When Dr. Lisa Diamond first moved to Utah 25 years ago, she had never heard the term “LDS.” Likewise new to Utah, her wife, Judi Hilman, bought a Book of Mormon to try to understand the culture better, but may have only made it through a few pages. The two recently celebrated their 30th anniversary, and marvel how 25 of those 30 years have been spent living in the same house in Salt Lake City. As outsiders to the state’s predominant faith, Lisa finds it amazing that “Our whole marriage is planted in the soil of Utah. I never would have predicted we’d find such a sense of meaning and purpose and community here.”
Lisa and Judi each grew up in California, and met in Ithaca, NY while graduate students at Cornell, at the very beginning of both of their careers. Now, Lisa is a world-renowned researcher and author in the psychology of gender and sexuality, who once appeared as a guest on Oprah--which she described as a positive experience, despite the hair and make-up team tamping down her trademark spunky hair into a mainstream “female politician” look. An expert in health policy reform, Judi is currently a professor of Community Health and Leadership at Salt Lake Community college, and was the founder and executive director of the Utah health policy project--a think and do tank for health policy in Utah. The two initially chose Salt Lake City because the job Lisa was offered at the University of Utah was the only offer she received! Her work was unconventional, integrating psychology with gender studies, and that was precisely the job opening available at the University. Now a Distinguished Professor at the U and past President of the International Academy for Sex Research, Lisa could not have known, when she arrived in Utah in 1999, how it would change her and her research.
Lisa’s interest in studying queer development started after her own coming out in the 90s, a time when it was hard to find representations of queer women in the media, and hard to find places to meet other queer people, especially if you were too young to go to bars. “If you were young and queer, you were stuck; you pretty much waited for the Pride parade to roll through town. There was no internet.” Although she came out in Chicago, during her college years, she had grown up in Los Angeles, where her exposure to spirituality was decidedly eclectic: Her father was an atheist (after having set aside his Greek Orthodox upbringing) and her mother was a Southern Baptist, but they sent Lisa and her sister to an Episcopalian elementary school, and all of the family’s best friends’ were Jewish. So Lisa never experienced religion as a monolith. Rather, moving through multiple faith communities became an everyday experience (as was religious conflict – when Lisa’s mom decided to have her baptized in the local Episcopal church, her atheist father originally refused to attend, and had to be talked into going). But the faith tradition to which Lisa felt closest was Judaism, due to those years and years of gathering with her parents’ friends for Passover and Hanukah, singing Jewish songs and making latkes and attending bar and bat mitzvahs. So perhaps it was fate that the woman she eventually married was Jewish, and that they celebrate the sabbath every Friday (with Lisa’s homemade challah), and had a Jewish wedding. For Lisa, religion was always about the people around you, not the doctrine.
Like many young people, Lisa was afraid to tell her parents she was gay, but “didn’t feel the threat that an entire community that might turn away from me,” a phenomenon of fear she has since often witnessed and studied in Utah. She came out while earning her bachelor’s degree in psychology at the University of Chicago, and remembers hanging out in the gay and lesbian section of bookstores and reading classifieds in the newspaper to find gay social gatherings, for which she usually had to take three forms of transportation to attend. But she didn’t mind; as she now says, “It was worth it for the connections.” There wasn’t much awareness or discussion of queer youth at that time – most research on sexual identity focused on adults. But while she was at the University of Chicago, one of her professors published a groundbreaking book on queer teenagers in Chicago, called Children of Horizons. She read the whole book while standing up in the aisles of the 57th street bookstore in Hyde Park, and found it perplexing that everything written about queer youth seemed to be about boys. Where were the women like her? She had been trying to decide whether to go to graduate school or to become an activist, and it now struck her that bringing women’s experiences into the study of sexual identity development was both a scientific and a political act. “As a feminist, it seemed like a rather low hanging fruit, to just put women in the studies.” The reason women were underrepresented was that they didn’t socialize in gay bars and community centers as frequently as men, and tended to be less open. Lisa finds this mind-boggling now, given that there are now many more queer women than men among Gen Z, along with greater acceptance of bisexual and plural identities. As she observes, “Now, far more women identify as bi or pan than exclusively lesbian, but bisexuality was not a fully validated identity in the past – bi and pan individuals had less community; it was often underground.”
When it came time to pursue her doctorate, Lisa sought out a program and mentor who could train her to study queer youths’ development, but there were only two academic psychologists doing so: Gilbert Herdt at the University of Chicago and Ritch Savin-Williams at Cornell, and she decided to go to Cornell. Her timing was spot on– Savin-Williams was on the verge of leaving the university because graduate students had stopped applying to work with him once he started studying queer youth. It was demoralizing, and he was ready to transition to clinical practice when Lisa’s application came through the door. He figured he’d give it one last try, and ended up staying at Cornell and mentoring scores of other queer researchers before retiring a few years ago. Lisa says, “I often joke with him that I extended his career 20 years!” During her tutelage, Lisa says she felt isolated from all the other grad students, who were studying conventional topics like cognitive development, or doing research in large teams. Ritch and Lisa were a tiny team unto themselves: As Lisa remembers, “It felt like him and me against the world.” Ritch didn’t have any research funds, but Lisa needed a Master’s project, so she bought a 1989 used Toyota Corolla for $4,900, and set off each weekend to collect data, driving around New York state to interview as many young queer women as she could about their own identity development. Some of her participants were lesbian, some bisexual, some not quite sure—and Lisa found these stories the most fascinating.
