that. And that's when I was like, “OK.” LR: So did your parents had a conversation with you about the Oklahoma City bombing? MT: No, they might have. I don't have any memories of it. I just remember, I think on the radio I heard about a moving truck exploding. I think a couple years prior, we had helped my aunt and uncle move from Wyoming to, I don't remember where. But they had driven a Ryder truck and I remember riding in it, so I think I knew that name, I knew that brand. So to then hear about it exploding, yeah. LR: What junior high did you attend? MT: So Spanish Fork is very weird. Nebo School District, I did kindergarten through fifth at Brockbank Elementary and then sixth and seventh were at Spanish Fork Middle School, eighth and ninth were at Spanish Fork Junior High and then 10th through 12th was Spanish Fork High School. So for two years, because school wise my siblings and I are two years apart, and for two years my parents had a kid at four different schools that they had to get to. To add insult to injury, the high school was not on the traditional semester system. They were on trimesters. So their teacher development days and blocks landed differently. So there were times where the rest 11 of the school district was off, except for Spanish Fork high school. So the buses still had to run and they tried, all while I was in high school to get rid of it because it was just wasting money and too difficult on parents. I think they were able to line up spring break the like fall breaks didn't always line up. Then there'd be days where the rest of the district was in school and the high school was off because it was a teacher development day. That was very, very convoluted. LR: Because they happened kind of in close succession, let's talk about your memories of 9/11. MT: So I was in eighth grade and at that point there was a family in our ward/neighborhood that had started a carpool with the kids that were going to the middle school and junior high because we were a mile away from the middle school, but right on the mile mark. The school district wouldn't let us ride the bus, even though the buses would drop the high schoolers off and drop the junior high and then middle school. So we just had to walk across the street to the high school to get on and so they would have emptied some of their passengers, so there was room for us. We had a bus driver that was like, don't tell anyone, but you guys can just get on it and I'll take you up to the middle school. So at this point, we were doing the carpool and I remember getting in the van and hearing, they had the radio on, and they were listening to the news. But all the kids, we were all talking and I just heard bits and pieces of something happening in New York and something about a plane. Didn't really pay attention. I think we dropped the kids off at middle school first and then junior high. I walked into my homeroom class and no one else was in there because I'd gotten there pretty early, like 15-20 minutes early. The teacher was in there and she had the news on. I just remember walking in and seeing the scene of the smoke coming from the Twin Towers. It just felt like the bottom of my stomach had dropped 12 out. I've always had a weird fascination with urbanization and buildings, and I think I had recently learned about the World Trade Center and had been fascinated with them. So for me to walk in and see them on fire and burning, it was like heart wrenching. The closest I can think of is similar to finding out Notre Dame caught fire. I didn't realize the depth of it right at that moment. Then I sat there and watched the news and heard more and they started replaying the videos from the second plane hitting and realizing that it's not just the buildings on fire, it's an actual attack and people are being killed. The teacher let us watch it through homeroom, and then I had that same teacher for first period, so she turned it off. We had our lesson and then second period I had biology. The teacher's like, “There's no point in teaching you guys.” He had the TV on. We just sat and watched and chatted and he’s like, “Let us play games.” He tried to keep it a little bit more lighthearted. But he's like, “You need to know what's happening.” I think third period I had American history and the classroom didn't have a TV, but the teacher didn't want to stop the lesson. So what she did is she picked the two students with the highest grades in the class, they would switch off going into the computer lab, that you could get to through her classroom, to watch it and give updates. She talked with the computer teacher and they said that would be fine if we just sat there. I just happened to be one of the top two, surprise, history degree, my top subject. So I became the reporter to that class. The timeline that I'm struggling with in my head is I know I got to school before 8:00 AM Utah time, but that's about when the buildings collapsed Eastern Time, because it would have been about 10:00 AM. But I remember not seeing them collapse till second or third period. So there was this, as I look back, there was a big delay. It's like they kept reporting it fresh. As each time zone woke up, they wanted to start from the beginning instead of having people wake up to the building's gone type thing is 13 what it seemed like to me. Like as I think back, I'm like, yeah, there's no way the timing matched up. LR: Were you watching world news? MT: I don't remember what news was on, but I feel like everyone had a different one. After that I went to lunch and then the rest of the day it was hit and miss on whether the teachers wanted to show us. But I remember seventh period, it was English and our teacher took us to the library and we spent most of the period just sitting there watching it. Course, by that time, we knew both towers had collapsed, we knew Building Seven was about to collapse. The Pentagon had been hit. The plane had crashed in Pennsylvania, and I think President Bush was about to make an address. He had already been flown out of Florida and so it was by that point, we knew the worst of it was over. But it was still a lot of uncertainty, and lot of questioning, like, “Well, there's something else,” and rumors that L.A. was a target and other major cities were targets. But because we had shut down because of the time zone difference and the quick shut down of the airspace, we prevented other major disasters and just all these rumors flying by the end of the day. I then got home and discovered that my younger sister, I guess I'd forgotten earlier in the day because of everything, that she had stayed home sick and my brother had stayed home from high school to be with her. They were watching it from home. But my older sister who, she would have been a sophomore, she went to school. The high school, none of the TVs were connected to any sort of channel, it was just more like a closed-circuit system, and so she really had no idea what was going on. I think she'd come home for lunch, heard something had happened, but then went back to school. I remember at my brother's graduation, because that would have been his senior year, at his graduation, the school district rep saying, it was odd and surreal to look into Spanish Fork High School because they visited all 14 the other schools and the news was blaring, and then you walked in and it was like nothing had happened and nobody knew. Nobody was talking about it. I think people knew something had happened, but nobody was talking about it. The TVs weren't on, like it felt weird to walk in. It was like walking into a bubble that was protected from what was going on. That's insane because I was basically watching it firsthand. I've become obsessed with it. Like every year I rewatch documentaries, I try and find new footage. I've actually been wanting to collect oral histories of people's stories, cause I've heard others tell the stories of their experiences, and it's just amazing to hear the impact it had across the country and that. The next day, I remember waking up and just wondering, like, what's gonna happen, what are things going to be like now. Sadly, one of my biggest memories from the rest of that year is just all the anti-Muslim talk that took place throughout the school. I remember laughing at some of them, but also just being, it was more of a courtesy laugh, like everyone else is laughing at the lone person, but there's a lot from eighth grade that as I think back isn't dominated, up until the Olympics, wasn't dominated by 9/11 and anti-Muslim rhetoric. AK: Did that include kind of sort of things that your teacher was saying as well, or was that more kids or people who were scared? MT: Kids sharing...well now they would be memes, but back then, that term didn't exist. But like lots of songs and videos about going to the Middle East and blowing their heads off and trying to find Osama Bin Laden. The crazy thing is when they announced that they had killed Osama, I remember feeling sad for his family, just it wasn't joy or excitement, it was sadness, like there was no relief. I remember talking to Julie. It was our first year of marriage and she's like, “I can kind of see why you're feeling that way.” But that's kind of interesting. It was a deep sadness for his family 15 and for him, even though I know he orchestrated the deaths of 2000 plus people. But I've always been emotional, so that wouldn't surprise me. LR: Well I appreciate you sharing. (To Alyssa) Do you have any other questions? AK: What I was going to ask you is, did you also feel that when they killed Saddam Hussein too? Or I guess they didn't kill him, that they helped bring him to justice? MT: With Saddam Hussein? Not so much. It was more of- I never wanted to join the military. I was scared to death of joining the military because I was so small. I was a very picky eater. I hated being yelled at, very emotional. So to me, I was like, mentally, I can't handle it. I was dreading the day that the Selective Service card arrived for me to sign up for. I just remember being terrified the night that the war in Iraq started, because just in the back of my mind I'm like, “They're going to reinstate the draft and I'm going to have to go fight. It's going to be a Vietnam type situation,” like just terrified. Yeah, it wasn't the same. I didn't know as much about Saddam Hussein, I just knew that we had put him in place, helped him get in power, and now we're removing him. But it was more that fear because, I mean, that was 2003. So I was in high school. I was a few years from having to sign up for the draft and the Selective Service. Then every year after that, once I signed up, just praying that they would not reinstate the draft. Any time moms of people who would join the military cried out, saying it was unfair that their kids were dying and all this and they would call for a reinstatement of the draft so that everyone could share in the sadness, I would get scared to death. Of course, in the back of my head, I'm thinking, “I'm proud of these men and women for being willing to sign up so that I don't have to.” But you also realize they chose to sign up. To me it'd be worse if you knew they didn't have a choice and they were forced into it and died in action. But I've always been very grateful for those who are willing to join and serve, because I've had that fear. That's always been a big fear of 16 mine is fighting in wars, and if I ever were to join, I would definitely struggle with boot camp, but I would try and find more of a command center position, like not on the front lines, because it just terrifies me to be out on the front lines. LR: Interesting. Thank you. So we've made it through middle school, kind of talked a little bit about junior high. I think we've talked junior high. I get my dates all mixed up. You mentioned earlier that it was in your sophomore year that you completely changed your friends. So as you started high school, I'm kind of skipping a little bit over junior high, unless there's a memory that you want to share in junior high, that's just extending that. MT: The biggest thing between middle school and junior high is I wasn't big in sports. I hated P.E. and I was bullied a lot because of that. I did not have the best skills. I tried to stay out of the way of the kids who were good at sports and I remember, to this day, I'm still extremely grateful to this one kid. It's either eighth or ninth grade, so junior high, we were doing basketball drills and I was sick of the drills because we'd be split up into teams and inevitably I'd be the weakest link and our team would be doing great, and then I'd come up and would fail. This one kid who had already taken his turn, and we were told we each had to do it, he could see me getting upset. It could have been partly he didn't want to lose, but I just remember him offering to take my turn to do the drill, which was like dribbling a basketball, making a layup or something like that. He took that turn for me and I remember just being amazed that somebody would do that for me, like that a guy would do that for me, like