Cam W

BYU English (‘08), Transferred, UVU Creative Writing (‘11)

Describe your coming out experience.

For most of the time I was on campus, I was in the closet, even to myself. Couldn’t really admit it most of the time I was there. There was about a year where I had come out, and I had a boyfriend, which made it difficult. You can’t tell any of your classmates. I also worked there and couldn’t tell any of my coworkers. Even coworkers I was close with. It’s weird, having to avoid questions like,

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Oh, no.”

“Do you want to date so-and-so?”

“No.”

“Well, why not?”

“I just don’t want to.”

Such a weird environment to look back on. I’ve been away from it for so long now that it—yeah, it’s been a long time since I’ve thought about a lot of it.

How has your life changed since leaving BYU?

Pretty much everything is better than when I was a student. I am in a much better place now in all regards. Financially, mentally, relationship-wise. My relationship with my family and friends. It’s all a lot healthier now than it was when I was at BYU.

I identity as gay, so I feel it’s like the gay experience of just having secrets growing up. Learning in your adulthood to let go of secrets. So, my BYU experience is just me holding in secrets. I think that’s one reason why I’m such an introvert. Why I’m so shy and not a very social person, even though I can be in certain social situations.

I grew up in Provo, so growing up in the heart of BYU country and Mormonism, [taught] myself to not reveal too much.

So, my time at BYU was very similar in that way. I didn’t have friends when I was at BYU. I didn’t have friends at all until I decided to come out, and that’s when I met my boyfriend, now husband, who had a social network and helped me to build my own social network with him. That was really an awakening for me when I did decide to come out.

What were some of the consequences of your coming out?

There’s good and bad, of course. For me, the good thing about coming out, I expanded my social network like 200%. I had no friends, and I suddenly went to having a whole bunch. It was such an awakening to me—this is fun, being who you are, and seeing other people in ways that you’ve always tried to hide.

Of course, the flip side of that, there were negatives. I came out to a cousin that I thought I could trust. He ended up telling his father because he was so worried about my soul. His father, being the very religious person that he was, said that they needed to tell my bishop. At the time, my bishop was my father. They called my dad, and that’s how I came out to my family, involuntarily. At the time, my parents, very well meaning and very loving people, but at the time, they didn’t understand. They wanted me to fix it. So, they sent me to a therapist at LDS Family Services who talked to me about trying to change—conversion therapy basically. I had one meeting with this therapist and he knew that I didn’t want to change and he somewhat angrily told me to never come back. Which, I was very grateful for. I was able to go back to my parents and report that the therapist never wanted me to come back. And they were, “Why?” And I said, “Well, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me. And it didn’t sit well with me.”

That’s one way things have changed. They’ve come a long way and are a lot more understanding. That was the more difficult part of it. There were highs and lows. It was such an emotionally and mentally trying time. It made my pursuit of education very difficult because I had to deal with all of these emotional and mental issues on the side that I felt like a lot of the other students weren’t experiencing to the same degree.

It was both a good experience and a very bad one.

What was your LDS mission experience like?

The mission was pretty good, mainly because I went to a tropical location. I think if I hadn’t been in such a beautiful, tropical paradise, I might’ve suffered a little more mentally and probably would’ve come home early, if I’d gone to like Oklahoma. Nothing personally against it, but it probably would’ve been just too much like my normal life and I probably would’ve come home.

One thing that I thought was difficult about the mission was constantly being with heterosexual men. Growing up, any friends that I did have, I didn’t have many because I didn’t show myself—I was so closed in that even in elementary school, I didn’t have close friends because I was so afraid of revealing so much of who I was—but on the mission, it was just so weird because any friends that I had had before were women and I was not close with any male heterosexual people. Being with at least one 24/7 was unusual.

I was such an immature person back then, so I got into a lot of arguments with other missionaries. I didn’t know how to deal with people because I didn’t socialize much as a kid. I didn’t know how to behave. It was overall a good experience. I had a good time out there. When I look back on my mission, I look back on the secular positives of it. The locale of where I was, the people that I met, how beautiful everything was, the food that was okay, the language that I spoke—all the things like that, I look back at those. The religious aspects of it—I don’t spent too much time thinking about that.

