Inside Gay Students’ Fight to Be Heard at BYU

The flier was bright, with words splashed across a rainbow background. It advertised a panel on LGBTQ issues at Brigham Young University — the first-ever university-sanctioned event on the topic.

But 10 days before the panel, the organizers hit a snag: Administrators and about half of the students involved said they wanted the rainbow-flag colors removed.

Sarah Langford, a student who would speak on the panel and a bisexual woman, was all too aware of the tense religious climate she and other organizers were stepping into. She knew the rainbow colors could scare or anger conservative Mormons. But students were begging for the chance to be proud. “We’ve spent so much time being ashamed,” Langford remembers a student organizer saying in an emotional plea for the rainbow flag to a group of LGBTQ Mormons. “I just want to show myself,” he said.

In the end, administrators and students against the flag outweighed those fighting for it. They removed the colors, opting instead for a plain, two-toned blue flier. It read: “Come understand what it means to be LGBT and SSA at BYU.” (Some students identify themselves as “same-sex attracted,” a term used by people whose religious beliefs don’t allow for physical expressions of same-sex attraction.)

In the climactic final days of planning the panel, every detail was scrutinized and debated among student organizers and administrators. What would have been an innocuous event at campuses around the nation was a milestone here.

The status quo — that openly talking about homosexuality on campus is taboo — has held at BYU since it was founded in 1875. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints forbids same-sex relationships and marriages. The March panel would be the first time in the Mormon campus’s history that LGBTQ people could have an university-sanctioned platform to speak publicly about their experience.

Still, the atmosphere is far from welcoming. There are no institutional means of supporting students or educating professors on LGBTQ issues. A group for students and other community members called Understanding Same-Gender Attraction, or USGA, is forced to meet in a local library because the university does not support or sanction its existence. Students in the group say they’ve been told it will never be allowed on campus.

For students, this event was the falling of a wall between gay Mormons attending BYU, with all of their fears, and the university’s administrators, who were finally ready to start conversations. But progress has come with compromise, gay students at BYU have learned. That hasn’t lessened their commitment.

An Unlikely Catalyst

In 2016, the Big 12 Conference announced it was officially considering expansion. BYU’s administrators and athletic director jumped at the chance to join. But publicly vying to join the conference brought on national criticism of the university, which observers said did not uphold the NCAA’s stated support of inclusivity because of its treatment of LGBTQ students.

After the university’s effort to join the Big 12 failed, Tom Holmoe, the athletic director, suggested that pushback from LGBTQ advocate groups stood in its way. In response, BYU requested an invitation to the NCAA’s annual Common Ground conference, an effort begun in 2014 to provide a place where leaders and students at religious institutions can talk about LGBTQ issues and “begin exploring how to bridge these gaps and find common ground.”

Hired in 2015 to oversee diversity and inclusion in the athletic department, Liz Darger, a practicing Mormon and senior associate athletic director, flew to Indianapolis to attend the conference in November 2016. She knew no one and says she was nervous as the conference began, not knowing what to expect. In one activity, attendees, most of whom were administrators and LGBTQ students from religious institutions, gathered in a circle and were told to step forward if a statement that was read aloud applied to them.

I’m from the West Coast. Some people stepped forward.

I’ve thought about killing myself because of what it’s like to be gay. A few stepped forward.

Then came one Darger wasn’t expecting.

I’m a Mormon.

She heard the words and moved into the center of the circle. Of all the questions read that night, she says, that was the only one to have just one person step forward.

In that moment, she said, she caught a glimpse of the isolation gay students experience every day attending BYU among crowds of young heterosexual couples. She says it “lit a fire” in her.

“It’s this sensitive issue that we don’t have all the answers for,” Darger said. “All of us, whether you’re Mormon or evangelical Christian, are all trying to figure out in our hearts and our minds how to reconcile our religion and sexuality. That’s something many people are doing on their own anyways, and certainly many of our students.”

When she returned to campus, she met with administrators and the university’s president. BYU put out press releases about her attendance, championing the university’s increasingly strong relationship with the NCAA Office of Inclusion. The ball started to roll.

