Oral History Program Jim Miles Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 4-10 October 2022 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Jim Miles Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 4-10 October 2022 Copyright © 2025 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description Queering the Archives oral history project is a series of oral histories from the LGBTQ+ communities of Weber, Davis and Morgan Counties of Northern Utah. Each interview is a life interview, documenting the interviewee’s unique experiences growing up queer. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Miles, Jim, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 410 October 2022, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections & University Archives (SCUA), Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Jim Miles conducted over three sessions between October 4-10, 2022. The first session was conducted over Zoom, and the following two were conducted in person at the Stewart Library. Jim shares his experience growing up queer in an LDS household in Utah. He discusses how his mental health was affected by and impacted his queer journey. Also present during these interviews is Grant Ulrigg. Content warning: Suicide ideation LR: Today is October 4, 2022. We are over Zoom doing an oral history interview with Jim Miles for the Queering the Archives Project in the Stewart Library. My name is Lorrie Rands conducting and Grant Ulrigg is on the call as well. So Jim, thank you for your time and your willingness to share your story. If there's any question I ask that you're uncomfortable with, please let me know and we can just move on. We always begin this with talking and sharing our pronouns and how we identify, so I will begin. My pronouns are she/her and I identify as lesbian. Grant? GU: My pronouns are he/him and I identify as gay. JM: My pronouns are he/him and I identify as queer. LR: Okay, thank you very much. Let's start with the first question of when and where you were born? JM: I was born in Bountiful, Utah; Lakeview Hospital. My family then lived in North Salt Lake for a little bit and didn't love the area. Apparently there was some crime stuff happening, didn't feel comfortable, so they ended up moving up to Tooele, where I spent the next 16 years of my life until I graduated high school. Small town, middle of the desert by a big army base. A very interesting dynamic for growing up. That's kind of my quick rundown. LR: Okay, so where in Tooele did you live? 1 JM: When we moved out there, there was a new development being built on the eastern side of Tooele. There's a big, famous road that runs through Tooele called Droubay, and there's a subdivision being built just on the eastern side of it, and that's kinda where I grew up. There's a small little neighborhood, but it made for a really close community. A lot of new families moved in, a lot of kids my age, and I kind of grew up in that prototypical suburbia background, a bunch of middle-class families, not necessarily upper-middle class, but just a bunch of us spending time doing a lot of socialization with people. Of course, I grew up in Utah with an LDS family, so there was a strong religious background. We were members of the church, which meant we had a ward, which consisted of said neighborhood, so we were all really close. For me, especially as I was young, I would see people I knew five days a week and just spend time with them. LR: Okay. Let's talk about your family dynamics and where you fall in your family dynamics? JM: Yeah, yeah. I grew up in the typical nuclear family, especially with a LDS upbringing, so my parents are still together. I am the oldest of four siblings. There's me, my sister, and the other two are under the age of 18. I have another sister and then a brother. LR: So you have four siblings? JM: I have three siblings. I'm one of four. LR: You're the oldest, and then I know you have a younger brother and sister that are under 18, but you have another? JM: Who's two years younger than me. LR: Okay. And that's a brother or sister? JM: Sister. 2 LR: Okay, so you have two sisters and a brother. We're on the same page now. Talking about your family and upbringing, what were you taught about gender roles growing up? JM: In the LDS religion, if I remember correctly, we have a big newsletter thing that's called the Family Proclamation, and that hung right in the center of our hallway, and it very explicitly separates things into traditional male/female gender roles. Man is head of household, mother is meant to stay home and raise children. I didn't have much deviation from that in my early life, but my mother always made a point ‘cause her parents were divorced and her mom had to raise the kids on her own for a little bit. She ended up having to go back to work and stuff like that. My mom always had a strong sense of, “Heaven forbid anything go wrong, I need to be able to provide for my family.” She actually went through college and got a degree and it was very important for her. When I was born, she stopped working, but she ended up actually going back to work probably when I was in fifth grade. There was that slight deviation from the idealized gender roles that are common within religious spheres, to where I did have a mother who was working as well, once all of her kids went into school and stuff—free time during the day. I guess the long and short of it is, I was raised with very traditional gender roles. However, I had a more liberal experience than others whose mothers completely stayed at home all the time when my mom went back to work. LR: Kind of along the same lines, what were you taught about sexuality growing up? JM: Let's see, there's sexuality in terms of having sex and being sexual, and then there is sexuality in terms of the spectrum. I was never given the sex talk, so I didn't have that strong of a sexuality vibe in my household, we just were taught it was a negative. We didn't talk about it much except for when it came up in terms of 3 religious teachings, that marriage is only between a man and a woman. That was very strong. It's a huge thing in the Family Proclamation, which I said hung in my hallway. My family was always a little bit political. They like to claim they weren't, but they definitely were, and so when Prop VIII came around, I very vividly remember being in church meetings, where they talked about— I believe Prop VIII was to ban gay marriage, so they talked about why Prop VIII was so important, if I remember correctly. Can anyone back me up on that? LR: Yeah, you're remembering correctly. JM: Okay. So, yes, I remember vividly getting read things from the pulpit, saying that Prop VIII’s important, that we can't let the secular world ruin good, wholehearted religious traditions and the fall of mankind and yadda, yadda, yadda. So, I was always aware that my family supported that and that gay marriage was technically a sin. However, I always had some cognitive dissonance. Of course, I can't claim to always having stuck with that, but that kind of sums up my relationship with sexuality. I remember there was a big thing where they banned children of LGBT couples from getting baptized. I remember that was also a really pivotal moment in me learning about sexuality. That was where I started to question things and be like, “Well, that doesn't seem right. Even if you believe that the LGBT people are the ones who are the sinners, that seems to be affecting people who aren't sinning.” So that really was a tiny seed for that cognitive dissonance. We're still a member of the church, we didn't necessarily believe in that teaching. Then I started to expand on that a little later in life. But that was kind of a quick synopsis of my sexual learning, or my learning of sexuality. LR: Do you remember how old you were when the dissonance began to happen? 4 JM: Yeah, I was born in 2000, so the easy thing is in childhood, if I said a year, you just take the back end of that. So Prop VIII, I believe, was in 2008, so I was eight when that first happened. Then the LGBT children being banned from baptism was 2015, I believe, so I was 15 when that happened? LR: Okay, I'm going to kind of go back a little bit. Where did you go to elementary school? JM: Tooele happened to be hitting a growth spurt at the time when my family moved there, so with the new development, there was a new elementary school being built. It was very close to where I grew up. I walked to school a lot of days, took 10 minutes. It was called Middle Canyon Elementary, and all the people from the new subdivision that was built went there, and then a couple local neighborhoods. But that's, again, part of that really strong community I had growing up, where I just saw the same people day in/day out, because we went to church together, played together, and then went to school together. LR: Okay. What are some of your favorite memories of elementary school? I know it's a long period of time, but is there something that stands out? JM: It was a very long time ago for me, regardless. I also have had a few traumatic brain injuries since, so I don't remember much, I guess one of the things that I can bring up that comes up fairly often in my conversations for some reason is the fact that, for the area of Tooele I lived in and the religious fervor and stuff like that, I had a surprisingly liberal teaching experience where there was a really strong emphasis on the arts. I remember doing a couple of class plays in elementary school, and then a couple of school-wide ones. But it felt like there were mandatory plays and music classes every other grade. The one that always comes up a lot is whenever someone mentions Christopher Columbus, I remember being in second grade and learning that he was 5 maybe not the greatest of things, and that he actually partook a lot in slave trade. We watched a Discovery Channel video or something in my class, and they were like, "Look, they're going to show old pictures of naked people. You need to be mature about this." That's always been just one of those funny things where a lot of people from Utah have a very conservative upbringing, but my elementary school was actually kind of—For the demographic and the location, it was surprisingly accepting of other people and looked into history with a more nuanced scope. LR: How do you think that that affected your moving into, say, junior high, where it doesn't matter where you go, it's junior high. How did you think that helps, or any effects? JM: No, I don't think it did. Junior high was interesting for me because I had—It's always been funny in my life. I've made friends and lost them, especially in elementary school. It's kind of funny because I would make a friend for the grade and they always seem to move away at the end of the school year. I was always kind of in a state of limbo at the beginning of every year. Then when you move into a giant citywide junior high—because that was a small town, so it was like the entire city— and you don't have any friends going into it established, and you're not going to maintain those elementary school bonds, you just kind of have to start from scratch again. So, elementary school didn't have this huge effect on my junior high experience, other than science classes, where I had had strong science classes. We had the science fair. That was the one thing that did get me through into a new friend group was making friends with some science kids and doing science fair projects with some groups of people there. That was the biggest effect elementary school had with junior high experience. LR: All right. Where did you go to junior high? JM: Tooele Junior High. 6 LR: Okay. So, what was your first exposure to queerness? Do you remember? JM: My first exposure to queerness, not in the political and religious sense, like I mentioned, Prop VIII and the 2015 stuff, would probably have been my first time recognizing queerness in a person in my everyday life. I had a friend come out actually in eighth grade, and it was one of those things where I had been really good friends with them in the past, and like I said, they always kind of just seemed to float away. So, I hadn't talked to them in a while, but it was another one of those big cognitive dissonance moments. I knew them really well and really liked them still—we hadn’t floated away for negative reasons. But when they came out, I remember thinking, “Oh, it's supposed to be a big, bad, negative thing. The church doesn't like this, so I'm not supposed to be okay with this,” but it just kind of was like, “Okay, well, I know that I like girls, so why can't they like girls? Must be just kind of confusing for them.” Like I said, I didn't have a big sex talk, so anything related to sexuality, sexual-ness was always just this weird, ambiguous thing for me where I didn't even necessarily know what I was looking for all the time. So being confused as a child, I was like, “Well, yeah, it makes sense they would be confused too. Maybe they're just confused. Maybe they'll come back around on it.” I remember saying the things the church wanted you to say, like, “You need to be there to support them so they'll come back to the light,” but very halfheartedly. As I talked about it with friends, I would say those things, but I didn't necessarily mean them. That was my first experience with queerness. LR: Okay. You talked about feeling a bit of dissonance and confusion in yourself. Him coming out, did that add to that confusion? Did it help you look a little bit more introspectively? 7 JM: No. We are a long way from me even remotely coming out yet. This was purely just having an experience with queer people. LR: Okay. So, what are some of your memories of junior high that stand out? JM: Well, like I said, science fairs. I did really well in one of them, actually, where I ended up getting an award from the American Civil Engineering Association, I believe, and got like 50 bucks. Most people don't get that, so that was kind of a pivotal moment that was going to forever set me on what I thought my career was going to be. I thought, “I'm good at this, so I must be going into that.” That was the biggest junior high memory I have. I don’t really look back and remember much else. Like I said, those traumatic brain injuries have unfortunately made things a little murky for me. LR: That's fine, no worries. JM: Looking back on my life, I did some sporting-type stuff where I got recruited for track. That set me up to do sports in high school, which had not been something I did a lot of prior. I did soccer as a kid, but I didn't plan on actually being good at sports. That's about the only other thing from junior high that might be relevant for the future. LR: All right. So where did you go to high school? JM: Tooele High School, right across the street from the junior high. LR: Oh, okay. I know I keep asking this, but what stands out for you in high school, memory-wise? JM: Yes. There is a lot that stands out that could inform my life picture, so I guess we'll lay the groundwork for what's going to spur a lot of this on. I had done track and decided I was gonna do a sport in high school, so I ended up joining the swim team, which is going to put me into a lot of situations I'm going to be in later that'll spur off from that. So, I joined the swim team, and I remember getting a really good coach 8 who actually was inducted into the Swimming Hall of Fame for coaching. At the end of every season, he wrote every one of his swimmers a handwritten note. I remember mine, at the very end of the first season, said, “When you walked into the pool, I thought, ‘What the hell is this kid doing?’ Then I saw you get in and thought, ‘What the hell was this kid doing?’” Because I was not a good swimmer to start with, and he had a lot of patience for me and let me stick around and watched me almost drown for probably three months before I actually even learned how to swim properly. Very patient guy. He fostered a community in a swim team. Again, community is always going to be a big thing for me. I had a lot of it growing up and it's something I strive for now. He fostered a special type of community that was very family-oriented, and he made us watch out for each other, expect us to help each other with any tutoring, classes, grades, anything, and be friends with each other outside of just swim practice. The swim team kind of stuck together, and that was my big group throughout high school. We spent a lot of time together, and then when swim season ended, water polo started up, which I then joined because everyone else in the team was; you stick with your family. That's where I really start to shine. Maybe I'll brag about that a little later if it becomes relevant. But I was good at water polo. Not in the beginning, and I didn't necessarily even enjoy it in the beginning, but I became good and came to very much enjoy it. This is the place setting for my high school experience. Generally, I was still religious at this point in time. I was taking seminary classes my freshman year and still doing okay with them. It wasn't until my sophomore year that I feel like everything kind of started to change on that front, but I don't know if you have other questions you want to ask? LR: I don't. Grant, do you have any questions? 