because all my best friends have been girls. I've never had a close guy friend. That was kind of like, I was very flattered by that and just it opened my eyes up that, “Okay, not all jocks are bad.” Like, no matter what his intentions were, the fact that he was willing to do that for me, it made my day. That's like the highlight of my junior high/middle school years. All the bullying because of my height and all 17 that and my inability to play sports like that's the highlight is, this one kid who was on, I think he was on the basketball team, he was definitely a big athlete, was willing to do that for me. Of course, there's also the puberty and attraction throughout like noticing certain girls and guys that I'm attracted to and the whole time just because of church and growing up and my testimony and all that, just feeling like the attraction to men was not really part of me. It was something I needed to work on to overcome. When I was attracted to women, it didn't surprise me because I was like, well, that's how it should be. But middle school and junior high, lots of different memories for various reasons, but nothing really stands out other than that. I think seventh grade was the only time I ever cheated. But I didn't cheat, I allowed somebody to cheat off of me. LR: It's funny what we remember. So during this time, you're obviously you're going through all the normal changes that everyone does. Still, you have no one to talk to. Let's just talk about high school and how you're telling yourself, if you just do this, then the attraction will go away. Did that change at all during high school or was that something you kept enforcing? MT: It was something I kept enforcing. I don't know how to explain it, but I just remember, like my senior year, there was a boy in my choir that I became good friends with. Towards the end of the year, I realized I was in love with him. I was getting very, not outwardly emotional, but inwardly emotional at the thought of “We're about to graduate and I don't know if I'm going to ever see him again.” But he was not like, showing any sort of reciprocation of attraction. I've been told I'm very bad at hiding my attraction to men. A lot of people, when they find out, are like, “Oh, yeah, I knew.” So I don't know if he could sense that there was something there, but we became really good friends. 18 I remember we went on choir tour and we got back and I got home. I think we got home on a Sunday afternoon and I remember saying goodbye to them, knowing like there's still a few months left in the school year. But I remember getting home and just being sad and wanting to cry because I missed him and I felt like I wasn't going to see him again. We had such a great time, and I think part of me was thinking like I knew I was attracted to him, but I think part of me was, this is the first guy that I really felt a deep connection with as far as a friendship goes. So it was like this mix of emotions because I've never known how to act around guys. Never known how to be just a friend to guys, because the attraction has always somewhat played into it. I just remember like, there was a battle between the two sides, like wanting to be a good member of the church and also having the attraction, but it still was always just a thought of well, “It's because of the pornography, it's because of this, it's not actually who I am.” And the thought of, “Well, I can't come out, if that is part of me, I can't accept it because that's not what we're taught in church.” I had some really amazing experiences in high school as far as church spiritual experiences, especially my senior year. It's funny cause I feel like in church they talk all the time, like people are almost like, “I know exactly when I gained a testimony of the Book of Mormon, or when I gained the testimony of this,” and I just had all these little experiences. The only clear memory I can think of is when we were studying the Book of Mormon in seminary and I was reading just the introduction to the Book of Mormon. It just hit me like, “This is true,” like it wasn't the Book of Mormon itself, it was just that introduction that was written. I think it was actually written in the 70s or 80s by the Quorum of the Twelve. So just reading that hit me and I was like, “That's where I get my testimony of the Book of Mormon and the truthfulness of the messages that it teaches and every time I read from it, I feel peace and comfort and I feel closer to Christ and I feel like I better understand him 19 as far as his loving side and not the, “Well, this is what I'm commanding you to do, and you need to do this, this and this,” type thing that seems to get spouted a lot at church and was spouted a lot at church when I was in high school. I think it was the summer between my junior and senior year, my stake went on trek and we actually got to go to Martin's Cove and we were the first group that year to go up over Rocky Ridge. The family I was put into, we had two handcarts because we had a handicapped girl with us and the service missionaries had created a special handcart for her that was basically a wheelchair up on a handcart frame. So we were pulling two handcarts. As the trip went by, she got to a point, like she was actually the first with two of the leaders to cross Rocky Ridge. We all sat and watched as she went down the ravine and back up with the two leaders, and we cheered her on and we kept losing members of the family because they were getting sick so they'd be driven ahead to the final camp. It was just a very special moment for me, like I felt connected to my ancestors. My mom's always been huge into family history and I've loved family history. So I really felt connected that way. Then we celebrated Joseph Smith's 200th birthday that year, so I was part of a huge spectacular put on at BYU. I got to sing in a choir that, originally it was three different regions in Utah and Wasatch counties that we were each going to do one performance, and then they decided to combine all the choirs. So each region still did their performance. But it was a thousand voice youth choir from all three regions that got to perform at all three. The very last performance we had actual descendants of Joseph Smith sitting across from us, and it was the first time that a lot of them had even heard about the church and I just remember like finishing the hymn “Joseph Smith's First Prayer,” and looking around, there was nobody had a dry eye. It was an amazing experience to be testifying of my faith and testimony of what I learned to the descendants of Joseph Smith and then later find out some of 20 them actually ended up investigating the church and joining the church because of that experience. I had all these experiences that really made it so it was like butting heads between the two. I was very strong in the church, wanted to serve a mission and wanted to be married in the temple. But I had this addiction and attraction that I was dealing with and throughout high school had some inappropriate experiences with some of the young men in my ward that I kept hidden. I could tell that was the attraction, like trying to come out. I really questioned like, that's when I think I really started to be like “Am I gay, like, I want to be married in the temple, but I can't if I'm gay.” I feel like I'm just babbling. LR: No, you're answering the questions, you really are, you're processing it in your way. You're having these spiritual experiences that are helping you feel a connection to something that's important to you, but you also feel like, Okay, that doesn't fall in line with the way I'm feeling about who I am. What I'm trying to ask is during all this time, was there anyone that you felt like you could just talk to? MT: No, because I was embarrassed and ashamed of, I think mostly the pornography. I don't think the attraction was really a big deal to me. I never really felt like I could open up to anyone, and I think it's because of just some of the rhetoric being thrown about at church and feeling like if I say something, then I'm going to… like the older I got, the more fearful I got of being excommunicated. MT: Even though I'd been working with various bishops to try and overcome the addiction to pornography, I still was fearful. Then having those inappropriate incidents with the young men in my ward. It was “Okay, I need to keep things just quiet and bottled up,” and so I did and had these amazing experiences and then I graduated and went to SUU. I feel like that's where things really came to a head at first. 21 LR: Will you describe what you mean by “came to a head?” MT: Yeah, I struggled a lot with homesickness, I realized, because I lived down in Cedar City for almost two full years. It was about halfway through the summer that I lived down there that I realized, if I leave my parents home to go back to Cedar City, I'm okay, but if my family drops me off or comes to visit and leaves, I'm an emotional wreck. There were quite a few moments of that where I remember just not wanting to go to church because my parents had left and I missed them and just wandering campus trying to find a quiet spot that I could just cry because I was embarrassed to cry in front of my roommates. I felt it finally came to a head that I needed to tell somebody about what I had done with some of these young men, because I was still putting on that face of, “I'm a good member of the church and I'm preparing to serve a mission.” I wanted to serve a mission, but again, I was scared to death of serving the mission. I finally worked up the courage, typed up an email, and sent it to my parents, explaining everything I had done and all the struggles I'd had throughout high school. My dad got the email first and he hid it from my mom. He responded and his response was just… he was shocked. I never said I'm gay or I'm attracted to men. I may have mentioned I struggle with same-sex attraction, but I don't remember actually using any of those phrases. But that's really when I first came out to my parents. So my dad had responded, he's like, “Your mother hasn't seen this yet. I'm so sorry that you're going through all this. I want to help you. I suggest you get in and meet with your bishop.” The bishop I had in that ward was amazing and just so kind, I explained everything. My dad drove down to go to the bishop the first time with me, and the bishop was just like, “Okay, have you done anything since? No? Don't do it again. Like, who cares? You're a great kid no matter what.” Like, he was in his 70s or 80s. He was like a grandpa. All of us in the ward viewed him like a 22 grandpa. He just loved us so much. I knew he wasn't judging me because of the attraction. He's like, “There's nothing wrong with having the same-sex attraction. It's a struggle that you will have in your life there's nothing wrong with that.” But the term used was always ‘same-sex attraction’. My dad did eventually, like soon after, he asked me, “Do you want me to share this with your mom?” I said yes, and she wrote me back. Somewhere in my email, I still have all that initial email and the responses, she said she was sad to hear what I'd done. I don't think it was email, but at some point I was talking with my dad or something, or my mom, and she just said, “I always knew that you were gay or that you had attraction to men.” Really? It just surprised me because I thought I had hidden it so well. I had crushes on roommates and things that year. But at the same time, I had a big crush on some of the girls that I hung out with. I became really close friends with one of them to the point that we're like brother and sister now. That's how it came to a head. It felt like the two sides finally collided and it was now time to start piecing things together, seeing how the two fit together and finally being able to talk with somebody. Because my parents now knew. LR: That's really cool, you literally answered the question I wrote down. What year did you graduate from high school? MT: 2006, and then I was at SUU that first time from August of 2006 to April of 2008. LR: So you had mentioned that you wanted to serve a mission. It doesn't look like you did. MT: No, I didn't. So the confession and all that happened early spring, 2007, I think, coming out to my parents, all that. MT: But so that whole year I was, “Okay, that's over. Let's kick this addiction once and for all in the butt.” I think I finally somewhat came to terms because of this bishop, like there's always going to be that attraction. It's not going to go away. It's not 23 something I need to be ashamed of. It's just if I'm wanting certain things within the church, then I'm going to have to choose to do that and not pursue the attraction. As I thought about it, more and more like I was always excited at the thought of where I could be called to serve, but it scared me because I was a picky eater, I did not want to get called to anywhere that I didn't know what the food was like, because I felt like I would be insulting people by saying, “No, I don't want to eat that.” As I was going through all this, I realized