Darger and Steven M. Sandberg, deputy general counsel of the university, teamed up to invite administrators to start having conversations about how BYU could improve the campus experience for LGBTQ and SSA students. Then, in October 2017, administrators brought in students and formed a working group, an invitation-only gathering of the relevant administrators and selected gay students charged with deciding what, if anything, should be done. The group included nine administrators, from housing, student life, and the honor-code office, among others. About 12 students made up the self-described “kiddos” of the group, some of whom were representing the off-campus group USGA or North Star, a “spiritually uplifting” organization for Mormons dealing with sexuality issues.

Students and administrators decided that the best way to start a conversation with the entire campus community would be by continuing their own discussions at a public panel, Q&A style. Any event had to “align with the doctrine and teachings of the church,” Sandberg said, and administrators aimed to take Darger’s experience at the NCAA conference and recreate it in the working group and panel.

“We basically held our own, extended type of Common Ground experience on campus,” he said of the working group. “That’s what I hope we can replicate throughout our entire campus.”

Some members of the Brigham Young community remain deeply conservative. The working group, which met every few weeks for sometimes five hours at a time, allowed administrators to hear from students about their biggest challenges. Members of the working group liked the panel format because it could feel like an introduction, the first step in “helping all of our campus community get to know our LGBTQ & SSA students,” Sandberg said.

In their conversations with administrators that fall, students described their daily lives — like that of Gabe Cano, a transgender student who would speak on the panel. He was not out to many people, except for those who knew him before his transition.

“Maybe I’m being paranoid,” he said, “but I don’t like being out.” Professors who know he’s transgender sometimes don’t call on him in class, he says, and he fears personal violence on campus. And the fears go further than that, as a result of BYU’s system. Say the wrong thing, and you fear losing your sponsorship to attend BYU as a Mormon. Students’ course credits, scholarships, and admission depend on approval from their bishop, who can, for whatever reason, revoke that sponsorship at any time.

But Cano and others also understand the risks of not speaking out: Gay freshmen keep their identities hidden; a student disowned by her family for being gay goes without any support; the larger community may never hear about the transgender experience; suicide statistics continue to weigh on their collective conscious.

It was time to come forward and speak out, students said.

For the students who were also members of USGA, and had been organizing off campus for years, it was thrilling. Suddenly, their reach grew enormously. Their budget grew, too: With funding from BYU, students were able to launch a full promotional campaign for the panel, unlike anything members of the unofficial group could have supported. They had money to advertise, have giant banners made, and hire a designer to create fliers — and then came the attached strings, like removing the rainbow flag.

At the turn of the year, administrators selected four people to sit on the panel, one representing each letter in “LGBT.” Among them were Langford; Benjamin Schilaty, an alumnus and instructor; and Gabe Cano. Cano, who was assigned the female gender at birth but transitioned recently, says he was picked because he’s a certain “type” — LGBTQ but not too radical. He considers his views middle-of-the-road, but felt a responsibility to speak for his more liberal peers.

“I was representing my friends who couldn’t be on the panel because [organizers] were afraid they would say something too far,” he said. “There were a lot of people that were not represented simply because they were not trusted.”

Langford was a more conservative choice. She has one foot in each camp: She remains devoted to Mormonism — active in the church and employed by it, in missionary training — while at the same time she identifies as bisexual. In a way, every gay student attending BYU is similarly divided.

“I have the unhappy responsibility of no one liking my lifestyle choices,” Langford said. Further complicating her situation, she is married to a gay man. “I remember thinking when he came out to me,” she said, “I’m going to be best friends with this guy for the rest of my life.” Instead, they got married. Afraid of judgment, of harmful portrayals of their story, and of overwhelming labels, they’ve learned to take life 10 minutes at a time. And that’s how she hopes the BYU community can approach the complexities of sexuality and religion.

‘I Won’t Kick Out My Child Tonight’

At the March panel, students answered questions and spoke about their experiences. Some spoke of feeling like deciding not to get married was selfish, of feeling afraid to express themselves in any way because of the Honor Code’s strictness, and of attempts to reconcile a beloved religion with its “family proclamation” banning same-sex marriage.

