New Year

I was talking to a boy named Dylan this last Thursday at USGA. He was quite amazed at the number of people that came, and on top of that all the people that couldn't quite make it but are still part of the group. He came from Salt Lake City, where they have an LGBT center at the U of U.

A few weeks ago I was talking to a different boy that was on a small panel with me for the Utah County PFLAG. He was also from the LGBT center at U of U. I sat there and proudly told them all that USGA had moved into a bigger room and that we were mentioned in a small, independently student run newspaper and that we were hopeful that faculty support would come soon. Afterwards he told us about how U of U has an entire center and full university support and funds and all this stuff. I felt kind of silly, that our biggest goals at this point were to not get kicked out of our own room some weeks. I felt like we should have done more.

So back to this Thursday...one of the first questions Dylan asked me was why such a club exists here at BYU. Why would I fight for such a club? Well I looked over at all of the people standing around that room and talking and knowing how far a lot of those people have come and with out hesitating I answered "Because we NEED one. I mean, just look...". He understood what I was saying and told me that the number of people we had that night was more than the U of U center gets all week (and they're opened 6 days a week).

It may not be the best, but it's what we need, and believe me when I say we're trying our hardest to make it even better. Just seeing how much USGA has grown, from when there was ten of us sitting in a circle to now where we have an average of 45-50 people a week, it's gives me hope. We will continue to reach out and grow because that's what people here need.

I have a lot of hope for this year :)

~Bridey J

Hindsight is 20/20

A look back at how my 2011 went. I know everybody who has a blog is probably doing one of these, so I won't feel bad if you think "not another one" and skip right on to the next one.

I have this unfortunate habit of thinking in terms of school years, or sometimes how old I am at the time. And since neither the first day of school, nor my birthday, happen on December 31/January 1 (although my friend's birthday does) it's sometimes a bit hard for be to think back on a year in terms of the calendar year. But you ARE my favorite reader (don't tell the other's, they'll get jealous) so I'll try just for you ;)

January:
It started out at a new years eve party and we turned on the Glee soundtrack to bug my brother. So the first 30 minutes of 2011 were amazingly awesome. But it ended in the crazy hospital for a week, so who knows where this is headed.

February:

It's shorter than the other months. I've always wondered if this gave it a complex. I got a new roommate from BYU-H. She turned out to be amazing and took pictures of everything :)

March:

This month always gets lost in a blur of midterms and depression, so I bought a ukulele to help me make it through the winter.

April:

I was introduced to Doctor Who so catching up on that kinda of took over my world. Life has never been the same and I am not complaining one bit :D

May:

I started my blog! I realize I don't write as much as I would like, but it's good to know that I'm getting my voice out there somehow. I also accidentally came out to most of my family via this blog, but they have been so amazing, so it's all good.

June:

I rekindled an old childhood friendship via Facebook that has turned out to be nothing but amazing (I love you!) and I made it through my first semester teaching statistics. I've never stayed in Utah past April before, so it was an adventure. I was drained by the end, but it was worth it.

July:

First year that aerial fireworks were allowed in Provo, so of course people in my apartment complex were shooting them off well into the night. This wasn't so bad except the swamp cooler pulled in the smoky air from outside and the fire alarm kept going off all night long. I slept through it all though.

August:

I somehow officially inherited USGA.

September:

School started again, and I was quite optimistic, given the awesomeness of the previous school year. Unfortunately my roommates saw to it that life would be quite miserable.

October:

The beginning of this month is kind of a blur...but I do remember that I cut the head off a jello bear for my birthday and I dyed my hair blue. Also my friends and I were Amy Pond, River Song, and The Doctor for Halloween :)

November:

Circling the Wagons in SLC --> lots of new friends. So many late night parties with my friends. Passing out fliers and getting in trouble. Spent Thanksgiving with the extended family here in Utah, and got to eat real food.

December:

As a reward for not dying by now I went home to visit my family. I also finally read "The Hunger Games".

Overall it was a good year. It had some really rough patches, but I'm still alive, and kickin'.

2012...prepare to get your ass kicked.

