At age 18, Johanne Perry showed up to Provo as a brand-new convert to the LDS faith, convinced she’d never marry a Utah boy. Born in Montreal, Canada and raised in Monrovia, California, the BYU dating scene was new to Johanne. She remembers looking across the sea of shiny-faced students in her Young Ambassadors performance class as Steve Perry, fresh off his mission, caught her eye when he was the one asked to give the closing prayer. She wondered, “What if I married him?” Seven years later, that’s what happened; and the couple (who has resided in Utah ever since) will celebrate their 36th wedding anniversary this May.
Growing up in the 70’s, Johanne says, “I never knew ‘homosexual’ was a thing… the same way I didn’t know what bulimia and anorexia were. People just didn’t talk about it.” Looking back, Johanne says that as a musical theater major, several of her best friends and the young men she had crushes on later came out as gay—including her own husband. “I couldn’t have cared less about sports and big muscles—all I wanted was someone with a good sense of humor who could sing.” That defined Steve.
As they toured together with the Young Ambassadors and other musical performance groups, their friendship grew. After two and a half years, Johanne invited Steve over for dinner and proclaimed her love for him. He said, “Uhhh, we’re just friends.” Johanne resigned herself to the friend zone, but several months later, they tried dating. When they first kissed, she remembers Steve saying, “It’s like kissing my sister.” Johanne says, “Of course I was devastated, but we remained friends.” Johanne moved on to dating someone else, but after a few more months, Steve called to tell her he’d been up all night thinking and he knew he was in love with her. When she told him about her current boyfriend, Steve promised Johanne they didn’t even need to date, they could just get married. After all, they’d spent all those years traveling together, laughing, performing, and Johanne laughs that Steve already knew what she looked like backstage, “in curlers, sweating like a pig.” A week later, Johanne was engaged to the man who has proven the love of her life.
“Everything about Steve attracted me, but the first thing was his sense of humor. He just exudes goodness. You know he’s a good, kind person all the way to the core. And he’s intelligent – my mom always said the person you marry has to be able to talk about anything, and that’s Steve.” Johanne and Steve have raised four kids together and enjoyed decades sharing their love for music in various formats and professions. In their spare time, they love cuddling on the couch while watching YouTube episodes of the UK show, “Escape to the Country,” and dreaming about places they’d love to travel. They recognize their love story is unique.
“I found out about Steve being attracted to men during our first year of marriage,” says Johanne. “Back then, we didn’t know anything about orientation at all. We–like everyone– thought you could pray away the gay as long as you were righteous enough. I knew he loved me enough. And after years and years, it never did go away. But we never really talked about it.” Busy with their kids and careers, Johanne said it likely never really came up, because he gave no indication he was gay. “He was still attracted to me, we had a great life, great friends; I was totally head over heels in love.”
It terrified Johanne when Steve later shared that he wanted to come out publicly. With his public profile and their professions, she wondered if their whole lives would be destroyed. She also worried about personal safety. While Johanne recognized it was essential for his mental health to do so, each time Steve told her he’d opened up to a new friend or loved one, she’d spend the following two days feeling dizzy and trying to breathe. “Looking back, I don’t know what it was that I was afraid of—them judging me or judging him. Maybe I thought people thought we’d been lying to them, but that wasn’t the case.” As a longtime theater teacher at a conservative school, Johanne also feared what her colleagues might think. She was relieved to sense her boss’ and fellow teachers’ support, and actually discovered many teachers and students identified on the LGBTQ+ spectrum and had already been meeting in their own quiet support groups. The school now has assemblies promoting inclusion of various marginalized populations, and Johanne says several students have commented how much they like the rainbow heart pin she wears to class.
At home, Johanne was impressed by her own kids’ reactions to Steve’s orientation when she found out he had taken the liberty to share with each of them at a time when each of them had opened up to him about feeling confused or judgmental about themselves. “It was good for their relationship to know that about him—that he was a good, honorable man who had this thing in his life that wasn’t accepted.” The best thing for Johanne about Steve being more vocal is that now they can have open conversations in which he can reassure her about his love for her and their relationship. “Steve has been very humble about the whole orientation thing which has allowed us to keep a good relationship without either of us feeling defensive. He’s always worried about my needs and wants.”
There are times when Johanne has worried Steve may decide to pursue a relationship with a man, and she admits to feeling terrified every time he wants to go to an event where there will be a lot of gay men, as he is “so likeable. But then I wonder, how is that different from a straight man going to work with a bunch of cute female co-workers?” If given the chance to go back, Johanne says she would do it all over again and marry Steve, “Because it’s Steve. I don’t think ‘I’m married to a gay man.’ I’m just married to Steve. Others in our situation have to ask themselves the same question – is the fact that they’re married to a gay man overshadowing that they’re married to this person they fell in love with? I just got lucky with the guy I married. It’s hard to explain–I couldn’t possibly tell someone what to do. But my motto is always to choose love.”
If she could go back and give advice to her younger self, Johanne would say: “Don’t be afraid to ask hard questions.” She says she kept so much bottled inside for years, but “the not knowing was worse than the knowing. I was too afraid to ask because I didn’t want it to end our marriage, but now that I know it wouldn’t have done that, I wish I’d been more willing to talk about it earlier and be curious.”
After going to a support group for wives in mixed-orientation marriages a few years ago, Johanne saw how many women were still dealing with betrayal that didn’t necessarily characterize her situation, as she’d known about Steve’s attractions for such a long time. She didn’t feel a need to engage in those groups anymore. She also steers away from conversations in which she feels people’s pity. But now, the Perrys have formed a group of mixed-orientation couple friends who they’ve met through North Star and Emmaus gatherings. They regularly enjoy going out to dinner with these couples who get their inside jokes and shared language. “It’s good to just laugh,” she says.
While Steve has sent Johanne many podcasts to listen to about others in their situation, and Johanne has found Richard Ostler’s particularly helpful, she says she prefers to enjoy her dog-walking time focusing on nature and saying “good girl” to their lab-pit bull-boxer mix, Blossom. She is optimistic about her future with Steve, and hopeful the church as a whole will move forward with more loving messages from the pulpit where people make it clear that it’s not ok to kick out or minimize your LGBTQ+ children. As she’s become more fully immersed in the community in the past several years, Johanne has been introduced to “some of the most kind, compassionate people I’ve ever met—no one would choose this just to get attention. The people I have met are so humble, genuine and wonderful.”
