Why Do Mormon Men Come Across as Gay?

THE SMITH INHERITANCE

When my fun, romantic, guitar-playing brother, who begged for my dating advice, returned from his Mormon mission, I almost didn’t recognize him. His longish, blonde curls had been replaced by the identical shorn head of all Mormon missionaries, but more upsetting was discovering that his mischievous sparkling eyes, giant smile, and spontaneous laugh were also gone. He was rigid in my engulfing ‘welcome home’ hug; he didn’t hug me back but responded with a careful pat on my back.

Where had my brother gone? I still miss him. My brother was not an exception. He was the product.

The Substack writer Celeste Davis recently asked why everyone thinks Mormon men are gay. Her piece in Matriarchal Blessings argues that Mormon men appear feminized because patriarchal dominion over women removes the pressure to perform conventional masculine traits. Perhaps. But the story I am telling goes deeper.

I believe Mormon men aren’t perceived as gay because they’re feminine. They’re perceived as gay because the traits we culturally associate with masculinity — sexual confidence, emotional directness, autonomous judgment, the capacity for controlled aggression — have been systematically removed. What remains reads as absence. And absence, in a man, gets misread as femininity.

The Mormon Church will tell you it produces strong men. Men who lead their families, hold the priesthood, preside over congregations, and exercise the authority of God on earth.

What the Church actually produces is something more complicated, more contradictory, and more quietly devastating: men who hold the architecture of authority while being systematically stripped of the interior life that makes authority real. Men who have power over women and no power over themselves.

This is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of three institutional forces operating simultaneously on every Mormon male from the time he is ordained a deacon at twelve years old. Sexual shame. Performed niceness. Obedience without autonomy. Together, they do not make a patriarch. They make a man-shaped cavity where a self was supposed to be.

THE BODY AS THE ENEMY

The Mormon Church’s relationship with male sexuality begins with a premise so foundational it is rarely examined: the natural man is an enemy to God.

That phrase comes from the Book of Mormon — Mosiah 3:19 — and it functions in Mormon culture as a theological justification for one of the most comprehensive programs of sexual repression in American religious life. The natural man, the man who feels desire, who has urges, who experiences his body as alive and wanting — that man is spiritually dangerous. He must be overcome. Subdued. Replaced with something holier.

For Mormon boys, this theology arrives early and lands hard. Masturbation is not merely discouraged; it is treated as a serious sin requiring confession to a bishop, a middle-aged man in a private office, potentially resulting in loss of temple recommend, inability to serve a mission, or formal church discipline. The For the Strength of Youth pamphlet, distributed to every Mormon teenager, instructs: “Do not arouse those emotions in your own body.”

Do not arouse those emotions in your own body. The Church is not merely telling young men not to act on desire. It is telling them not to feel it.

The emotion itself is the sin.

What happens to a man who spends his formative years learning that his body’s most basic drives are spiritually dangerous? He does not simply suppress them. He learns to be afraid of them. He learns to distrust his own interior experience. He develops what psychologists call sexual shame — not guilt, which is about behavior, but shame, which is about identity. Guilt says I did something wrong. Shame says I am something wrong.

The research on sexual shame is unambiguous: men who carry deep sexual shame show higher rates of sexual dysfunction, intimacy avoidance, and what therapists call “erotic rigidity” — the inability to be spontaneous, playful, or present in sexual experience. They also show something more diffuse and harder to name: a quality of self-absence. A man who has learned to distrust his own desire has learned to distrust himself. That distrust does not stay in the bedroom. It follows him into every room.

A man who is afraid of his own desire is a man who has lost access to his own power. Sexual shame does not exist in isolation. It requires a culture of performed wellness to keep it hidden. In Mormonism, that culture has a name.

THE SMILE THAT ISN’T

Ask anyone who has spent time around Mormons, and they will tell you the same thing: ‘Mormons are so nice.’ Genuinely, persistently, sometimes disconcertingly nice. Friendly at the door. Helpful with the move. Casseroles after the surgery.

The niceness is real. It is also a mask. And for Mormon men specifically, it is a mask over a face that was never fully allowed to form.

The Church does not merely encourage pleasantness. It enforces emotional performance as a condition of spiritual standing. To be angry is to lack the Spirit. To be uncertain is to lack faith. To be sad — genuinely sad, not the kind of sad that resolves into a testimony — is to be spiritually deficient. A faithful Mormon man is expected to project a particular emotional register: warm, calm, positive, encouraging, untroubled.