I don’t go back and read my missionary journals because it’s all forced testimony. My letters to home, I don’t read those because I felt like I had to talk about certain things or my family would be like, “Well, what are you doing out there?”

Describe your spirituality from when you were a student.

When I was a student, I was an active member of the Church, of course. I was very active up until I decided to be honest with myself and come out to myself. That’s when I realized a lot of the things that I was doing in the Church, I realized I was only doing for my family. The big revelation to me was that everything that was taught to me in the Church never sat right to me and always only made me feel bad growing up. Didn’t really have any positive feelings about the Church. And I realized, why am I spending so much energy on something that doesn’t make me happy? And something that I don’t even know that I believe in. And why am I spending my energy on this?

So I decided to be more authentic to myself.

Of course that was complicated with BYU. Because, while I wanted to be more honest about who I was and didn’t enjoy the Church, I couldn’t stop because my education was being held at bay.

Why did you choose to go to BYU?

I don’t think a lot of people understand why a gay person would want to go to BYU. At the time that I enrolled, I didn’t identity as gay. Of course, I was, but I didn’t want to be. I didn’t want to admit that to myself even. Let alone anyone else. So, at the time I enrolled, I was trying to be the good Mormon boy, and that’s what good Mormon boys do. They go to BYU.

Of course, that all changed at 23. I found myself in a very different situation. At that time, I had to essentially become a liar and still put forth effort into being seen at church. By the time I was 23, I had moved out and was in a BYU ward. So I made sure the bishop or branch president, whatever they were back then, in the BYU ward, saw me at church once a month. I made sure I was seen once a month, so when I went in for my ecclesiastical endorsement, he could be, “Alright, yeah, I’ve seen you at church.” The rest of the time, I didn’t want to do that.

In the same timeframe, I had also met the man who became my boyfriend and now my husband. Of course, that was taking up a lot of my attention. And I didn’t want to waste that attention on something I didn’t believe in. So I didn’t want to spend a Sunday at church if I didn’t have to. I didn’t want to have to take more religion classes at BYU if I felt like it was not going to do me any good.

Describe your current sense of spirituality.

Spiritually, now I would say that I am an atheist. I take the most comfort in saying that I don’t know. I think the phrase, “I don’t know,” is very comforting to me. My mom, she’s had a hard time with the gay thing, of course, but I think the harder thing is me not being able to participate in the Church. I also have a sister who has left the Church and she gives my sister a lot harder of a time about it because I have the excuse. Even if my mom badgered me to come back to church. I have a husband.

At this point in time, I identify as an atheist. I think it’s more comforting that there is no plan to this because there’s so much that’s awful in the world. And it makes me feel better thinking that it’s no one’s fault. I think it’s more comforting to think that the world, the universe, is what it is, and we make of it what it is. I believe in humanity. It’s very hard sometimes, especially these days, to believe in humanity, but to a large degree, I believe that humanity is capable of great things, of great kindness. So that’s what I believe in.

I can see humanity. I can influence humanity in certain ways. I can be mindful of my own humanity. So that’s what I believe in.

Advice for current BYU students?

My only advice would be get out of BYU as soon as you can. I wish that I had gotten out of BYU a lot sooner than I had. I wish I had never applied there. That would’ve saved me a lot of grief and anxiety. It took me 10+ years to get a Bachelor’s degree in English because of all the anxiety and mental anguish that I went through. Of course, there’s also transferring from one school to another, you lose certain credits, so that sets you back as well. But, just, I felt like I was set back even further just by all the difficulty of the situation. I couldn’t focus on getting good grades; I had to also focus on my life that was falling apart. And, enjoying the new aspects of this new world that I was allowing myself to be a part of. So, it’s a lot.

Answers to the questions are transcribed from Cam’s video interview and lightly edited for clarity. The transcription does not cover the entire video.

Posted November 2021