I spent years worrying about what people would think if I finished and published my memoir, Hippie Boy: A Girl’s Story.

I didn’t want to hurt anyone, particularly my mom, a devout Mormon who credits the LDS Church with saving her life. And yet it was her obsession and absolute devotion to Church doctrine that nearly destroyed mine.

It wasn’t until last May, when I was invited to share my story of oppression and abuse of power within the Church on Mormon Expression, that I understood the power of sharing my story. I heard from dozens of people, mostly women, who talked about similar experiences and told me how much my story had resonated with them.

That’s when I realized that by sharing my story— which is ultimately about learning that I had the power within me to overcome my challenges and claim the life I wanted for myself — I could help others find their voice. By the time I published Hippie Boy in October, I knew I wanted to work with at-risk women and teens. I envisioned using Hippie Boy as a tool to encourage them to face their challenges by finding their voice and claiming their inner power. I wasn’t sure what form it would take. I just knew it was a message I wanted to get out into the universe.

Then, in early December, I was contacted by Marjie Bowker, an English teacher at an alternative high school in a suburb outside of Seattle. She told me our mutual friend had given her my book to read. Her next words were an early Christmas gift to me.

“Hippie Boy is the book I’ve always wanted for my students,” she said. “Do you want to form an author partnership?”

Neither of us understood what an author partnership even meant. But we both knew we wanted to figure it out. So on a whim, we started brainstorming and Marjie was soon crafting a curriculum that focuses on using Hippie Boy as a guide to help her students share their own stories in a narrative format.

Our month-long curriculum kicked off January 4th. And magic has been happening ever since. These juniors and seniors, more than forty in all, have experienced the kind of heartache and tragedy that most of us can’t even fathom. They’ve experienced gang life and drug overdoses, and have lost loved ones to prison, suicide and cancer. Some have been shuffled from house to house without ever having a safe place to call home. Some have been battered and abused and neglected. A few have resorted to stealing food because they didn’t have enough to eat.

These students have every right to be angry and hardened. Instead, they are some of the most compassionate people I’ve ever met. And they are STRONG. I felt a connection with them the first day I met them. They are me when I was their age and thanks to the power of story, we share a common understanding. Using Hippie Boy and the writing exercises Marjie crafted for them as their guide, they spent the month working to bring their own stories to life and, in the process, they have found their voice and are taking back their power. On February 1st, we hosted a celebration and all-day reading so the students could share their life scenes. Their stories were mind-blowing. And they were so charged up by the power they had found within themselves that nine of them stayed after school for nearly three hours to share their stories with a producer from our local public radio station.

We’ve hit on something powerful and have made such a connection that I’m working with these students again later this spring—when we plan to publish their life stories in an eBook that will carry their powerful words out into the universe. The experience has been a huge gift and has taught me an incredible life-changing lesson: No matter what challenges you face, you can overcome them if you claim your power, find your voice, and shout it to the universe.

If you want to learn more about the writing program with these teens, click on this story by the Herald Weekly. And if you are interested reading Hippie Boy, it’s free TODAY ONLY as an eBook on Amazon. 

Invictus Pilgrim formerly blogged at invictuspilgrim.blogspot.com. For personal reasons, he has taken that blog private and has started at new blog at mohosapiens.blogspot.com. The following was his initial post on his new blog.

A little over 15 months ago, I was prompted (not in the Mormon sense, but in the common-usage sense) to start blogging about what I was going through. A few weeks before, I had been blasted out of the closet upon hearing a talk which soon became infamous that was delivered by the President of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles – the second most-senior apostle, the man who was and is a heart beat away from becoming the “Lord’s mouthpiece on the earth.”

During the course of the next 13 months, I blogged extensively about my thoughts and experiences as a gay man who had finally come to terms with his true identity after over 20 years of marriage and activity in the LDS Church.

Two months ago, I reached a decision to take that blog private and to take a break from blogging. Like other men who were (closeted) gay, married and Mormon and who blogged about their coming out experience, I reached a point where I wondered whether there was anything left to write. Furthermore, I am definitely not the same man I was when I began my blog in October 2010, and my life is very different today than it was a year ago and even six months ago. My head, so to speak, is in a very different place.