~Bridey J

I Dreamed a Dream

True story from high school:

"Hey Kaity, you took AP Psych. Wanna analyze my dream?"

"Sure, what's it about?"

"Well it's about this giant carnivorous marshmallow and it was trying to eat me..."

"Well according to my textbook it's probably about your sexual frustration."

"Well, that's awkward..."

"Yeah..."

Lately I've been obsessed with dream analysis. The events in dreams are generally outside the control of the dreamer, unless you beat the system and realize you're dreaming before you wake up, but even then control is very limited. Many studies have concluded that most people believe that their dreams will reveal the meaningful hidden truths of their lives. This causes them to act irrationally about dreams. They try to put together unrelated information so the outcome will convey some important meaning. Before I make it sound like I'm calling dreams nonsense, let me say that most of these same studies also showed that we are irrational about our dreams the same way we are irrational in our day to day decisions. We just want to make them important.

In our seemingly never ending search for meaning, people will turn to dreams for answers and explanations. Many believe their dreams are predicting future events. Much of this is accomplished by only remembering the times it worked out and not the many times it doesn't. It is easy to take a distorted memory and retrospectively fit it into a life experience. Recalling dreams is extremely unreliable anyway, even if you're not trying to prove your own supposed premonitions. Most things only come back to you when randomly triggered by some visual or audio cue. This is where Déjà vu seems to come into things.

Some may try to keep a dream journal, (I am right now) writing in it the moment you wake up, but even this may not be perfect recall. An average 95% of your dream will never be remembered, no matter how hard you try. Even the memories we have of our waking life are constantly being changed in our minds every time you recall them. Our brains are not good at storing accurate memories, only narrative ones. So every time you run through the story in your head you're rewriting it as you go and things tend to change from one time to the next. If this is how our conscious mind works, I can only imagine how the the unconscious brain reacts when it's in the middle of a REM high and all of the junk floating around in your head is unleashed while the short-term-to-long-term-memory-converting chemicals in the brain are suppressed and then it is ripped from all of this in an instant by an annoyingly loud alarm clock. I'm not quite sure how accurate what gets written down can be. I'm imagining an anti gravity chamber with millions of blobs of different colored paint floating about...and then someone turns the gravity back on and all the paints falls strait down. I feel like being asked to remember a dream is like you're being asked to reconstruct

this --> by looking at this -->

As illustrated by the short anecdote at the beginning of this blog, we are often taught that to interpret dreams we have to understand the symbolism behind certain objects or happenings in them. I once heard if you dream of loosing your hair or teeth it actually means you're thinking of your own death. Or you could take the less gruesome, but equally creepy, approach of saying it's all about sex. This all comes back to my first point, that we are trying to make our dreams important. We are trying to find meaning beyond ourselves. It doesn't matter what it might mean to someone else. It matters what you feel and what you think of when you had the dream. The only important symbols are the ones that mean something to you. (It doesn't matter that Karen Gillan has been in my dreams, but it might matter that I'm quite in love with Amy Pond...)

A friend of mine has been helping me work through my dream journal and figuring out what it all means. I don't think it's gonna tell me any deep answers of the universe or anything. It's not like I live with a giant crack in my wall or something (if you get that, gold star). But what we've found is that the brain keeps working while you're sleeping. The dream is the brain's way of thinking and working through things while the rest of you is out of the way. While the events in the dreams have all been different, the overall theme of the dreams have in fact revealed some stuff about what my subconscious mind has been thinking about the things that occur in my waking life. The thoughts and stresses of life that I often put out of my mind, or on the back burner, resurface again through my dreams. By understanding what's truly plaguing my mind I can face it, and deal with it, and understand myself better.

I've had this recurring dream since I was ten years old. It's gotten to the point where my mind immediately knows I'm not in Kansas anymore and I can control everything I do. It's quite simple really...

I'm suddenly standing outside my house, the one I lived in when I was ten. I know that I need to find my bike, so I run up to the porch. I can choose to ride around the corner or down the street, but I can't choose both. I know it's a dream and that I'll wake up soon, so I need to move fast. I need to find her, my friend I left behind. I need to reach her before I wake up...