Over 1,000 people attended the panel, broken into a morning session and an evening session that were standing-room only. It was covered by the local news. The community response was widely seen as positive. After particularly strong moments, audience members cut in with applause. Student organizers estimate that about a fifth of the people in attendance were gay themselves. Some students came wearing name tags that said, “I’m gay! Ask me questions!”

Much of the conversation and questions centered around sexuality in the context of religious beliefs, reconciling and in some cases struggling to reconcile the two. Panelists even at times expressed frustration with church leaders and defended their life choices: According to The Salt Lake Tribune, Schilaty said at the panel, “My decision to not get married has nothing to do with selfishness.” They also pointed to ways BYU could be better, like by using more inclusive language.

When Langford thinks about what progress looks like, she said, she imagines a family home and a man who’s never had a conversation about LGBT issues himself in his life listening to his son come out to him as gay. “And he doesn’t know what to do but, ‘Oh wait, I went to BYU, and BYU says they invite this conversation. So I won’t kick out my child tonight.’”

That child might look a lot like Cano. Langford recalls that on the day of the panel, as the four panelists positioned themselves on stage. Cano looked nervous. He’d be coming out publicly for the first time as a transgender man to a room possibly containing strict, conservative Mormons. Before the audience was quieted, Langford caught a glimpse of Cano’s notebook, laid out in front of him.

“Out of any of us, Gabe has the most reasons to be the most bitter,” she said. “Gabe has experienced pretty hard, hard rejection because of his housing and so many other things in his life. Yet here he is, showing up to this conversation.” Handwriting at the top of his notebook read: Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter.

A quote from Martin Luther King Jr. She’s never told Cano or anyone else in the group about what she saw, but she said it’s been on her mind ever since. And Langford is letting go of the anger, too.

“We all understand that this is important and this isn’t going to look how we imagine it as individuals. But if we work together, we can create something that is bigger and better than what any of us could have imagined,” she said. “I’m not going to get mad at a 72-year-old man who thinks I’m going to hell. He was raised that way, it’s not his fault. I can try to make that better.”

The panel was declared a success, in part just because it happened. After it ended, the students on the panel and the working group that had planned it went out for Mexican food. They chatted around the table about reactions and moments from the day, about the two semesters they’d just spent planning it, and about what lies ahead.

“As we talk,” Langford recounted, “one of the group members was very candid and said, ‘I feel like in this group there are the righteous gays and the unrighteous gays.’” Conversation at the table stopped. “Two of the members said, ‘We had a conversation, and we ranked everyone from righteous to least righteous based on what we perceive the administrators to perceive us as.’ They had Ben and I at the top and themselves at the bottom.” Langford is married to a man, and Schilaty is gay but says he practices celibacy.

Even among what’s already a comparatively liberal group of young Mormons, a divide persists. “The easiest way to think of it is people who plan to stay in the church once they leave BYU, and the people who plan to leave the church once they leave BYU,” Langford said.

Close to no one ever leaves the church and stays enrolled at BYU. Being officially active in the church requires three hours on Sundays and other meetings and responsibilities dotting the week. But many gay Mormons feel they shouldn’t have to give up the community they’ve known since childhood, or are simply tied to the institution out of convenience or necessity. (Church members pay a discounted $18,836 to attend.)

The working group is now starting a conversation about how to make things better for those who do stay at BYU, regardless of their plans after graduation. So far, though, only certain kinds of LGBTQ voices are being elevated at BYU.

Instead of allowing an existing student-created group like USGA to become official, administrators plan to start a new LGBTQ student group next fall, said Liza Holdaway, a student who served as a moderator on the panel.

This has left some students feeling skeptical. “It’s only really going to be a safe space for Sarah and Ben and people who comply so well with the church,” Cano said. “People choosing to date while at BYU would not be safe in this group. And I would argue they would probably be the people who most need it. They’re being rejected by friends, by BYU as a whole, by their church, and probably by their family. If we made a very controlled group on campus, it would not help them.”

Still, when Langford looks years down the road, she is optimistic.

“We are modeling for the rest of the church what this could look like,” Langford said. “When BYU makes a decision to open up the conversation and provide a platform for LGBT students to tell their stories, it sends the message to people who still believe you can’t be LGBT and Mormon: We don’t believe that here.”