my fears weren't really about the food or about if I could do it, like if I had the stamina to serve a mission. I was fearful that I would get on my mission and be spending so much one on one time with another man that I would either do something inappropriate to him without him knowing, because I had struggled with that, or that I would find another guy that had same-sex attraction and we'd end up falling in love and I was like, “That's not the point of serving a mission.” If I'm going to go, it's to serve a mission, serve the Lord. And I can't in my right mind do that if I'm constantly going to be worried about falling in love with my companions and worried about, are they going to notice if I get aroused by them, or things like that. I talked with my parents and I explained, “This is why I'm choosing not to serve a mission,” because I moved home to prepare to serve a mission. That's why I left SUU in 2008. When I got home, that's when I realized, “No, if I serve, I'm going to end up doing something I'm going to regret and that will hurt my relationship with the Lord.” And to me, I'd much rather have the right intentions to go than go just because it was an obligation and my parents supported me in that. I think they were a little fearful about what would happen, me not serving, like becoming a pariah, but I think to them they were more fearful of what could happen if I did serve. I knew where my testimony was and my spirituality was and all that, but I felt even with 24 that, just because of the crushes I had in high school and on some of my roommates, it was like, “No, if I'm crushing that hard and we're not constantly with each other, I can't imagine what it would be like to be living in the same apartment and sometimes sharing the same bedroom and having to be with them all the time.” Because I shared bedrooms with roommates, but we went and did our own things during the day. I wasn't right next to them all the time. LR: Ok. So did you decide to go back to SUU? MT: No. So I was originally an architecture major. SUU you didn't have an architecture program. So I was going to major in engineering and before the semester even began, I met one of the engineering professors and mentioned to him, like, I just want to design homes. He said, “Well, you don't have to have a degree to design homes. You just have to have an engineer approve the designs so you really don't need a degree to design homes.” And I was like, “Oh, well, then I don't want to be an engineer, so what am I going to do now?” I think it was that whole year I was still an engineering major, and then, halfway through fall 2007, I realized I want to do hospitality management, not engineering. I know I loved traveling, I loved hosting, like, so I was like, “I'm going to switch my major to that.” Then when I moved home, I'd been told UVU had one of the best hospitality management programs in the state, if not the country, so I had decided I was going to transfer to UVU and get my hospitality degree there. So then I worked to get a job at a hotel. I worked at the Provo Marriott from September 2008 to December 2011. I lived at home, saved some money, hadn't started at UVU yet because they required P.E. as a gen ed at the time. I didn't realize, “Oh, there's ballroom dance, there's yoga, there's lots of other things.” I just had visions of high school and middle school. So I was like, I'm going to finish my associates at SUU. So I was taking online courses to finish up. It got to the point where it was just math left. It 25 took me three or four tries and it's only because of Julie that I finally passed. Her and then the professor I had, I ended up taking it at UVU, and her and the professor, very similar, “Okay, this is how you do it. Oh, you're not understanding? Let's look at it from this side.” That really helped me understand it a lot better to the point where I could pass finally. LR: Is UVU where you met Julie? MT: Yes. LR: And was her helping you your first interaction with Julie? MT: No. So I realized I didn't give very good context prior to us meeting and all that. I want to go back a little bit first. In high school, my two best friends were girls, and I had a crush on one of them, Gwen. Then there was a girl that I liked, that we actually had the same birthday, met at college. We didn't really date. So throughout high school and college, I had crushes on girls, but I also had crushes on guys. When I moved back home, I started dating and going on dates with different women. Nine months before I met Julie, I met Courtney. My mom sold Mary Kay, and in October or November, she decided to put together a one stop shop type thing at our house with other consultants from different companies, and Courtney happened to work for the woman my mom had invited from Scentsy Candles. We met at that event and hit it off instantly, like we liked each other and started talking, and went on a couple of dates soon after. Things started to get pretty serious. She was my first kiss and of course, this whole time I was still like dealing with pornography and unsure of my feelings and how do I deal with the attraction to men as I'm dating women. Courtney and I would hang out with two of her friends. One was engaged and the other was married, so it was like the three of us couples at different stages in our dating life. As we would talk, I would be like talking more generally, like when 26 I'm married or I want to move to Arizona or I want to do this. And Courtney took it as when we are married and we'd only been dating for like three weeks at that point. Things were going pretty good, but they were moving really fast, and the entire time I kept thinking, I need to tell her about my addiction. But I was scared to death to tell her. The thought of mentioning to her that I was attracted to men just was even more terrifying. Finally, there was one afternoon I was coming home from work and the roads were super icy. I got in a minor fender bender like to the point where there was no damage and it was like we were going two miles per hour and he just kind of slid into me and we both were like, “There's no point in exchanging insurance.” The roads were still so bad that my nerves were shot and I had plans to go out that night with Courtney and her friends. When I got home, which was around 3:30, 4:00 o'clock, I texted her and said “I just had a terrible experience driving home. I don't feel comfortable going out. I hate to cancel last minute on this but can we try and get together for something else another day?” She just kept saying like, “Well, we can drive down and get you.” I kept saying, “No, I don't feel comfortable being on the roads, not just me driving, but in general, I do not want to be out on the roads in the conditions they are.” She kept pushing it and pushing it, and they ended up driving down to my house and ringing the doorbell, trying to get me to answer. I just happened to be in the bathroom when they rang the doorbell and she took it as me purposely ignoring her. They took off because I didn't answer and she got all upset with me and I was like, “I wasn't ignoring you.” She's like, “You're being childish and all this.” I'm like, “No, I was literally in the bathroom and could not come out to answer the door. I didn't even hear the doorbell or the knocking. So I apologize that I didn't answer, but I told you I did not feel comfortable.” That was pretty much it for us. 27 We ended up breaking up through Facebook Messenger, because I felt like I needed to officially send something, but I didn't feel confident enough to call her or talk to her in person, especially because I was still really upset with her and that she didn't respect my feelings and how I was feeling after that. She got really mad at me and blocked me on Facebook and all this. Then two months later, I found out she was engaged and a week away from being married. So from the time we broke up, she met another guy and got engaged within a month. I was like, “I know I want to get married, but that was too fast. I don't want to get stuck in something that I'm really not,” and the fact that I didn't feel comfortable sharing things with her, that's just not a good thing. So then I was living at home, still trying to finish up my associates through SUU online. I'd taken a math class, Math 1050, in the Spring of 2009 and failed it. So then in the Fall of 2009, I took it again and failed it. In August of 2009 is when I moved into the complex that Julie lived in, right across the street from UVU. During the summer I decided I need to be on my own. I'm twenty-one at that point, it's like having to drive all the way to Spanish Fork and dealing with the snow. Orem and Provo were a lot better with that because of their larger populations, so they got on top of it faster. I was like, “I just want to have more freedom, not feel beholden to my parents or feel like I'm living at home.” I found this apartment and I had signed the papers and was scheduled to move in on a Saturday. It was the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, I believe. It was like a holiday weekend, and I get there and management did not have a room ready for me, even though they said, “We can try and fit you in somewhere.” They showed me one apartment and it smelled; the guys were super messy. I was like, “I can't handle this,” and they're like, “Okay, well, then you'll just have to come back on Monday.” I'm like, “But my contract starts today.” It was frustrating, but I ended up getting into the show apartment. At that time, they 28 hadn't reserved an apartment to be empty, to show people. So the roommates were super clean, and because of that, they're like, “You guys, we're going to give you a discount on rent and your apartment will be the one that we show to people as they come to check out the apartments.” I made some amazing friends, one of them was Donny Osmond's nephew and his name was Troy Osmond. He actually passed away a few years ago. But he was an amazing person. The first Sunday living in that complex, I went to church and Julie's roommate Kyla just happened to be speaking in church. She was wearing a dress that she had made herself, that had music notes all over it and of course, loving music I just clearly remember having the thought, “You need to go talk to her,” like I want to get to know this woman. So after church, I caught up with her and told her, like, typical “Oh, I loved your talk.” Then I started talking about her dress and how I thought it was awesome. She told me how she'd made it, and then she started telling me about how her and her friends had made up this holiday, called Pajama Llama Day. They celebrated towards the end of September because they felt Labor Day was lame, and there's no holiday in August. It's not till the end of October and the next really fun holiday. So they're like, “We're going to be planning this holiday soon if you want to join us. You can.” That was the second year they'd done it. But basically, the holiday was they would exchange pajamas amongst each other like Secret Santa style, and then they would try and find a llama pinata and destroy it with a machete. LR: Oh wow. MT: And then we'd watch like llama videos on YouTube or llama themed movie like Emperor's New Groove. The first year they destroyed a toilet. They happened to come across an extra toilet somewhere, and they destroyed it and discovered that porcelain explodes when put in a fire. So we've not done that ever again. I wasn't 29 there for the first year, but they like we're never doing that again. So every time we've celebrated it, we happen to come across a toilet and that year one of Julie's other roommates, Rena, who I met later that Sunday evening at Ward Prayer, her parents ended up letting us throw the toilet off the roof of their house. I started hanging out with Kyla and Rena, and I'd go over to their apartment and get to know their roommates. For some reason, I don't know why, but I hadn't met Julie at church that first Sunday, and then every time I was over there, Julie was working and I worked at the Marriott from six a.m. to three p.m. So by the time I got home from work, Julie was either in school or had gone to work. Her roommates kept saying, “Oh, you've got to meet Julie. She's amazing and that you'll love her.” They kept mentioning, like, I think they were trying to hook us up and then they'd tell Julie about me and they're like, “Oh, you've got to meet Michael, he's awesome.” I kept thinking, “Well, Julie's just got to find the time to be there when I'm there,” and Julie was thinking, “I think you're making this guy up.” We finally had the planning meeting to decide what exactly we're going to be doing for Pajama Llama Day. Who all we're going to invite and that. We're over there at another friend's apartment where we had the meeting and we're chatting and I'm in one part of the room and Julie's in another and one of Julie's roommates points her out to me. They're like, “Oh, that's Julie.” I'm like, “OK,” I finally get to see what she looks like. When I looked up, Julie just happened to look over in my direction