9 GU: I have one, but I think maybe I'll wait until high school is done to ask it, ‘cause I think he's going to touch a little bit on it. LR: All right. What prompted the change for sophomore year, do you recall? JM: Yeah. So, during the last bit of freshman year, water polo, we started doing away tournaments. There was one openly queer person on the team, and I didn't have much experience with them generally, other than I very vividly remember parroting a talking point that I'd heard in church, and I once said to the team when he wasn't around, “Man, I hope I don't get stuck in a room with him because he's gay.” That very blatant homophobia. I had no idea what I was saying because I didn't believe it, I was just parroting it. Thank God for my teammates. If they could have smacked me, they would have, but they kind of verbally smacked me around and went, “Why? Why? Why is that bad?” “I don't know. Isn't it weird to sleep by gay people?” “Why? What's he going to do?” “I don't know.” Thankfully, they smacked some sense to me and introduced some more rational thinking into my life, which reinforced more cognitive dissonance. I had conversations with friends. Those dumb philosophical ones were like, “Well, what if it isn't true, and you actually just die, and there's nothing when you're done,” and I’m suddenly doubting the afterlife. All of this cognitive dissonance built up to me not being such a big member of the church. I remember around age 15, right in tandem with that announcement that children in the church can't be baptized, I then started to have my own sexual feelings, not knowing how to deal with them. Then having to talk to the bishop because I never had the sex talk. There's a whole sin aspect of things, where you 10 start looking at people and having arousals, to keep it broad, and then you're like, “Oh no, I've sinned because sex is bad.” Then you talk to your bishop and it feels very uncomfortable. I have a lot of trauma I've had to unpack from those discussions in therapy afterwards. It just built into this general dissonance that I couldn't deal with anymore because my family is so religious. I guess I should throw in: I was taking a world history class in my sophomore year as well, where we started learning about other religions, and we started learning that every society has religions and they all somehow revolved around these same basic principles. It's like, “Huh, maybe people just want meaning. Maybe that's why religions kind of sprang up.” These are personal beliefs, I'm not trying to— All of this built up to ideas where I went more philosophical. I remember learning about— I'm going to blank on his name. He's the Chinese philosopher. LR: Confucius. JM: Confucius, thank you, and I remember thinking Confucius had a holistically better moral system that I felt the church did at the point. I told my mom about that and said, “I don't want to go to church anymore. I think I might want to study Confucianism instead. I think that's got good principles.” Then she said, “Well, one of Confucius' principles is honoring your parents and your father, and I want you to go to church, so you should honor us if you're going to be.” So, I stayed in church and I went to seminary still, but boy howdy, was I on my phone the whole time and not paying attention. Then you start dating people around that time because that's when your parents start letting you, when you turn 15, 16. All this was building into me leaving the church a little bit, and having more experience with my sexuality and sexualness, holistically. That's kind of why sophomore year was a big change for me. 11 LR: Okay. You talked a little bit about having sexual feelings and the confusion. Let me ask this appropriately here. Was there confusion for you in that? Were you noticing, “Man, I'm not really attracted to girls?” JM: No. I guess this is a problem with how I identify. We're going to jump to current me really quick. I really dislike how pedantic a lot of the community is right now. I feel like the more I understand from a logical point, where we have to get really hyperspecific about what we are and why we are and all of that, because a lot of it is that people question us all the time. We have to justify to ourselves, we have to justify to people, so if we can have a language that we can use to justify it, it makes sense. But my sexuality has been very fluid over time, so I tried to just capture a catch-all term of ‘queer,’ because it's just so fluid and I hate to have to figure out what the new thing is every time. It's just so much easier to say, “You know what, I'm just part of the community and whoever it is I like, good for them. If they like me back, we can try that relationship.” Early on, I did identify as bisexual. Well, that's not true. After coming out, I identified as bisexual. That should help frame things a little better. I think I can still get the gist of your question. During my early experiences with dating—and it's funny because I can look back and recognize and have the language as a child, because I never got the sex talk, to be like, “Oh, this is what I'm feeling.” I had to parse things out on my own. When I started to realize what those feelings were, I kind of galloped on to, “Well, I know I have these feelings for women, so it's okay. I'm straight. I don't have to question a whole lot.” That’s kind of where I was through most of high school. But it is funny because I can look back and recognize early on, before I had the language to realize, I was interested in girls in elementary school. I can also look back now and be like, “I was also interested in guys in elementary school, 12 because there were those guys I wanted to be best friends with and I would want to spend all my time with.” But as a child, I didn't have language for that, and I thought that friendship was all there was. I can look back and be like, “Oh, there were those feelings the whole time.” But throughout high school, like I said, I really held onto the idea of, “Well, I know I have these feelings for women, so let's not rock the boat. I don't need to examine it anymore.” LR: So, what you're saying is you were hanging on to the beliefs and the way you were taught, almost like a lifeline. JM: Not even like a lifeline, because it wasn't a conscious thing I did. Just having to parse it out on my own, I honestly just wanted to not have to worry about it. So as soon as I had that, I could just be like, “Oh, I like girls. Great, let's start dating girls.” It was honestly more of protecting myself from having to question things anymore. It wasn't necessarily a lifeline. I wanted to be done with it because there was such a bad stigma around sexuality or sex in general in my life. LR: Okay, so more of, “Let’s not rock the boat.” JM: Yeah. LR: All right. So, as you move into your junior and senior year. How were those years for you? JM: Really bad for me sophomore year. Like I said, I was having the hardest time. I got very depressed during all of this, too, as people tend to do when they feel like the world's falling apart already. Then you suddenly start questioning your religion, and you're a teenager, and you are predisposed for depression. So, I got really depressed, and I finally got on medication, and I started just allowing myself to be me and separate myself from the church a little bit. My junior year of high school, things were going fantastic. I was dating people that I wanted to. I was enjoying life. I was doing very well in water polo. I 13 became varsity goalie for the water polo team by the end of my freshman year. By the end of junior year, I actually ended up getting first team all-state, so I was the best goalie in our entire division of the state. Unfortunately, I didn't play in the AllState games. I don't know how I stacked up against the best goalies in the best of the state, but I was doing very well in water polo. I had a great friend group and I was dating people. It was going very well. I was enjoying life. That's really the gist of it. I think senior year when things kind of took a turn again. As we move into senior year—I made the mistake in junior high school of paying attention again in my seminary classes. Not so much as I believed in the religion or I wanted to, but I felt bad for the teacher having to sit up there and no one answering questions or anything. Because I've been raised so religiously, I knew all the answers to the questions. Whether or not I believed them was a different question. I bailed them out a lot, which set them up to ask me to be on seminary council my senior year of high school. It's going to push me back into some darker periods. Essentially, they call your parents first, and my parents told me that, “Hey, the state presidency wants to talk to you.” I said, “Why would they want to talk to me?” They kind of gave me a look and I caught on almost immediately and went, “Are they going to ask me to be on seminary council?” They kind of gave a knowing shrug. I went, “No, no, no.” I literally just repeated, “No,” for the rest of the car ride, I feel like. I didn't want to. I was dating someone and I heard that you're not supposed to date anyone while you're on seminary council. I didn't want to actually do any of it. I didn't care. I repeatedly said no. 14 My parents were like, “Well, you should pray on it.” Of course I have adverse feelings, I'll try to remove some editorializing. When I prayed on it, you feel like you're supposed to be talking to a moral authority, and you have something you've been taught as the moral idea of what you need to be doing. It tends to put you in a headspace where you're going to feel like that's what you're supposed to be doing. So, I went and prayed about it, and God's revelation was that of course you're supposed to do it, because the people who want you to do it in your life are telling you you need to do it, and the people with power are telling you need to do it. So, it must be the right thing. Go do it. So, I agreed to be on the Seminary Council, and boy howdy. I guess it was a good thing ‘cause I left the church pretty quick after that. So senior year kicks up and I'm like, “Oh, I'm going to give it the good, honest try, ‘cause obviously someone thought I was supposed to be here. Maybe there's a higher power. So, let's start praying a lot, read a lot of scriptures, and just really throw myself into it.” A lot of what the seminary council does is create little activities that we are supposed to do sporadically. I remember mine. I essentially created a pen pal program, because community, again, has always been something so important to me. When I was given the chance to say, “How would you improve people's lives,” I would say, “Well, we have to foster community. So, let's get them talking to each other and make sure people realize they have connections to people, and that we're all going through the same things.” I spent so much time putting everyone's names in Excel spreadsheets and lining them up perfectly and giving them codes so they can be random and being like, “Here's your code, and you're going to write to this code.” I bought plastic tubs so they could grab a letter at the beginning of class and drop it back in. It took so much planning and so much work. It got nixed so quickly by the teachers who felt 15 like it was taking away from their lesson time. They had asked us to create these programs, which was ironic to me. That's where the final straw for my religious dissonance came in. Someone asked me to be here. I was told the Lord on High wanted me specifically to do this and then I received revelation that I was supposed to foster community and use the Lord's power and make this all work for everyone. Then you guys, who should supposedly be receiving the same message from God, aren't and you're nixing it. That's when I realized that religion was a big sham for me. That was the final straw for my dissonance, which thankfully put me on a track to start being more open with people and question my sexuality. I ended up quitting the swim team because Mel retired my junior year and they brought in a new coach. I have always been anti-authority, and she came in and was very hard-nosed and “I'm going to make this team the best it's ever been.” I said, “No, we're here to have fun. This is high school sports.” There was a lot of clashing, and essentially it ended with me saying, “It's not worth my time. Thanks for everything, goodbye.” So, I ended up quitting the swim team and I went and did cross country, which pushed me into a whole new group of friends and introduced me to new people. During school hours I was looking for new people to hang out with, and I ended up finding someone I would date long-term for the next little while, and they're going to be very relevant in this story for a bit. They were not religious, and this was my first time dating someone who's not religious. It all led to me being more of an open person, but I guess I did skip my first chance at awakening my true feelings on sexuality, so I guess I should loop back to that. Prior to dating my big significant other at the time, there was another person who I knew on a swim team previously who came out as gay. I remember talking to 16 someone about it. They were an older person who worked at the pool and I viewed them as a confidant. When I talked to them about it, I mentioned offhand that for some reason, I felt like I wanted to take them on a date. I didn't know why because, again, no idea how sexuality is going to work anyways, but I kind of chalked it up. I was like, “I don't know if I just feel bad that there's not that many gay people for them to date, and so they're not going to get to date in high school. I don't know. I just kind of want to take me on a date, but I don't know why.” He's like, “Why would you do that? You've dated X, Y, Z girls throughout high school. That's rude. You would be pulling him along; you're obviously straight. Why would you?” So that was my first chance to come out, and it got shut down very quickly. Not to any fault of that person necessarily, because we lived in rural Utah where no one—I didn't know what bi was, they didn't know what bi was. They had no idea you could like both people, they at least were open minded enough to be like, “He likes men. Good for him,” but they just didn't know what bi was. I didn't know what it was, so I kind of dropped it. That was kind of my first chance to have had an awareness of sexuality, but didn't. Then we end high school. I'm dating a girl that I'm going to date post-high school for about a year and a half. That's kind of my high school experience. LR: Okay. Did you ask him out or just want to? JM: I wanted to and I didn't ask him out. But two years down the line, we kind of had a romantic encounter, but we can get to that later at this point in time. No romantic entanglements. LR: Okay. So, all of these changes that are happening in your senior year of high school, how did that affect your relationship with your family? JM: Rough—that's a good word for that. Things went rough. My parents love me very much; they always have. But religion has always been such a big thing to them. 17 They love you in the religious way, which is that you're gonna say you love them no matter what, and you love the sinner, but you don't love the sin. All those empty platitudes that really say, “I don't love you.” They did love me, but their way of loving me did not feel very loving, as someone who no longer shared those views. Does that—? LR: Yeah, I think that explains that quite perfectly. I think both Grant and I can relate to that in a way. GU: Absolutely. LR: Okay. Grant, do you want to ask your question now? GU: He touched on it pretty well. But just for a timeline, Jim: you mentioned being so close with people in your neighborhood and being part of the church and the local communities. I guess you hit on it towards the end, but how has your involvement, not with just the community, but also with the church, progressed or regressed as time has gone on? JM: I was very religious and very involved until sophomore year, kind of dipped off, didn't fully leave because my parents didn't want me to. I kind of hung at this midpoint where I was still attending and stuff like that. It also didn't help that around that time, they switched ward boundaries, and so we ended up actually losing half our neighborhood and getting mixed into another neighborhood, so the community changed as well. It brought in some interesting voices. So, I didn't quite leave, but I was still in a lot of leadership type positions because like I said, I've been raised religious, I knew all the answers to say, so I thought that meant I was a very religious person. Then I kind of went back for a little bit for the seminary council, and then there was the whole fiasco with the seminary council thing that kind of put me on 18 this downward spiral. But I was still going to church with my parents after that, even though I didn't believe it anymore, and going to activities for their sake. The final nail in the coffin, to the last point I was really religious, was when I was going to stuff with the group of young men that's now going to become adults to take on those adult responsibilities. I remember the final nail for me for being religious again was, we're sitting around a campfire at an activity where they're prepping you to become these adult figures, and someone started going off on antiLGBT stuff, started ranting and raving about, “How in the world could anyone ever think that they're not a man when they have a penis? How could you ever date someone who's the same gender as you? That's a sin in the eyes of God.” I was just like, “Wow, you guys are really terrible people. You're supposed to be the most accepting people who love people no matter what. Maybe you are to