FYI, this is going to be a bit more about my sex life than I typically talk about on my website. I have described this as “half therapy, half theology”. Read at your own discretion.
1. Growing Up LDS
Some of my earliest memories around sexuality are actually memories of its absence. When I was very young, my parents would fast-forward through any movie or TV show that had a sex scene, and when fast-forwarding wasn’t possible they would simply turn the TV off and wait till it was over. As devout Mormons, they wanted to protect me from being exposed to sexuality altogether. However, this void of knowledge caused me to become even more curious. Bodies became mysterious and fascinating because they were never explained to me.
A couple of neighborhood kids were similarly curious, and that shared curiosity eventually turned into games like “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours”, and then into playing with each others’ bodies. We were very young and had no real understanding of what we were doing, but I did understand one thing clearly: this was something my parents would be upset about.
Eventually, when I was 8 or 9, one of the kids told his parents, who told mine. When my mom confronted me she framed it as a sin and used it as an opportunity to talk to me about the Atonement. However, this did not provide any comfort for me, and made me feel broken and dirty instead. Overwhelmed with emotion I tried to hide from my mom under a bed. She followed me into my room and decided to take this opportunity to talk to me about the birds and the bees. I just wanted the moment to end, so I plugged my ears and chanted “LALALALA” so I wouldn’t hear anything. Whatever education and safety that talk might have offered was completely eclipsed by fear and embarrassment.
The first time sexual purity came up for me at church was in Sunday School, and I was so young that I was still in Primary. My teacher was the mother of a girl my age whom I was friends with, and the lesson must have involved a scriptural story that touched on sex, because, naturally, we had questions. Looking back, I feel a lot of sympathy for her; she signed up to teach us Sunday School, not Sex Ed. Still, she handled it with surprising care. She taught us that our bodies and our genitals were gifts, and that the feelings they produced were also gifts, but these gifts were meant to be kept for ourselves until marriage. In hindsight, this was actually a fairly healthy introduction to sexuality. When I began puberty, that early framing helped me avoid feeling shame as I explored my body and learned what felt good. For a time, sexuality felt neutral, even positive.
That changed when I entered Young Men’s and the messaging around sex shifted dramatically. When I read the For the Strength of Youth pamphlet, I was introduced to Alma 19 (LDS Alma 39), where Alma the Younger rebukes his son Corianton. Corianton had left his mission and had sex with a woman described as a “harlot.” Alma condemns this so strongly that he claims only murder and denying the Holy Ghost are more serious sins. He goes further, suggesting that Corianton’s actions caused thousands to reject the gospel, implicitly making him responsible for their spiritual destruction. The message I received was unmistakable: sex could be the third most serious sin imaginable, and my sexual behavior could determine whether other people made it to the Celestial Kingdom. That was an extraordinary burden to place on a 12-year-old.
The pamphlet also warned, “Before marriage, do not do anything to arouse the powerful emotions that must be expressed only in marriage… Do not arouse those emotions in your own body.” I understood this to mean that masturbation was included in this third-most-serious category of sin. This directly contradicted what my Sunday School teacher had taught years earlier, which made me feel as if I had already committed this grievous sin.
For years, I felt constant guilt about my sex drive. Whenever I masturbated, I was overwhelmed with shame. I didn’t talk about this with anyone; I carried it quietly and alone, believing there was something wrong with me. By the time I was fifteen or sixteen, I already felt spiritually ruined. Since I believed I had destroyed my chances at exaltation anyway, I sometimes fooled around with girlfriends – fondling breasts, fingering vaginas, and they would stroke my penis. These experiences brought guilt, but not significantly more than I already felt for masturbating.
When one girlfriend went in for a Temple recommend interview, she told her bishop the truth, and then told her parents. She informed me that either I could tell my parents myself or hers would, so I chose to tell my parents myself. I remember hiding under a blanket, sending a text that stripped the situation down to bare facts, while fighting off a panic attack. My parents came into my room. My dad grabbed a tennis racket and jokingly pretended he was going to hit me on the head, trying to diffuse the tension, but it didn’t work. Years of sexual shame had just detonated, and I felt vulnerable and exposed. My parents had me go confess to my bishop, who barred me from taking the sacrament for two weeks. Rather than endure the public humiliation not taking the sacrament, I simply stopped attending church during that time. This shame was a large factor in me breaking up with my girlfriend a couple months later. I decided I didn’t want that shame in my life anymore, and for the next two years, I did not masturbate at all and tried to avoid developing feelings for girls at school.
