Read more

Kids who aren’t loved and accepted at home will go somewhere else to look for support or relief. They would prefer to get their acceptance from their families, but queer kids struggle to find their tribe when there is painful exclusion around the supper table.

Young people, in search of acceptance, become more vulnerable to the false hope of temporary relief and the allure of escaping to a pain-free life.

Many of us know the pain of not feeling loved at home. Where did we go to find it? We were looking for love in all the wrong places, as the song goes. Some of us turned to friends who were just as lost as we were. We got in trouble for petty theft or other mischief. We couldn’t go home, so we stayed away as much as possible.

Queer youth face intense pressure to fit in. Sometimes they are forced to make impossible choices for survival. Other times, they don’t survive at all.

There was a hate crime in my hometown of Bangor when I was 13. I didn’t have to guess how my community would have reacted if I had come out. I heard it in the snickers about the chuck-a-homo bridge. I understood it from the remarks from family and friends that Charlie Howard got what he deserved for being too gay. How dare he? The temptation to turn to substance use after that kind of painful messaging is a predictable pattern that we have the power to interrupt.

I left Maine because I couldn’t find my place here. I was away for 30 years before I finally came back, having accepted myself. I had to face the reality that those snickers would now be about me. Maine is my home. Maine is our children’s home. Let’s not chase them away to live in other parts of the world where they might find more acceptance. Let’s not back them into corners where they feel like the only option is to numb their unbearable pain.

Sometimes our children teach us how brave the world needs us to be. My catalyst for leaving the church was watching my teen learn how to hate himself for being trans. No parent wants to see that. I would rather let my kid change their name a hundred times than have to write their obituary. We use nicknames all the time. Who cares? What’s the bigger picture here?

A human cannot choose to be straight. I can testify with confidence that if it were possible, I would have been able to do it. I was married to a man for 25 years in the Mormon church and I raised two children as a stay-at-home mother.

My pain was private, because being gay meant eternal exile. Like so many, I struggled to choose life over the relief that death surely would have brought me. I saw others punished into submission and compliance. I watched queer folks try desperately to align with what their communities wanted. Their families tried to love them despite their queerness. This is not the kind of unconditional love that I was taught to show. This is not inclusion. This will not help a young person feel safe.

Be the parent your kid needs you to be. Be the parent your neighbor’s kid needs you to be. Your niece, your nephew, your grandchild. Be the human in a queer person’s life that celebrates who they are, not despite who they are, but precisely because of who they are.

You have the power to make a difference in the life of a young person. Don’t look the other way.

Save a Life Recovery Resource Center provides a safe environment where all community members can gather in deliberate sobriety. You don’t have to be in recovery to attend the programs we offer. Find a workout buddy. Pick a tomato. Write your story. Learn an instrument. Sculpt a piece for a traveling art show. Share a meal with likeminded people.

The whole message is that you belong here. We want you here and we want everything you have to offer this world. Please stay. Please show up as your true self. We care.

Chris Davis

Board of Directors member at Save a Life

Leave a comment

🧠 Brain dump (5 mins): Get us into the zone for writing about what we’ve been thinking about, or to clear our minds of what we don’t want to write about today.

⚙️ Skill build (10 mins): Teach someone how to do or make something. Can be for an adult, child, friend, stranger, colleague, enemy, etc. Choose to write fiction or non-fiction. Write it as a story or as a list. Whatever feels right for you.

✍️ Writing prompt (10 mins): Imagine you wake up and something is very different. For example, you’re your best friend’s shadow, you’re a ghost, you are living 10 minutes in the future.

Thank you to Save a Life Resource Recovery Center in Lincoln, Maine, for hosting the party!

WRITE TO HEAL is a weekly workshop to build writing skills, engage in creative word play, and use this dedicated time to sit down and write in community. It can be purely creative or learning therapeutic practices about how to tell your story in journal/memoir format. You can’t do it wrong.

The purpose of WRITE TO HEAL is to walk all the way around the issues you’ve been pondering and try to interact with them in different ways. This is not therapy or coaching. Think of it as mentoring. Take what’s helpful and leave the rest.

We’re all friends here.

Welcome home,

Chris

Get more from Chris Davis Proud in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

We also followed this writing prompt, submitted by an attendee:

I know it cooked my noodle! This prompt gave me a chance to walk all the way around the scenario and come up with some unexpected answers!

See you next Wednesday LIVE or catch the replay here on Substack!