...but I always wake up. Many times I won't do anything for a long time, because I'm sick of being tricked. But when I don't wake up and I'm still just standing there, it almost feels so real I've been convinced I was really there and started to cry...so I try it again and wake up right as I get to her house. I sometimes think if I ever really go back to visit it might take me a while to truly believe I'm there. The strange thing is, she and I finally got back in touch (thank you facebook)...and suddenly the dream I had almost every week for thirteen years stopped. I haven't had it since. And when I see her again (hopefully soon) it really will be a dream come true :D

Now if only this would happen for the dreams where I'm Superman...

~Bridey J

Standing for Something

A few weeks back I was a part of a group of students that put together a small flier that we past out on campus in response to something that was posted in the school paper. I don't want to go into all of it, because that's not what this is about.

I was passing out fliers on the south side of campus when some guy pulled up on to the sidewalk with his car and started yelling at us to move. I went up to him, not wanting to yell or argue, but to just stand up for what I was doing. In our short conversation I asked if he knew what we were doing, and why he cared so much about it to demand that it stop. He was yelling about property lines and calling the cops. When he realized his yelling was getting nowhere he said "You know, there are better things to do with your life".

You know...at that moment, I'm not sure there was. I was speaking up instead of being silent. I was leading, and doing instead of just sitting by. I was standing for something I really believe in. Simple, but real. And that made it the best thing I could have been doing with my life.

I'm not saying this to give you ideas of rallying the troops and going out and stickin' it to the Man. I'm trying to say stand up for what you believe in. Not always in such a literal sense of the word standing, and not strictly in a religious sense either. If you believe in art, share it. If you believe in words, speak them and let them be heard. If you believe in love, live it and feel it. If you believe that pajama's were invented to be worn until noon and cereal is a perfectly good midnight meal, then don't you dare let anyone tell you otherwise. I guess what I'm trying to say is do something about the things you have passion for. Stand up, and be true to you. Live it with all of your guts. That's the best way I know how to live live.

~Bridey J

Thoughts From My Head

Today, this blog comes to you in 3 parts...

PART 1: Jobs I think would be hard:

• Ventriloquist in Antarctica: The one time it's not cool to be able to see your own breath.
  
• Making the Chinese version of Scrabble: I'm not even sure how that would work.
• Being Lady Gaga's tailor: I'm not sure how hard it is to sew meat together but...
• Streetwalker in Venice, Italy: I'm picturing needing snorkel and water-wings...so sexy.
  

PART 2: Real make or break moments:

• If I'm dancing in the kitchen and singing out of key you would join me and not make me stop to put on pants first.
• You understand that cold pizza IS an acceptable breakfast food.
  
• I have an obsession with Superman...deal with it.

PART 3: Things I don't understand

• When waiters tell you "If you need anything tonight, my name is So-and-So"...what is their name if I don't need anything?
• Sunflower seeds that have no shell are said to be "shelled", while seeds with the shells still on are called "unshelled".
• Fantasy Football.
  

Thanks for reading :D

~Bridey J

Drawn Together

I once had a friend of mine ask me how my first girlfriend and I found each other when everyone in the Mormon community is so closeted. I have often wondered how out of all the girls that came to school that year I lived across the hall from the one girl who would say yes. I've never understood it. My answer to him was that I was lucky. Years down the road I would meet other people in USGA only to find that we had been in classes together throughout the years and just never conversed. I've recently found out that at least three out of the six guys I hung out with everyday of freshman year are gay. The nail in the coffin for me was I discovered my best friend from elementary school is also a lesbian.

I often go and speak to classes around campus about my experience of being a gay Mormon at BYU (if you want me to come talk to your class, ask your teacher) and something we always say is that if you are sitting there thinking you don't have any gay friends, the truth is you do and they just haven't trusted you enough to tell you yet. Every time I said this I always thought I was the gay friend. I never thought there was someone waiting to come out to me. I only wish I had trusted more people and talked about it more before now. The guys I knew freshman year have all been best friends and roommates for 5 years (excluding time for missions) and they are just now coming out to each other. I can only imagine the type of support we could have been for each other, and I'm sad we went through it alone instead. I asked one friend why he thought we never talked about and discovered it before now and he simply said, "I wasn't ready to talk". Looking back, I'm not sure if I was or not, but I am glad I had these guys as friends. Somewhere inside they understood me, whether I realized just how much or not. Even knowing my childhood friend is a lesbian makes me realize I was never truly as alone as I thought. I like to think that had I not moved away we would have been the support the other was looking for. After twelve years we finally are.