and she smiled at me and I smiled back. She recently had met with the stake president and was like, “I really want to start dating, but I feel like nobody asks me out.” He's like, “You need to start smiling every time a guy looks at you.” So I looked in her direction, she saw that and smiled at me. That was when we first saw each other, but it wasn't until right before the actual party, for Pajama Llama 30 Day, that we actually met. We decided to toilet paper the bishop's house, and not just toilet paper the bishop's house, but put the toilet in his yard as well. So the toilet is in the back of Rena's SUV. It needed to be steadied as we were driving, and Julie and I just happened to be in the back seat and we're right next to each other and we're cramming as many people into all the cars as possible. So we both, because we're right by the toilet, put our arms around the toilet and we're like almost cheek to cheek because we're all like squished in. She goes, “Hi, I'm Julie, you must be Michael.” I'm like, “Yes,” so that's how we first officially met was holding a toilet in the back of her roommate's car. We're like, squished together. She's like, “It's nice to finally meet you and that you actually exist and all this.” We toilet and toilet paper the bishop's yard, and of course, his wife is freaking out and we're like, “We're not going to leave it. We'll clean it up. Don't worry.” We got a picture with the bishop sitting on the toilet and all of us around the toilet with the toilet paper in the trees and all that behind, and then we cleaned it all up. So it looked like nothing had happened, but it was a lot of fun. The bishop loved it. Then, every time it seemed like after that point, every time I went over to her apartment, Julie was there for at least part of it. Soon after I went over, she was there and we started talking and ended up talking all night long on her balcony, like in their apartment. I had work the next morning, so I think I finally left at like four to then be to work by six. We started hanging out and, of course, I was taking my math class, and I felt I was doing pretty good. Then I would go to the testing center at UVU to take the tests. On my assignments I would do great, but the tests, I would fail. I'd mention this to Julie, and she's like, well, I'm a math tutor. At this point, like, the semester's almost over. I'm like, “Well, we'll see what my grade is. If I have to retake it, then I'll have you help. Would you be willing to help me?” Of course, we're also at the same time trying to actually go on a date. 31 I took one of her roommates out on a date because Julie had mentioned she doesn't like Halloween a whole lot, and I wanted to take somebody on a date to a corn maze. So I took her roommate who loves Halloween, and we became really close friends and planned this whole Halloween activity. That really irked Julie because she knew that I liked her. I ended up putting her in somebody else's vehicle inadvertently and she was really upset. It still irks her to this day because she hates Halloween, and it was like a ghost GPS scavenger hunt. So my friend and I found like haunted places in Utah county, we made people go to the Pleasant Grove City Cemetery and do ring around the rosies around a specific grave. I'm like, “This is awful, we tortured these people.” Some of them didn't even complete it because they were scared to do some of them. So we did that and we watched Halloween movies. Then November 1st, there was a fireside at BYU that we went to and we were sitting next to each other. The entire time her roommates kept looking at me like, “Hold her hand.” I'm very self-conscious because I was like, “I want to hold her hand, but you guys are making it awkward, and obvious.” That evening, it was either that evening or the next evening, we sat down and we're watching a movie at her apartment, and I finally held her hand. It was the most awkward handhold because her hand was sitting there and I grabbed it like this [makes a weird claw-like shape with his hand]. As soon as I touched her hand, she went and fixed the handhold, but she's like, “You finally worked up the courage to hold my hand.” I kept asking her to go on dates and she wasn't available, and I had planned an ice skating one. She's like, “I'd love to go,” but she was a manager where she worked and she's like, “We just barely got done telling everyone not to switch the schedule after it had come out for the following week, so I need to set an example. I can't switch, so I can't go.” I asked Rena on a date and Julie’s like, “You just wanted 32 to date all my roommates before you would date me.” I'm like, “No, you just weren't available.” We finally went on a date later in like mid-November and went to a laser tag place and then walked around downtown Provo, went and got gelato and talked, and every time we would talk, it was very easy for us to talk, and just communicate and share things. For Thanksgiving, she left to go to her sister's in Fort Collins, Colorado, and like an hour before she left to go to the airport, we'd only been on the one date, but we were hanging out a lot more and we both really liked each other. She came over and she's like, “I hope this doesn't scare you, but I'm a very blunt, direct person, and I just needed before I took off, I needed to let you know. I really like you and want to date you exclusively.” I was like, Okay, this is different. Because with Courtney, it was like she was very much pushing for marriage, but it was like waiting for me to do stuff. I was like, “Okay, I like you too, and I would like to be exclusive as well.” She's like, “Okay, we can talk more when I get back.” And she took off and I'm like, “Okay.” That same Thanksgiving, she's in Colorado, and my mom and dad decided to go out of town for Thanksgiving. My mom had wanted the house painted for years. Like we moved into the house they lived in at the time in 2002; it was a brand-new home. All the walls were white and she did not like the white. So this was 2009. We finally, she's like, “I'm going to take your dad on a trip and while I'm gone you guys paint the house because he can't say anything once it's done. He's not going to say, ‘Go waste more money to buy white paint to repaint the walls white.’ He's just going to accept it.” She discovered that because she had painted one of the bathrooms while he was on a business trip and he came home and didn't even notice that it had been painted until she pointed it out. He's like, “Oh, I guess it's OK.” Then it was like still pulling teeth to paint the rest of the house. 33 So she picked out the colors and while she was gone, I got all my friends from my apartment complex and my sisters brought their friends and we all painted. Julie had come home that day. She wasn't there to help paint, but she came home and that evening was there for the big reveal. My parents got home late and it was like this nice tan color throughout the house and then this big red accent wall in the kitchen that my mom wanted and, surprise, surprise, my dad did not notice that the house had been painted until he saw the red wall, and then he realized the white was gone as well. Like, oh my gosh, you are ridiculous. Julie came over that night and met my parents for the first time, and I was like, “This is my girlfriend,” and Julie's like, “I swear your mom hated me on that first meeting because she just stared at me like.” My brother had had tons of girlfriends throughout high school and was constantly dating, and that just wasn't me. Of course, my parents at this point knew that I was attracted to men as well, and for my mom, it was confirmed that I was attracted to men because she always, I guess, thought that I might be. So Julie didn't realize that the look was more of that. Like my mom was like, “Okay, this is weird, like what's going on?” Shortly after that, we started talking and I told Julie, “My previous girlfriend,” which was a year ago. “We had our first kiss, all of that, it happened within three weeks, and she was talking about marriage and all that. It just scared me and I wasn't ready for that. I don't want to move fast.” She's like, “Okay, that's fine. We'll move at your pace,” because she's like, “Why haven't you kissed me yet.” I'm like, “This is the reason why. I don't want to kiss you until I know that I love you.” We met in September of 2009 and started dating exclusively in November. Some of our friends and I, we took a trip down to SUU in December along with Julie because one of my friends, she also went to SUU for a little bit and we're like, “We got to show you guys Cedar City and SUU, it's awesome.” We did that, and then 34 Julie went home for Christmas and she had made me the 12 days of Christmas before she left. Each night we would Skype and I would open the present, and it was really cool, like doing that. Then I picked her up from the airport and I was really excited to see her. I think at that point she's like, okay, maybe he's going to kiss me now, like we've had some time apart but I didn’t. That spring, I took an online math class again through SUU, not even thinking, “I can take it at UVU, transfer it and it'll count.” Like, it never crossed my mind. It was just, “I need to finish all my classes at SUU, get that associate then transfer to UVU.” She started tutoring me, helping me. But again, it was the tests. I kept failing the tests so I failed that class, but she was amazing at helping me look at the problems a different way. That's one thing I love about her when it comes to math, and even with our kids, she can look at a situation and be like, “Okay, this is how you should do it, but I can see you're not understanding it that way. Let's figure out how you understand it and teach it that way.” That helped me really start to understand the concepts and that. We continued to date, and around Valentine's Day is when I officially said, “I love you,” to her. She was like, “Okay, he said I love you. The kiss is coming.” I didn't kiss her, and I realized that I said it, but I still wasn't ready to kiss her because I was still unsure. I think at this point, I hadn't quite told her yet about pornography or that I was attracted to men as well. It was like, “I like her, but I need to let her know before I do anything.” I don't remember exactly when it was, but at one point after a date we sat and talked and had a heart to heart, and she opened up about her experiences in high school and struggles with depression and PTSD. I was like, “She's opening up to me. I need to open up to her,” and I just laid it all out. I was like, “I struggle with pornography and I am attracted to men.” She's like, “I figured. I've been praying about it and I just I knew you were struggling with something and I 35 just had a feeling it was something to do with sex. Doesn't matter, like you're working on it. We can work on this together.” I was like, “But what about the attraction to men?” But it was really like it took a lot of stress off of me, like, “Okay, this will work.” Of course, at the same time, I'm also in the back of my head like, “I know what I've been taught at church. I've had experiences to know that for me, the church is true. If this is really what the church is teaching regarding homosexual relationships, then I shouldn't be pursuing that.” Lots of confusion that way. But Julie seemed to be just this calming, help me get through it. There's one point where I had viewed again and it kind of put our relationship on the rocks, and it was the first test of like, “Okay, is she going to stick around if I mess up with the pornography or is the attraction really getting to her?” We worked it out, and the biggest thing was just like, “If you're struggling to come to me, let me know. I don't like the fact that you hid it from me.” It was her big complaint, but that was right around the beginning of April, right around her birthday that we had that discussion. A week later, I had my wisdom teeth removed and whatever medicine they gave me right before, I don't remember anything from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. that day. Julie has had to fill in all of it for me. I still like the way I view it, when I think about that period and what she's told me. It's like I'm watching a TV show still, nothing has come back and she's even showed me pictures. My brain did not record any memories of that time period. She had taken the day off and she stayed with me. At this point, I had discovered the list of Disney theatrical released animated films and that Disney has an official canon of their animated films. So not every animated film they release goes into the canon. I was like, “I want to watch the entire canon,” because I'd grown up with like maybe five Disney movies, most of them from the 90s. I was like, “I want to see all of these movies.” So we had started 36 watching them in chronological order. The day I got my wisdom teeth out was when we were on the package films that were released during World War 2. “Make My Music,” “Fun and Fancy Free,” “Melody Time.” She watched them two or three times in a row