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read those words, I experienced physical sensations I had never felt before—sensations involving pleasure and revulsion. That I still remember the exact words of the passage forty-six years later attests to their power for me. In the following years, I tried to understand why sex would be bad the day before you got married and wonderful the day after. But I was sure it would be true.
    So, we Mormon youths thought about sex all the time and felt guilty about our thoughts all the time. In an attempt to protect us from ourselves, church guidelines state that we are not to date until we are sixteen, and necking and petting are taboo. Like most people, young Mormons are not able to adhere to such guidelines, so they are tortured with guilt about their weakness. I was no exception. I dated a few boys steadily, and I liked to make out with them, but I came home from my dates feeling sinful and wretched, full of promises to Heavenly Father and myself that I would not give in to temptation again. Of course, I did. However, I did not have much trouble saying no to actual intercourse and remained a virgin until my wedding night on September 24, 1970, one month after my twentieth birthday.
    In spite of all that talk about sex, though, I don’t remember anyone at church ever mentioning homosexuality. No invitations were issued to us young people to explore our sexuality. No consideration seemed to be given to the possibility that there might be gays and lesbians among us. The first time I heard the word “homosexual” out loud was from the lips of my mother when I was about fifteen. I danced in a ballet company, and one of our principal dancers was Henry; somehow (the story is hazy), Henry got into trouble with one of his male art students. My mother explained to me that Henry was gay—homosexual. Her explanation was direct and unencumbered, as I recall, by judgment or moralizing. She said some men loved other men and Henry was one of those men. She did not say anything about women, and I would be several years older before I realized women could be gay too. I did not even make the connection between Henry’s story and the relationship I had with my friend Sharon when I was thirteen.
    For about six months during my eighth-grade year, Sharon and I got together every Friday night. As time went on, we began to pretend we were on a date. One of us would be the boy and one would be the girl. At first one of us would put an arm around the other one, or we held hands, but soon we escalated to making out. Truthfully, Friday nights could not come soon enough for me; if we spent the night together, we slept in the same bed and eventually had all our clothes off. We pretended to have sex, still thinking of one of us as the boy and one of us as the girl. We couldn’t really have straight sex of course, and we didn’t know girls could have sex. In our minds, we were practicing making out for when we had boyfriends and for when we had sex with our husbands. And we were sure we would have the same feelings when we were married to the men of our dreams. We carried on this junior high friendship, punctuated by hot and heavy make-out sessions, but we did not talk about our relationship. And somehow we sensed it was important that no one knew what we were doing. We didn’t know about lesbians, but we knew we would be in trouble if anyone caught us. I had some inkling then that I was different, but I could not articulate why I did not fit in, and I certainly did not attribute my difference to my sexual orientation. Years later, after I came out to my parents, my mother admitted that she had never known what to do with me.
    In the fall of 1969, when I was a sophomore at the University of Utah, I began dating the man who would be my husband for twenty-three years. Up until he asked me out, he had only dated cheerleaders and sorority girls, so my long blond hair and dancer’s body made me exotic; and I think he was as fascinated by my serious,