I debated for a time whether to revive my former blog. Frankly, I didn’t know whether I wanted to bother with it anymore. But when I read what Elder Packer recently said during a broadcast which two of my children probably saw, I decided the time had come to “take up my pen.” I do so, however, in a new blog, having ultimately reached the decision to permanently close my former blog.

I don’t claim to have anything earth-shattering to say about Elder Packer’s seminary address; others have written eloquently about what was said that night. But I wanted to add my voice to theirs and share a few thoughts about the following passage from Packer’s talk:

“We know that gender was set in the pre-mortal world. The spirit and the body are the soul of man. The matter of gender is of great concern to the brethren, as are all matters of morality. A few of you may have felt, or have been told that you were born with troubled feelings and you’re not guilty if you act upon these temptations. Doctrinally, we know that if that were true, your agency would have been erased. And that cannot happen. You always have a choice to follow the promptings of the Holy Ghost and live morally pure and chaste, one filled with virtue.”

Points to ponder:

“ Gender was set in the pre-mortal world.”

As I recently tried to explain to someone who knew absolutely nothing about Mormonism, Mormons believe that we humans are made up of an immortal spirit housed in a mortal body. This spirit is the offspring of deity and has existed for countless ages with a gender, either female or male. What President Packer believes but doesn’t explicitly state is that gender and sexual orientation are basically one and the same, i.e., male (gender) = wants to love and have sex with females (sexual orientation). He apparently cannot conceive of this equation: male (gender) = wants to love and have sex with males (sexual orientation). Because of this unspoken belief, he believes that we were programmed as heterosexuals in the pre-mortal world and that homosexuality in this mortal world is an aberration that defies logic and Heavenly Father’s plan for his children. Thus, the infamous line, “Why would Heavenly Father do that?”

“The matter of gender is of great concern to the brethren, as are all matters of morality.”

Gender is a moral issue? This is where we really start to get into what I call “Boyd-Speak.” Elder Packer doesn’t come right out and say that believing yourself to be gay is immoral, but he certainly implies it. He’s doing here the same thing he did in the October 2010 conference address. He couches his language in innocuous-sounding words and phrases that most (straight) members of the Church believe to be perfectly defensible (“he was talking about pornography, not homosexuality”), while sending a message straight to the hearts (like a dagger) to gay members of the Church.

“A few of you may have felt, or have been told that you were born with troubled feelings …”

This phrase reminds me of Elder Packer’s infamous 1978 BYU multi-stake fireside, “To the One,” in which he devoted an entire address to speaking “to the one” among 100 who might be suffering from “troubled feelings” of homosexuality. As if a young man or woman wouldn’t feel isolated enough, he’s going to make sure they and others know that only a tiny minority of Church members is plagued by such “troubled feelings.”

And just in case you believe the “propaganda” that you were “born” with the inclination to be homosexual, Packer’s belief and thinly-veiled assertion is that such beliefs are hogwash, pure and simple.

“Troubled feelings.” I think this is the segue to NARTH and the unspoken invitation to see a good reparative therapist.

“ … troubled feelings … act upon these temptations.”

Notice again the Boyd-Speak. Is he saying that if you have “troubled feelings” that you may be gay (a) you are suffering from a temptation to actually believe that you’re gay, or (b) that you will automatically suffer from temptations to go have sex with a guy (or gal, as the case may be)? I think he’s saying both – at least this is the message that I believe all the gay kids suffering from “troubled feelings” will hear him say. Both assertions are, of course, unfounded, unsound and just plain ridiculous. But he will have made his point through nuanced language that camouflages his message.

“Doctrinally, we know that if that were true, your agency would have been erased.”

What exactly is he saying here? The impression is given that he’s saying that if you’re born with “troubled feelings” you automatically feel that you have to “act” upon those feelings. He seems to be saying that this is where agency gets erased. That if you’re born gay, you have to have sex, and that you can justify it by saying that you were “born that way.”