Mormon men are expected to be providers of emotional support, not recipients of it. They are not asked how their marriages are doing. They are not asked about their personal happiness. They are asked about their qualifications for their Temple Recommend, their job, their ability to provide and pay tithing.

The result is a specific kind of loneliness that Mormon men rarely have language for, because the language of loneliness requires acknowledging an interior life, and the interior life has been so thoroughly managed and monitored that many Mormon men genuinely do not know what they feel. They know what they are supposed to feel. They perform it reliably. But the man behind the performance — the man who might be furious, terrified, sexually frustrated, or simply exhausted by his own mandatory optimism — that man has nowhere to go.

Nice is not a personality.

Nice is what happens when a personality has been told it is too dangerous to come out. But the deepest damage is not visible at all.

THE AUTHORITY THAT ISN’T HIS

Of the three forces operating on Mormon men, this one is the most hidden and the most corrosive: the systematic destruction of personal autonomy in the name of priesthood authority.

The Mormon Church is organized as a rigid hierarchical structure. The prophet at the top receives revelation from God. The chain descends — apostles, stake presidents, bishops, elders — each man receiving from above, each man obligated to pass it down unchanged. At every level, the man below is expected to follow the man above, not out of admiration or persuasion or reasoned agreement, but out of obedience. The Oath and Covenant of the Priesthood, delivered in the temple, demands strict obedience to all duties at every level of the organization. Deviation is not spiritual independence. It is faithlessness.

What this produces, over decades of formation, is a man who has never developed the musculature of personal judgment. He has not had to evaluate a situation and decide what he thinks. He has been told what to think by the man above him, who was told by the man above him, who was told by the prophet, who was told by God. The chain of authority is total. The individual conscience is, at best, a mechanism for confirming what has already been decided above.

An Exponent II piece on Toxic Mormon Masculinity named this precisely: “Instead of embracing a full spectrum of positive human traits, Mormon men are instructed to perform their masculinity in particular ways, especially in regard to presiding, leadership and decision-making.” But the presiding is scripted. The leadership is prescribed. The decision-making is bounded by what the handbook permits. A man can preside over a meeting whose agenda he did not set, in a role he did not choose, according to rules he did not make, reporting to a leader whose authority he cannot question. He has the title of patriarch without ever having made a genuinely patriarchal decision in his life.

This is the deepest wound, and the one most invisible from outside. The Mormon man appears to hold power. He does hold power — over his wife, over his children, over the women in his ward who cannot hold the priesthood he was handed at twelve. But the power flows through him from above. It is not his.

He is a conduit, not a source.

Personal power — the real kind, the kind that comes from knowing your own mind and acting on it — requires exactly what the Mormon Church forbids. It requires tolerating doubt without resolving it through obedience. It requires sitting with anger long enough to understand what it is telling you. It requires the capacity to look at what you have been taught and ask whether it is true. Every one of those capacities is systematically suppressed in Mormon male formation.

THE PARADOX OF THE PATRIARCH

The Mormon Church does not merely substitute patriarchal authority for embodied masculinity. It destroys embodied masculinity from the inside and then hands the hollowed-out man the title of patriarch.

The man who has been shamed out of his sexuality, trained to perform emotions he does not feel, and conditioned to outsource his judgment to the man above him is not a man who has been relieved of the burden of proving himself. He is a man who has been denied the experiences through which a self is formed. The sexuality he was never allowed to own. The anger he was never allowed to feel. The decisions he was never allowed to make. The doubt he was never allowed to hold.

What remains when you remove all of that is not a patriarch. It is a performance of a patriarch, running on institutional authority rather than personal power, maintained by compliance rather than conviction. It looks like leadership from the outside. From the inside, many of these men have described it as a kind of numbness — going through the motions of a life that was constructed for them before they were old enough to choose it.

A man cannot be a man from a self he was never allowed to develop.

I resented my brother’s transformation. I felt I had lost a sibling. I was angry at him for years. Now I understand what was taken from him before I ever had the chance to be angry about it.

The toll the Mormon Church extracts from Mormon women is well-known and documented. But the men are also harmed, and their trauma isn’t well understood or discussed. They lack the inclination to seek support, the resources to find it, and the language to name what the indoctrination cost them, to grieve the sexuality that was shamed out of them.

I think about what it would have cost my brother to doubt. To be honest. Just honest with himself about what he wanted, what he doubted, what he felt in the moments the Church had already answered for him.

He has learned to use those answers instead of himself.

That is the inheritance I am describing. Not the patriarchy men were promised. The vacancy it left behind. The hollow Mormon man.

Further Reading: Matriarchal Blessings, Celeste Davis: https://substack.com/home/post/p-205137194