their face, but the second you get behind their back, you just… ‘Bad sin. Horrible.’” That's the nail in the coffin to me ever being religious again. For my parents’ sake, after that, I attended young single adult wards. But if they are listening to this, this is how they’ll find out about this. I would only attend until someone said, “Hey, you should meet with the bishop,” which is code for, “You're going to get a responsibility.” I would go to another single adult ward in the valley so that they could no longer give me that responsibility until they said, “Hey, you should meet with the bishop.” Jump to another one. I would just keep jumping between three young single adult wards that were all equidistant from where I live, so I never got a responsibility. Then I would claim I was taking my girlfriend at the time to these young single adult ward meetings with me, but half the time we would just park the car somewhere along the way and then make out. So have fun hearing that one, Mom and Dad. 19 GU: So, a follow-up on that. You talked about how in high school you didn't really believe in religion, but you would still go for your parents. Do you still do that to this day? I know we're kind of jumping forward, but it's not something you've kind of allowed yourself to still do. Have you completely broken off ties with the church? JM: Yeah, we're going to get into some real recent stuff if we go on that front. But long and short of it is no, I do not go to church anymore. There was a period in my life, that summer after high school, where I did that single adult ward thing. Then when I went to college, I stopped. I no longer attended any meetings, except for when I would go visit them around the holidays: Mother's Day, Father's Day, Christmas, Easter. I would try doing that thing where people just go to church on the big ones for their family, but then that would lead to religious discussion with my parents where they would say, “It was so great to see you there,” like they thought I was becoming re-active. It would always lead to discussions where I'd have to stop them and say, “No, I'm not going to rejoin the church. This is dead. I'm done.” I actually ended up having to sit them down and talk to them, say, “Look, you guys can't handle me trying to have good faith attendance with you for your sake because you're trying to reconvert me, so I will no longer be attending.” I told them that I will not go even for Easter, Christmas, Mother's Day, Father's Day, so I had to do that with them. In terms of fully severing ties with the church, I have not yet, because I've not been a member of this church for a long time, so I do not know a lot of the language anymore, or the repercussions. But I did follow the recent scandals of sexual abuse, especially of children. I decided that I want to make it official and figure out how to stop that. For a long time I was okay never going, but not my records, because not even thinking about the church long enough to remove my records felt like more of a middle finger to them. But now there's been so much, especially recently, I just 20 kind of thought, “I need to remove my records,” but that's a current issue me and my family are talking through, because apparently that has very long-term repercussions. So, I looped them in that I want to pursue that in the near future. We're trying to figure out how to make that happen and how we can best salvage some feelings, but I am not technically fully separate from the church. LR: Would you like to take a break for a minute? JM: Absolutely. [Due to technical difficulties, the rest of Part 1 was lost. Part 2 picks up with an abridged version of what was discussed at the end of Part 1.] Part 2: October 6, 2022 LR: It's October 6, 2022, and we are with Jim Miles continuing his interview. We are in the conference room at the Stewart Library. I’m Lorrie Rands and Grant Ulrigg is with me again. Let's do a quick synopsis of the last little bit that you talked about: graduation and then your mission, or not going. JM: Technical difficulties, we may or may not have lost it, so it's going to be abridged. Just in case anyone's listening, for future reference, we talked about graduation really quickly: how I didn't want to go. I hate authority, so I tried sticking it to the man by wearing a rubber duck tie, because it was the way that I could stick to the appropriate dress code that they had given us and still make as much fun of the event as I possibly could. My mom would have been okay with me not going to graduation because she didn't go to her college graduation, which is why I didn't go to college graduation. But I did end up going to high school graduation. I don't remember exactly why, but it was quite possibly because my ex was going to be part of the story, kind of a long-term thing for the next little bit. My partner at the time was valedictorian; they were on speech and debate so they were able to give a speech, and they were very much a fan of pomp and 21 circumstance and awards. It very well could have been that I went for them, or I might have had some grandparents talk me into it too. I don't remember because of traumatic brain injuries, which we'll get into just a moment. In the meantime, you asked me about having been a member of the LDS Church, what my thoughts on mission was, their plan to go on mission, what all happened. Growing up, there always had been the plan of going on a mission because I was very religious, and that's what you're supposed to do. We kind of jumped to whether or not I decided to in high school. Again, I don't have a full memory of what actually happened, but I have a memory of what I've told people happened. After not feeling great about church my senior year, I do remember telling my parents that I had prayed and ‘received a revelation to not go on a mission at this time,’ was the wording I used. Again, I don't remember the events. I don't remember if I actually prayed or if I didn't. I do know that I told them I had prayed, but I don't know if I did or did not, because I very well could have made it up because I didn't believe in the religion at that point in time and I didn't want to go. Or I might have still had some semblance and convinced myself, all that fun stuff. One story I did share previously was that I had been in a seminary lesson, and I remember telling my mom afterwards that I felt like the teacher of that lesson had told me—through teaching, she was not telling me specifically—but I had a sense that she told me that I would be going to Hell—or not getting into Heaven, because I know that there's some specifics in the religion on whether or not you go to Hell—but telling me that I wasn't going to get to Heaven if I didn't go on a mission, because that's what young men are expected to do. Even if I had received revelation, then how did that fit together? That was a nail in the coffin for my religion. 22 LR: I'm curious whether or not you had mentioned to the seminary staff that you weren't going. JM: I don't know that I remember. LR: Okay. That's fine. JM: I can almost say with certainty that I probably did at some point tell them that I received revelation that I wasn't going at that point, because that feels like something I would have done, because I was pretty blatant at that point in time. I might have told them that and told them that I would consider doing it after a year of college or something, but I felt like I needed to go to college first. Probably would've been how that went down. I feel like I can vaguely remember stuff, but I cannot promise. LR: Moving into the traumatic brain injury. JM: That happened in high school. Lorrie asked me to do this because it will inform a full picture of my life, even though I didn't feel like it necessarily played into my sexuality, so I will share. Not that I'm averse to sharing anyway, I just took it out because I didn't see relevance. I had a week from hell during my high school year where any number of activities could have caused the concussion. Depending on when I got it, each one of those added on to it, which would inform how I came to have such memory problems today. As I believe I mentioned previously, I was the varsity goalie on my water polo team, which meant I was in the goal, blocking rubber balls coming at your head at 30 miles an hour at least. That means you're prone to stopping a couple with your head because that's what's above water. You're in water above your waist, so you can try to use your hands, but obviously you fill in that triangle with your head. So that concussive force to my head was not a stranger to me. It didn't become a problem, though, until my senior year. 23 Let me see if I get the timeline right. I got rear-ended the first day that week by someone going above the speed limit in the zone, so they probably hit me at 35 miles an hour. My girlfriend at the time, same partner that I've been referring to, had to go get checked out because she'd actually had spinal surgery previously, and it was severe enough of an accident they wanted to get it checked out, make sure it was okay. I went to the doctor and I tried mentioning that I felt like I might have gotten a concussion, but I don't know how it didn't get communicated, because my parents called the doctor's office later and they said, “No. He didn't mention anything about a concussion,” which was really weird. I tried being like, “I feel like I might have hit my head a little bit. I feel a little groggy,” but he brushed it off and I was like, “He's a doctor, so obviously it's not a concern.” That happens on the first day of the week. Second day, we go to practice and we are training for Summer Games, because we’re going to be at this weekend's Summer Games, which is a big competition where you get all the teams from the states to go down to southern Utah and they will compete in a tournament. So, we're practicing our shots, I'm in the goal, and I took a shot to the side of the head so hard that it broke the plastic earpiece that they have over your ears. I actually have a scar behind this ear because it broke and went into the back of my head. Then I also took several shots off the top bar in what we call a ‘JFK’. Very fun analogy where it goes through the top right behind you, but then bounces back and hits you in the back of the head. I took at least three serious hits to the head that day. Then the day after, we're getting to the lead-up to summer games. The coaches give us some easy breaks so we don't wear ourselves out right for the games. We play what we call ‘doubles’ and that means that we don't need to get in 24 the rules, but it's rougher than water polo somehow. I actually ended up being held underwater and I got an elbow in the head a good couple of times. The next day I woke up and it was the only time in my life I ever described my pain as a 10. Whenever someone asks you, like, “How are you feeling, 1 to 10? How bad’s the pain in your head?” I was just saying, “It's terrible. It hurts like hell.” My parents think it's a sinus infection, which you're prone to get as a water polo swimmer because you get ear infections all the time as water stays in, and that spreads a lot. “Maybe you're just congested up there.” I've had plenty of those. I said, “No, this is way worse.” So, they took me into the instacare. My mother loves when I share this part of the story. The doctor basically said, “It's almost a certainty that he has a concussion at this point, after you describe all the events that just happened during this week.” Then my mom asks, “Well, it's Summer Games. We're leaving today in the afternoon for that, and he's the varsity goalie. It's a very important tournament for the team. Can he go play?” The doctor looks at her in disbelief and goes, “Why would you risk putting your son at risk for another brain injury? No. If he could put a helmet on, even then, I would say no. You're just wearing a little fabric cap with earpieces,” to which my mom feels like the doctor is insulting her parenting skills. Then we get to that outside the doctor's office, and she says, “That doctor has no idea what she's talking about.” So, I went to the Summer Games. I did tell the coach, “Hey, my head hurts like hell. Even if it's not a concussion, please don't put me in unless you really need me.” At this point in time, we had gone through a bunch of goalie coaches, and I 25 was actually the goalie coach on the team while being the varsity goalie. I had gotten the First Team All-State Goalie Award the year before, so I was training the team while working out with them. At the end of this year, actually, three of the goalies I had trained all got all state titles for the goalies. I was like, “We have good goalies. I've trained them. I know for myself, if you're willing, put them in.” She's like, “Well, he's JV, he's not playing varsity games. We'll put him in, but we'll put you in if we need to.” We get to the very first game of the tournament and it was eight brackets or something like that, so we had at least eight games. The very first game, we were down at half. It's a close game, but we're down, so she says, “Jim, we need you to go in.” So, I go in, and then literally within 20 seconds of being in the water—it wasn't even a full shot clock—I took a ball straight to the forehead and my nose started bleeding. I hit it. That's about the last thing I remember from that tournament. I know I played the rest of the games. I don't remember much more, that's all really foggy. That's the severity of my brain injury, and it's gotten worse over time unfortunately. That was the last tournament I played in that season, left a lot of people with sore feelings. But I think my mental capacity and health is more important than high school sports. That's just me though. Coach didn't seem to take it that way and got mad that I didn't play in state that year. But hey, I trained three goalies to get allstate that year, so I think they did okay anyways. That's the severity of that brain injury and the extent of it. Later on, I was in a pretty big car accident again where I knocked myself in the head. I had a bruise here [points to face]. I gave myself a black eye, essentially. We rolled over and my 26 arm hit myself. There might have been something there, but at this point, I already had enough damage. Like I was saying, though, coming back after it: as I was recovering and didn't go back to polo, I started focusing on school a little more. I could already tell that something changed between that week. I was in AP Calc at the time, and suddenly AP Calc was even harder than it had been. I was having trouble adding numbers in my head and stuff like that. Some brain damage. LR: Hmm. Were you ever taken back to the hospital after the tournament and officially diagnosed? JM: No. Not had any brain scans done or anything, but from getting far enough away, you can tell when there's a difference. LR: No, I get what you are saying. JM: My dad had had lots of concussions growing up. I am my parents’ first child, so there's part of it where it's like, you were still learning, but then another part of it where it's like, I'm definitely being affected. My dad had lots of concussions, and serious ones at that, and he was fine. That was kind of the, “We know you have a concussion, what are we going to do? There's nothing you can do.” LR: Okay. You finished high school. You mentioned that your classes were a little harder. How much of high school did you have left after that week? JM: That would have been probably in March of my senior year. A month or two. LR: Okay, so you were almost done. So, you're not going on a mission, and now you've decided you're going to go to college. Where did you decide to go? JM: I guess that's another fun story. Originally SUU because I did have a full ride scholarship there, and then— Oh, wow. There's a whole other part of that. Summer Games happened, which is where SUU is, and after doing that drive and knowing I 27 was going to have a girlfriend who's going to the U I was like, “Oh, that commute is pretty rough.” I also forgot to mention that the Summer Games was the weekend of prom my senior year. I guess I did go to prom after that with a terrible, terrible headache and had to leave early, to my girlfriend's chagrin, because the bass was making my head hurt so bad. I forgot about that. Then I slept in the car on the way home. There's that fun little story we're going to add there. Because of all that commuting and driving back and forth, going down for this tournament and then back for prom, like, “Oh, this is literally the commute I'm going to be taking. That's not going to work for me if I want to stay in this relationship.” The last week possible, I applied to USU and got in there, not on as good of a scholarship as I had at SUU. I had, I think 40% tuition paid for two years, which I immediately lost. LR: This is not a fair question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Did you ever regret not taking that full ride scholarship at SUU? JM: No. Well, yeah, I'm sure at points in time, I've gone, “Man, would have been nice to have had extra money.” But God, I hate SUU. I hate Cedar City and I would have hated being there even if I wasn't doing it long-term. It's just not a city for me. I spent lots of time there with those tournaments, and then my current partner's sister lives in SUU, and so we've gone down a lot to Cedar. Works for some, not for me. LR: Isn't SUU in Saint George? JM: No, it's in Cedar City. LR: Oh, it's Dixie Tech that's in St. George. Thank you. So, you start up at Utah State and, as you said, promptly lost the small scholarship that you had. Do you think that's partly due to the brain injury? 