with me because I would be like, “Let's put this one on,” and I'd fall asleep. Then she's like, “Hey, we're going to put the next one on,” and we'd watch that and I'd fall asleep. Then just like, “Okay, we're going to do this one,” I'm like, I don't remember that one, can we rewatch that one?” And I’d fall asleep. So it was like two or three times in a row for two or three of them. Finally, she's like, “I'm done with this section of the canon. You can rewatch them on your own, but we're going to move on.” But she stuck with me like all day through that, she made sure I had salt water to gargle. I had forgotten we were out of salt and that we needed to buy some. But I had a sugar shaker, which was something she did not grow up with. I grew up eating cereal and you had a sugar shaker so you could add sugar to your cereal. So she had made me sugar water to gargle with. Like this was while I was still incoherent. I don't have memories when she first did it. Later, when I was aware of what was happening, she's like, “You need to gargle with saltwater again.” I'm like, “Where did you get the salt? You said you did it before.” She's like “From the cupboard.” I'm like, “That's not salt. That's sugar. Like, we have no salt.” She's like, “That makes sense why you made such a weird face when you gargled the first time.” So that night, I was laying on the couch and she was getting ready to say goodnight, and she had asked one of our friends to come because I slept in the living room and my roommates were all busy and that, so we asked one of our friends from another apartment to come over and sleep on the floor just to keep an eye on me. As we were saying goodnight, it hit me like she did all this for me, like that was showing how much she loved me, like the fact that she was willing to 37 rewatch those movies. I ended up kissing her that night because I was like, “I really love her, like, I appreciate that she did all this and that.” The next day, I go over to her apartment and I hadn't mentioned the memory issue at all to her yet. I go over and like, “Hey, how are you?” Didn't kiss her on greeting her or anything because I was like, “Is that normal? Is that what you do once you've had your first kiss?” Like questioning everything. She and I start talking. I'm like, “I don't remember anything from yesterday.” And she just goes white, like, “You do remember we kissed right?” I'm like, “Oh yeah, I remember that, it was just the morning and early afternoon I don't remember.” She's like, “Okay, why didn't you kiss me when you came over?” I was like, “Cause, I don't know. I just wasn't sure if that was okay or not.” She's like “Yes.” I ended up taking care of her when she got her wisdom teeth out a few weeks later. Soon after, like we had been attending a preparing for eternal marriage class that our stake was putting on and had discussed marriage and started seriously talking about getting married. Finally, like in May, we're like, “Okay, yes, we're going to get married.” We went ring shopping and the ring I wanted to get, they didn't have in her size, so we had to order it. There was going to be a few weeks until it got there. The ring arrived on June 18th and my birthday's June 21st. I've always had a fascination with multiples of three. So I was like, I knew it was going to arrive around then. I was like, “If I proposed on the 18th, that would be amazing.” That's also the day that Toy Story three was released, June 18, 2010. I know, I'm ridiculous with Disney stuff. The 19th was one of our roommate's birthdays, and she was having a party on the 18th. So she was over there, having a sleepover at her roommate's parents' house and I'd gotten the ring. So I was like, “Okay, I'll just do it the next day. It's fine.” 38 She hadn't really spent time with my family. I text my sisters to be like, “Hey, so this is my plan, how I'm going to propose and all this. Would you guys mind hanging out with Julie and driving her around to all this?” They're like, “Yeah!” So they text her and they're like, “So do you want to hang out tomorrow?” Julie turns to her roommates and she's like, “Guys, I think I'm getting engaged tomorrow.” But then like I took her on a scavenger hunt to different places that were significant in our dating life, like the laser tag place we went, and then we'd always go see movies at the Dollar Theater in Provo. She would always plan the movies and be like “Kay, who wants to come, I'll buy all the tickets and then we'd go to Dollar Tree or Wal-Mart and buy a bunch of candy and make snack bags to sneak in.” It was a lot of fun. Movie watching has been a big part of our relationship and so I sent her there. I had it end up at the Mount Timpanogos Temple, which beforehand, I was like, If we do get married, which temple do we want to get married in? She's like, “You know, I love San Diego, but most of my friends are up here and I don't know if any of them would be able to travel down to San Diego. So let's do either Provo or Mt. Timp.” So we decided on the Mount Timpanogos Temple, and that's where I had the scavenger hunt end. I was waiting there on the back side of the temple, on a bench. That's where I proposed and I had my sisters hide and take pictures, because that's what my brother did when he proposed. My sisters like, were hiding and took pictures because he wanted pictures of the proposal. That is not Julie's thing. She would have preferred it just be the two of us, and we just spend time together that evening. We ended up celebrating with my family afterwards at Applebee's, and she was just like, this is weird because her family's not like that. We ended up getting married in the Mount Timpanogos Temple. I received my endowments in the Draper Temple two weeks before we were married, and she was there for that, and then the wedding. We had planned it and had our reception 39 at a park in Orem that we would go to a lot. There was a pergola that was built over this picnic area and it had wisteria that was starting to grow across it. I was like that'd be gorgeous, and we were trying to decide should we do it in August or September? We figured, well, Labor Day weekend, people will have off of work and they can travel out and it will be perfect. So we planned it for that. It was nine or ten in the morning when we had the sealing. The park had been reserved for that evening, so we reserved for the morning and we had it till 2:00 PM and so we had the reception from noon to two. We decided on what we wanted, like my sister and some of her roommates went out with us to take engagement photos. We've got hundreds of engagement photos because all of them were taking pictures of the four different spots we went to. Julie created the wedding announcement, and we decided, “We'll start a blog.” Her roommates had decided to start a blog, and they each had nicknames. They're like, “We'll use this to tell stories like basically document the fun stories and things that are happening in their lives as roommates.” But they didn't want it to be obvious who was who. So they all had nicknames that they wouldn't tell anyone. But I've since been told who the nicknames were, then every time they referred to a guy that they liked, it was Mike was his name because the ward we were in had ten Michaels. When I moved in we had probably another five or six move in during the course that Julie and I were in that ward. So every Michael got a nickname and mine ended up being MAT Shelley, because my initials are M-A-T. Then in high school, for Homecoming one year, the group I was in, all the guys made a video to show the girls. One of the guys was playing the girl in the video and then couldn't be there for the last day of filming. So I ended up being the girl and they completely changed the character's name and all this and the character's name was Shelley. That kind of became a nickname in high school. So I was telling them the story 40 because they're like, “What can we call you?” “You can't call me Matt, because there's Matt’s in the ward, and my brother's name is Matt. That'll just be weird.” So we came up with MAT Shelley and two of her roommates still to this day, that's all they ever call me. It's actually weird to them when they call me Michael. LR: The actual date of your wedding? MT: September 4, 2010. Yeah. During the summer, so we're planning the wedding. We went to a family reunion and that's when I took the math class at UVU, and Julie would still help me out. But the professor I had at UVU had a very similar mindset to Julie. So he would explain something and then say, “Who doesn't understand it?” If anyone raised their hand, he's like, “Kay, let me show you a different way.” All the homework was through WileyPLUS, an online program, but I still didn't do well on the test. But I finally passed math and was able to get my associates. I had actually gone to graduation in May of 2010, and I went down and didn't even think to invite Julie. She's still upset by that, but it never crossed my mind, and I realized, like there were a lot of things, like the attraction to men was messing up the way I viewed relationships, and I was like trying to mimic Hollywood and TV and all that. This is how our relationship is. And because my parents didn't really talk about that, at all, and in church, it was like, “No, you, you don't talk about how to have a good relationship with somebody,” and then you go on a mission and you come home and then it's like, “Okay, you need to get married.” I'm like, “There's no real explanation of open communication or different things like that.” So that was going on. Our wedding colors were, my favorite color is green and hers is purple so we're like “Okay, we'll have those.” I'm like, “Well, we can't just pick any green and purple. We need to find some that match.” So it was a mint green and a lilac purple. Then Julie's like, “We need some sort of color to kind of combine it. Why not 41 chocolate brown?” I was like, “Okay, that that's good. What if we add one more color, but it's an accent color of an orange?” She's like, “What kind of orange?” As a kid, we would do bead crafts, and there was an orange bead that we had that was hyacinth orange, which is a light orange. So I was like, “Let's do that.” I came up with all the color names. She's like, yeah, green, purple, brown and orange. I'm like, “Okay, it's going to be mint green, lilac purple, chocolate brown and hyacinth orange.” She's like, “Okay, this is weird. Most guys don't know colors like this.” We didn't have a wedding party because I didn't have a best guy friend and I didn't want my brother as my best man. It was like, “I don't know who to have.” Since then I've met two guys that I'm like, “If we had known each other when I got married, you would have been co-best men,” because they're amazing guys. But we just told our family, “Here's our wedding colors, dress in those colors,” and we told them the green, purple and brown. We're like, “The orange is reserved for us.” So I had a white vest and a light orange tie, and then Julie had in her bouquet, it was like there was one orange gerbera daisy, which is her favorite flower. And then she had an orange sash, I think, around her dress. Orange was just a very light accent throughout the reception. It turned out really great, like, we actually have a whole album over there, our wedding photos because that was the one thing we wanted to spend money on. The venue was $50. Julie's mom, we were talking about making sandwiches ourselves and she's like, “I'm going to splurge and pay the extra money to have Costco put the sandwiches together for us.” But a lot of the food was homemade and that. The photos- she had a family friend that did professional photos, and he gave us some good discount but it was still, probably a thousand dollars we spent on the photographer. We're so glad because he brought a second photographer with him and he gave his list of shots that he tries to get, and then he's like, “You 42 need to tell me if there's any additional shots you want.” The other photographer was just there taking candid shots. We've got tons of candid’s from her. The one shot that I was adamant we get is I wanted a picture of myself with her parents and a picture of Julie with my parents. She's like, “This is weird.” A lot of people are like, “Why?” I was just like, “I want those photos. I want Julie to have a picture with my parents.” Four months later, my mom died, and I think for the most part, it was family history reasons and just a unique photo that you don't normally get at weddings. I'm wondering if part of me kind of felt like something was going to happen, and we need to get this now before it was too late. The wedding day went off without a hitch. Everything was great. The only thing was we didn't have as much time as we wanted at the temple to get photos afterwards. Because of the tight schedule with the park and completely forgetting that Labor Day is still in the summer, we didn't put any sunscreen on for having an early afternoon reception. The next day Julie had a nice red spot, but it was great because we were done by