I remember hitting myself at night when I came home from church in my early teens as I just couldn’t stay away from masturbation. I stopped for a year while living with my father. I then felt so guilty after a babysitting porn book relapse, that I told my father, who immediately had me into the bishop the next week. I was 13 years old, trying to figure out all these new and troubling feelings I was having in my body. This never really went away.
Cut to age 21 after having spent 3 years sewing every single oat I could think of having left Utah to Chicago to attend music theater school. I found myself back in Utah with a bouncing baby ovarian cyst and a year and a half to be revamped into Christine Mormon young adult version. It was Halloween 1989, and I was in Bishop Blueberries’ (that’s what I called him because he was 300 pounds, with white hair and purple skin) office having my “you’re thinking of going on a mission meeting” with the bishop. I went in having 2 very juicy stories of my first 2 sexual experiences with women. Bishop B would say, “Then what happened?”….”what did she do to YOU then?”…., “that must have felt…how DID it feel?”.
Cut to 2 weeks after my interview, I’m at sacrament meeting, and through a chain of events found out that at least 3 families in the ward knew about my stories I had told the bishop. It was at that point I said au revoir!
I have since been in a 23 year relationship. We both consider ourselves bisexual. We have had a good fun sex life, but I am still stifled with crippling panic attacks, paranoia, jealousy, and rage at anyone my husband gets “too close to”. Thanks for that Mormon church! Eff you Mormon Church! How about YOU pay my shrink bills! You are ALL culpable for the suicides and self-harming behavior that takes place daily. You are on the wrong side of history!