Answer

Can I Experience Same-Sex Attraction Without Making It My Identity?

You may be attracted to people of your own sex and be trying to work out how much of you that is supposed to explain. Whether you should call yourself gay. Whether it makes you different at church. Whether something is wrong with you. That is a heavy thing to carry, and heavier still if you are carrying it quietly.

Yes, you can experience same-sex attraction without letting it define you. The attraction itself is not a sin, and the Church has said so plainly. What you are accountable for is what you choose to do, the same as every other disciple of Jesus Christ. The feeling is one true thing about your mortal experience. It is not the truest thing about you.

Eternal Truths

Feeling this is not a sin. The Church’s teaching on same-sex attraction draws a clear line between attraction and behaviour: experiencing the attraction is not a transgression, and what the Lord asks is that you live the law of chastity. President Dallin H. Oaks made the same distinction in “Same-Gender Attraction”, and taught that help comes through prayer, gospel truth, service, inspired leaders and, where needed, professional care.

Your identity started long before the attraction did. The Family: A Proclamation to the World teaches that you are a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents with a divine nature and destiny. President Russell M. Nelson taught young adults in “Choices for Eternity” that being a child of God, a child of the covenant and a disciple of Jesus Christ come first, and that every other label sits underneath those three.

You were never meant to carry this alone. At baptism you and everyone in your ward covenanted to bear one another’s burdens (Mosiah 18:8-10). That covenant is not a courtesy. It is the reason telling one trusted person is usually the step that changes the most.

What Can Make This Confusing?

Labels do more work than we notice, because what you repeatedly tell yourself shapes what you expect of yourself. A word does not create an attraction, and dropping a word does not remove one. But there is a real difference between thinking this tells me who I fundamentally am and thinking this is part of my mortal experience. The culture around you will press hard for the first, and it will feel like honesty rather than pressure.

Questions to Think About

• What do I actually mean when I use a label about myself?
• Who is one person I could tell, and what has stopped me so far?
• Which parts of my life make keeping covenants easier, and which make it harder?

What You Can Do

Pick one person this week and say the true thing out loud. A bishop, a parent, a friend who will not flinch. Then look at the media and online spaces that make this loudest and change one of them. The essay behind this Answer covers the ground at length. So does one Latter-day Saint woman’s account: she spent years away, and what turned it was deciding she wanted the Lord more, helped by a bishop who told her first that Heavenly Father loved her. Read her account.

Jesus Christ knows the feelings you did not choose and the choices you did, and He can make you more than you are now without asking you to pretend.