You got this,

Chris

Leave a comment

Get more from Chris Davis Proud in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Now picture your childhood self in the loft of your family’s camp. You’re snug in your sleeping bag, trying to drift back to sleep, but a menacing urge persistently tickles your bladder, waking you up at irregular intervals. You open your eyes to get your bearings, but there is no light to help you recognize your surroundings. The power company hasn’t established its presence yet in this pucker brush corner of the Northern Maine Woods.

The first step is to stand and assume the customary slouching posture to avoid hitting your head on the slanted ceiling. The second step is to stifle the cry of pain and rub your sore head when you bump your noggin anyway. Step three involves navigating to the loft ladder using only the plastic flashlight you got for your birthday with the nearly dead D cell batteries. As a young kid, you learned the all-important life skill of climbing down a steep ladder in bare feet with a bulky flashlight in one hand. You hope heaven smiles upon the human who invented the headlamp, but such fancy things are not widely available in the ‘70s. Crossing the linoleum floor, trying not to wake your family of slumbering campers, you reach the front door, slip on some camp shoes, and take a deep breath as you prepare to meet the ax murderer who is certainly waiting for you outside. The creaking floorboards of the front porch and the slap of the spring-loaded screen door announce to the boogeyman that you have entered his dark nighttime domain, and because you’ve procrastinated so long, your dash to the outhouse has become a desperate emergency.

You’re not afraid of the dark. Who would be afraid of something they can’t see? Or several somethings they can’t see? Or many somethings they can’t see? There are any number of somethings out there that you can’t see. Not scary at all.

Pesky mosquitoes zero in on your infrared presence and buzz close to your ears, warning you the trip to the outhouse is too perilous. Owls ask each other rhetorical questions about what might bring a small human outside in the middle of the night. Tree leaves and the casual breeze conspire to shush the nocturnal creatures lurking in the woods. Tree roots sneakily stretch in your direction, trying to trip you as you blearily sleepwalk to the loo.

It’s logical to assume that the pain of stubbing your toe in the daylight hours would feel equal to the pain of a nighttime toe stub. You don’t know the science behind it, but it is a commonly accepted fact that getting hurt in the middle of the night is significantly more painful than the everyday walk-it-off type of pain experienced in the light of day. Your impulse to cry out is tempered by your mission to get to the outhouse and back quietly and safely, attracting as little attention as possible from things that go bump in the night.

You travel the orange pine needle carpet of a path, trying not to wake up too much so you can get back to sleep when this urinary nightmare is over. Your flashlight beam lands on the small wooden structure that promises relief, but not comfort. You pray the last visitor left enough paper on the roll.

Arriving at the outhouse, you reach up to open the squeaky door and are greeted by the acrid odor de toilette. Ice fishing augers, puffy orange life preservers, rusty saw blades, and sticky flypaper strips do not provide the ideal setting for squatting over an outhouse seat. You expose your bareness to the chill of the season and release your liquid burden into the dark hole while wondering what an ideal setting would be for such a thing. Maybe the soft flickering of a scented candle and some soothing elevator music? This is not the time to sit and ponder such luxurious accommodations. You pick up your flashlight and muster the moxie you’ll need for the second half of this journey.

You return to the camp as your 99-cent cone of light bounces with each step. You’re relieved and less frantic but still cautiously racing the bobcats, fishers, bears, skunks, raccoons, and Freddy Kruegers, to the safety of a latching door. You console yourself with the assumption that they don’t have the opposable thumbs necessary to open the camp’s door. Then you remember that Freddy has fully functional thumbs, and you twist the doorknob locking mechanism, just to be certain you and your loved ones are safe for the remainder of the night.

Your mother doesn’t know you were recently introduced to the horror cinema genre at a friend’s sleepover, and you will never feel safe in the woods again. Much like Jaws made movie buffs afraid to swim in the ocean, slasher movies made camping in nature not simply uncomfortable, but life threatening. Anyone not using the buddy system was asking for an unpleasant visit from a psychopath wielding a big knife.

For years you’ve watched your grandmother head for the lake after dark with her flashlight and fishing pole. Her return with a steel pail full of eel was always a mystery, but now you begin to understand just what a badass your grammy was to brave the nighttime unknown and come back with a bucket of food.

You climb the ladder and settle back into your sleeping bag, zipping the sides for maximum protection and comfort. The warmth of your own body heat has waited for you to come back. You are safe. You are tired. You are free of distraction. Your sleep is quick to resume and, in your dreams, you relive memories of Christmas morning presents and warm chocolate chip cookies.