two. We went over to our church building and opened presents there. We had family come over and they jotted down everything we got and who it was from. So we had a great list for sending out thank you cards. Our friends helped us take everything over to our apartment and we were to our apartment by 3:30, 4:00. So we have the rest of the evening to just relax and enjoy being married. We get home, she says she was joking, but I'm pretty sure she was serious. Our friends helped bring all our presents in and then they finish and they're like, antsy to get out the door, and Julie's like, “So what do you guys want to do now?” I just glared at her like, are you serious? This is our wedding night. But it was great because we could just be together. Then dinner came around and it was like, what should we go do? We ended up going to Wingers for dinner and came home and all 43 that. The next day, our friend, Julie's roommate Rena, drove us up to the airport and we flew down to San Diego because we were having an open house on Labor Day at Julie's parents house. There we wore flip flops. Julie wanted to wear flip flops, but here in Utah we didn't. Down there at the open house, we did. We were in our wedding dress and our tux with flip flops, it was a lot of fun, we had our honeymoon, a mini honeymoon there, and then another one a few weeks later in Salt Lake. Back in January of 2010, Julie bought me tickets to go see The Lion King at Capitol Theater in Salt Lake. Her roommates were like, “Are you sure?” She does not like musicals, and she's like, “Well, if we're together still, we'll go see it, if not, then he just gets the tickets.” Thankfully, we were still together and we got to go see The Lion King together and have a mini second honeymoon there. LR: I really appreciate the time you took to explain everything, it's really telling about who you are. It's not something that I think we've ever experienced. I can't quite explain it. I really appreciate your time, and I don't want you to feel bad that you spent an hour talking about Julie. MT: Oh my gosh. LR: And your relationship with her, into the marriage part, because I thought it was really important in who you are. But now I have questions. You finally got your associates in 2010? MT: Yes. LR: Are you still doing the hospitality career path or have you decided on something else? MT: So I was still planning on hospitality at that point because that was my thought is UVU has the best hospitality program in the state. I was working at the Marriott, while taking that class at UVU that summer, I realized, “I can't go to UVU, I can't handle it,” because SUU, when I went down, was six thousand students total, 44 including grad students and UVU was at least twenty-six thousand at that point. I mean they had just gotten university status recently and it seemed like their goal was to become the largest university in the state and they were on track to do that. I think it was a year or two later that they actually surpassed the U and BYU as far as student population goes. It just felt like even though the professor I had for the math class was amazing, it just felt very impersonal and I didn't like the campus. The one amazing thing about UVU is you can get to almost any building without having to go outside in the winter, which is fantastic, that you can stay inside and stay warm. But I was like, “I can't handle this.’ And Julie this whole time, is telling me like, “I keep getting waitlisted for my upper division math classes. I'm a senior, I should be graduating, but I can't get the classes I need to graduate.” I decided I'll take a year off of school when I finish that math class and of course, I'd had experiences at work that I was like, “I just can't handle hospitality management. I don't want to deal with people complaining to me all day long for the rest of my life,” or having to make people who I knew were complete jerks, make them feel better and not being able to be like “You're being a complete jerk and you don't deserve any of this,” because that's just not how things are done in hospitality management. You want your customers to be happy as much as possible. We started thinking about it and I came around to history as an option. The reason I switched from engineering was the math. I was like, “I can't do more than 1050,” and then this I was like, “Well, maybe I'll do history.” So I ended up switching to history, and when I did that, like it felt right. I told my parents and it was like a light bulb went off with them too, they're like, “Oh yeah, like, you've always been fascinated with history. Why didn't we think of that from the beginning and push you in that direction?” 45 During that time off, I switched to history and then worked on convincing Julie to transfer from UVU to SUU. That first year of marriage, we lived in Orem. Julie was going to UVU and then I started classes again in fall of 2011, and Julie had officially transferred to SUU at that point. So we both did online courses that first semester. One semester is all I could do online after that, I had to be back down at SUU because they didn't offer anything else online for the history program. Soon after we were married, like Julie and I had talked about having kids and we both were like, “Let's wait.” I was really like excited at the prospect of becoming a father and all this, but we're like, “The church pushes people to have kids right away,” but we see a lot of our friends who had kids right away, and they regret having kids super-fast, not having a year or two to get to know each other and all that before. So we're like, “Okay, let's do that.” Then Julie got this impression that we just needed to start trying right away. I'm like, “Okay, I'm going to be a father soon,” like, all excited, but I'm like, I also want to just make sure that it's the right thing. So I prayed about it, like we went to the temple and I felt confident, like, okay, yes, this is good. That was more for Julie because she was so hesitant. She's like, “I don't know if I even want to have kids.” So we start trying, and within a month, she was pregnant. Our first Thanksgiving Day, we went down to Julie's parents house for that, and then we decided Christmas would be here with my family. My mom's family does a Christmas party every year out in California, so my dad and mom and sister took Amtrak out for that. On the way back, the train ride back, my mom got a headache and started complaining and like Tylenol wasn't getting rid of it. They got to Salt Lake and something had happened on the tracks so the train couldn't take its normal route to Provo, it had to wait or be diverted. They had to take a bus bridge down to Provo. So they were getting off the train in Salt Lake, and my mom 46 lifted her luggage and the headache became excruciating. She almost collapsed. This is from what my dad and sister told me, and they knew something was wrong. But I don't know why they decided to take the bus all the way to Provo. Once they got off the bus they realized, “We need to take her to the hospital,” instead of when she got off the train. But that's my understanding of it. It's possible that it was actually on the bus like after they got off the bus. Lifting the luggage is when all that happened. But my understanding is I thought it was when they got off the train. They took my mom to the hospital, well, they had taken her to my brother's house, there in Provo, first of all, because they got on super early, so that was the plan. Because my brother would pick them up and then they took her to the hospital and they found out that she had an aneurysm. They're like, “We're going to rush her into emergency surgery.” I'm at work, I have no idea what's going on. I just knew that they were supposed to get home that day. Julie's at school and while I’m at work, my dad calls and informs me of everything that's going on and the way he talks about it, he makes it sound like it's no big deal. “We got into the hospital in time. Everything's fine.” Like I'm pretty sure I asked him, “Do I need to come home? Do I need to leave work? Do I need to come over to the hospital?” He's like, “No, everything's under control.” I took that at face value and was like, “Okay, I won't come then. My younger sister, she went over to the hospital and I think my brother did too. So they all were there at the hospital a few hours before Julie and I got there. But I hung up with my dad and I'm like, “I need to call Julie now,” and I called her, and I'd been totally fine emotionally. I called Julie, and she's like, “What's up,” because she could tell something was wrong. I said, “Mom's in the hospital.” Thankfully, December was a super slow time for the hotel, because I'm the only one at the front desk and I'm on the phone and I'm trying not to just break down. I was totally fine on the phone with my dad, but as soon as I called and told 47 Julie it was like the floodgates just wanted to open. She's like, “Do you need to come home?” I was like, “No, I think I'm fine.” I finished my shift. When I got home, I changed and we went to the hospital and we were able to see my mom. At that point, she was not responding verbally to anyone. I think my sister-in-law was able to talk with my mom before she died and my younger sister might have been able to, but I'm not 100 percent sure. I thought all of my family had been able to. So Julie and I were the only ones that didn't, and it was really, like, frustrating. But I've since learned that my brother didn't get to and the conversation my sister-in-law had, it was really short. She could only say a couple of words and that so it didn't feel like I was being left out or forgotten. But in the moment, it felt like we were the last to know, we were forgotten about, nobody cared how we felt. Julie, being the new one in the family, especially felt that. The doctor kept saying that they caught it in time and everything would be OK. They're like, “She's responding,” like when they'd squeeze her hands, her muscles would react, like she was reacting to the pain. They'd poke her foot with a needle, occasionally for the same thing. “She's responding, she's there. We know that there's brain activity. So it's just the waiting game of her body recovering and recuperating.” Of course, because it's a brain aneurysm, they had to shave her head. So she didn't look exactly right to us when we got there. This is three days before Christmas, two or three days before. I call work and I'm like, “I'm not coming in, my mom's in the hospital.” They're like, “Okay, take the time you need.” She started to get better. Christmas morning, Julie had felt that she might be pregnant, and she'd woken up early and decided to take a pregnancy test and it was positive. She took a picture of the pregnancy test because I was still asleep, it's like 4:00 in the morning. So she waited until six. She got me up and that was the Christmas present she got me. I had gotten her a sewing machine, but I had my 48 mom go on Black Friday to get it while we were in San Diego. So Julie's first sewing machine that she had was from my mom, technically right from me, but because of my mom. So that was really special to her. We go to the hospital and they're like, “She's responding, she can hear you,” based on what they could tell, like her responding and all that. So the plan was we were going to go over to my brother's house and kind of do a mini Christmas together as a family. We had gone to the hospital, my dad stepped out of the room and while he was gone, we told my mom that we were pregnant and of course, we didn't get any response. But the nurses were like, “She can hear you,” so we knew that she heard us. She knows that we're pregnant. Things seemed to be going well, so my sister, her boyfriend, Julie, and I went to a movie, “Tron Legacy,” and things were looking up and we're like, “She's going to be out of the hospital soon.” Of course, we turned off our phones for the movie, and as soon as we turned on our phones, we realized we had a bunch of missed calls from the rest of the family. We finally got through and they're like, “You need to get to the hospital right now, something happened.” We headed over and the doctor told us, “We can wait it out, or we can try doing more surgery and we might be able to fix this and that.” He's like, “We can make the decision in the morning.” The next morning, he told us, “We can do it, but she basically will be a vegetable. So you guys need to decide, do you want to do that or do you want to take your mom off life support?” Of course, we're all in various stages of grief. My dad had called his dad and his dad reminded him, he's like, “You're lucky to have had her this long,” because she had had a kidney transplant at 18, she was told she wasn't going to live much longer to not even attempt to have kids and all that. He's like, “You got her for an extra 30 years, that you shouldn't have had. So don't look at it as a sad thing, look at it as a blessing that you got to have her for that long.” My 49 dad shared that with us and we all were like, “Okay, let's take her off life