Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, says gay grandson of LDS apostle Dallin Oaks, creates ‘an environment ripe for violence’

In the late 1990s, Jared Oaks was a sweet and shy Latter-day Saint teenager in Tacoma, Washington, who was taught to believe his sexuality was “an abomination.”

He knew the position back then of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — that being gay was a sin — and had read works by apostles decrying the immorality of same-sex attractions.

He knew that gay-straight alliances or gay clubs were popping up in high schools and thought they might be beneficial but joining one might give him away.

He knew that his grandfather, Dallin H. Oaks, was a Latter-day Saint apostle — now first counselor in the governing First Presidency — who supported the church’s teachings about the evils of homosexuality and that another apostle, Boyd K. Packer, once gave male missionaries permission to punch a companion who made sexual advances to them.

He knew that some pastors, notably Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell, had suggested AIDS was “God’s punishment for the sin of homosexuality.”

What Jared didn’t know then was that such religious rhetoric could lead to violence.

Or that the 1998 brutal assault and murder of 21-year-old Matthew Shepard, a college student in Wyoming, was just one more attack that Shepard had endured throughout his life, that in high school he had been raped, beaten and robbed in Morocco, and that back then his own Episcopal Church held the same views as Mormonism.

Or that thousands of other LGBTQ people all over the world had been harassed, attacked, hurt, mugged and, yes, killed.

Now 26 years later, 42-year-old Jared believes that no matter how much the language has softened — the LDS Church now teaches that being LGBTQ is not a sin, but acting on it is — defining some forms of love as unacceptable is to invite dehumanization and hostility.

“When we are taught that others are morally corrupt or dangerous for acting on the way that they love,” he says in an interview, “we create an environment ripe for violence.”

The violence is not always physical, Jared says, but the spiritual, emotional or even educational harm still wounds.

“Maybe you’re going to get punished by the church, get thrown out of [the faith’s Brigham Young University] or out of your ward,” he says, “simply for loving somebody.”

Jared, the music director for Ballet West, feels a connection to Shepard and welcomed the chance to write a number in honor of the murdered gay student. “Life After Laramie: A Matthew Shepard Memorial Concert” is to be performed Sunday, Oct. 27, at 2:30 p.m. at Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center in downtown Salt Lake City.

Jared’s piece is called “Bleeding,” based on Utah poet May Swenson’s verse of the same name, and will be performed by singer Evie Marie Gilgen, a transgender woman and Jared’s friend, and Lisa Marie Chaufty, who plays the recorder.

Jared thinks about the possibility of “bleeding” — as described in the poem — whenever he hears about a new government or church policy, he says, “that could result in violence against somebody.”

- - - - - - -

Stop bleeding said the knife.

I would if I could said the cut.

Stop bleeding you make me messy with this blood.

I’m sorry said the cut.Stop or I will sink in farther said the knife.

Don’t said the cut.

The knife did not say it couldn’t help it but

it sank in farther.

If only you didn’t bleed said the knife I wouldn’t

have to do this.

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‘Told me what was bad’

Facing puberty, Jared scanned his home library for church books by prominent Latter-day Saint authors, looking for answers (“I knew how to use an index,” he recalls, “to my detriment”) and that’s when his worries started setting in.

“None of it helped me,” he says. “It told me what was bad and what not to do, but there was nothing that I could connect to on a spiritual level.”

Though he had had no sexual experiences, he felt “dirty” and begged God to remove his attractions.

For his first year of college, Jared attended the University of Puget Sound, where the theme of the year was sexuality and diversity.

“I learned from a former Catholic priest in a lecture that the roots of antisemitism are in defining the self by what others are not,” Jared says. “That was a gift, because it applied to so many different things.”

At 19, he left for his two-year Latter-day Saint mission in Sweden and “had no struggles,” he says. “I just obeyed the rules the best I could. I knew my attractions had to go away after my mission — or else.”

Upon his return, Jared transferred to BYU to study piano performance and again began praying for a “miracle.”

His parents thought he was too busy to date, so they gave him money and movie tickets to take girls out. To appease them on one occasion, he invited two girls to a movie, so neither would think it was a date.

Near the end of his years of studying music at the faith’s flagship school, someone reported a couple of his male friends to the Honor Code Office for being in a same-sex relationship.

“I was incensed, because I didn’t think anything was going on,” Jared says. “So I went to the office to be interviewed and to defend them.”

On the way there, he worried if the connection with his grandfather — who had been BYU’s president and was then an apostle — would give Jared’s words extra credibility but decided it would be worth using whatever “pull” he had to help his friends.

At that time, Jared didn’t fret about being outed himself (he was too deeply closeted) but he also realized by then that the “gay” was not going away.

And he found his first Latter-day Saint gay “friend.”