However, during my senior year of high school, I grew close to a girl I had crushed on for years. She was an edgy Mormon, and I thought she was incredibly cool. We spent a lot of time together, developed feelings, had make out sessions a couple times, and eventually I asked her to be my girlfriend and she said yes. Shortly after, she told me she was bisexual and not a virgin. I took this to mean that she wanted to have sex with me, and all the religious shame I had accumulated over the years came crashing back. Even though the relationship made me happy, I felt compelled to end it before I “messed up” my chances at exaltation again. About two weeks into dating, I broke up with her over text. A few days later, she confronted me to make sure I understood that I was an asshole for how I behaved, and I didn’t argue that fact.
A couple of months after graduating high school, I began talking to another Mormon girl. We quickly developed intense feelings for one another. If I’m honest, we wanted to have sex without guilt, and we believed the solution was marriage. After only four months of dating, at eighteen years old, we decided to elope. My mom and grandpa begged us not to, but we went through with it anyway.
Being married allowed me to explore sexuality again without the crushing weight of shame. It was exhilarating to rediscover pleasure, especially with another person. When we went through the Temple, the Law of Chastity was finally defined clearly and definitively: “the daughters of Eve and the sons of Adam shall have no sexual intercourse except with their husbands or wives to whom they are legally and lawfully wedded.” For the first time, I felt like I could fully comply. I no longer feared being responsible for my own or others’ eternal damnation.
As my ex-wife and I grew older, we learned more about ourselves. We both stopped believing in the truth claims of the LDS Church and we both realized we were bisexual. Eventually, we also recognized that we were non-monogamous. In a familiar ex-Mormon cliché, we opened our relationship, and a couple of years later we also acknowledged that our marriage itself was no longer working. We separated relatively amicably when we were 24.
Outside of the LDS Church, outside of heterosexuality, and outside of monogamy, I had to develop an entirely new sexual ethic. Through only a little trial and error, I realized I could sum it up with a single word: safety. My sexuality had felt like a source of danger in my life up to that point, and I didn’t want it to any longer. I wanted to reduce shame and improve my mental health, protect my own physical health and that of my partners, and wanted relational security through honesty, communication, and clearly articulated boundaries (even when those conversations were uncomfortable). I have been polyamorous for ten years now, and this ethical foundation has served me well. I have been with my beautiful wife for nine years, my lovely partner for three years, and my wonderful girlfriend for two years.
2. Layover in Community of Christ
While I no longer believed the truth claims of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I never really stopped being a Mormon (I often see “Ex-Mormon” as a kind of Mormon culturally speaking). I remained deeply invested in the Restoration tradition and wanted to understand as much of it as possible.
In 2020 I became interested in Community of Christ, which has a reputation for being the most progressive Mormon sect. I talked with a pastor there and was told that I would be fully accepted as a bisexual non-monogamous person. As I explored their theology, I was especially drawn to Doctrine and Covenants 164 and its framework for ethical sexuality. This section articulated 8 “Principles for Behavior and Relationships”:
- Upholds the Worth and Giftedness of All People
- Protect the Most Vulnerable
- Christ-like Love
- Mutual Respect
- Responsibility
- Justice
- Covenant
- Faithfulness
This theological framework felt profoundly healthier than what I had been taught as a teenager. It centered ethics rather than fear, relationship rather than rule-keeping. With both the theological grounding and the assurances of inclusion, I joined Community of Christ in 2021.
Over time, however, it became clear that Community of Christ carries unresolved Nauvoo-era generational and institutional trauma surrounding polygamy that it has chosen not to heal. This tension is most evident in Doctrine and Covenants 150, which characterizes non-monogamous families as a burden to be reluctantly and begrudgingly tolerated rather than as equal participants in the life of the church. In 2023, the First Presidency reiterated this stance by issuing a policy that explicitly barring people in non-monogamous families from serving in the priesthood.
I refused to submit myself to religious sexual shame again. I knew that my sexuality was practiced ethically and my family was holy, and I believed it was theologically defensible within Community of Christ’s own stated principles for relationships. For over a year, I attempted to raise awareness and foster dialogue, including writing educational materials specifically tailored to Community of Christ theology and culture.
However, my efforts were consistently ignored and in 2024 I chose to resign my membership. I later learned that, despite my repeated calls for open conversation, church leadership had privately re-affirmed that my family structure was sinful in their view, which they later again publicly re-re-affirmed at the following World Conference. At that point, it was clear that my inclusion had always been conditional, and that the church’s commitments to justice and worth had hard limits when tested by my lived reality.
3. Settling in as Reform Mormon
After leaving Community of Christ, I resolved that I would no longer place myself under any religious hierarchy. Hierarchies were what had taught me to experience my body with fear and shame, and they were what later attempted to impose that same shame on me as an adult. I spent about eight months identifying simply as an “Independent Mormon”, committed to the Restoration tradition but unwilling to submit my conscience to institutional authority.