support. We'd much rather have that, especially with how vibrant she was to then have a vegetable, it's better for all of us and for her.” The doctor later told my dad, “You guys made the right decision and honestly, she actually passed away on Christmas, but I didn't have the heart to tell you guys on Christmas that your mom had died,” so he purposely gave us false hope, so that the death day would officially be December 26th. Christmas was one of my mom's favorite holidays, and I think somewhere that had been mentioned as well, so he really was like, “I don't want to ruin Christmas for you for the rest of your lives.” So she technically officially died on the 25th, but her death day is the 26th, and then she was buried on New Year's Eve. After making the decision to remove my mom from life support, my family talked and on the 26th we decided we'll officially have Christmas back at my dad's house and exchanged gifts and all that. While there, we informed the rest of my family about Julie being pregnant. We were going to wait to tell them that we were pregnant, but because of the circumstances we're like, “We'll tell them now.” I mean, there's still the possibility Julie could miscarry and all that, but we told them and of course, we're expecting everyone to be super excited, and instead, everyone starts bawling. I'm like, “Are you guys not happy?” They're like, “No, we are, it's just sad that Mom doesn't get to know.” We're like, “Mom was the first to know, we told her yesterday at the hospital. Dad, when you stepped out of the room and it was just the two of us in there with Mom, that's when we told her.” We actually told Julie's parents and family first because we had decided to tell my family and we thought, “We better tell them before they hear through the grapevine somehow.” It was really kind of a bittersweet Christmas for us. We'd went and bought a record player and cassette combo that you can use to convert records because my 50 parents had tons of records and cassette tapes, and my dad had a bunch of slides from his mission. So we had converted all that and we were so excited and I knew my mom, it would just be the best Christmas present ever because there were tapes that she recorded of her mom's story. We had my dad's mom's story on cassette that we digitized and we took their favorite records and digitized them. BYU used to have a group called Lamanite Generations, that was a performance group that was made up of Native Americans, and they performed traditional Native American dances and other spiritual, religious songs. My dad went on tour with them as a stage crew member while he was at BYU, so he had a bunch of their records. We digitized those and he was really touched by it, but it was bittersweet because of my mom’s death. Also, the day that my parents left to go to California was the day the Provo Tabernacle caught fire, and I just remember thinking, it's an omen of something bad to come. When my mom passed away, I was like, “Was that it?” Like it was very interesting. After that we decided, “We're going to name this baby after my mom,” and we had come up with the name Emma Elaine, because we weren't sure if it was a boy or girl so we're like Emma Elaine, and we were still unsure about a boy. We go in at 18 weeks to have an ultrasound and we're told it's a girl. So we're like, it's Emma Elaine, and we're all excited. Julie was friends with the ultrasound tech and the prior appointment, she had told us the story of how she gets it right all the time, except for once she got it wrong, told them it was a girl and then they came back for the 20-week appointment and it turns out it was a boy. We go in for the 20- week appointment, and she's doing all the measurements and Elai had been sitting like this, and all she could get was the butt shot, and there was no sign of it. She's like, “In all my years, usually you can still tell from that angle if it's a boy or not.” 51 That's why she had said, girl, and then she's like, “Nope, there are the boy parts. I'm so sorry.” So Elai, for about two weeks, was Emma Elaine. Julie felt like she had lost like mentally, it felt like she had lost the child, and she kept using pronouns like that. Finally, after a couple of weeks, I'm like, “I'm sad, too, that it's not a girl, but that is our child and you need to stop.” That, like, snapped her out of the mentality. And, after that, it was like, “Okay, it's our son.” We chose the name Elai, and it’s spelled E-L-A-I. So it's Elaine, but you drop the N-E, and that's his spelling. There was a family in my neighborhood growing up that their last name was Lai [pronounced lie] and it was like L-A-I. He was from Hong Kong and they pronounce it like that, so I was like, “We can get away with this, like spelling Elai this way.” We only had one person mispronounce it as Elay or Elaya something, but everyone else is like, “It's Elai?” Like, “Yeah, you got it. Like for Eli.” He loves his spelling and he sees E-L-I, and he's like, “That's not how you spell Elai.” He loves the way his name is spelled. But his middle name is Guy after Julie's dad. Elai was born in August of 2011. The due date was actually our anniversary, but he was born a few weeks early. We hadn't been married a full year before we were parents. Around that time, I'd been doing really well with the addiction and that, but still struggling. I’d been trying to come to terms with the attraction and how it fits in with my relationship with Julie and I ended up messing up and viewing pornography that summer of 2011. I hid it from Julie because I was ashamed. We started school, did online school through SUU that fall and moved down in December to Cedar City and then started in-person classes at SUU. It was April of that year of 2012 that I got home from the priesthood session of General Conference, and I was just like, “I need to tell her, I've been hiding this for nine months. I haven't viewed since then. I need to tell her.” So I broke the news to her, and she got all upset, obviously upset and all this. Then we went and talked to the 52 bishop and then he got me into a support group that the church offers for addiction recovery. I started attending those classes and then we moved a few times and we lived in three different apartments in Cedar City, we were down there from December 2011 to May of 2014. In our second apartment down there, I'd been doing great and then messed up again, and I had been going to the addiction recovery classes, but the bishop we were working with, he's like, “You guys should get into marriage counseling. I can set you up with LDS Family Services, and I really feel like especially with you being attracted to men, you really need to talk about this because you're not going to be able to overcome the addiction without mentally figuring this out.” So we started seeing, I forget his name, but Julie and I loved him to death. He was amazing. We were attending and going, I think it was like twice a month. It was during one of those sessions, we were talking and I was explaining like how I struggling with same sex attraction and all this. It's LDS Family Services, and in the past when I've gone to them, it's been very church-centered and they used the term same-sex attraction all the time. He was the first therapist I'd seen that he's like, “You keep using same-sex attraction, but it's okay to say gay, it's okay to admit that you're gay.” Both Julie and I were like, “Okay, this is weird.” So he, got me to start saying that, using gay instead of same-sex attraction. I remember the first time saying it was just like, a relief like, even though I didn't feel like I needed to come out publicly or anything. I felt relief and felt like I was finally being honest with myself. So we continued to see him off and on until we moved out of that ward. I graduated from SUU in 2013 and then Julie finished up in 2014, but I got a job up in Utah County in April of 2014. So for the last half of Julie's last semester, she was living on her own in Cedar City with Elai. At this point, we felt like we should start trying to have kids again, and she had found out right 53 around the time I got the job that she was pregnant. She was pregnant, with an almost three year old, finishing up her math degree, living by herself for a month. I came down for graduation and then we moved to Utah County and that was very emotional. My dad drove the moving truck and Julie drove my dad's car that they had driven down and I drove our car. So I was by myself and I went to gas up and I like had to take like 5, 10 minutes and just cry because there were so many memories with SUU and Cedar City, and I just felt like I was leaving home. LR: What was your degree in when you graduated in 2013? MT: So my graduation date is December 2013, and I have a Bachelor of Science in History. LR: OK. That's right. MT: Then Julie had one more semester. So her graduation date is May 2014. But we walked in the same commencement because SUU just has one a year. Her degree is a Bachelor of Science in Math Education. LR: OK. All right, so you're leaving SUU, it's quite emotional for you guys because you've been there for so long and made a lot of really good friends. Where are you going in Utah County? What is the job that you had lined up for you? MT: So initially, I had gotten a job at a Jimmy John's up in Utah County. I had been working at Jimmy John's in Cedar City and the one up in Utah County was just getting me a job up there while I looked for others. The full-time job I got up there was working for a company called ACH Fulfillment. It was a local company that sold supplies for essential oils, and they focused on both doTerra Young Living products. The owners actually wrote a book on how to use Young Living essential oils and then wrote one for doTerra oils as well. They also had their own mini line of essential oils they would sell. 54 LR: Were you hoping to find a job in your field, or what was your thought process on that? MT: So Jimmy John's, because of the Affordable Care Act, was really limiting how many hours employees could get. Because right around 2014, I think is when all the official penalties for not having insurance and all that were going into effect. The franchise owners decided they could only afford to give the managers benefits, so all of their employees had to be less than 30 hours and I was trying to get in as a manager there. But the boss kept promising he would make me a manager, but that never happened. So I was trying to find a job that we could get health insurance for. At that point we had applied for Medicaid and Utah said, “Oh you make too much to qualify for Medicaid, go to the health exchange.” We went to HealthCare.gov and they're like, “Oh, you make too little to buy insurance.” Like they wouldn't even let us look at what was available they're like, “You make too little to qualify for any of these plans. You need to apply for Medicaid.” So we were in this crack in the system. I was like, I need to find a job that will at least get me insurance because Elai, we were low enough in our income that Elai was covered by Medicaid, but Julie and I had no health insurance. Which, to me, doesn't make sense. We can't take care of ourselves, but we can have our kid be super healthy. Then Julie ended up finding out she was pregnant and the Utah levels are higher for pregnant women, income limits are higher. So she suddenly qualified. I still didn't qualify for insurance, and there were no jobs down in Cedar City or St. George that I was getting offered. I think I could have been applying pretty much everywhere. At this point I was looking at higher education or librarian positions. My sister worked at this company that I ended up getting hired at. They heard what was going on, and they actually fast tracked me through their system because they always hire 55 through a temp agency for the first few months and then they decide if they want to hire you full time and they fast tracked it so I could get insurance faster. Which was really nice. I worked initially as a picker in the evenings. I would pull items for the orders that were being shipped. Eventually I transitioned to shipping and to the morning shift as well. Because once Julie moved up to Utah County, we found that me working in the evenings just wasn't working and I had gotten a temporary job at a family history startup company in Orem. I think I spent one or two days there and I was like, “No I can't do this,” because that's morning and then run home, change real quick, eat lunch and shoot over to the other job and be there till like 9:00 at night. I wasn't getting any time with Julie or Elai, so I quit that. But for the first few months, we were there in Utah County, we lived in my dad's basement. We found an apartment on the east side of Provo right next to the state hospital, which was actually quite fun because it's a quiet campus cause it's the mental hospital. We would take walks up and down, it's got a beautiful boulevard to enter campus, and so it was a pretty place to go walking. Right at the east end of Center Street, so it wasn't too busy, even though Seven Peaks Water Park was a block away. I felt like we were kind of in this little bubble away from all the BYU traffic, which was really nice. During this time, I had been contemplating grad school and wasn't sure when I'd start. So I was looking at different programs, and the two main ones I was looking at was San Jose State and Emporia State. San Jose because it was completely online and Emporia because one of their locations was just in Orem, even though the main campus is in Emporia, Kansas. LR: So let's see, you're there for over a year and in this time, Julie, has your second child. When did that happen? 