Are you kind of getting a whiff of a stereotype of gays as sex-crazed animals who only care about sex? If you haven’t already smelled it, this is born out by his next sentence: “You always have a choice to follow the promptings of the Holy Ghost and live morally pure and chaste, one filled with virtue.”

Another alternative interpretation that is perfectly plausible, given his personal beliefs, is that he’s saying that it would be a violation of agency for you to have innate, authentic feelings of attraction to persons of the same sex. In his view, this would be a violation of “agency” because he believes that such feelings are a choice, not innate.

Which brings me to my final point.

“You always have a choice to follow the promptings of the Holy Ghost and live morally pure and chaste, one filled with virtue”

The unspoken, Boyd-Speak, message is that one cannot have even feelings of attraction toward persons of one’s own gender and be “morally pure and chaste,” and certainly not “filled with virtue.” This line is reminiscent of his October 2010 line in which he labeled such feelings “impure and unnatural.” The message to young members of the Church is clear.

So why do I bother blogging about this? Because I know that Packer’s words influence impressionable young men and women in the Church. And that impression is negative. They drive like daggers into the hearts of souls of all those youth who “struggle” with “troubled feelings”, and they put arrows into the quivers of ignorance, self-righteousness, intolerance and bigotry that other youth in the Church, along with their parents and leaders, carry around with them. I feel a personal obligation to not let those words go unchallenged.

To be clear, I am not saying that Elder Packer doesn’t have the right to preach about the law of chastity. Obviously, this is a key teaching of the Church. But it could hardly be said that he reached out (in his seminary address) with love, compassion and understanding to young members of the Church struggling with feelings of same-gender attraction, which both hurts these youth and enables the un-Christlike attitudes of other members of the Church toward homosexuality.

Here are the polls! You have two weeks to vote!!

(Note: Some nominations are for multi-part series. Due to the character limit in the poll entries, I generally couldn’t provide multiple links, even using tinyurl, so I did my best to indicate that the nomination is for multiple posts and provide a link that will lead you to all the parts of the nominated work.)

Year-long awards for people and websites:

Awards for Individual Works:

Note: I reorganized some of the categories, and moved some of the nominations that could fit into more than one possible category. I did this for one of three possible reasons in each case:

I hope nobody objects to this reorganization.

Since McKay Coppins reported about the Romney campaign’s efforts to energize the South Carolina primaries with volunteers from out of state Mormon colleges, which has been linked by Profxm, I thought that a quick note to put the event into context might be in order.

Every campaign is trying to swell its volunteer force by bringing in people from out of state. When I was the co-director of the Obama campaign in Prince George’s Coutny, MD, for example, we depoyed over 3,000 volunteers to Virginia for the general election campaign in 2008 after helping out in various states during the primaries.

BYU and Bob Jones University are notorious for supplying volunteers to Republican campaigns across the nation. In part, their prominence may reflect Democratic paranoia but the real reason is obvious:

There aren’t that many places with a high concentration of conservative young people with disposable time to volunteer.

In this case, it’s an easy story to tell because the Mormon Mitt Romney receives help from Mormon college students. In reality, however, BYU volunteers routinely come in support of conservative gentile candidates in states like Virginia and California. Likewise, you can be sure that somewhere in Florida, there will be busloads of student volunteers from Bob Jones University supporting this or that candidate.

Since they won’t be Mormons campaigning for a Mormon, the media will be less sensitive to their appearance.

Can’t believe someone didn’t think of it sooner: a pop song about rivalry between sister wives. 

Here’s the direct link.

We were poor when I was growing up. So poor that we depended on free lunches at school, WIC food vouchers from the government, and occasional trips to the Church welfare office to eat.

But our daily struggle to survive didn’t keep my mom from stockpiling food in preparation for the end of the world, which we –like most of the other Mormon families we knew — believed was to occur around the year 2000, give or take a few years.