28 JM: No, no, that one's not. I've always been able to get good grades since. Well, I guess I lost my scholarship, so I'm ignoring USU. When I came to Weber, I got one of the summa cum laude awards or whatever it is. I've done well enough grade-wise. I can work hard. It just is more work and things just came a lot more easily. I could just remember instead of having to focus and memorize and “Oh, we're going to have to repeat these things so you don't forget these terms on the test.” It definitely wasn't because of the brain injury that I lost my scholarship. It was very much because at that point in time I wanted to be an architect, and the only university in Utah that has an architecture program is the U. Since I applied too late and didn't get into the U, I couldn't take an actual architecture program, so I went into their civil engineering program, which is what my dad did. There was some encouragement from him there, where he thought it would be better anyways. The justification was that if I was an engineer, I could stamp my own projects and then you can just draw plans, because my parents don't have a huge care for the arts. Well, not that they don't, but definitely my dad's opinion of architecture is, “They're just drawing. They don't have to make anything structurally sound. They have to get approved.” The plan was to do civil engineering, get a civil engineering degree, and then you can just be an architect after that because you can just stamp projects. Why would anyone have to actually take architecture classes, learn about design principles and blah, blah, blah? I start out in that, obviously already know what I want to do because I want to be an architect, and God I just fucking hate engineering. I took chemistry my first semester there, and chemistry has always been a subject I struggle with. It was one of those where I had to memorize things, because it just doesn't make sense in my head intrinsically. It's like, how do you even know that these subatomic particles that we can't even see are going to act like that? How do we prove it? I don't have any 29 way to logic it in my head, so it's all memorization. Maybe the brain injury did come in a little part there, but I’m just always like that with chemistry. I barely passed that course. That was the start of me losing my grades. It was the first time I've ever not been good at school. I got a C-minus and barely passed and I got put on probation for my scholarship. It's like, “Oh, that's too low of a grade, you have to have this.” I was like, “This is hard. I don't like this, and I'm doing the hardest work I can and getting a shit grade. Why not just put in the minimum work and still get the shit grades?” The next semester, I had to take physics for scientists and engineers. As soon as you start getting impulses and circular force, and literally one of the questions on our test was, “If you drop a piece of clay that weighs X amount onto a spinning pottery wheel, how is the impulse going to work? What are the motions? How much force is it?” I just looked at it and just turned the page and went, “Fuck it, I can still get a C.” I didn't even answer that question at all, and so that was why my grades struggled so much. I didn't want to be there, you know, all those things I listed. At the same time, I'm doing long-distance for my partner, who lived in Salt Lake. Any chance I get, I'm leaving Logan and driving to Salt Lake and spending time with them and spending the night at their place. I spent a little time there and I had really shitty roommates, so I just hated everything about being at USU. It was just all of that combined, and not getting good grades because I didn't want to be there. I'm not doing work. Just kind of the situation. LR: That makes sense. So how long did you last at USU? JM: I did a year. This is the time that I actually came out and I have good friends from there now. We'll break that down piece-by-piece. But that's a brief overview of why 30 my grades were so bad at USU. I guess we should probably talk about the whole thing, while we're here. LR: So, you mentioned that you came out while you were at USU. JM: Yes. LR: While you're talking about that, some of the questions that I had is: did you feel the need to come out officially? JM: Yes—Well, actually, that's a hard one. LR: Okay. It's just something to think about as you're talking about this period of your life. JM: USU is where everything changed for me, once and for all. I became the person I am today, mostly through lots of different factors. Where to start? How do we tell these tangents with the least resistance? The first month I was there was when everything happened, so it's all tangential. I guess if we're going to set up my sexuality and my coming out, I should really go back to a comment that was made previously. It's going to kind of inform the rest of what happens. So, I had mentioned previously I did debate with my partner, and we were at the debate tournament at some point in high school. I was always dressed very well and people always said I was the gayest straight person they knew. There was a point in time where I was critiquing people's outfits at the debate tournaments. I really cared about suits and clothes for some reason— obviously not anymore—and I was critiquing people's suits with another person there who happened to be queer themselves. A joke was made about me being somewhere on the LGBT spectrum, and my girlfriend at the time pulled me aside and said, “Hey, I need to know, are you gay?” Because I was still Mormon, of course, you jump into planning and thinking, “Oh, the rest of our lives. As soon as I get to 21, I need to be married, obviously.” 31 We're thinking about our future and all this stuff, even though she wasn't religious, and she was a ride-or-die, for better or worse—Well, in the beginning she was a ride-or-die, and so she's like, “I can't have you come out later in life. We can't be married for years and then you come out and tell me you're gay. You need to tell me now, because I can't dedicate all this time to you.” I was like, “Oh, I'm not gay because I know I like girls.” As I've said previously, this is why I never had to really question my sexuality, because it was always weird in my family, and once I knew I liked girls, it was enough to just be at that. But at this point, I had had some awareness to realize there might be some other feelings there, and so when she said that, I said, “I'm not gay, and I can promise you that at most I may be bi, but that means I still like you and I still have feelings for you.” She broke down in tears and was like, “That's not okay. You can't lie. That's still queer.” I don't remember the whole conversation, but essentially I felt like, “I can't be bi because this person I love very much would not like that.” That was the first time I consciously made an effort to closet myself. I didn't even have the awareness that I was bi, so that was the first time I ever referenced possibly being bi, and it was because my cousin had come out as bi like a month earlier. That was the first time I ever heard that term to even go, “That's a possibility, maybe that's what I am.” I hadn't had enough time to think about those feelings and think that I actually was bi, so I didn't know I had closeted myself. I was like, “Even if there is that threshold that maybe I am, I just have to shut it down and never reach that threshold.” That was the time I stopped questioning it. That was back in high school. 32 We dated over the entire summer; we got in a massive car accident together, a rollover—managed to survive. Lucky that we survived because we were going 65 and rolled the car three times, and I'm tall, so if the roof ever would have gotten hit, it would have broken my neck. So, we have that whole trauma-bonding together and everything. Things are really strong. We both go to college in different places, start the same week and we come down and visit each other. Her college technically started a week before mine did, but I took an introduction-to-USU class where they’ll take a bunch of freshmen and bring them a week early to classes and just teach you, “Here's what college is going to be like. Here's what you need to expect. Go find your classes so you're not worried the first day you actually have classes.” I had a fantastic professor who I'm still friends with to this day. I went and saw him two weeks ago; we went and got lunch. Fantastic professor. Dustin Crawford—recommend to anyone who goes to USU, great man and he's going to be very pivotal in my story from here on out. There is a student advisor for the class as well. He's an upperclassman, and his name is Calvin, and I believe he was out at the time as openly gay. Obviously fell into the stereotypes so no one doubted he was gay, even if he wasn't out at the time. But when I asked him about it—we'll get into why that was not the most okay thing for me to do—he did at least tell me he was gay and he knew. I don't know if he was out to everyone, but he was at least out to me at the time. I have that week of classes where I'm spending a lot of time with just random peers who I've never kept in contact with afterwards. I'm friends with Calvin, and I'm friends with my partner. I spent a night at her place for the weekend and then we went back our separate ways to college. Our first week is going and we have fun. At 33 this point, I've started texting Calvin as a friend because he was the only friend I made at USU at that point. So, we started talking and the week goes on. Then I came back for the weekend and my girlfriend and I went to Salt Lake together, and we were like, “Cool, let's go clothes shopping,” because I was very into clothes at the time. We go into Nordstrom Rack and she forgets her phone in the car. So, I tell her, “Here, take mine. We'll try on any outfits you like,” ‘cause we both like clothing. “You grab a bunch of clothes rather than walk out between every one. Take my phone, take pictures of the ones you like, then come out and show me. Any ones that I like, we'll have you go put it back on, so we can limit how much you have to actually go in and out.” I don't know if it saves time. We thought it did. Since she forgot her phone in the car, she took my phone. I'm a very reciprocal person when it comes to texting, and I assume so was Calvin, so if we texted, we would just tack things on to the end and then respond point-by-point, so our texts started getting longer and longer to each other. While she's in the changing room, she opens up my phone to take a picture, and Calvin sends a text. She opened it for one reason or another and sees this huge block of text where we're just kind of building this thread. I guess a good thing to mention at this point is we had a very short period before we started dating; there wasn't a whole lot of friendship beforehand. We really clicked as high schoolers so we just jumped into dating. In her eyes, the only person she's ever seen me send long texts to is her, because that's what I used to do as a high schooler: when you get to know people, you just start talking about what you like, what you don't like, and things are long. In her head she goes, “This must be a romantic attraction to this man,” who I already mentioned is gay. She comes out of the dressing room just in tears, crying, and goes, “You need to tell if you're gay or not.” 34 I’m like, “Why?” It's been a while since I closeted myself for the first time. I've had time to actually think about it, and I realize I probably am bi, even though now I’ve consciously closeted myself because I know there's bad things that happen if I ever come out. I say, “Let's go to the car.” We just leave everything where it was, and we just go to the car and talk. The fun part. I fucking hate this part. She keeps saying, “Are you gay?” I'm like, “No, I'm not gay.” She keeps asking, and the more she asks, the more I get less certain, the more I don't know. It starts coming: “I don't know now. I know I'm attracted to you,” and she's not believing me. I guess there's a little bit of background before we move on. Oh, Mom, Dad— you're gonna love this bit again. She had wanted to have sex with me for a while, and I still have some religious trauma, and I'm putting it off by saying, “No, I don't just want to be one of those clichéd people who just goes to college and starts having sex.” I'm putting it off ‘cause I'm scared. I don't want to have sex for religious trauma reasons. She repeatedly keeps not believing me and everything, and she's made it clear that she wants to have sex with me prior. This is always the hard part where I don't know how much of it was internalized, how much was communicated to me, and how much she pushed. This is always the part of the story where I can never tell if it was sexual assault or not, because I have such a bad memory. I don't remember exactly what she said or whatnot, but essentially it boils down to, “Let me prove it to you that I like you. Let's go buy some condoms and have sex.” That was my first sexual encounter. It was fucking horrible. We won't obviously get too much into it, but I hated every fucking second of it. No one had a 35 good time; no one came away feeling any better, but in my head, I proved I liked her. I was straight and had sex. That was good enough for the weekend, and it was a very quiet weekend after that. Not much was said. There was a lot of resentment on every side. It was very rough; obviously I did not want to do it. We did do it, and it was bad. We go back to college and I can no longer fight this feeling that I might be queer in some way, even though I think I've proven to my girlfriend I'm straight and I love her. Because of how bad the experience was, I was like, “Man, I really fucking suck. I've heard it’s supposed to be good. Maybe I am not straight.” Calvin had been very open at this point in time. I just sent him a text like, "Hey, Calvin I know this is a lot. You don't have to respond if you don't want to. How did you know you were gay?" Like I said, I don't know if he did officially come out to me at that point or if he was out to anyone, so this is kind of how I asked him. I just assumed that he wasn't out. Maybe I'm a shitty person for that, but I don't know. He was like, “I don't know, it was just a feeling. I guess I've just kind of always known.” I was like, “That doesn't help me. Give me an answer. Let me take a test and then I'll know I'm gay for certain. That's too much introspection because I don't even fucking know.” So, I'm mad. I don't know what to do, I don't fucking know anything. I just went like, “Calvin, I don't know. Here's what I'm feeling. What do you think?” He's like, "Sounds like you could be questioning, and that's fine. You can question." I was like, “I can't question. I have to know. People want me to know with certainty. They need to know, ‘Are you gay or are you not?’ I can't question. I need to know." 36 He's like, "It sounds like you're questioning being bi and you should try to explore that a little bit.” He was a very good person. He probably gave me great advice, and because of the situation I was in, I had no fucking clue. I don't know how that conversation ended, what happened after that, but that's kind of how it all started. Any questions, follow-ups right now? I don't know where to go, necessarily. I might need to take a break. LR I was going to suggest that we take a break. I can see how much you're struggling with this. [Recording pauses for a break] [Recording begins again] LR: All right. We were talking about you having this conversation with Calvin and wanting answers, some sort of a definitive, ‘Yes or no, I'm gay.’ This is your first couple of weeks of school? JM: Still within the first month of school. LR: Okay. So that's a lot in a short amount of time. JM: Oh, yeah. Being out for the first time, not living with family. Doing long distance with girlfriend and establishing routes and coming out, all at the same time. LR: That's a lot. So, as you're having these conversations with Calvin, as you're being more introspective, probably, than you've allowed yourself to ever be in previous: when is it just, “I'm going to say the words and be honest with myself.” JM: I think it was—Fuck, I don't honestly know. Let's just go chronologically. Let's keep telling the story. So that conversation with Calvin was only one conversation actually. It was literally during a bowling class where I'm sitting and waiting for my turn to come. I just sent him a text, and so I'm having this small conversation in fiveminute intervals because I would get up and bowl and do whatever I want to do. By the end of it, he tells me the questioning thing, and internally I go, “Oh, give me an 37 actual answer,” but of course I'm not going to do that to someone I don't know that well. “Thank you very much for your time.” So, I take the rest of the week to think on it. This weekend we already had planned that we were not going to be together. I actually went down to my family’s, and we were talking. My older of the two sisters—I feel comfortable mentioning it ‘cause she's of legal age. We're talking, and she's about to go to homecoming or something, one of the big dances, and she wants to get dressed up, and Mom and Dad are mad because it's not appropriate or something. I happened to make a comment offhandedly. I'm like, "Well, if you really want to give them something to be mad about, you can tell them that I think I might be bi. If you want to take the heat off yourself, go ahead and tell them that." That's the first time I said it out loud, but it was not necessarily a surety. I don't know how much I was joking or not. I said, "Don't tell Mom and Dad please." There's a little irony there because previously, the summer before, I do remember a conversation with my parents. My mom and I were talking about something entirely different at one point and I was like, “You know, at one point in high school, I kind of wondered if I might have been queer. I was always afraid of telling you and Dad, because I thought you might not take it so well.” My mom didn't know how to respond. She's like, “Glad we didn't have to find out. We're sorry you thought we wouldn't like it.” So, there's some irony there, that we already had that conversation right before leaving for college. I'm going by the best timeline I can remember. I think this is how events worked out, because it's what makes the most logical sense for me to go see my family and my girlfriend all this time. I'm assuming the next weekend, my girlfriend comes up to Logan this time, and she's going to spend the night with me. I've okayed it with my roommate, who I'm sharing a room with. Jesus Christ, poor kid. 38 It's okay, they're all dicks, so don't feel too bad. I was like, “Hey, I promise we won't do anything, but are you okay if my girlfriend stays the night and just sleeps in the same bed as me and you're in the room?” He's like, "Yeah, sure, whatever." God bless his soul. I'm trying to remember how it all went down, but essentially, I officially came out that night. This is the first time I've ever admitted to myself, “I'm fully bi.” I tell her, “I've taken a lot of time to think about it. I think I'm bi. I still love you, but I'm bi. It doesn't change how I feel about you, but you asked questions, now I have answers.” She starts crying and calls her sister. I don't remember if she stayed in Logan that night: if we did sleep together, or if she went home, I don't remember. I just remember that conversation. She cried a lot, and at this point, the person I loved the most in the world, I hurt them. It hurt. It was hard. I don't remember how it ended. I don't remember much, but at some point, she said, “That's okay. I know you still love me. We'll keep dating.” I don't know when that happened, I don't know how many weeks or if it was that same night. I thought, “All's well that ends well. Tada! I'm bi now, I'm out, and I still have my girlfriend: win-win. Now let's tell my parents.” At this point, I think Dustin has emailed me. Calvin got really busy and I don't know when he got busy—the guy was chasing going to med school, so he had time throughout the rest of the year to talk to me a little bit. At a certain point in time, classes kicked up and got really busy and he was harder to get a hold of. I don't know how it all happened, but Dustin ended up sending me an email one day like, "Hey. You should come meet with me if you get a chance." I was like, “That's weird. I know you're cool, but you're my professor, why do you want to meet with me? I'm not even in your introductory class anymore, really,” 39 because I only had full classes for one week, and then we do monthly meetings the next three months. I’m thinking, “I’m in trouble.” I don’t know why, and one day I might just figure out why, but he reached out and so I went to talk to him and I told him about my girlfriend. I told him, “Hey, I came out to her, and I think I'm this way. I've been talking to Calvin a little bit. I'm thinking about coming out to my family.” He's like, "Oh really? That’s a big deal." I was like, "Yeah, I don't know how big of a deal it is. I've already told them I'm not religious anymore. Feels like that's kind of like it, coming out already. It sounds like it probably is a similar thing." In retrospect, it's two different ways of coming out and saying, "Oh, hey, I like guys,” and “Oh, hey, I don't believe in God,” so he wasn't wrong. The way he comforted me is telling me how he used to be religious, and he went on a mission, and he is who I would have been if I went on a mission. He was a fucking rabble-rouser. Snuck his Walkman on and had listened to Rage Against the Machine in the mission and got in trouble ‘cause he wouldn't follow rules. He was getting sent home, and they had just gotten their payday or whatever it is. What he did is he took all his mission companions who lived in the house or something— there were like four of them—and he went and bought them all lobster dinners, and then they all went scuba diving because they were somewhere in South America with beautiful beaches and he's like, “Fuck it, I'm never coming back here. Let's go scuba diving. It's the one thing all the tourists do, and I can't go near water.” So, he takes all these people and then he gets put on the bus and sent home. He tells me about his experience leaving the church and telling his parents and how hard it was, to comfort me. It really helped. A great guy. We still keep in 40 touch; we try to talk a lot. I don't know if I've ever told him how much he really helped. He's like, "Are you worried your family will disown you?" The checklist is like, “Are you going to have a place to stay, to keep feeding yourself? Are you going to be safe?” just making sure that all of this is good to go, anything I've not thought about. I have been thinking about it since I told my sister, so probably two weeks now, and I had already gone through every checklist in my head. “If this goes this way and this goes that way—” He says “Okay, how are you going to do it?” “Well, I think I'm going to tell my mom because I think she's going to be the most understanding, so I'm going to tell her first. Then I’ll get the guts up to tell my dad because I don't think he's going to take it well.” “Okay. Good luck to you.” Finish the rest of the conversation, just talking normal things: politics, philosophy and stuff like that. That's the kind of person he is. When I get ready to tell my family, I text my mom and I say, “Hey, any chance I could buy you dinner this weekend? I have something to tell you. Can you come up?” I only gave her a heads-up of one day, so I let that panic set in too much, but I knew it was important to tell them in person. I didn't want to be near my dad, and obviously it’s not something I wanna do over text, so I have to be in person and she's gonna come up here. Later in life, she tells me she thinks I've gotten someone pregnant or something. I take her to Olive Garden, and you can only go so long putting it off and trying to drag it out and not getting around to the point and keep doing small talk. But you're killing the other person because they're like, “What the fuck do you have to tell me?” 41 “Hi, Mom, how are you?” "Can we get to why I'm here?" Got breadsticks at this point, we haven't even got any entrees or anything. Waiter’s still coming around. "Well, I think I might be bi." "Why do you think that?" Well, I start walking her through the story—abridged, of course, ‘cause I can't tell her I had sex and stuff like that. She starts crying, the waiter comes around to get food, and she's in tears and I'm in tears. I'm like, “We’ll just get some alfredo.” He deserved a bigger tip than he got putting up with all that shit. Sorry, I use humor to cope a lot, so we're going to get into the more humorous section, in my eyes. So, I tell my mom, have a conversation over fucking shitty alfredo. "I think I'm bi." "Well, why do you think that?" “Well, x, y, and z.” "Well, how do you know for certain?" All the religious excuses get rehashed, of course, and then it’s quiet for a while. She drives me back to my apartment and I go to get out of the car. I say, "Can you please not tell Dad yet? I want to tell him on my own, but I felt more comfortable telling you first." She goes, "No, your dad and I have made a promise not to keep secrets from each other, and this is not one I can keep from him. Either you've got to tell him, or I'm going to go home and tell him. I prefer you tell him. I would tell him myself, but it's something that should come from you. You tell him." Fuck. Oops. 42 So, she makes the call on speakerphone and we're sitting in the car, it’s fucking cold out and I tell my dad, "Hey, Dad, I think I'm bi." All the questions, all the Mormon things. "How do you know? You can't be certain. Those feelings are more common than you think they are." Even in my head I'm going, “Dad, I think that's more an indictment on your sexuality than it is on mine. If you can relate to having these feelings, that means you're probably bi,” because if there's one thing I've learned, if there are people who just have feelings for one gender, so if you can relate to having feelings for multiple people, ta-da! But I don't say that, obviously, and I still haven't told him, because what am I going to do? He's too religious. It would break him. So, I’m just calling my dad over the phone in a fucking car right outside my shitty apartment, and he thinks it's so bad I'm going to kill myself. He's worried about me being alone, so he asks my mom to drive me to my grandma's house— his mom, who lives 30 minutes away—‘cause I was in USU and they live in Mantua. He says, “Will you please go stay the night with them? I want him to be somewhere safe.” They make me sleep in the bed with my mom so that I can't run off and kill myself. “If I get up, she's going to hear.” Fucking hell. I mentioned previously I had a cousin who came out as bi. That's where I learned the term ‘bi’. I've learned since that my grandma found out when my dad said, “Hey, he’s coming.” Grandma goes, “Why, what's wrong?” and he must have told her. I didn't tell her, that's for goddamn sure. My bi cousin sees my mom’s car and goes, "Why is [Jim’s mom] here?" Grandma says, “She's here with Jim. He's having a hard time.” My cousin jokes, “What he'd do, come out as gay?” ‘cause he knows the terminology my grandma uses, and my grandma—I need to be very careful with 43 what I say. I'm not on the best terms with my grandparents, even though I've lived with them. It’s just that special kind of Mormon kindness where it's not actually nice, you don't actually say you care or worry about my eternal salvation, which won't make me fucking normal. My grandmother goes, “Don't joke about that, that's a very serious thing. He saw you and he always wanted to be like you. It's just a phase.” I found this out a year ago. This story was four years ago. So, I’m sitting alone in the bed at my grandmother's house and we don't say a word to anyone. School starts and I say, “Well, I gotta go to school.” They're like, “We can't leave you alone.” I said, “Why would I fucking kill myself? I chose to tell you this. This isn't what I want, this is who I am.” So, they let me go back to school and things were really tense for a while. What time is it? It's a good stopping point if we're close. LR: I think it's a really good place to stop. Part 3: October 10, 2022 LR: It is October 10, 2022. It is Indigenous Peoples’ Day. JM: Yeah, and for the worst people, Columbus Day. LR: Well, that's old-school. It's 2022, people. We are here in the Archives conference room finishing Jim Miles' interview. I'm Lorrie Rands conducting, and with me today is Raegan Baird. JM: We'll make this the last one, whether I'm done or not. LR: Well, we'll get through your story, whatever it takes. Let's pick up where we left off. You had just finished with, according to your parents, the suicide scare, and you're like, “I gotta go back to class,” and sharing your coming out story. Let's begin from 44 that point and continue. I have a question. You had mentioned that you felt bad for your girlfriend at the time. JM: Yeah. LR: I was wondering as I thought about this, was there ever a moment when you felt like, “Why couldn't she support me? Why couldn't she be there for me?” JM: No. LR: How come? JM: Just a lot of internalized homophobia that you get from growing up in the church, I think most likely would be the easiest definition. I recognized that I was creating a change that was negative in a lot of people's eyes, so I was the problematic one. For all the faults of how everything went, she was surprisingly supportive for a completely straight person in Utah who gets told her partner is queer. If I lived somewhere else, if I were living in a more liberal place and we didn't both come from small-town Utah, I might've had an expectation of more, but I got more than I expected, if we're being honest. I could look back and be like, “I should have wanted more.” But honestly, even in that moment and even now, I can be like, “You know what? That was one of the more accepting things that happened.” She took a little while to think about it, talked to her sister about things, and then decided to stay with me. We even talked about trying to have an open relationship for a bit so I could date guys and get that experience. I wasn't feeling it at the time, so I was like, “No, I love you. I wanna stay with you,” and that was it. For all the faults in that relationship, the supportiveness was not one. LR: All right. You're back at school. Your parents are having their moment. JM: Yeah, they're gonna think about things for the next little bit, and they keep sending texts every night saying, “We love you and always will.” LR: All of this coming out, this happens within a month? 45 JM: Yeah. LR: And now you have the rest of your semester to finish. The question really is, what next? JM: What did happen next, if we're trying to think chronologically? After I told my parents, my girlfriend was supportive and tried to be like, “Well, they'll come around and they still love you.” They tried to rationalize things for me. Everything's pretty quiet on the family front for probably a week or so—just like I said, those nightly texts where they think I'm going to kill myself. I think I told Calvin about my coming out experience because I didn't want him to feel bad. I might have had a talk with Dustin at that point in time; I don't know that I did for certain. We'll have lots more to come as things get a little rougher. What happens next is I start figuring out how it feels for me and what I want to tell people, how open I'm going to be. Any friends, I have the time to decide whether or not coming out, what I'm going to do about it. Do I want to tell them? Do I not? Is this a private thing for now? We jump a couple of weeks ahead, after I've come out to my parents. It would have been a holiday—maybe it's fall break, which would have been near the end of October or maybe September. The next thing I remember is being in the car with my mother from Logan, but I know it's not that first night, ‘cause it's afternoon. I remember telling her, “When can I tell my siblings?” She's like—this is where we get fun. I don’t remember the exact language she used, but she essentially says, "Let's not go cause confusion. Let's not tell your siblings,” which is funny because I have been depressed as a kid, and I'd always made a point of being open and talking about that experience. I was like, “It's important for other people to know.” I was open about my depression with my 46 family; my parents applauded me for that. But then when it becomes another issue, it's, “Let's not, it's going to be too much.” I remember picking a bit of a fight and being like, “It's me, and it's not going to change. My cousin’s come out to them, why can’t I?” I don't know if I actually talked to her into letting me be able to do it. I think I might have just said, “I am going to do it.” I told her that I had already told my sister about it anyway, before I even told them. My memory is foggy on all of the specifics, but I remember that first week they talked to my sister and told her how hard it must have been to find out her brother was gay. I remember they told me later that she had told them, “What does it change? He's still the same person. We love him all the same. It's not that big a deal,” which they said was helpful in rationalizing everything for that first little bit. That is going to be a little ironic as we hit the next portion of the story. We'll jump back to that car ride. I told my mom, “I'm going to tell my siblings. It's an important thing for me.” They go, “Okay, well, can we at least proof however you're going to tell them? Let's make sure we keep it appropriate and talk in language they're going to understand.” It's like, “What's to understand? I've dated girls around them. They can understand I might date guys, ta-dah. That's my sexuality.” I went home and I talked to my sister. I'm like, “Hey, will you sit in with me as I talk to the other siblings?” I told my third in line in age first, so my sister. I pulled her aside and I was like, “Hey, just want to let you know”—I was identifying as bisexual at the time—"I'm bisexual, a lot like my cousin. Just means I might date some guys in the future, we'll see. I like my partner so we're going to stay together, 47 but if we break up, you might see me date some guys. I might bring some guys home on holidays.” I asked if she had any questions. About that time, my dad comes in the room and is like, “Hey, why are you doing this without us? We wanted to be present for this.” I wanted to tell my siblings about me, this was a very natural way to come out being a little punk. We have a little tiff but nothing really comes of it. He was like, “Well, at least for your youngest brother,” who's seven years younger than me, and I would have been 18/19 at the time, so he's 11 or 12. They’re