The Scarlet Letter and A Tale of Two Lives

At 16, I found The Scarlet Letter tediously melodramatic; at 22, I found it caustically autobiographical; at 25, I won’t even open the book. The private agony of Arthur Dimmesdale bears an aching resemblance to the feverous tension I endured as both a devout Mormon and a closeted Homosexual. Like Dimmesdale, my clerical collar—the omnipresent white shirt and tie—was the excruciating disguise that hid the flagellant’s searing emblem of sin and self-mortification. But my Scarlet Letter was a G.

To my congregation, I bore a profession of faith that became piercing and profound even as my internal conversations grew desperate and hopeless. As I testified of Christ, I craved the nails of the cross in my own flesh. As I demonized the horrors of sin, I cast my own perversity into hell. As I railed against the enemies of the kingdom, I knew I was a traitor in Zion’s Camp. I gave no theological exposition that was not a personal accusation. I held myself before the judgment and pronounced an abomination.

The fervency with which I preached this gospel of suffering and expiation was proof to my congregation of my own humility and godliness. But they mistook humility for hatred and didn’t realize that my God didn’t love me. Mine was a devotion of fear, a righteousness of guilt, and a holiness of self-loathing. They didn’t understand. I couldn’t make them understand. I practically begged them to see through the hypocrisy and lies to the real person beneath, the vile creature that was really me. The temptation to tear off that while shirt and confess my own unworthiness was nearly insuperable. But the public manifestations of that private agony only made them love me more, and the more they loved me, the more I hated myself.

There was a certain frenetic zeal I gained the more desperate the struggle grew, and the closer I came to inward self-annihilation, the more powerfully eloquent were my words. And so, when the gossamer thread that connected my two identities finally snapped, my last gasp was both a poignant affirmation of my faith and a quiet declaration that I had been offered the bitter cup and shrunk. With Arthur Dimmesdale, I mounted a scaffold, tore open my shirt, and let the world see the truth, the shocking, bloody emblem emblazoned there upon my breast, in my soul. And there a devout, valiant, witnessing, suffering, powerful Mormon man died. Perhaps he was crucified with Christ; I only know that he is no more.

And I passed from the devotion of a godly man to the dissolution of a worldly. In my second life, I became Sydney Carton. A Tale of Two Cities is another book that tells my story, but it’s a different story. It’s a post-story. When I was Mormon, I attacked the Gay lifestyle as a life without morals, a life characterized by debauchery and waste, a life without purpose or happiness. And it became a self-fulfilling prophesy, for the only kind of homosexual I knew how to be, was the kind I had constructed. My exit from the Closet was abrupt and furious, and I reacted to the oppression of the “straight” Mormon ethic, by creating a post-Mormon ethic, an anti-ethic.

I wanted to drown myself in excess. I wanted to deliberately sin myself into hell, to run as fast and as far away from the Mormon ethic as I could. And in that first week I tried to do everything I had ever been told I couldn’t do. Alcohol to vomiting; drugs to delirium; sex as often as I could get it. And tea. I drank tea as the pinnacle of my rebellion. I drank tea and cried. I cried because there was no victory. I cried because I was no happier outside the Closet than I had been inside it. I cried because no matter how fast, how far I ran, I could not escape that Mormon ethic. For I had saturated myself in it. And it continued to define my cosmology, to declare that if I could not find happiness within the kingdom, I would surely never find it beyond the royal gates. And though I still wore the shackles and fetters of that ethic, I was now also robbed of its salvific teleology. It was a damnation I had written with my own hand.

And so I say I became Sydney Carton, a man whose life might have amounted to something; a man with talent but without aspiration; a man with the power to succeed but not the will; a man whose love had been buried by cynicism and apathy. A dissolute man, who drowned himself in alcohol, not because he liked it, but because it was something to do. An indifferent man, who practiced law but cared nothing for justice. A man without a teleology. An unhappy man. A waste. And yet…

The revocation of my personal teleology was a profound act of goodness. For the first time in my life, I am living now, not in that future day when that teleology reaches its fruition. And I am loving now. I know nothing of, I care nothing for my own salvation, and so I give it to others. I live now, I love now, and I care not about the future. The moment has become my world, and my fellow man has become my purpose and my salvation. I have no soul to save, so I try to save the souls of others. I have no life to live, no self to love, so I give it selflessly to others. Only now that I have renounced that Christ do I become Him.

Sydney Carton was redeemed. Like Arthur Dimmesdale he died upon the scaffold, but he died, not to expiate his own sins, but to save another. And his last words were not a confession of sin, but the words of a savior: “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” And there, on that scaffold, I may hope, a devout, valiant, witnessing, suffering, powerful Gay man shall die. Perhaps he will be crucified with Christ; I only know that he will be evermore.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.