She continued to follow her 100 interview subjects over the phone, every 2-3 years, and ended up publishing the first 10 years of findings in her book, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire (Harvard University Press, 2008) which was awarded the Distinguished Book Award from the American Psychological Association. The book argues that while sexual orientation is not chosen, some women show unexpected and unbidden shifts in their sexual orientation identity over time. Lisa points out that in her research, younger women are usually a bit more focused on their identity labels than older women. As one of her participants stated, “These days, I care more about my 401k than my orientation.” Lisa’s work showed that change over time is a widespread phenomenon in women’s sexual patterns, but carefully pointed out that these changes are not under women’s control. But, she says, changes that individuals force on themselves, like conversion therapy, are totally different – they are unhealthy and ineffective.
When Lisa first started to get to know queer students with a background in the LDS church, she started to observe that the struggles they faced seemed different from the struggles she was used to seeing in young queer people –there was more of a sense of utter despair and loss. The contradiction between their sexuality and their faith seemed to go beyond just doctrine, it involved their entire sense of self and community and kinship. For LDS individuals raised in Utah, she came to appreciate that church membership was more than simply a matter of belief, it involved one’s entire sense of social selfhood. To leave the church meant being cut off from one’s entire community. Lisa had never lived in a religious community like Utah, in which one’s entire social environment was interbraided with the church, and she remembers her amazement when paging through the Salt Lake City White Pages in the early 2000s, seeing pages and pages and pages of entries for different wards, and realizing the degree to which church membership was literally embedded into each member’s physical environments as well as their psychological world. There was no way for queer young people to escape the eyes of their neighbors and ward members, the immersion was total – which meant that rejection was a more all-encompassing and devastating prospect than for other faith traditions. Being queer “could cut you off from not only your religious community but also from your neighborhood and potentially your family; that can result in a fundamental existential loss.” Lisa continues, “It shows that with as much progress as we’ve made, there are a lot of people who’d rather kill a part of them off to stay in the group. It shows how deeply social humans are… We live and die by social connections to people. When they cut us off for something we have no control over – that’s terror.” Over the years, she became increasingly fascinated with the unique experiences of queer Mormons, listening to their autobiographies on “Mormon Stories” and following “the devastating excommunications of figures like Kate Kelley, John Dehlin, Natasha Helfer, and Sam Young, simply for speaking out against the church’s views of sexuality.”
But it wasn’t until the pandemic that her observations about queer Mormons started to intersect with other aspects of her academic work. She had been doing a deep dive on the neurobiology of rejection and abandonment, and started to realize that the conventional view of anti-queer stigma as a form of “stress” was incomplete. Those models presumed that the mental health challenges of being queer stemmed from the stress of discrimination and victimization. Yet the newer neurobiological work suggested that a far more important threat to stigmatized people is the loss of social safety – the sense of unconditional connection, protection, and belonging that all humans rely on. As a social species, humans cannot survive alone, and our brains evolved to prioritize staying in the group above almost all else. Lisa was accustomed to hearing people describe queer people as “oversensitive to rejection,” but the newer neurobiological work suggested that there was no such thing, since the human social brain is literally a “rejection-detecting machine.” For a social species, social shame and rejection feels like a mortal threat, because isolation and abandonment was a mortal threat in our ancestral environment. She learned that our entire immune system has evolved to “turn on” under conditions of social threat, preparing the body for wounding and damage. “When humans are rejected, and their social safety is withdrawn, the brain and immune systems start amping up, fear coursing to the same place. That’s the type of loss my queer Mormon students were experiencing. They weren’t exaggerating. They were on fire with abandonment and a sense of real threat.” She saw this especially in the context of “ecclesiastical roulette,” in which youth never know for sure whether their Bishop will strictly enforce church doctrine on sexuality, or will allow queer youth to stay in the fold. On top of that uncertainty and doubt was the ever present possibility of new changes in church policy, such as the devastating “November policy” about the children of same-sex couples, and the more recent “trans ‘clarification’ that has solidified the church’s exclusion of trans individuals.”
Lisa realized that the toll of this uncertainty was just as significant as the toll of explicit discrimination, but had never been fully appreciated by previous research on queer mental health. As she says, “Nothing is more stressful for the human brain than unpredictable stress. Studies show that when mice can predict shock, they can handle it better. If they can’t predict it, they develop a state of learned helplessness. If you can’t predict where danger is, you’re in a protective stance at all times. The world becomes threatening, even terrifying.” Looking at the current mental health crisis, Lisa says it’s not daily threats, but sporadic ones that are the most harmful. “You’ll have six months of feeling good, then something terrible happens at church. And so then, you don’t know that the ground beneath you is stable. Unpredictable danger leaves everyone hypervigilant.” Lisa explains that this cycle of constant, chronic watchfulness and the stress preparation of looking around the corner, unsure of what’s to come, produces damaging long-term effects, especially on the immune system.
