Thanks!! Such a warm welcome.

I will keep specifics out of it for anonymity reasons but I have plenty to say about mormonism. Honestly my personal experience was not nearly as bad as 90% of queer people who grow up mormon. Most queer people suffer from cognitive dissonance and feelings of guilt much worse than what I dealt with. That said, it has still effected me in profoundly negative ways.

You are right that mormons leave to “serve a mission” when they turn 18. They leave for 2 years and get assigned a random place to go try and convert people. They also send missionaries to developing countries, and a lot of those missions end up being largely humanitarian, but it’s always a religious thing at the end of the day. If you’ve ever had young mormons show up at your door with name tags, those are missionaries. Be nice to them, they’re in the most cult-like part of the whole mormon church. Missionaries are expected to devote ALL of their time to working on “spreading the gospel”. It’s not technically a requirement to go on a mission but there are STRONG social incentives to go. Some of my friends didn’t want to go on missions but did anyway because they felt like they had to. I was “mentally out” (stopped believing but still going through the motions of a mormon) by the time I turned 18 so I managed to dodge that bullet.

I actually ended up leaving the church before I even realized I was gay. Because I like girls I just figured I was straight. With hindsight I have been into men since I was at least 13, but I didn’t even realize it. Like I didn’t even recognize that they were gay thoughts.

Mentally I stopped really believing by the end of high school. The thing about mormonism is that it really messes with your brain. It does this in many ways but a LOT of it surrounds sex and sexuality. ALL mormons are sexually repressed. Even the most faithful and straightest mormon is still sexually frustrated. As a mormon you get told that masturbation is a sin, and not a minor one either. Pornography is basically pure evil straight from satan’s cock. (Utah has the highest rate of porn consumption in the US.)

Really what this amounts to is that basically all mormons feel guilty because they watch porn occasionally or jerk off sometimes. I discovered porn from a really young age, probably 10 or 11. I loved it from day 1. My parents found out and put up some half hearted attempts to block porn on the home network or lock down my devices. It never really worked, I always found a way to get jerk off material. They even sent me to mormon-church-sponsored therapy a couple times to try and get me to not watch porn. It didn’t work at all, but it did reinforce a lot of the mormon sexual repression.

It has taken a while to “untangle” all the toxic shame and guilt from my brain. I used to feel like I was doing something awful whenever I jerked off. (That didn’t stop me from doing it almost every day.) I’m still not completely done with the shame, but I’m 99% clear of that shit.

By the time I moved out of my parent’s place I had stopped going to church entirely and didn’t believe in it. With this new found mental and physical freedom I was able to explore my sexuality more, and I realized how gay I am. At first I was still more or less in denial about it. I unironically did the whole “I’m just into anime traps” then “I just think dicks are kinda hot b-but not the g-guys or anything tho!!” then “ok maybe I just want to suck dick” and at that point I finally accepted that I was bisexual 😂

Thanks for reading my ramble. I could keep going but I’ll stop myself for now.