‘I didn’t feel guilty’

After finishing his graduate work in choral conducting at BYU and accepting a job at Ballet West in 2009, Jared moved to Salt Lake City and began attending a Latter-day Saint singles congregation in the Avenues.

He was immediately assigned to work with the choir, which he loved, and made great friends.

Almost immediately, though, someone “outed” Jared for his “relationship” with that gay friend.

“I was very open with my new bishop,” he recalls, who put him on church “probation” in a move “to protect me from a [disciplining] high council [of regional authorities].”

And that bishop said that no matter what, Jared was loved and always welcome in the congregation.

After two years, a new lay bishop was called and offered to wipe out the probation.

Jared declined.

“I had been on some dates, and I didn’t feel guilty for it,” he says. “I thought, ‘Well, I’ve been taught my whole life that I will feel guilty if I need to. So what does it mean that there is no guilt?’”

That was when he finally stepped away from the church — unless members asked him to participate with music, which he has done even recently playing for two stake (regional) conferences.

- - - - - - - -

Why must you bleed in the first place said the knife.

For the same reason maybe that you must do

what you must do said the cut.

I can’t stand bleeding said the knife and sank in

farther.

I hate it too said the cut I know it isn’t you it’s

me you’re lucky to be a knife you ought to be glad about

that.

- - - - - - - -

‘I needed something further’

Though Jared believes his parents likely guessed he was gay in high school, he did not officially tell them until 2011.

Their reaction to the news was “OK,” he remembers, “nothing negative was said and neither was anything particularly positive.”

His two brothers, on the other hand, seemed fine with it.

“I don’t know what I needed, but I needed something further down the road,” he says, “and I wasn’t even sure what that was.”

As for his grandfather, his reaction — relayed through a family member — was, “Tell Jared to keep taking the sacrament, because if he doesn’t keep taking the sacrament, it will be harder for him to take it [in the future].”

Jared knew that the sacrament was one of his grandfather’s “theological interests,” he says, but the presumption that “I wouldn’t keep taking it or that I wouldn’t be worthy upset me.”

The grandson thought, he says, “Here I am in a sort of crisis or life-changing admission, and that’s all he has to offer?”

When a family member told him that he should speak to his grandfather, “I said I’d be happy to answer any of his questions about this topic, and she said he doesn’t need your help to understand anything.”

Jared then got a second message that his grandfather was willing to talk to him “as long as it remained completely confidential, that I’d never tell anyone.”

But, the grandson reasoned, “How could I possibly keep something secret? If it was good, if there would be light at the end of the tunnel for kids who are much younger, for people who are more at risk than I was, it would not be fair for me to know something and then to not share it. And if it’s negative, you wouldn’t want to keep it secret. They would need to know right away.”

Jared started a letter to the elder Oaks many times, but ultimately didn’t send it after hearing that his relative had said that the church never apologizes.

In the end, grandfather and grandson never had that talk.

Since then, Jared has had limited contact with his grandfather, he says, “maybe for a few family dinners or concerts, but eventually, I opted out. Now it’s nothing.”

The Salt Lake Tribune reached out, through a church spokesperson, to the apostle for comment for this story but did not receive a response from Oaks.

- - - - - - - -

That’s enough now stop now do you feel better now said

the knife.

I feel I don’t have to bleed to feel I think said the cut.

I don’t I don’t have to feel said the knife drying now

becoming shiny.

- - - - - - - -

‘Policies not prophecies’

Dallin Oaks seems to have made “a religious career out of anti-LGBTQIA+ policies, not prophecies,” Jared writes on Facebook. “I’m saddened by that.”

Indeed, the church leader arguably has spoken and written more about the issue than any other Latter-day Saint leader alive, especially from a legal perspective.

In 2006, Oaks, a former Utah Supreme Court justice, gave a joint interview on homosexuality with church attorney Lance Wickman in one of the first statements distinguishing between “feelings” and “behavior.”

He has signed on to the anti-discrimination statutes for LGBTQ persons, while reminding members of the church’s opposition to same-sex marriage.

More recently, Oaks declared that transgender members must be known by their “biological sex at birth.”

Although no longer a practicing Mormon, Jared says it pains him to say that his grandfather “does not represent the best parts of Mormonism, which has immense room for everyone.”

Many of his Latter-day Saint friends “do not act and speak with anything but love for everyone,” Jared says. “They constitute a ‘true church.’”

Oaks’ “love, but” rhetoric “tells me,” Jared says, “that my grandfather does not know the meaning of the Latter-day Saint scripture about Jesus Christ who ‘wept and stretched forth his arms, and his heart swelled wide as eternity.’”

The 92-year-old Oaks, next in line to lead the global faith, should realize that words have consequences, his grandson says, that they can trigger both physical — as in the Shepard killing — and spiritual harm.

That’s why, Jared says, “Bleeding” is such a potent symbol for him. It reminds the composer that “the knife doesn’t have to feel the pain; the cut does.”

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