The solution? Lisa proposes young people without supportive home environments find at least one safe social setting where they can regularly connect with friends or people who they can trust will “come running if they fall.” While online networks can suffice, Lisa recommends in-person connection as the ideal, and shares that her work shows that close friends are often the most important source of social safety and inclusion for both youth and adults. In Utah, Lisa often refers young people to Encircle and SLC’s Sky Hop, which provides free media arts courses, to find joy and connection and community. Although it’s important to offer emotional support to LGBTQ+ youth, Lisa emphasizes that they also need fun, joy, laughter, and play, experienced in a safe setting with people they authentically enjoy.
In her conversations with LGBTQ+ youth who are struggling with non-accepting parents, Lisa encourages mutual empathy and patience. “I’ve seen some remarkable growth journeys. I tell young people, ‘Your parent may have it the capacity to become a huge ally, but it’s usually not overnight’.” Lisa explains that because the time course of parents’ and kids’ journey are often not in sync, it can create a lot of pain and disharmony. She explains, “Some kids initially lose the warm embrace of their protector, which can be terrifying to any person. But I say, ‘Don’t write them off just yet. And in the meantime, surround yourself with other people who do care, protect, and affirm.”
Speaking at the recent Gather conference, Lisa compared social networks to a dew-covered spiderweb, with life-giving drops of water clinging to the spots where the silken threads connect. “Some of have dense webs with a lot of threads and people. For others, there aren’t that many. But even on a sparse web, we find those drops of water, in human connection. That’s essentially what people are to one another– every relationship is a potential drop of water that offers a bit of connection and safety and support.” She expounds that often, we only focus on the drops closest to us (family, closest friends), but in our broader webs, there are so many more, and they are all important: “the people we regularly see at our book club, at the gym, at work, at our kids’ basketball games. All of these individuals are part of our social fabric, as well, and we can make active choices to strengthen those ties – each of us has the potential to be a life-giving drop of water for someone we know.”
Lisa advises parents to tap into the “wonderful sense of community the LDS faith provides” and find their own support network when their kids come out. “Meeting another parent whose kid has come out will do more than any website or pamphlet.” She also encourages parents to find their own way to show their allyship. “Some parents may not want to go to a protest, and that’s perfectly understandable. But they can choose other ways to show their love, for example having their kids’ friends over for pizza, and giving them the safety and space to nourish their own webs of connection. Make every step a step forward. For one parent, it can be going to a protest; for another, it can be a quiet conversation with bishop. There are a million ways to show up for one’s kid. And it might even be different between mom and dad – there’s no single way, and it’s important for us not to judge one another, but to keep moving forward together, step by step.” Lisa says that missteps and hurt feelings and poorly chosen words are inevitable, and that we should actually look forward to these moments because they are opportunities for real growth. “Those moments of rupture are the perfect opportunity to come together and ask for a redo and repair. Those are the opportunities where we can model what apology and forgiveness look like.” Lisa says parents need not relinquish their responsibilities as parents to support LGBTQ+ young people – and they need not even agree with or understand their child’s views. “But their first job, as parents, is to create a safe, protected environment in the home where kids know they are always welcome, and where they can let down their guard. They can do that just by showing their affection – it need not be a big emotional display, it’s a simple as spending time together doing the things you both enjoy, like watching movies together, feet intertwined, feeling that calm connection.” Those moments remind both parents and children that their essential bond will never change, and that they don’t have to agree with one another to fiercely love one another, she explains. “Loving in spite of disagreement is, in some ways, the most challenging but important form of love in a family.”
As the tension of election season escalates, especially in a sector in which so many rights are on the line, Lisa advises us to focus our attention on our social ties, instead of distant political debates. She says that if you really want to make a difference, then “pick one connection in your life, one person who you think could really use some more security in their life. Invest a little more. Go for a walk. Text them more often. Make sure they know that they can call you, anytime. It’s the fastest way to make a transformative effect on this world. How often do we hear stories that culminate with ‘and then I met this one coach’?” Lisa has seen this operate in her own family. Her mom grew up in Lakeland, FL, and dreamed of going to college, but there was no money. Her piano teacher was determined to help her find a music scholarship, and even helped her created an audition tape (in 1960, this required getting hold of reel-to-reel recording equipment). It worked – she went to college, and it changed the whole direction of her life. She met Lisa’s dad, they moved to Los Angeles, and eventually she became a piano teacher, too. And now both Lisa and her sister Nicole are teachers (Nicole teaches second grade in Burbank, California). They all link it back to Mrs. Raymond C. Smith, their mother’s dogged protector. She was that drop of water. Lisa thinks that all of us have the capacity to do that for those around us; to reknit our social fabric one relationship at a time. And that’s the change she’s now trying to foster in her adopted and beloved home of Utah.