“A bushel of wheat will be worth a barrel of gold when the Second Coming nears,” my mom would say as she stocked up on five-gallon containers of freeze-dried space food she purchased from a survival store in our small Northern Utah town. Our cellar shelves were packed with tins of Spam, cans of tomato paste, and bags of pasta and rice. They also held hundreds of home-bottled jars of fruits and vegetables. Lining the walls were three giant aluminum trash cans– like the one Oscar the Grouch lived in on Sesame Street — which housed our bags of whole wheat and powdered milk. We collected plastic milk containers, filled them with tap water, and lugged them down our splintered wooden steps to ensure we had plenty of water to get us by. And to keep our food supply going, Mom dug up our entire half-acre back yard and turned it into a garden.

We spent endless summer days weeding, watering and harvesting vegetables. When we weren’t doing that, it felt like every free moment was devoted to peeling, slicing, and bottling peaches, apricots, beans, carrots, beets and anything else we could get our hands on.

To keep us motivated, Mom talked about the last days. She said our Mormon-dominated valley would be covered in tents because the gentiles (non-believers) would descend on us for food. We would feed them, of course. But we also needed to save enough for our 1,500 mile trek to Jackson County, Missouri. That’s where we believed the Garden of Eden once stood and where the Second Coming would occur. Mom said we had to walk because the cost of oil would be through the roof — if oil was available at all — making fuel impossible to acquire.

By the time I was eight, I was so obsessed with the end of the world that I lay in bed at night calculating how much time I had left. If the world ended in the year 2000, which was the year my mom always referenced, I had only until age thirty-three. My gut ached at the unfairness of it all. I didn’t worry about food. We had that covered. I worried about getting cheated out of my time on earth. I suffered full-on panic attacks trying to think through how I would possibly have enough time to enjoy life (sin), and still have adequate time left over to repent and be saved when we finally made it to Jackson County.

I left the Mormon religion soon after leaving home and refused to have anything to do with the Church — including preparedness. Planting a garden, however small, was out of the question. Just the thought of stepping foot inside of a Costco made me want to throw up. I got into the habit of shopping daily for the food I needed for that evening and the following morning.

I spent so much time stressing over the future as a child that once I reached adulthood, I had enough and vowed to focus on the present. But given the recent uprisings in the Arab world, the ongoing economic crisis, and the devastating tsunamis, earthquakes and tornados wreaking havoc across the globe, I’m starting to rethink my position.

What if my mom is right? What if the world really is headed for one big, catastrophic collapse? Even the Mayan calendar ends in 2012. Shouldn’t my husband and I be a little prepared?

We do have what my mom has sent us in the surprise UPS packages that occasionally show up at our door – tin foil space blankets, hand crank flashlights, a five-pound bag of hot chocolate mix and a ten-pound bag of instant potatoes. But at the moment, we don’t have enough water stored to make the hot chocolate or instant mashed potatoes – let alone keep us from dying of dehydration.

A friend and I have talked about the need for a wine and preparation evening that involves stuffing personal backpacks with an emergency kit, a three-day food supply and a little cash. I’m even working up the resolve to give Costco a try. But if things get really bad, I’m grateful to have a Mormon mom who loves me despite our opposing views on religion.

I’m certain my mom didn’t have me in mind when she talked about gentiles descending on our valley. But if I can find a way to get my family and friends from Seattle, where I now live, to her house in Northern Utah, I know she’ll welcome us with open arms.

I also know there will be a whole cellar stuffed with food and water waiting for us.

I found this open letter on Facebook. It is a courageous and inspiring effort to protect our gay children and neighbors in the BYU community. Since it is doubtful that the Daily Universe will publish it, I am taking the liberty to disseminate it on Main Street Plaza. It might be a good idea, if you share it on your own pages and blogs as well, not because you or I agree with it 100% but because it is a thoughtful contribution that deserves consideration.

We of the BYU community who are sympathetic to our homosexual brothers and sisters were extremely hurt by the ignorant articles in the Daily Universe comparing homosexuals to prostitutes and serial killers. Gay students are in every classroom, every ward, and every apartment complex at BYU and we want to reach out in love to help you better understand.