During that time, I attended Rob Lauer’s Sunstone presentation, “The Mormon Theological Paradigm: How Reform Mormonism Is Preserving Mormonism’s Most Valuable Heirloom.” His articulation of Reform Mormonism’s non-hierarchical approach deeply resonated with me. A few months later, I began identifying as a Reform Mormon. For the first time in years, I felt a sense of theological peace and freedom.
As a Reform Mormon, I feel free to receive truth wherever it appears, including across the Restoration landscape. I am not bound to a single denomination’s canon or authority, but instead engage Mormon theology as a living tradition. In the course of my studies, I encountered the Restoration Church of Jesus Christ, which was founded in the 1980s largely by Queer Mormons who likewise claimed theological freedom. They recorded their revelatory experiences in a book of scripture titled “Hidden Treasures and Promises”.
Because they were Queer Mormons navigating relationships and sexuality in a tradition shaped by monogamous heteronormative assumptions, they were forced to engage sexual ethics and theological understandings directly and honestly within the context of their sexual orientation and lived experiences. Their most significant theological reflections on this subject appear in Sections 9 and 10, which I find especially compelling.
In early September of 1985, John R. Crane sought guidance on how to live ethically in his own relationships and what to teach other Queer Mormons. Together with Antonio A. Feliz, he sought revelation. Each received portions independently yet simultaneously – an experience they later compared to Joseph Smith Jr. and Sidney Rigdon’s shared reception of “The Vision” (Doctrine and Covenants 76). The resulting revelation consisted of five parts: two received by Crane and three by Feliz.
The revelation begins by reaffirming the 2 Great Commandments:
- Love the Lord thy God with all thy might, mind, and strength
- Love thy neighbor as thyself
Everything else spoken or written by prophets, it teaches, exists only to help humanity understand and live out these Two Great Commandments. Within that framework, the “Law of Chastity” is described as a lower, preparatory law, and has a higher counterpart called “the Law of the Gospel,” “the Perfect Law,” or “the Law of Charity.”
Under this higher law, sex is understood as a symbol of a deeper spiritual unity that will exist in the afterlife. That unity is not achieved through rigid rule-keeping, but through charity. Charitable sexual relationships, whether hetero- or homo- sexual, are characterized by kindness, hospitality, compassion, love, and respect. Departing even further from mainstream Brighamites, verse 28 again opens the door for non-monogamous relationships within this higher ethical framework but this time it is non-compulsory. Additionally, the revelation cautions against sexual connections where the foundation isn’t kindness, hospitality, compassion, love, and respect but instead founded upon lust or exploitation, and strongly condemns attempts to disrupt existing relationships for sexual gain.
At the same time, the revelation affirms that individuals may continue to live by the Law of Chastity if they are not prepared to live by the Law of Charity, and it instructs believers not to police one another’s spiritual maturity. While the text clearly expresses a preference for the higher law, it insists that coercion and judgment have no place in this moral development.
This revelation proved so formative for the Restoration Church of Jesus Christ that, in their endowment ceremony, members covenanted not to obey the Law of Chastity, but to live the Law of Charity.
4. Conclusion
I find this theological approach to sexual morality far more compelling than what I was taught as a child and teenager, because it does not depend on shaming natural desire or invoking fear of eternal consequences. Instead, it asks deeper and more demanding questions: Are we acting with love? Are we protecting one another? Are we being honest, kind, and accountable? These are not easy questions. They require maturity, self-reflection, and empathy, which are virtues that rigid rule-keeping often circumvents rather than cultivates.
The Law of Charity reframes sexuality not as a dangerous human impulse that must be tightly restricted to marriage, but as a sacred capacity that reveals the quality of our relationships. Within this framework, harm is not defined by rule violation, but by the presence of coercion, deceit, exploitation, or disregard for another’s well-being. It is a moral system capable of grappling with the varied ways people form loving and responsible bonds, including queerness, non-monogamy.
As a Reform Mormon, I do not understand this shift as a rejection of the Restoration, but as a continuation of it. If the Restoration is fundamentally about ongoing revelation and the refinement of moral vision, then moving from “chastity” to “charity” feels less like rebellion and more like growth. In fact, we can already see this trajectory emerging across Restoration traditions. What the Restoration Church of Jesus Christ articulated decades ago now finds echoes within Community of Christ’s “Principles for Behavior and Relationships”, like two branches of the same tree growing in the same direction.
Looking back, I can see how the “Law of Chastity” I was raised with taught me to fear myself and others around me, to associate sexual desire with catastrophe, and to measure righteousness through compliance rather than care. By contrast, the “Law of Charity” encourages me to trust myself, to associate sexual desire with joy, and teaches me that sexual morality is based on how I positively affect myself and others.
For the first time in my life, my spirituality and my sexuality are no longer in conflict. They now belong to the same ethical and sacred whole.