It gets a little better

On April 7, a group of LGBT youth at Brigham Young University released its own “It Gets Better” video, a project started by columnist Dan Savage, targeted toward lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth and triggered by a recent bout of teen suicides and incidences of violence toward LGBT youth.

The video is a series of interviews with university students who identify as both LGBT and Mormon, a group that, until very recently, did not have much of a voice. This video is, in many ways, their “coming out.”

While they never had much of a voice, the issue certainly drew interest from their peers.

On Tuesday, April 3, the BYU Department of Sociology coordinated a panel of four gay students to discuss how they reconciled their LGBT identification with their Mormon faith. Nearly 600 students stood together in a 260 capacity room to listen to the speakers.

Understanding Same Gender Attraction is the unofficial campus group of LGBT BYU students and their straight allies that produced the video, and some of the members participated in the panel.

Their goal is to spread awareness of LGBT issues throughout campus and the greater Mormon community, something that LGBT Mormons desperately need.

According to the video, statistics for LGBT students at BYU are pretty grim. The Princeton Review has ranked the university as one of the most consistently unfriendly campuses for LGBT.

With an estimated 1,800 gay students at BYU, they make up about 5 percent of the student body population, which is proportionally comparable to IU in size.

Before 2007, students were not allowed to be openly gay, and up until 2010, gay advocacy was not allowed on campus. Gay advocacy was grounds for expulsion and in violation of the student honor code — a code that previously came to attention for banning skinny jeans. 

In 2011, Brandon Davies, the college’s star basketball player, was suspended from the team for having consensual, pre-marital sex with his girlfriend.

More specifically, the honor code still prohibits students who identify as LGBT from being physically intimate with a member of the same sex.

The document reads, “Homosexual behavior is inappropriate and violates the honor code. Homosexual behavior includes not only sexual relations between members of the same sex, but all forms of physical intimacy that give expression to homosexual feelings.”

Abstaining before marriage, however, is expected of all students.

So while same-sex feelings are now tolerated, acting on them is not, and given the church’s sometimes unclear but definitively disapproving stance on gay marriage, these young people are essentially committing themselves to lifelong celibacy.

Steps such as this panel and video are progress, certainly, but I’m concerned that not every young Mormon who is struggling with his or her sexuality will be able to reconcile with his or her faith so peacefully. Despite the video’s reigning message of hope, it is also distinctly somber.

As one student said, “I don’t know for sure it’ll get better, but people that I know that love me have told me that, and I’m trying to believe them.”

­— alliston@indiana.edu