Abstinence vs. celibacy — and other highlights from Nathan Kitchen’s “Boughs of Love”
The subtitle hints at the juicy contents: The Boughs of Love: Navigating the Queer Latter-day Saint Experience During an Ongoing Restoration. How can one remain authentic and healthy while truth is being restored and policies are changing? Institutional change happens at a glacial pace, but each of us only gets one lifetime. Major decisions are made in the span of moments or years, not decades. Sometimes one simply can’t wait for church-wide revelation to catch up to personal revelation.
Enter Nathan Kitchen, former president of Affirmation (2019-2022), returned missionary from Alabama, BYU grad, father of five, now living in AZ with his husband, Matthew. In other words, Nathan is positioned squarely in the LDS/LGBTQ intersection.
Wish you had time to read Nathan’s whole memoir? Already read it and want to compare notes? Here is one of Nathan’s memorable insights that I take with me, among many. This is particularly useful to me when folks say, “It’s one standard — chastity for straight people and queer people. Same/same.” Nathan explained:
Abstinence is waiting to have sexual relations until marriage. Celibacy is the discipline of waiting forever because marriage is not approved for them on Earth or in heaven.
Strictly speaking, this is not a forced celibacy, but for orthodox, believing gay and lesbian Latter-day Saints who desperately want to belong, live with God again, and be with their families for eternity, it is as close to “forced” as possible.
This is not a group of religious elites as in Catholicism, where the celibate order holds power and runs the Church. This is a second-class subgroup under the suspicious gaze and supervision of the straight majority.
Of course, gay Latter-day Saints can live a fulfilling life even in celibacy. I know some who do. I also know straight Latter-day Saints who live incredibly fulfilling chaste lives as single people. This is not the issue. The issue is the inequality of treatment between a gay or lesbian Latter-day Saint and a straight Latter-day Saint when they choose to marry according to their orientation.
Every hour, an LGBTQ child is born into a Latter-day Saint home. When the modern church continues to offer Latter-day Saint families with queer children less protection and equality in their spiritual home than what is granted them under the law, it doesn’t matter how politely and eloquently the modern church paints the terms of belonging under the rainbow stained-glass ceiling. [Elsewhere Nathan calls it “theological checkmate.”]
Today’s parents want their queer children to have the same opportunities and happiness that they have experienced in life and are promised in the heavens. The seventy-year history of the modern church with its LGBTQ population. . . was an awfully generous amount of time to quietly extend grace to a church struggling to be helpful as it continued to exclude us from eternal life, our heavenly parents, eternal marriage, and our families.
In case Nathan’s incisive analysis didn’t convince you to put the book in your shopping cart yet, here is a sample of his evocative writing as he describes his coming out process:
I didn’t navigate my coming out with poise and composure. Instead, I came falling out of the closet, dripping in fear and shame, awkwardly tripping over the threshold, experiencing that unsettling step into nothingness like when you think you’ve reached the bottom of the stairs but haven’t—there’s one more left. I didn’t just miss a stair; the entire landing was gone. My closet door was on the edge of Mount Everest, and I was in free fall, flames on fire, wildly spinning movie stunt-double style in a process that was lasting much longer than I thought it should.
That style of vivid writing permeates the book. Finally, Nathan quoted Jesus and the Buddha. We’ll give them the last word:
Christ will always say, “Let the queer children come unto me; forbid them not."
“In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.” Gautama Buddha
Thank you, Nathan, for bravely living a memorable life—and for capturing it in a memoir I won’t forget.
-Marci
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NB - These quotes all come from Nathan’s book, cobbled together here.