You wake up to the bright light of morning, and the loons’ cheerful announcement that a new day has started. This is when you learn that the older female family members simply take a small bundle of toilet tissue with them and squat beside the camp to avoid the trek to Spider Town USA in the dark of night. They casually mention this as they make their morning trip to the facilities and gather the used tissue bundles from the night before to dispose of them properly. You mentally slap your forehead and criticize yourself for not thinking of that, while tucking the information away for your next foray of fright.

The possibility of Maine blueberry pancakes cooked in a cast iron skillet accompanied by crispy salty bacon erases all memory of the events you endured only a few hours before. You discover renewed happiness in the smell of a hearty camp breakfast. You draw the maple syrup close and hold it under your nose for a moment. You inhale the sweet fragrance. How long can you hold it inside you before you need to exhale and sniff another lungful?

How long can you hold the memory of this moment to reflect upon for years to come? How long can you hold true to the person you become when you connect with the natural world at this precious camp? How long can you hold onto the hope that you will come back and recreate this magic with your future family? How long can you hold your impatient heart still until the time when you grow to adulthood and decades later return to this sacred peaceful space with a realtor? How long can you hold onto the gratitude of having the opportunity to purchase this camp and bring it back into the family? How long can you hold this secret to yourself before you’re ready to share it with the loved ones who cherish it the same way you always have?

The waiting is over. Exhale. Let go. You don’t need to hold it anymore. Welcome home to the camp. Welcome home to yourself.

Leave a comment

What if we all lifted each other up for a better chance at scoring? What would scoring look like?

My vision includes sharing friendly smiles at the grocery store, holding the door for the person behind me at the gas station, and taking a moment to chat with a fellow laundromat patron on a random Tuesday afternoon.

Each of these activities costs nothing but a little time and patience. What a generous gift it is to devote our full attention to another human when the only expectation is connection and community. How much out-of-pocket does it require to help someone feel seen? Yet we all walk away from an interaction like that with a lighter step and a brighter hope.

I witnessed my grammy doing these things when I came with her to the big town of Lincoln back in the 1970s. Her investment in friendship and community cost her nothing and benefitted everyone. She died in 1988. I’m almost the age she was when cancer took her away.

My oldest and his wife had their first baby a few months ago. I’m wicked excited, though unsure how that relationship will unfold, given our complex family dynamic. I cherish the opportunity to share my love with this precious new family member. I look forward to witnessing his journey, wherever it takes him, without judgment or criticism. I will lift him higher for a better chance at scoring.

I know how to love because I learned it from my grammy. I learned how to serve because Grammy brought me along. I learned how to see the humanity in every heart because Grammy showed me how it was done.

I will teach my grandson all of these marvelous values. I will do it because Grammy taught them to me. I will do it because I’m Grammy now.

I’m Grammy now.

Leave a comment

He was at my author event at the Lincoln Memorial Library in September when I read an excerpt from my memoir about how I felt out of place in my old life as a Mormon wife and mother. I described it as feeling “like a sack of Wonder Bread in a basket full of homemade wheat loaves.”

Sounds like he understood exactly what that passage from my book meant.

Who can’t relate with that feeling? The self-help industry calls it imposter syndrome. I left Maine after high school, looking for my life somewhere else, but it turns out my life was right here in the Pine Tree State the whole time. I don’t regret my time away. I learned a lot, I met a lot of different kinds of folks, and I got exposed to many things. Thirty years of being a stranger in strange lands taught me I would never quite fit in anywhere else.

Returning home to Maine in 2020, after leaving my 25-year marriage and 2 adult children, allowed me to release a breath I hadn’t even realized I was holding. I felt tired from trying not to embarrass myself, learning the social rules of engagement in Utah, California, and Connecticut. I constantly misstepped and overcorrected, doing my best to fit in and catch up.

Coming home has brought me back to the culture I know and the type of people I’ve missed. I can let my mouth relax and I don’t have to say my aaaahhs so haaaahd.

Dorothy was right, “There’s no place like home.” And Norm from the ‘80s TV show Cheers demonstrated, week after week, the joy of walking into a place and being greeted by friends where everybody knows your name.

It’s nice to be back where I belong, where I can shed my layers and get the stink blowed off me. I’m filled once again with wonder for the place I called home, even while I was away.

Leave a comment

She is aware of the cold, how could she not be in her state of naked exposure? But she doesn’t hide from it. She becomes one with it and so, the cold becomes part of her lived experience, part of her outlook, and part of her present reality.

The cold isn’t happening to her. The cold is happening.