like, “Well, let's at least be present for this one. He's young, he doesn't even know his own feelings.” They most likely have not had the sex talk with him, so this might be his first experience with any sexual conversation. I'm like, “Okay,” and I keep it very brief. I don't remember much of telling him; apparently he cried afterwards. I think he might have cried during it because he knew I was going to Hell in his mind. I remember being very hurt by that, and I don't remember much of the conversation, but I remember he cried and it hurt a lot. The weekend continues on. I go back home to Logan, and I think my family must have expressed some disapproval of how it all went down at some point, because I remember making a conscious thinking pattern of saying, “My parents are not being supportive of me. They wish I hadn't told my siblings. They wish I would keep this closeted and quiet.” I don't know if I told them at any point in time. No, I know I did later on, when I wanted to hurt them. I wanted to stab back, and some of the pain I felt they were causing me by not acknowledging that they were causing me pain. Essentially, I kind of quietly disowned my family for a little bit. I don't come around for holidays and I don't really talk to my family for about six months. I really want to talk to my 48 siblings, but knowing there's no way I can talk to them without being around my parents, I'm not going to. I had that thought after that first weekend. At some point my dad had said he wanted to have a conversation with me, and I think it would've been before I disowned him. He wanted to talk about everything that's going on in terms of religion, because he thought I still believed in religion and I still believed in God, and “God still loves you and you must feel His spirit. You know it deep down.” I knew it was going to be an awkward conversation. Like I said, my girlfriend was pretty supportive, all things considered, backgrounds and everything. I remember actually asking her to come down to Tooele ‘cause my dad wouldn't come to me, I had to go to him to have the conversation and drive two hours. I said, “Hey, you're on the way, can I just pick you up and we'll go talk to them?” I remember I wanted her to be present during that conversation, to have someone in my corner. Then my dad said, “Let's go for a drive,” and didn't invite her. Then it was just me and him driving in the dark around Tooele, him giving me a religious speech about why God still loves me and I need to really consider what's going on, and maybe I should just recognize that everyone kind of has those feelings—which, again, I mentioned is more an indictment on his sexuality more than just on mine. It's not a negative thing that he might have, but it's not the end-all-be-all blow he thinks this to be. It's shooting yourself in the foot in an argumentative sense, in my opinion. It’s a very long conversation, like, “I just want you to respect and support me.” He's like, “We'll always love you,” and of course it doesn't feel like it because they don't want to love. You know, the old adage: love the sinner, hate the sin. They don't ever say that explicitly, but that's very much the sentiment throughout every 49 one of these conversations. That first thing is, “We love you, we just don't love that this is happening to you.” That happens somewhere along there, and essentially, I've decided I'm going to stop. Things go on as normal. During this time, I really double down. I started working a night shift job while at university because it's all I can find that will pay me enough that I can keep living, because as I mentioned before, I'm about to lose my scholarship and be on probation. I have to find a way to pay for things, so I need a job that pays money. So, I worked the night shift at Macey's stocking shelves. That kind of cuts off my social life as I'm now sleeping during the day and then going to class, then sleeping some more if I can. Then going to work and staying up; my shift starts at eight PM and goes till six in the morning. 10-hour shifts. It’s lovely. It’s a great time. It does wonders for my mental health, and my health in general, and my social life. I'm being closed off from the world. The only thing I have is that I don't work weekends, so I'll go visit my girlfriend over the weekend. She really becomes my social circle. I'm talking to Dustin a little bit at the time. He's being a good support and I'm using him now not as a parental figure, but definitely occupying an authoritative role. When I need someone with life experience, I'll go to him. It's not a replacement for my father, but you have to have questions about adult things. “Hey, how do you handle when you're living paycheck to paycheck? How do you get a job as you go to college and stuff like that?” I'm still talking to Dustin and mostly things are relegated to, “Hey, how are things with your parents?” “I'm still not talking to them.” He's really good and supportive, and he's been a really good friend through and through. Thankfully, he's no longer occupying that. We have more of a 50 friendship now rather than an authoritative relationship, which is good. All the while we're talking about other things: politics, stuff like that. Definitely a part of me is becoming much more left-leaning. I really branch out during this time and I go real left and start thinking, “We should solve societal problems,” because the election is coming up during all of this—it would be midterms during 2018. You're listening to all these political arguments and then people start kicking off their 2020 stuff, and so I start getting into politics. My girlfriend is studying political science as well, so I'm getting it from her. I'm trying to figure out where I fall politically now that I'm no longer following my parents' politics because I'm not talking to them anymore. I'm talking to him, and he's like, “I'm kind of a Marxist. I believe that everyone should have access to things. My parents were blue-collar workers and the only reason I was able to go to college is because we all worked very hard. We were all union people.” So, I start to get real left and it provides me with a moral compass that I didn't have from religion, when I was trying to figure things out. It's nice to be like, “Here’s what people think.” I'm listening to the public sphere just so we can avoid sexuality, though, ‘cause he's supportive. I guess we do have a running joke because one of the few sexuality things that I was fairly confident about once I came out was like, “I don't need people to affirm it.” As we talk, he's like, “When did you kind of know for the first time?” Definitely in seminary, back in my freshman year of high school. They asked the get-to-know-you question: who's your celebrity crush? I could not name a single woman in my head. I was like, “Chris Evans, Tom Hardy,” and I'm like, “Those are inappropriate answers to give in the middle of a seminary class,” so I said, “I don't know.” 51 They're like, “We'll give you a popular woman, Taylor Swift.” So, we had a running joke that I was going to start dating Taylor Swift, or if my parents asked a question about sexuality, I’d say, “I love Taylor Swift.” Like I said, my circle is getting smaller. I'm no longer having friends at college, and this is where things start to go bad in my relationship. It's a mixture of insecurity and immaturity from both of us. This is where she starts to get less— Early on, she was supportive and was like, “Maybe we should try opening things up so you can experience things.” As it progresses and we're doing long distance, she’s like, “I actually don't want you hanging around those people because you might get a crush on them.” Then I started doing that to her too, so we started doing really unhealthy stuff that you do when you're an insecure teenager. This is why people should really consider letting their brains develop all the way before getting into big relationships, because there's a huge learning curve. It’s not something I can truly hold against her, ‘cause I'm doing the same thing. I can recognize why we're doing it, but things are getting very unhealthy. There was a huge snowstorm, so it's probably November; I think it's preChristmas ‘cause I do spend Christmas with my family. I open up for just a little bit because there comes a point in time where she recognizes we're not being very healthy, I don't recognize we're not being very healthy. She says, “Let's take a break. We need to figure out if this is what I actually want.” We take a break for three days. It wasn't even long. That was how codependent we were; we're taking a break and I break down. I'm like, “I need to go be with someone.” I don't have anyone. I don't have friends I can talk to anymore. I don't have Dustin—Dustin's a teacher to me still, so I can't go to his house and talk to him. That'd be very inappropriate. 52 So, I call my parents. “Hey, we're having a hard time, but I want to come down.” But there’s this huge snowstorm and I have a little Ford Focus so I can't get through Sardine Canyon because that's a terrible canyon in the winter. They’re like, “We'll come to you. We have a Jeep.” They don't stay with me though; they go back to my uncle's house in Ogden for some reason, so I spend the night, talk to my dad about my feelings. “Yes, I'm depressed. Yes, I'm suicidal,” because I always have been. I have clinical depression and it's never going to go away. I had to manage it with medication. It was just something I've learned to live with. It's just something I have to manage and recognize and just go, “Oh, I'm getting real depressed. Let's go back to the doctor and figure out, do I need to switch medication? Do I need to up medications?” So, it's always been a natural thing, but then things get real rough, I get suicidal. This is where we have our big conversation about sexuality for the first time. “If we break up, I need you to know I'm going to bring a guy home, most likely. I'm going to try and experience this side of things.” He's ho-humming and not giving a straight answer. I can tell it’s, again, “Love the sinner, hate the sin. I'm going to support you because you’re my son. I don't want to lose you. I'm going to tell you anything I need to to get you to stay and be with the family, but I don't want you to.” I stayed the night at my uncle's house. I'm feeling okay. The next day—we talked on Sunday, so I had to go back to class or something, so they dropped me off on campus and I talked to her. Like I said, it was a three-day break, going back to each other being codependent and even more unhealthy than ever. This does open up a little bit of conversation with my parents. I have a cousin's wedding, I attend with them, stay during that time after that, and then I go to Christmas. It's still kind of reserved because I'm very aware of how little of a 53 social circle I have and I just feel like I need to do something. I'm like, “I’ll try to spend some time with them,” but after that, I kind of boxed things up again. I'm like, “Can't do it,” because things are just too awkward. It taints everything. Every time I'm around them, my dad is constantly hugging me and saying, “God loves you. I know you still believe in it.” I'm so uncomfortable and I hate it. Again, I can recognize it's my parents' understanding of how love works because they're such religious people and they think that's the end-all-be-all; God's love is the perfect thing, but it is so alienating. It hurts so much. I just feel like I can't say anything to make it stop because I’d already had so many conversations with my parents. Like I said, I box things up and I start talking to them again and things continue on during this time. I start to lose control of my sexuality a little bit. It's something I've talked to Dustin about at the time. My girlfriend starts outing me to a lot of people and a lot of her friends from high school. It’s getting around: I'm gay— well, queer, but they're just saying I'm gay. Apparently she's also telling her friends that I cheated on her with Calvin, because in her mind, somehow, I cheated. I came to find out afterwards that some people who were talking to her at the time think I cheated on our relationship, and she was just staying with me—with a gay person. What the hell? Every time she comes back from hanging out with friends and she tells me, “So-and-so told me we should break up.” “Why are you still friends with them? What's happening? Why does everyone seem to hate me as a person?” I tell Dustin I'm losing control. My parents are outing me to my family members because now they need a support group because it affects them and they're hurting. Then my dad is talking to the bishop, and my old bishop is now reaching out to me and texting me. I just can't. I'm being outed all over the place 54 and I just have to pretend it's okay because what am I going to do? What's the alternative? I can't take it back; it's not like I can put it back in the box, so I just need to go with it. Once my girlfriend's already done it, she does it the first time, then asks, “Are you okay with it?” I want to be in a relationship with her, so what am I going to do? I'm codependent. It's terrible. I'd say, “Yes, it's fine,” and then she gets the ‘ok’ for everyone to know. When things get really bad, I hate college. I was studying things that I wanted to do, but I switched degrees. I decided, “I'm going to go to philosophy and stuff like that.” [Recording pauses for a break.] [Recording resumes.] JM: We're in 2019 now, ‘cause I did Christmas, and like I said, it was just weird. LR: How long does this go on with your girlfriend before you finally both just say, “We're done?” It just sounds like you're both looking for a way out, especially her. JM: Yes. LR: I know I'm only getting your side, but it does sound that way. How long does this continue? JM: May 18, end of the semester, we went home. We're actually, ironically, living at our parents’ house; we're the closest we've ever been in Tooele. You're very right, it very much feels like she wants a way out. There is a point in time where I start feeling that, but I don't want to end it because I'm still in love with her—whether it's safety, codependence, any of that. But there is a point in time where I say, “Hey, maybe I am missing out on something because I'm not getting things changed.” I've done a lot of therapy to break it down and come to terms with it, which means I stopped thinking about it. This was three years ago; with the traumatic brain injury, you stop thinking about it. It just kind of washes out. But I do know I'm 55 at a point I'm feeling like I need something else, and I'm feeling isolated. “Maybe I do need to try and date people; let's maybe open up the relationship again.” I think that's my way of trying to have the security of the relationship, because it's one of the few social things I have: not being around people, but I can leave and go somewhere else and get that security. I very much feel like she's trying to get out, constantly. I'm asking, “Do you want to break up?” “No.” It's the codependency. It's very unhealthy. It all continues to the end of the year. We get wrapped up in finals. I know that something's going to change in my life because I no longer want to do architecture and I no longer want to do engineering. I was going to try and get into the U for the next year—part of it to be with her, but part of it because I wanted to take the architecture program and actually study what I wanted to study. But by the end of my USU year, I had decided I wasn't doing architecture. I considered philosophy, then journalism, then communications. I went through 11 degree paths throughout my college career, so I changed at least 11 times. I think I nailed five in college at USU. The plan was still for me to go to the U because it would be closer to Salt Lake and then it would be closer to her. In my mind, the U's a really good school, so you can find anything you want there, which is just a weird aspect. So, I was planning on going to the U and I'm ready to transfer all my credits and get everything lined up and get home. She starts doing a summer job, being a university ambassador or something like that, so she's got to start doing things back in Salt Lake while I'm still at home trying to figure out what I'm going to do. She gets really busy for a week where she's doing training and I’m like, “I totally get it.” 56 Then the next week comes and we're planning a date night and she’s just like, “Actually, they're doing another thing here. I want to do that instead.” I’m like, “Okay, we'll plan another night.” We finally get down to doing a date night and I'm like, “Hey, the water polo team is doing state and I've been invited to go watch the game. It’s in Salt Lake, so I'll be close to you and pick you up from work. We'll go watch that. We'll catch a movie or something afterwards.” We go to the game and there’s a bunch of high school friends. She talks to the other people the whole time ‘cause she hasn't seen them in forever. I'm very jealous because I haven't seen my girlfriend in two weeks and I'm like, “No, this was supposed to be our date night. Why are you talking to them, not me?” I'm just kind of sitting there because my team's in the water and I don't have anyone to talk to. She just talks to people. Then we get done. I'm like, “Let's go catch a movie.” We get there. She's like, “I'm not feeling the movie, can we get popcorn, and then we'll head back to my place?” I'm like, “Sure,” so I buy her movie theater popcorn. We go back to her place. She gets out of the car and I go to get out and she's like, “What are you doing?” I'm like, “I'm coming with you. This is our date night.” She said, "We just did date night." I said, “We didn't do date night. You didn't talk to me the entire time. I'm just supposed to buy your popcorn and drop you off at your house?" She's like, “...Yeah.” 57 The next day, I decided I'm going to break up with her. She's not making time for me anymore, so we break up. Then codependency strikes the next day, and I call her the day after, like, “I made a mistake, take me back.” She's like, “No. You need to push through it.” “Okay. Let's stay friends.” At least that was the plan. Then she ghosts me and I recognize—Well, actually, I didn't recognize it because she was a bad texter, so it's very hard to tell if someone is ghosting you or if they're just not responding when they never respond. Finally, probably a month later, I'm like, “You don't want to talk to me anymore, do you?” She's like, "No, I don't." “Okay, cool.” Then I'm very depressed and try to kill myself multiple times because I'm at home with my family who's being especially weird. I'm leaving the straight relationship, and that means, as I've been telling them, I'm going to consider getting in a queer relationship. They didn't like my ex to begin with and they want me back in the church. I'm living at home for the summer, so I'm so depressed. I have no friends to go to and I'm just as terrible. I try to kill myself a couple of times, but we finally get me a therapist. I don't know if they know I tried killing myself. I've kept that pretty on the down-low because I didn't do anything physical that left marks on the outside. I tried to overdose. I tried to make myself take some sleeping pills, make myself fall asleep in the tub. I would just kind of turn the water on, lay back, and try falling asleep; I hoped it would just drown me, I'd go out in my sleep. Just a couple other things. Nothing had external stuff, so they didn't know I tried to kill myself; they do know I'm severely depressed. 