I have a friend back home who is not gay, but she seems to be a magnet of sorts. We joke that she's really a gay man at heart, because gay men love her and vice versa. Every boy she started to like in high school would come out to her soon there after. For a long time she had a crush on my brother and was afraid to tell him because she was afraid he would turn gay. I used to tease her that she even came all the way to BYU and somehow found all the gay boys out here. Little did I know I would one day add myself to her list of gays. When I came out to her I remember her saying "WHAT! Are you serious? Why me!?" She doesn't have an issue with my being lesbian. It was more of a joking commentary of the thought "well, here's another one". I think there is just something about her, something felt but not seen, that lets us to know she is a good person and safe place.

As a scientist I have been taught that the universe is ever expanding and entropy is always increasing. So how is it that in this chaotic world, against all the odds, the gay Mormons find each other? Is it that we can sense each other somehow? A sixth sense perhaps, like a subconscious gaydar? What is it we sense in each other?

What ever it is, I truly believe that there is something fundamentally different about gay people, specifically LDS gays. We are, after all, a peculiar people within a peculiar people. We have grown up seeing the world in a different way and that has helped shape who we are. We sense that in each other, and others can too, even if they don't quite know what it is. What ever the answer is, my hope is that we continue to find each other and together create that safe haven we're all searching for.

~Bridey J

A Most Encircling Weekend

ATTENTION: This post will be frequently updated as more needed audio and video becomes available to add. Please keep coming back to find more. Thanks...

This weekend I had the amazing opportunity to attend the Mormon Stories conference "Circling the Wagons". Now that I am at home I find myself so emotionally and physically drained, but not in a bad way. In the same way that you feel so tired after exercising, climbing a mountain, or just having a conversation with a burning bush. It feels so good.

For most people it started on Friday afternoon, but for me and some good friends of mine it wasThursday night. One of the keynote speakers of this weekend's conference was LDS author Carol Lynn Pearson. I had just started reading her book "Goodbye, I Love You" about her life married to her homosexual husband. It's a heart breaking story, but so full of love and has been a real significant event in many of my friend's journeys. So I did something that I still feel was very out of the ordinary for me. I simply sent her an email asking if she would come and speak to a bunch of gay Mormon kids at BYU about...anything, really. I just knew that she was someone in the church who started facing this issue way before some of us were even born. Lately, my friends and I have been talking about how what we are doing is new, and there is no more map to follow, and that is scary as hell. So I thought hearing from someone who helped lay the first few bricks of the path might be helpful and encouraging. She quickly agreed and we were just absolutely thrilled. I think what surprised me the most is that I had done something. I'm finding a whole new part of myself that is opening new and exciting doors in my life. So Thursday night Carol Lynn used us as a sort dress rehearsal to practice her keynote speech. She talked to us about how each of us are going through what Joseph Campbell called "the Hero's journey".

(see below in Saturday's section to hear it)

We are each chosen for this "quest" of sorts, weather we wanted it or not, and if we make it through we can bring back some sort of "elixir" to the people we left behind. I've had a friend say that God is sending a lot of gay children to the earth right now, and we don't know why. In the bible there is a story of a man blind from birth and everyone is convinced he is this way because either he or his parents are sinners. But Christ says he is this way so that the works of God can be done through him. I think through us, the gay children, the world (and the church) will learn of a deeper level of loving one another.

Friday was quite a roller coaster of emotions as well. It was a small panel consisting of Carol Lynn Pearson (awesome lady) and Bill Bradshaw (a retired BYU professor with a gay son). It was a open Q&A about what ever we felt like we needed to talk about. Although many people asked some great questions, the one that seemed to grab everyone's focus was from a mother whose teenage son had just come out to her, but after a few hours of mowing the lawn took it all back. Everyone had some really good and supportive things to say to her. We have all been where either she or her son are and this was the community that she needed to find.