-Utah leads the nation in youth suicides and teen homelessness, a large number of which are gay youth. (Utah Suicide Stats Alarming, Salt Lake Tribune, 2007)

-Gay youth who are rejected by family or peers are 8 times more likely to commit suicide, 6 times as likely to be depressed, and 3 times as likely to use illegal drugs and engage in unsafe social behavior. (Ryan, Huebner, Diaz, & Sanchez. 2009. Pediatrics)

Attempts to “love the sinner and hate the sin” more often than not come across as rejection, hate, and hostility. The hostility directed toward anonymous populations instead spiritually wounds your brothers and sisters all around you. If you don’t think you know a gay person, you’re wrong. They just don’t trust you enough to tell you.

The attitude and environment at BYU represented by those articles creates and reopens wounds that the Son of God Himself died to heal. Gay members of the church struggle under the burden of self-loathing encouraged by a culture that inadvertently teaches that those attracted to the same sex are not worthy of God’s love. Only through much pain and the mercy of Jesus Christ are those wounds healed. And it is not your place to undo what He has done.

Some people believe that homosexuality is a sin, but what that have to do with love? The task of any religion is not to teach us who we’re entitled to hate, but who we’re required to love.

To our gay brothers and sisters at BYU you are not alone. We love you. There is a place for you, with us and with God.

For more information, see the Facebook group: ShameOnYou.

I project that my real-life schedule should lighten up sometime, but unfortunately it won’t be this week or next week. Fortunately, all the other bloggers of Outer Blogness (and beyond) have come through with tons of great posts! Here are some highlights:

Non-believers can’t seem to win — non-belief can always be blamed on caring too much or not enough. This helpful diagram should make it all clear. You can lapse in one religion, and still not quite be welcome in another. Discussions across belief lines can be a challenge. So you find your way and learn to be happy in your own skin.

The “Circling the Wagons” conference was a big success. Sexuality has such a range of possible expressions.

For all you correlation buffs, here are some picky rulebooks and their consequences. (Perhaps flexibility works better? Don’t do this to your kids.)

For history buffs, there were some interesting articles this week on Mormonism’s key fronts: gender, race, and marriage (polygamy), and a bonus about some hippy prophet. (Plus: what’s up with Mormons and the symbol of the cross?)

In the department of embracing doubt, believers are capable of asking hard questions about theology.

News highlights: The western black rhino is now extinct, and (unrelated) responding to hate with love.

For this week’s birthday blogs, here are some interesting cupcakes. And let’s wrap up with some more amusing images! Happy Monday morning!

Marguerite has a problem. She loves the structure and purpose that Mormonism provides, and — like every good BYU co-ed — she’s dying to land a man. Unfortunately, instead of being a perky blonde out of a shampoo commercial, she’s a shy, nerdy bookworm — and hence practically invisible to BYU guys. When she spends a Summer term back home in Arizona, all it takes is one fun guy with the body of a Greek god and a handful of Philosophy 101 to start Marguerite on a journey of contemplation that eventually melts her Mormonism away.

Problem solved? Not exactly…

Therese Doucet’s A Lost Argument is a realistic and heartfelt portrait of the ups and downs of life and love for young people who don’t fit the perfect Mormon mold. It’s also an interesting study in what happens when you take intelligent girls and train them that their worth is entirely determined by their ability to land and please a man. Even when you lose your religion, these sorts of ingrained lessons don’t automatically disappear with it.

A Lost Argument is published by Strange Violin Editions and available through Smashwords and Amazon.

Jason Chaffetz, Utah Congressman, is sponsoring the “Community Alcohol Regulatory Effectiveness Act.” The proposed legislation will allow states to prohibit consumers from ordering wine from out of state wineries. In this article, the author and the respondents discuss local versus interstate commerce and to what extent whether Chaffetz’s legislation is designed to benefit big business. It is interesting that no one made the connection between Utah’s already extreme attempts to control the distribution and consumption of alcohol, and how the Act might provide them additional leverage in assuring that Utah residents will be neither weary nor faint when they walk and run. Or is that too cynical a take on Congressman Chaffetz’s motives?