Dear President Oaks,





Growing up gay in the church I have had plenty of time to wonder who did it— who made me gay. There are only three plausible explanations. I did, my parents did, or it was an act of God.





What would be your first answer? Who made me gay?





You have been teaching for decades that it was my choice. And I’ll tell you right now that’s not true.





I think they begin to teach the doctrine of homophobia in Nursery, but they may have changed it Sunbeams now. This is a joke, of course, but we are taught from a very early age that there are no gays in the celestial kingdom. I know in sixth grade when I had my first crush on a boy, I wasn’t rebellious enough to actively go against one of the most basic oppressions doctrines of the church. My queerness was already there.

So I simply cannot take responsibility for the fact of my gayness.





It can’t be my parents, either. They have struggled with my gayness just as much as I have. I can still see the tears in my mother’s eyes when she first quietly asked if I was gay. I denied it then and would continue to deny it for years knowing that gayness was a sentence to a life of loneliness within the church.





You’ve been teaching that for a long time haven’t you? In fact, two days ago you told moms to not even let their kids talk about their gayness because you think if we shove it under the rug long enough then it will just magically disappear.





My parents and I have wept together, prayed together, and hoped together for years. I don’t believe they would have ever chosen to make me a second class citizen in their own church.





If it wasn’t me and it wasn’t my parents, then could it have been God that made me gay? I have wondered about that for years.





As Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father stitched together my soul from fragments of the fabric of the universe, did they add in my gayness?





Did She weep as She added in a few drops of “homosexual tendencies” to the mixture of my heart?





Did He cry when He made me, knowing that you would say if people love me too much they wouldn’t be loving Him?





When I imagine our life before this one, I can’t see Them sitting with all Their queer children and saying, “You will fall in love with people you cannot love. You will not be able to marry or have a family. If you choose to follow your natural inclination to love someone, you will ruin your parent’s eternal family and will never have a chance to live with Us. Goodbye and good luck.”





And yet, here we are. For twenty years, you have been on the attack. You have defined marriage so many times that I could give your talk for you. You have said gays have a condition. You have said that we threaten your freedom. You have said this “susceptibility” could drag me so far down I won’t be able to come back.





I am genuinely curious— if God made me gay, then why have you made it your mission to bring me down for the last 20 years?





And please don’t tell me it’s because you love me. Don’t feed me the lie that your love causes you to reject me, to threaten me with damnation and to withhold my promised blessings. I won’t stand for that anymore.





I wish we could be friends. I really do. I wish that you could see me. I wish that our relationship wasn’t clouded by your judgment. But until then I guess we all get to wait for your next attack.





All my love,

Michael