The beauty of her stalwart presence testifies to her years of slow growth toward the sky. Branches reach around unseen obstacles.

She stands still in the freezing temps. The snow is no inconvenience. She has nowhere else to be. Only to remain where she stands, and to exist. And she does it with such grace and majesty.

I imagine examining her rings and discovering some years have been bountiful and others lean. Longevity is recorded as progress, and never regression.

Let me be like the tree on the bank of the B_____, strong, slow, intentional, accepting, patient, peaceful, present, unfazed by the storm, open to experience, from which she draws wisdom both in times of dormancy and growth.

She doesn’t regret the fall shed. She doesn’t fret about spring renewal. She stands tall and true, embracing herself and her experience in each unique moment.

Every minute of experience leads to her own expansion and discovery of capacity. She is whole as she is.

She lives in community, her copse coven. She is supported and she supports herself. Her scarring embellishes her inherent beauty and celebrates her resilience. A monument to trauma overcome.

I send you my love, Dear Sister. I appreciate what you have to offer, without judgment or expectation. Let us be, together.

Leave a comment

For the first 53 years of my life, I believed there was a natural hierarchy of dominance and that men should be in charge. I believed they had a special conduit to heaven that I couldn’t access. I believed I needed to beg them to come around to my way of thinking, so they would choose to share their power. I bristled at it. I spoke out against it. I ran away from it, but I still believed it, because I had been taught what it meant to be a woman, from men.

I remember looking around at my church friends and wondering why they all seemed to accept that this oppression was not only reasonable, but divine. I knew these women were intelligent and I believed they were capable of critical thought. So why did they support this systemic hobbling?

I thought I was too stupid to figure it out.

Listening to this speech by Sonia Johnson, given at UC Santa Cruz in 1988, I learned that Sonia thought she was too stupid, too!

Part 1 of 2

Deceived by the Adversary

Sonia Johnson’s name represented a special degree of devious evil when I was growing up in the Mormon church. I heard whispers that she and other women had chained themselves to the temple gates in protest. She had been deceived by Satan, according to church leadership, and she was on a mission to convert unsuspecting faithful women, using her powerfully persuasive arguments for women’s liberation.

The church made an example of Sonia by excommunicating her in 1979 for openly supporting the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and speaking out against patriarchy. She became a cautionary tale. If you dabble in feminism, you’ll end up like Sonia Johnson. Well, lo and behold! They were right! I have, in fact, ended up like Sonia Johnson!

Feminists are scary

I haven’t read her memoir From Housewife to Heretic yet, but I just looked on my Goodreads list and discovered I added it to my TBR on January 19, 2020. That was the month I came out to my husband and my parents.

In my old life, as a Mormon housewife and mother, I didn’t even dare to look her up. It took me another 6 years to work up the courage to read about her, which shows how scared I was of her and her wild ideas about gender power dynamics.

Now I can’t look away.

I won’t look away. And yet, a small part of me still fears the judgement from the Mormon women I respect and love. One of them reads this blog as a paid subscriber. She will have feelings. I will sit with the discomfort of that.

Sonia is famous for saying “What I resist persists.”

She said it takes two to patriarchy, there is no oppressor without the complicity of the oppressed. When we chase after the men who make the rules, begging for equality, or even crumbs that might lead to equality, we concede that it’s theirs to grant.

I’m learning that the tug-of-war struggle of conflict disappears when I let go of the rope. All tension dissolves and I can walk away without worrying about winning or losing. If it’s a game I can’t possibly win, why do I continue to engage? That was Sonia’s conclusion, too.

Some scholars who critique Sonia’s theories say she’s too idealistic. She gets caught up in the duality of right and wrong. I would argue that anyone who grows up in the Mormon church will struggle to understand the nuance of the gradients of morality.

The Book of Mormon emphasizes the fundamental teaching that there is only absolute truth, and the opposite of that truth. There is no gray, because that’s where the Adversary will trick you. “For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things.” (2 Nephi 2:11)

God is a Man vs. Man is God

The difficult path of logic that I traveled to tame my intuition into obedience, broke my heart, broke my mind, and broke my will to live.

• Obedience is a fundamental requirement for membership in good standing.

• If the patriarchal order feels wrong to me, I must deny my intuition to qualify for heaven.

• Contradiction is a transgression.

• Only after I agree that men should set the policies and pass the judgments, am I rewarded with the label of WORTHY.

• Church patriarchy gatekeeps worthiness because authorized men speak for God.

• My lived experience teaches me that sometimes men harm women.

