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Kindle Notes & Highlights
As long as you write it away regularly, nothing can really hurt you. —SHIRLEY JACKSON
Out of nowhere, I remembered that Utah continued to allow death by firing squad after it was outlawed almost everywhere else—one of many weird facts I learned about the state growing up there.
How is it that bad memories can slice through time so easily while happiness evaporates the moment it’s experienced? The restless past is never content to stay put.
He looks like a hawk you’d want to have a beer with, or a German shepherd who’d do karaoke. It’s that sweet spot that propelled him to cross-genre fame: a touch more aggressive and he wouldn’t be believable in a comedy, a quarter-turn softer and he couldn’t be Crag Dynamite.
It was impossible to have writer’s block when Mormon church leaders were out there spouting homophobia in that fucking grandfatherly intonation, uttering all those weasel words about “eternal families” and “the definition of marriage,” repackaging the simplicity of their hate into ornate boxes. God, even thinking about it now makes me mad. I couldn’t not tell that story. It would have burned a hole in me if I’d kept it inside.
Back then, the leaders of the Church were actively combatting gay rights, more so than they do now, and their political influence over the Mountain states was as insidious as it was invisible.
What Richie didn’t understand is that food is the most meaningful relationship many people have in their lives. From birth to death, the one thing we all do is eat, the only purely enjoyable ritual in an otherwise grim world. A lot of Mormons I knew felt the same way. All that repressed libido had to go somewhere.
Midway through the meal, Kevin polished off a slider, pointed a finger at me, and said, “You know what, Gallagher? After everything I’ve given up, food has taken on a whole new meaning.” Then he picked up the last croquette—no, it was an arancini—and said, “See this? From now on, this is sex, alcohol, and gambling, all rolled up into a little ball. I’ve got nothing left but this and Jesus.”
But I never forgot how ravenous he was at that dinner. “This and Jesus,” he said. I lost Jesus. Maybe Kevin did, too. But I kept food.
But I hear these hitches in his voice. Moments when the smooth gravel cracks and crunches under the weight of something.
I think it’s the gap between the image he’s projecting and the man I suspect is underneath. There’s a contradiction there that I feel an itch to resolve, the same way you might like to see whether you can press the wrong poles of two magnets together.
Red-faced, he stammered warnings about “sullying the house of the Lord” and all the other nonsense that religious gasbags spout when they’re challenged, all of them cosplaying as men of God when they’re really just overgrown boys on an ego trip.
Twenty-two years of repression exploded in one glorious moment of catharsis. I walked out of that office like a batter trots to first base after hitting a homer.
He has a decade on me, but I’ve never been more aware of how much more life I’ve lived in gay years. He has the naïveté of a man half his age—a naïveté I once shared. Coming out didn’t make me happier so much as it kept me alive.
I’m experiencing a kind of intimacy that has never been available until this very unusual set of circumstances presented itself. For once, I’m feeling what it’s like for appetite to be an asset rather than an obstacle.
“I spent the first twenty-one years of my life being told that only my tiny little religion knew the truth. Everyone else was wrong about everything: not just the atheists, but the Muslims, the Hindus, and the Jews. Other Christians, too. On a planet of billions, we thought only a few million Mormons were right. Sometimes I wonder if being raised like that just broke me in an irreparable way. Like, what if I’m fucked-up forever?”
‘What if God really will damn me for this?’ Do you know how horrifying that is, Roland? To believe that there’s a being with an infinite capacity for love, but who would banish you precisely because of how you love? I was twenty-two then, only a year off my mission. I was convinced I had doomed myself—like, literally doomed myself. I had my doubts, but all that programming runs deep.
The Church churned out so much language. There were four books of scripture, three hours of Sunday meetings, two annual conferences, and one prophet all spewing thousands of words at us nonstop, but distilled, the mantra was simple: Obey. Pay your tithing. Don’t stray. Their words were weapons meant to hem us in. And it worked.