58 They finally get me a therapist. I say, “I specifically don't want a religious therapist. I want someone who specializes in LGBT stuff, and I don't want them to be Mormon ‘cause I don't need to have that feeling that I need to go back.” They are like, “No, we're not going to do that. You're on our insurance, we're going to find one.” They find me someone through LDS Family Services who is Mormon and specializes in LGBT relationships within the church. It's supposed to help people bridge that gap and still be queer within the church. Every time she mentions some BYU person who's a member of the church and is queer and out, “They're finding a way to make it work, and you can find a way to make it work.” It's God-fucking-awful. I do apologize, can we take a break? LR: Absolutely. [Recording stops.] [Recording begins again.] LR: Okay, you're finally seeing a “therapist.” I just did that in quotation marks. You're still not really getting the help you need. How long do you stay living with your parents before you decide enough is enough? Or do you wait until you just go back to school? JM: Pandemic hits. LR: Oh my God, okay. JM: Yeah, so, we'll get there. I actually stay with them till—Weber does online classes for a little bit, and they actually open back up, and that's when I move into my grandparents’. Things get real rough from every perspective in terms of family-wise. Thankfully, things do get a little better with my parents, though, after the next little bit. I am seeing a therapist, and I am getting help technically in terms of that I get back on medication, I no longer want to kill myself, and they talk through the straight 59 thing—straight problems people face, which is like getting over a bad relationship that you were codependent on, which is rough and terrible. Ironically, one of the best things she did was tell me to stop caring so much about what my parents think, which is good advice for everyone, that you need to learn to live your own life. Like I said, she wasn't the worst she could have been. As far as LDS therapists specializing in LGBT resources go, she's not the worst. Not great, obviously. She's one of the liberal Mormons. She loved Joe Biden and Barack Obama, which is a problem in my book personally, as someone who is a little even further left and doesn't quite like a lot of the things they've done. But it helps enough. I guess the biggest thing was financially because my parents have always been very conservative, fiscally responsible people. I've always been, I feel like at least, squarely middle-class, because growing up, even before we started making more money, they just put it in the savings and retirement side. Obviously, we start paying to go on vacations and stuff like that. I'd say my younger siblings definitely got to see a lot more of the upper middle-class stuff than I did because I was pretty well out or independent. But she [the therapist] tells me stop worrying about what my parents are telling me. I get a job working for a call center; it was awful, terrible. But I needed a job and honestly, it was so stupid. I was like, “I want to be a receptionist because I just want to talk to people.” I didn't have a good social circle, which is why I took the call center job. Funny enough, one of the dumbest things you can point out in terms of gender stereotyping: straight white guys have a whole lot going for them, but the one area they don't get hired in is receptionists. So, it was kind of funny that no one would even answer a phone call or hire me after an interview because all I have to do is answer phone calls and talk to people. 60 But anyways, I was working for a call center and started having my own income again, and I started making a small group of friends back in Tooele, which is the whole fiasco in itself. But I start having money. We want to go to Lagoon, and I would never have gone to Lagoon because my parents were just conservative and they thought, I'm barely making money. I'm supposed to be wanting to move out soon, so I have to be saving. “You can't spend money if you need to be saving.” She's [the therapist] like, “Is it going to make you happy? Is it going to make you want to stay alive? Go do it!” So, I go to Lagoon and stuff like that. That was the aspect she was telling me with kind of ignoring my parents. Then she tried to give me advice on how to talk to my parents, specifically my dad, who's still to this day not—we have an interesting relationship still. It's funny how if it's not my sexuality, it's something else where we just kind of butt heads. My mom's understanding; she knows how depressed I am. She really starts trying to learn more and maybe not in the ways I would have preferred, but at least listening to podcasts. Originally starts out as Mormon people talking about sexuality and at least being more open on that side. She listens to podcasts, actually queer people and then trans people, which has been very surprising as of late to me. It was not a leap that I saw happening, but she's actually become very supportive. I have a cousin who's trans, and it's happening all in the middle of this. Timelines are weird. Everything seems to be happening all at once. Anyways, but she does start actually trying to listen and take some of the advice my therapist gives. Then I tell my dad, "Hey I'm talking to my therapist about our communication styles and us. My therapist says we should look at this pamphlet and try to follow it." 61 He's like, "Why is your therapist giving me advice? They have never met me," so very antagonistic to learning any better ways to communicate or anything, which gets me to shut down again and stop talking to him. During this point in time, I really start hammering home I'm not religious, because I'm living with them. You can only hide so much. Suddenly they can see I'm not going to church, suddenly can see I'm watching rated-R movies, and it's having all these conversations of, “Well I'm going to continue watching my rated-R movies because I love film and I love movies. How are we going to balance it? I have to find a way to purchase them, watch them, store them.” It's, “Okay, well, you can put a TV in your room so you can watch, have headphones so your siblings can't hear,” and stuff like that. That's the whole concessions and everything on their end. But things get better, kind of; it's a lot of pushback and resistance. But finally, setting boundaries with my parents and then learning that I have to be there and they have to keep me there—‘cause otherwise at this point, I'm pretty erratic, mental health-wise. They start actually learning they have to make concessions to me. So, I am working for this call center right up until—I guess my dad had kind of heard tell of a lead at a place called Boncom, so I got an internship there. I applied for an internship there and things go well. I started interviewing while I'm still working at this place. I basically get told, “We're going to offer you the job. Don't quit your job just in case something goes wrong. Don't quit your job until we can officially offer it to you in X amount of weeks, once we get our H.R. paperwork on file and everything.” I'm like, “Okay, totally.” Then right after that conversation, there's a bomb threat called into the call center, and they leave me on the phone for 15 minutes while everyone else gets evacuated. I'm looking around like, "What's going on?" 62 They're like, "Don't hang up your call. Just finish it and then leave the building." Finally, they come back in for me and say, "Yeah, you should probably hang up your call." I'm the last one to exit the building after a bomb threat has been called in, and I'm like, “Yeah, no, think I'll find somewhere else to be.” I don't think I actually gave two weeks, like the next day I went, “Yeah, you left me on the phone during a bomb threat for me to calculate the cost for someone to move across the country on an online thing they can access themselves. We're good.” So, I leave and start working for Boncom. This is where things get really bad with the therapist, though, because Boncom works a lot with the church. I start mentioning I'm on church projects; our therapy sessions stop becoming about my mental health and therapy and start becoming, "What are you doing for the church? This is so cool, I get to learn all the things the church is doing." It's funny ‘cause I'm just giving her a rundown of what I do at work, and it's like I'm giving a presentation. Eventually, she actually ghosted me. She canceled one of our appointments. I said, “Okay that's fine.” She's like, “We'll reschedule.” So, I sent her an email afterwards, like, "Hey, can we reschedule? What availability do you have?" I never heard anything from her again, so I stopped seeing that therapist. At this point I'm working for the church a little bit, but most of my projects were working for the church Giving Machines. I was the volunteer coordinator on the Giving Machine. Make sure you're all staffed, working with any contacts who want to come check in on numbers, want to come to our facilities, creating training 63 videos, stuff like that. That's all boring work stuff, though; it's not really important other than to say that it is not a great environment for homosexuality. As I move into later projects, I start working on what was called the ‘Become’ app at the time. It was meant to be an app that missionaries could use to give nonmembers to convert them and give them a rundown on the church and teach them how to pray and stuff like that. An interesting idea, not terrible. I started having to take on a more creative role and start planning illustrations and hiring an illustrator to do them. Specifically, one of the worst examples was we have a scene which is, “Love one another as Jesus would and comfort your neighbors.” It's two men sitting on a bench—one looking very sad, one with his arm around trying to comfort him. We get in the meeting, and the client from church who's running it on the church end of things goes, "Does that look too gay?" and starts making jokes about homosexuality. The rest of the team joins in and makes jokes about homosexuality. I'm just sitting there in the corner like, “Cool.” “Oh, yeah, they look too gay. We need to make them sit further apart. They look like they're going to kiss.” It was just a terrible experience for me and a nail in the coffin for me, never, ever touching what the church does ever again. I don't know where to go from there, ‘cause after that's the pandemic. I actually keep working with them for a little bit, doing online, but once my internship is scheduled—and I had been renewed once—there's a chance for renewal, but they start having to lay off people, so they're not going to bring on an intern again. So, I'm without a job and I'm at home in the pandemic, nothing to do, just my family. I decide to go to Weber and start online classes. After that is pretty much life stuff, kind of derailing from sexuality. 64 LR: Okay. First of all, let's talk about historically speaking. You don't start at Weber until it sounds like the fall of 2020? JM: That summer, actually. I did summer classes online. LR: So, you're already at home when the pandemic starts. What was that like for you family-wise to go from, kids are going to school, and all of a sudden you are home with your family 24/7? JM: Yeah, I don't leave my room. That's pretty much it. I live in my room. It kind of happened when I first moved back anyways. They kind of gave me a space where I eat meals with them and then would disappear and watch movies, play games, try and find work. But mostly just try not to kill myself because I'm super depressed. Then it kind of resembles that early in the pandemic, because instead of just trying to keep myself alive, I'm doing work in my room. I'm on meetings originally, so I just stay in my room during the whole day, and then come out at night for dinner, then just kind of go back in. Basically, once I got fired from Boncom, I—not fired, like— LR: Right, laid off. JM: We separate. Yeah, it's always hard, because it was the end of my internship, technically. But once that happens, they have told me that I could never be hired on at Boncom until I got a degree, so the plan was for me to actually just keep working at Boncom while I went back to school and got a degree and eventually could get back on. When I left, they were kind of like, “Once you get your degree, there's an open invitation for you to come back.” LR: Boncom. So, Bonneville Communication? JM: Bonneville Communication is the parent company of Boncom. Boncom is specifically the marketing and market research. It's technically separate from the church. Not actually at all, because it's all church products, but they do a lot of nonprofit work. I did get to do a lot of these things like the Live On campaign, I was 65 part of that early on, Zero Fatalities, I was working with them over the pandemic, I did some focus groups and stuff like that, so I got to touch a lot of cool things. That's how it started me on this path of trying to do not-for-profit work, where I am now. For all the bad that was there, there was also the very good aspect of getting to work on anything that wasn't church. I loved it because you're doing good work, trying to do good. So, it's separate from the church so it can do all those other contracts, but it's not. LR: Right, right. So, your internship with Boncom actually helped shape what you would then study at Weber? JM: Yes. LR: So, when you applied at Weber, what was your degree? JM: I actually stayed true after that point. It was just Communications, that emphasis in Digital Media, which is what I graduated in. Basically, I got let go literally the last day of April, and it always pissed me off because I was like, “Man, if they would have just kept me till May, I could just put that I worked that extra month longer on anything that I was trying to apply for. Just one more day and that looks just so much better, I don't know.” I was like, “Fuck it, let's go back to school.” I finally have a drive. I know what I want to do now. I'm like, “Oh, I actually want to do nonprofit work, so let's find a degree and start shopping around. Oh, what's affordable? Maybe not the U because I can't afford that. USU now has a communications program, but they were still just focused on journalism at the time, otherwise I would probably would've gone back.” So, I end up at Weber, and I applied at the very last moment to get in for summer classes, too. I got on that deadline just right there. So, when it wasn't Boncom, I just replaced that with Weber and I was doing online classes. Again, I 66 stay in my room and I don't come out and I just spend a lot of time in there. It's basically like living with roommates when you have a shared house, and you just stay in your space and then go in the communal spaces when it's time to eat, and then otherwise you're in your space. Still very distant. Distant with my family. LR: When the school opens up, do they allow you to come to—Because even fall was online. JM: That's what I'm trying to remember is when everything happened. LR: Spring of 2021, when things start to really— JM: I think I had one class in-person in fall. It was a very limited one because it was audio production, which you can do, but you can't. I'm taking technical classes, which are real hard to do online. But it's mostly a hybrid class. Mostly online, but then you have to come in person every once in a while. Then my family decides they're actually going to move because, hard to believe now, but I think the housing market was just getting good. It was like, “Oh, you can move into a nice place,” rather than, “Oh, you can't move anywhere,” over the pandemic. So, they decide they're going to move. I'm like, “Well, I can't stay here. I'm commuting to Ogden; it's going to be too much for me to stay in Tooele because it's an hour-something drive.” Traffic adds on very quickly, forever in traffic. I don't necessarily want to move into a smaller space with you where I'm going to lose my personal space. So, I talk to people, and at first, I was actually supposed to move in with my aunt and uncle. I do believe our microphone just started flashing red, so it might die soon. LR: Let's pause it and change the battery. [Recording stops.] [Recording begins again.] 