• Men make mistakes, so I must excuse their weakness and forgive them.

• To get into heaven, I must covenant with God that I will never question male authority.

• No women speak for God, ever.

• Until I comply, I’m damned to inherit a lesser degree of glory for eternity.

• If I don’t qualify for the highest level of heaven, I will not be with my family forever.

It’s not that I was too stupid to understand. The givens I was using to calculate were not as absolute as I was taught. GIGO.

🗑️🗑️🗑️🗑️🗑️🗑️🗑️🗑️🗑️

Sometimes our children teach us how brave the world needs us to be.

My Grammy Sullivan told me if she’d been born twenty years later, she would’ve been “the biggest women’s libber you ever saw.” She was forty-one when I was born in 1971. This was the height of the Women’s Movement, and I expect she envisioned a better life for me.

It saddens me to think that she didn’t feel empowered enough to create that world for herself.

I was a closeted lesbian in the Mormon church until I was nearly fifty, but it wasn’t until my teen came out as transgender that I found the courage to leave. I accepted the self hatred for decades, but once I saw my child being taught that harmful rhetoric, I ran away and I took my kiddo with me.

WE DO THINGS FOR OUR CHILDREN THAT WE WOULDN’T DO FOR OURSELVES.

No parent wants to watch their child adopt the shame of a patriarchal system that leads them to believe they’re too stupid to figure out why it doesn’t work for them.

Wherever you are Sonia, I see you and I’m listening. Thank you for your leadership, resister sister, and ex-Mormon pioneer! I am grateful.

Leave a comment

If this content resonates with you, please subscribe and share. I deliver weekly messages to give you permission to do what you already want to do. ✨ Paid subscribers have access to all posts and recordings. ✨ Please consider supporting my work, so I can afford chainsaw bar oil and disposable bags for my wintertime indoor potty bucket.

I was told to give him my new name, which is a secret password in the temple, so he could call me through the veil and admit me into the celestial kingdom in the next life.

Although I complied in the moment, under the duress of wedding day pressure, I wouldn’t call it consent. I didn’t know until then that I would have to please him to ensure my eternal salvation.

When I talk about feeling haunted by the unequal power dynamic in my marriage, Mormon women argue that it’s not like that in their relationship. They protect the establishment because that’s where their safety is.

They’re told they have the freedom to choose, but there are strings attached if they want to be invited into a marriage in heaven that includes her husband’s (and hers) children. Because the kids are sealed to him for eternity, and she’s replaceable.

Now that I’m divorced and I’m free from that spiritual tyranny, I recognize it’s not the men’s fault. It’s patriarchy. It’s a system built on men having power and women getting and staying married to have access to that power.

LDS women have no idea how much power they hold:

Read more

“Love thy neighbor as thyself” is a beautiful proverb about shared positive energy, and active engagement in causes that uplift us all. I believe in it, and I have a feeling you might, too.

At the root of this wisdom is loving ourselves first. Trying to give love from a source that isn’t based in love can be a recipe for disaster.

What’s in your love soup?

Simple ingredients might include some of the following:

• saying hello to random strangers

• performing anonymous service

• helping a friend or family member without being asked

Here are some actionable ways to support the Queer Community as an Ally, an Advocate, and an Activist.

Read more

Although it’s clear to me now that I fit the typical description of what it means to be a conversion therapy survivor, my realization is fairly recent. When you’re taught not to trust your intuition, not to believe your senses, not to look too closely at the root of any issue, reality can become elusive.

I suffered the painful loss of a close family member when I was thirty-two. I turned to therapy for help to cope with the impact of that loss. As anyone who’s been to therapy knows, the skeins of trauma yarn get teased apart and things come to the surface that have been suppressed for a long time.

I got real with myself. Seven years into my marriage, I finally admitted that I couldn’t choose heteronormativity. I discovered it wasn’t a matter of willpower, but an innate fact of my humanity.

I knew it wasn’t safe to confide in my church leadership about my attraction to women, because I would be assessed as unworthy to participate fully in church membership and I couldn’t bear that shame. The effects it would certainly have on my family would be catastrophic and I wasn’t ready to blow up my life yet.

I asked my secular clinical therapist to help me survive my marriage until my young children were grown. I couldn’t even entertain the idea of abandoning them prematurely and leaving them without a mother, so I began my 17-year marathon to survive until my children graduated from high school. Then I would be free to end my life, because I’d been taught that death would restore my spirit to an appropriately straight orientation.

I didn’t choose conversion therapy, but I can see now that my therapist did.

Read more