56 MT: So Kathryn was born November 18, 2014. She shares a birthday with Mickey Mouse. She's exactly 10 years younger than one of her cousins and they are like best buds. They love each other. It's awesome. They love sharing a birthday. With Kathryn, because of what happened with Elai being told the wrong gender, we're going to wait till a 20-week appointment and then we made them check two or three times to confirm that she was a girl. It was a very stressful time. The hormones that Julie was going through just made her act crazy. Like there would be times she would lose it. It was usually on Sundays, like we had church later in the morning, and Elai and I would get ready and I'd wait till like half an hour before church to go in and get Julie to let her rest because she was tired. I'd go and I'd be like, “Okay, it's almost time for church. Are you wanting to come today or do you want to stay home and rest?” She would chew my head off, like, scream at me. Like get really upset. To the point where I didn't want to go to church and Elai and I would end up going for a two- or three-hour drive because I was like, “I don't want to go back home.” She had gestational diabetes as well, and there were a couple of times where we ended up at the hospital because Kathryn hadn't moved in while. It was a very stressful pregnancy that way. We set a date for her to be induced, which was the 18th. So we got up that morning, Julie's mom had come up to watch Elai for us while we were at the hospital. We got up, everything was going fine, going a lot better than with Elai. Things were progressing and all that. We got to the hospital about 6:00 AM, and it was around noon or so that they came in and checked on Julie. “This is the last chance. Do you want to get the epidural?” “Why not?” And so Julie got the epidural right then. “We'll come check you in 20 minutes, half hour or so and at that point, we'll break your water officially to help move things along.” 57 They came back a little bit sooner and they broke Julie's water and Kathryn shoved her hand out and brought the cord with it. Julie's doctor was this tiny woman, so she's like up on the bed with her hand, like pressing Kathryn’s head off of the cord because she broke the water. Everything's like fine, and all the sudden we just see like the doctor's face suddenly change. We're like, “What's going on?” She just said, “I got cord,” and immediately the nurses, like, jumped into action. They threw me a gown to put on so I could be in the O.R. They're like, “We've got to go into an emergency C-section because if we try and do a natural birth, your baby is going to die. It's going to cut off the oxygen supply.” They get another doctor who is like twice the size, or a nurse to come in to take over for the doctor in holding Kathryn’s head off the cord so that the doctor can get ready for the surgery. She's twice the size of the doctors. I'm all dressed in the gown and they're wheeling Julie who, the epidural is still just barely starting to work its way through her system. They wheel her into the O.R. and somehow, the anesthesiologist cart got misplaced, like moved out into the hall. So he's like yelling at everyone to stop and wait until he can get some drugs into Julie. The doctors are like, “No, we've got to go now, otherwise we'll lose both of them.” I have no idea what's going on. Julie's, like, groggy, but not fully numb yet. They're like, “We just have to go,” and they throw up the curtain so I can't see what's going on and they just start cutting into her. She had a C-section with very little anesthesia, if any. They finally found his cart and he started pumping meds into her, and then they finally get Kathryn out and they bring me over to the room that's just off the O.R. where they clean her up and weigh her and do all the initial assessments. Prior to Julie being induced, in the back of my mind, I was thinking, “If she does have a C-section, be kind of cool to 58 see her insides.” So I made like a quick glance because I could see everything from that other room. So I was able to see Julie's insides at that point. Kathryn was like grunting, a little bit similar to what Elai was having with breathing, so they're like, “You can stay here with your wife, or you can come with your daughter up to the NICU. We're going to run her up, put her on the machine to help open up her lungs, she'll be down within an hour or two. It's going to take a while for us to finish the surgery.” I decided to go up with Kathryn because I figured it'd be better for me to know what had happened with Kathryn, so when I come back down, I can tell Julie so she's not freaking out as to where Kathryn is. I go up, they get her on the machine and they're like, “Okay, it'll be an hour or two, we'll bring her down to Mother and Baby. So you're good to go back down to Labor and Delivery.” I get down there to our room, and none of the nurses say anything to me, it's like they didn't even acknowledge I was there. I just walked into the room expecting Julie to be back, and she wasn't. I'm in the room and there's nothing like no distractions whatsoever, and my phone is going off the hook because it's been two hours since I've updated anyone on the progress. It like hits me; because at that point I had no idea how long Kathryn will actually be in the NICU and if Julie's going to come through everything OK. I'm like on the verge of a breakdown because I had just finished texting an update and of course, texting people and saying emergency C-section then causes panic. As I was about to lose it, a nurse walked in and said, “They're just finishing up. Your wife will be out in just a few minutes.” That was enough to calm me down and stop the panic attack from happening. She came in a few minutes later and of course, shivering cause it's cold in the OR, and so they had a bunch of heated blankets on her. LR: Drugs do that, too. 59 MT: Yeah. So we got her warmed up, and then I gathered up all our stuff. They let us sit there for about an hour, I think, and then they moved us down to Mother and Baby. Kathryn was brought down a little bit later. Elai and Kathryn, were born at the same hospital, Utah Valley Regional. Apparently, they decided not to put Kathryn through all the same tests that they did Elai. So we got to have Kathryn with us in Mother and Baby and then got to leave like normal. Kathryn was tongue tied, so they clipped the frenulum, I think is what it's called, the little connector between the bottom of your tongue to the bottom of your mouth. We were able to get the same pediatrician that we had with Elai, and after that initial craziness, it was a lot better. Julie was still dealing with the effects of the surgery and that. But then when we got home, we had to tell Elai, “Mom can't pick you up for a while because she had surgery.” The only explanation we could come up with was that instead of being born normally, they had to cut mommy's belly open and pull Kathryn out that way. He like latched onto that phrase. Everyone we would meet for like the next year and a half when they'd be like, “Oh, is this your baby sister?” He'd be like, “Yeah, they cut mommy's belly open and pulled the baby out,” and make it super dramatic and intense. That was the easiest way we could explain to him what a C-section was. Soon after that, we hadn't really used essential oils, but Julie's mom had and we had started looking into it. We'd gotten into a class for doTerra using their balance blend and then frankincense. Really helps you recover from like surgery, and they mentioned putting frankincense on your baby because they're like one thing a lot of people forget is the birthing process is traumatic for the child as well but everyone focuses on mother. So we ended up putting some frankincense on Kathryn, and we used myrrh on Julie's scarring. The scar’s completely gone, like she has no sign of the scar. It healed up really nicely. Julie put the balance on, and it was like, she said she could feel almost immediately a change like she was just 60 calmer and she's like, “I wish I had this throughout the pregnancy, because that would have helped calm me down.” Because of that, we started using doTerra oils and products. It was, I would say, two or three years later, I finally have the courage to talk to Julie about how she was acting during the pregnancy, how crazy she was, and every time she'd freak out at me, the thought that would run through my head is, “I just want my wife back. This is not my wife. I want my wife back.” I finally was able to admit that to her and she goes, “Oh, I know I was crazy. When I'd get in those moods, I knew I was being ridiculous, but there was nothing I could do to stop myself. The hormones were just so crazy, it felt like I was a prisoner in another body.” She kept thinking, “I shouldn't be acting this way, but there's nothing I can do to stop it.” So because of that, we're like, “I think we’re done with kids like two's enough, we have a boy and a girl, we're good.” Shortly after that, I really started looking into grad school. That spring, I officially applied to both Emporia State and San Jose State, but San Jose State, I would be able to start fall of 2015, and Emporia State it was going to be spring of 2016. At this time, I also transitioned from being a shipper at work to working at the retail store they had in Orem. I was working up towards becoming a manager there. Things were going good, but they also had a tendency to promote women more often than men, and there were quite a few men that ended up leaving the company because there just was no progress for them. Looking back, talking with Julie, she's like, “Oh yeah, they totally were discriminating against you based on your gender and all that.” I didn't even realize that, but because I had decided to go to grad school, we decided Julie would get a full-time job and I would stay home with the kids and just focus on school. I had started the application process with both, but completed it with San Jose State and got accepted in March. Julie interviewed for a 61 job at Weber State University in the testing center and then a month or two later, she was offered the job and we moved up here at the beginning of June 2015. We moved to just over on 28th and Quincy. So we've lived right here in downtown Ogden the entire time we've been here. LR: So did you start San Jose in the fall then of 2015? MT: Yeah, I did, and there were four prerequisite classes for the program. Kind of intro classes that I took. I decided to take them all that first semester. Julie was like, “You're not going to want to take that many. Grad school's different.” But one of them was a one credit, it actually finished before the semester actually started, and it was more of an introduction to online grad school. So it was a really easy course cause I'd taken online courses before. So I was like, “I know this about Canvas, I know how to use Blackboard,” so it was really easy. But I ended up not passing with high enough grades because all the required classes you had to get, at least a B. All the other classes, it was a C or higher, so I ended up having to retake those. During this time, I kept looking for library jobs. I'd actually applied for the archives three times, finally got hired on the third time and when I applied for that final time, I was like, “I hope they don't think I'm desperate, like I keep applying for a position here.” When I talked to Jamie later, she said that she was actually grateful that I applied that third time, the fact that I was willing, having been told no twice and I was still willing to apply, it said a lot to her about my commitment to the job and she's like, “This way, we got both you and Tanner.” So it ended up being good. But she did say that I was the second choice. Like if Tanner hadn't accepted then I would have gotten the position. So that's how I ended up applying and getting that position. LR: I have two questions left, but before we delve into that, is there any other story that you want to share in relation to your identity that you think would be relevant? 62 MT: Yeah. So this entire time I kept finding myself with the label gay, and I could tell when I used that label, it irked Julie. Right as I started grad school, all the stress of like, from the pregnancy with Kathryn, and then starting grad school and all that, I'd been doing well with the pornography addiction and ended up slipping up again. At that point, Julie was lik