[audio recording will be posted here when it becomes available]

It was quite amazing. We took a raise-of-hands poll somewhere in the middle of the meeting and about 2/3 of the group was LGBTQ and 1/3 were strait allies. Carol Lynn herself announced to everyone about USGA and the kids down at BYU that were changing things and I even got to speak a little bit. So many people came up after words and just wanted to talk to us about everything we were doing. I guess I had never really thought before how much of an impact our little group was making on people outside of the BYU bubble.

Saturday was quite epic. We walked into a Baptist church building that was so beautiful and so peaceful. It had giant stained glass windows and a ceiling so high...oh I wish more LDS church buildings felt more like a place of worship like this. When we got there we slid in to the back row, which was really not all that far from the front. The audience was much larger than I had expected and it made me happy. It was a beautiful meeting. There was a choir and lovely talks by Joseph Broom, Lee Beckstead, and Carol Lynn Pearson.

(Video of Saturday's meeting: Joseph @ 27sec, Lee @ 13min, Carol Lynn @ 39min)

When the meeting was done we stood up and I looked behind me. When the meeting started we had been on the back row. Now there were over a hundred more people sitting in the rows behind us. It was amazing.

There were little break out sessions and I went to one about Lesbians. I honestly don't think I've been in a room with that many lesbians before, and it felt awesome. I was not alone. I mean, it's great that most of my friends are either gay men or straight women, but I need me some lesbians now and then. We talked about the idea of just being authentic and loving it. Most of us have found that when we finally accepted ourselves as lesbians and were honest about who we are and what we're going through, that is when we found a deeper love and spiritual meaning to everything. It's when joy started coming back into our lives.

• Q&A Panel: Affirmation, Family Fellowship, and North Star
• To Be or not to Be: The Power of Authenticity as a Mormon Lesbian
• A Father’s Journey Toward Understanding Homosexuality
• What Helps (and Hurts) in Resolving Sexual, Religious, and Social Conflicts
• A National Perspective on the Church and LBGTQ Issues
• It HAS Gotten Better: An Overview of LGBTQ History in Utah over the Past 30 Years

The rest of the conference followed suit in amazingness, so I'll just post the links and let you listen...

[audio/video recording will be posted here when it becomes available]

Sunday we had a little service together in a much smaller chapel. It was sort of structured like an LDS meeting, but not at the same time. Bishop Kevin Kloosterman, from the Chicago area, gave a talk that he's been getting a lot of slack for in the press. I thought it was beautiful though.

My favorite part was when Julia Hunter played her violin for us. Oh that absolutely made my heart melt. She kinda of did it a bit impromptu which made even more spectacular. I don't think she planned on playing a bunch of hymns, but I'm glad she did. I always sing to them in my head when the music is playing. The second song she played was a medley of hymns and the last song was "I'm Trying to be Like Jesus". The words of the chorus sounded loudly in my thoughts as her fingers let the music ring out... Love one another, as Jesus loves you. Try and show kindness in all that you do. Be gentle and loving in deed and in thought, for these are the things Jesus taught... sometimes I think that we often forget the simple truths that we learn in primary. We look beyond the mark and become blind. Love is all we ask for, and I will do all I can to love others and become more like Christ.

I saw my friends touched by the spirit this weekend, which in turn touched me. Many people within the church may not understand how a bunch of gay people can come together and feel the spirit if what we are is said to be wrong and evil. But I know that these are some of the better people I know. The people I met at this conference were amazing. At the end of the Saturday session I got to be part of the "testimony" meeting. I have been so scared for a while because I just keep thinking that we're just a small group of kids, what can we do to change things. But when I looked behind me that morning and saw close to 300 people in the room things felt different. So many people are supportive of the work we're doing at BYU and they want to do anything they can to help. It's not just me, or a small group of my friends. I'm part of a bigger community of Gay Mormons who are starting to change things. What this weekend did for me was truly fill me with hope and I left knowing I am not alone, and things ARE getting better.

With much love...

~Bridey J