67 LR: Back to it; this is the fourth time. This is going to be fun. Your parents are moving, you’re contemplating it's time to find someplace closer to Ogden. So, you move in with your—? JM: Ends up being my grandparents, but originally was going to be my aunt and uncle who live in Layton, and I was going to pay a little bit of rent. Then surprise, they're pregnant. No one thought they were going to have kids anymore, but surprise, like genuinely surprise! So, they're like, “Well, that spare room we had—plus things are going to get tight money-wise, so, no.” I'm like, “I get it.” So, I moved with my grandparents in Mantua, which are the grandparents I went to when I first came out. It's a fucking—I hope they'll never see this. I'll make sure they'll never see—fucking terrible. God-awful. My parents at least had the good sense to let me be an adult when I lived with them in Tooele. It was having a new set of parents for some reason. “Where are you going? Where are you? When are you going to be back?” When you're 20, 21 at this point, somewhere in there, fully an adult, have lived on my own and I don't need this. Why? What is this? But they won't, and so I have to eat dinner with them every night. Yeah, it's a mess. They're very overbearing, so I just pretend I'm doing a lot more at school than I am. Just like, “Oh, I have a meeting in a couple of minutes, can't come down,” and playing video games with friends online or stuff like that, because that's the best you can do with the pandemic. Everything shut down, so you had to make online friends. Plus, I'm not even near Weber, near people my age. Mantua is a town of a handful of people. LR: Right, small town. JM: Yeah. LR: So how long were you with your grandparents? 68 JM: I actually spent the entire year with them, the entire school year. Went back to Tooele once my parents had their house built. Did an H-Vac job working four 10s, so I was never home, and then I was basically just sleeping on those Fridays. Same deal: spending time in my room, wasn't around them, was pretending I was independent. Make a lot of money so I can pay for college. At one point, I'm actually working 70-hour weeks ‘cause I had two jobs at the same time, which is god awful. Then I go back to Weber, and by now things are officially opened all the way back up, and so I'm commuting every day down to Weber for classes and for my job that's in Ogden ‘cause job market got really bad there. I had a job in Ogden working at a Home Depot that was awful; almost got fired for trying to start a union. Had to reach out to the actual National Labor Relations Board, started up a case with them, and they said, “Oh, it sounds like they actually didn't do anything to punish you.” Because of how labor law works currently, because the cooperation of lobby, if they don't actually punish you, they can only do restorative damages. They can only make good what they damaged, and they can't do punitive, which is punish them for breaking the law. They told me I couldn't talk to coworkers about wages, which you can. That's a protected right that everyone has. Talk to your coworkers about your wages, make sure everyone's getting paid fair. At this point, I'm doing nonprofit work, and I actually kinda wanna go into that. So, I knew all this, and they really fucked with the wrong person until I found out that they could only do restorative, so I ended up having to drop the case because it would have made more problems for me. I would have gotten nothing out of it other than just, I'm getting a piece of paper written to them from the National Labor Relations Board that says, “Don't do this again.” 69 They'll sign it and say, “Yeah, we'll never do it again,” and then go back to doing it until they actually do something wrong. Actually, till they actually step too far for doing wrong things. But at this point, I've got a job, I'm doing this, and I'm like, “I finally have to move to Ogden.” I finally find a house to move into and it's also terrible. This is where I care about landlord and laws and renter’s laws, because I couldn't live in the house for two weeks because the house flooded from bad pipes and plumbing. They blamed us and said the roommates have to pay for it, and I said, “We can't do that.” But I'm now on my own living in Ogden, so I find a new house. That's kind of how things go. One of the notable things that's happened during this time is—I'll only talk very briefly because it's not my story to tell and she is not of legal age, so no names. My second sister, so third down, gets very depressed and ends up going to a facility. This is all happening and life's getting hard for my family, and this is when they actually start to—our relationship's better now because of it. It's terrible that this is how it happened, but once they recognize, “Oh shit, we can really lose people. We need to be very accepting.” Because my sister also cited that one for her depression symptoms was that she didn't feel like my family was accepting of me when I came out. Thank you, unnamed sibling. So that sobers them up, and she at one point tells them that she doesn't feel like she can even question her sexuality because of how they are. I had to talk with her about how it's okay to question, even if that means that you end up coming out straight on the other end because it's okay. That's about where we're at. She said she didn't want to question and that she didn't know that 70 she wanted to question right now. I said, “That's fine. Talk to me if you ever have any more questions.” Because of all that, my family starts getting more accepting. LR: Out of curiosity, did you ever start dating again? JM: Yes, I did. I skipped over all that. Things got real weird. LR: You don't need to go into a lot of detail if you don't want to. JM: Yes. I currently have a serious partner who is a female, or identifies as cisgender female, she/her, cool, is somewhere on the sexuality spectrum like I am. Kind of same feelings where she's like, “I don't feel the need to actually pinpoint what I am, so I date whoever I like.” I have started a serious relationship with her that starts up right about when I move into Ogden on my own. Prior to that, I had experiences right after that breakup because I'm trying to find a friend group and my main focus is on friendship. You asked at one point if I ever ended up dating the guy back in high school who came out? That's where things got weird. I became friends with him because he still lived in Tooele, and I just thought it was friendship, but then he very much did not think of it as friendship. As LGBT relationships can be in Utah, it's a lot of— I'm not saying, because you're trying to protect yourself and don't know what's going to happen. So, he thinks I'm dating him at the time and thinks all these activities we're doing are dates and not just friends hanging out. Kind of a funny story: on the 4th of July, we'd go to watch fireworks, in my mind, my cool friend. He takes me to what's colloquially called in Tooele “Make out Hill” and parks the car there, and I'm like, “Oh shit, I realize what this is now.” I just kind of position my body towards the car window away from him the whole time so that there can't be any interaction like that. So, depending on who you ask, yes, we did or did not date. 71 Ironically, that kept happening all throughout that first summer I lived there, or all before the pandemic hits, where I keep making friends and then they want to have a romantic relationship with me. I have to friendzone them, and then some of them take it, some of them don't, which also led to whole other problems. Depending on who you ask, I dated or did not date a lot of people during that period of time. I really was just trying to extend that social circle and find friends, and a lot of people misconstrued it, which is what it is. So, that's kind of my dating life. Then after a lot of those experiences, I basically said, “Nope, no more romantic relationships. I'm done.” Then funnily enough, probably two years without a romantic relationship at that point, when I started developing feelings for my current partner, I remember calling my mom and going, “Man, I feel so sick to my stomach constantly. I don't know what's going on.” I call her back two days later and go, “Oh, hey, this is what having a crush feels like. I forgot you get so anxious you get sick to your stomach.” I had been so long and so content to just be single, honestly, for the rest of my life that I forgot what it feels like to have feelings. It was kind of a funny story to share where again, didn't realize we were going on a date until this time it was me who went, “Oh, I want to go on a date.” Then we talk and make it a date and it's fun. LR: I have two final questions. JM: Absolutely. LR: Before I ask them, is there any other story you want to share that you think is relevant? JM: Any other story I want to share that I think is relevant? No, I think. LR: The first question is, how is Northern Utah different from other places you've lived in Utah, specifically Logan and Tooele? To preface, within the LGBTQ+ community. 72 JM: Yes. Gosh, Northern Utah isn't even a consistent enough area to give an answer, because Logan was terrible. LR: Maybe Ogden specifically? JM: We'll go Ogden specifically. More stories to share. Coming out in Logan I remember as I was taking control of my sexuality and deciding who I was going to tell. A poorchosen moment to tell someone: I told a coworker I was working with on night shift that I was actually within the community, and they start going, “Well, have you ever read the Bible? Do you know the story of Sodom and Gomorrah? Do you know you're going to Hell? Yada yada yada.” Whether it be the circles I was in in Logan, I just found it to be a much more religious community. [I] joke that it had a higher LDS population than BYU even had. I actually ended up moving into what was colloquially called the “Morm dorms” because I needed a cheap apartment last-minute, and I just moved wherever there was apartments where I went to USU. It apparently has six wards in the entire apartment complex because that's how many Mormons lived there. I got lectured by my roommates, and they would try and corner me while I ate dinner and bring out the Bible and say, “Have you ever read the Bible?” I'd be like, “Yes, I was on Seminary Council and I studied the Bible very indepth. I know everything you're going to tell me.” A bunch of them were RM’s. Like I said, whether it be those circles, how much homophobia I faced, I faced a lot of it up there, a lot of slurs. I was very glad to have Dustin and Calvin and the good people up there, but at the same time, there was a lot of people [who were] very homophobic, to put it blatantly. Ogden has been an interesting experience as I have lived here. I've run into a lot more queer people. Weber itself, it feels like my class has been a lot more accepting. Part of that could be that I'm in more humanities-based programs, where 73 I was in STEM, which tends to be very conservative people who are “real job” people as opposed to humanities, which can be the artsy, liberal ones. Whether that be part of it, I've just found a lot more LGBT people in classes in general, and I have found this program that I'm now helping to work with, and I found Sarah. Of course, you're still called slurs anywhere you're in Utah. A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in the gas stations and someone yelled “fag” at me from their car and drove off. That's fun, always fun to feel those. As tensions are ratcheting up in general political-wise—which, I have lots to say, but I won't. This is not the place. We're getting worse, so it very much feels like I have kind of this preexperience in Ogden where things were really good, and I can definitely see things are maybe going to change here in a minute. But there's always people in Tooele who were homophobic, and there were people who were accepting. Like I said, this one team was actually very accepting, and I got lectured by the water polo team for having the homophobic comment that I made, so there was a good community there for acceptance. The person who told me not to date the gentleman who came out thought they were being protective of the gentleman who came out, telling me not to lead them on. So, there's been good people and bad people everywhere. It's consistent and inconsistent in different ways. I think Ogden's been more openly accepting, but you can find the pockets, and then a special kind of accepting in more religious places still. Is there a next question? LR: Yes, one more question before I ask the final question. Who are some of your gay icons? JM: Sam Smith, Freddie Mercury, and— Honestly, probably those two are the biggest ones. Sam Smith, I remember it was you can look back and that's probably my first what you would call “celebrity crush.” I didn't recognize it at the time, but I can look 74 back to watching the “Stay With Me” music video for the first time and be like, “That’s a really good-looking guy. I wish I could be like them. Obviously, I don't like them, but I want to be them.” That's that oft-referred to feeling queer people mention when you're closeted still, like, “No, no, no, no, no. Those aren't romantic feelings. I just want to be like them.” I can look back and kind of see him as kind of my first queer celebrity crush/icon. The Bohemian Rhapsody movie dropped—for all of its problems, which are numerous—right as I was coming out. Freddie Mercury was definitely one of those where you started learning and it just kind of was right place, right time. I bought the Adidas shoes he wore at Live Aid. Not his, obviously, I'm a broke college student, but the brand, the ones that are remakes, because I liked it so much and that was very pivotal. The movie portrays it very similar to what I felt with my family where every queer person's story has similarities, people who are not supportive, and yada yada yada. So, when you see these parents not being supportive, and you're like “Oh, my parents weren't supportive. Someone else is experiencing that.” LR: That makes sense. So finally, if you had an opportunity to talk to the younger generation or your younger self, what advice would you give? JM: It's hard. It's funny. Let's go on a quick tangent. In my middle school classes, we actually wrote letters to ourselves, and then the teacher kept them and delivered it to us when we graduated high school. Except for he forgot to deliver them immediately after we graduated high school. I didn't get mine until I was out. It was very interesting to read my thoughts of who I was going to be as a person because it was a very religious point in time. I'm like, “You better be going on a mission. You better be loving God, loving parents,” all of that stuff. It was very interesting to have that tie in together and feel judged by my younger self. Obviously, it was internalized homophobia from how I grew up. That would have been the cause of it. 75 So, it's not so much what I wish I could have told myself, because I don't think I would have understood because of the situation I was in, which is going to lead me to my answer. The next thing is that I don't know. There's so much I need to tell the young queer people. There's the classic answer: be yourself, be proud of who you are. But that's not the problem, really. The problem is society's not understanding and accepting of us. That's the problem. That's why I've made it such a strong mission to try and go for nonprofit organizations, work for projects like this, where we're going to talk about queer issues and just make it more accepting. Fight for every single inch we have because it's being pulled back from us and queer people aren't the problem. Rather than tell them what they need to do or change or be different other than be yourself, it's more important for me, I feel, to create a world that's better than the one I came into. Fight for everything we already have. Don't let it go, and continue to fight for more so that we can just create spaces where people can just be accepted for who they are. That's what I strive to do. That's why I hope to build a strong community. I'm very open about my experience, trying to tell anyone who might benefit from it, anyone who could be questioning, and just be open to be there so I can provide people that stability that I didn't have when I came out. Be the Calvin, as I put it. It was very helpful when I got to ask him questions, and I just try to create that for people. Hopefully, I lived a good life. I don't care if people remember my name, didn't care if I had money. I care that I fucking fought fascists who want to take away our rights and do some good with it. LR: Okay. Well, thank you for your candor, for your words. 76