Welcome and Introduction to Eli McCann

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It's August 17, 2026 and today we have someone on the podcast who has been recommended to me many, many times over the years and by two friends named Barbara. Today we have Salt Lake Tribune humorist, columnist and attorney and father, Eli McCann. Hey, Eli.

Eli McCann [00:00:24] Hi. Thanks for having me.

John Dehlin [00:00:25] Thanks for coming on Mormon Stories podcast.

Eli McCann [00:00:27] I do. I was joking with you. I do. I go around and I collect Barbaras. I find that they biggest supporters. Anytime I meet a Barbara, they'll support me. So that's what I do. So happy to be here. It's been a long time coming and it's nice to finally connect with you. And as John, as you mentioned, I'm a humorist for the Salt Lake Tribune. I've been writing humor columns for the Salt Lake Tribune for about four years, I guess partly why I'm here. The impetus for me finally showing up here is because I had a book come out earlier this year that we'll talk a little bit about called We're Thankful for the Moisture.

John Dehlin [00:01:02] Hold it up higher. Hold it up higher.

Eli McCann [00:01:03] There you go. If you can see it, cover your

John Dehlin [00:01:05] face on the book.

Eli McCann [00:01:06] We're Thankful for the Moisture, A Gay Guy's Guide to Mormon Faith, Family and Fruit Preservation. And this book came about because I had. About four years ago, I started writing this humor column for the Tribune when Peggy Fletcher Stack, who's an incredible journalist for the Salt Lake Tribune, reached out to me and said, we have a need for a humor columnist at the Tribune. Robert Kirby, who had written there for years, had retired and they asked if had any interest in stepping in and doing that. And so I started writing these columns. And the columns are an exploration of kind of Mormon culture, what it's like to be a gay man living in Utah.

Eli McCann [00:01:43] Today I step back into childhood memories. I talk about bringing my husband, who is not originally from Utah, to Salt Lake City, having him relocate here, and watching him explore and see Mormon culture for the first time without really any context because he didn't grow up religious at all. And most of that has just been really funny and interesting for me to. To.

Eli McCann [00:02:05] And so I've been writing these columns for a while and have had people over the years ask outside of Utah, is there a way that I can read these? I don't want to pay for a Tribune subscription because I live in Milwaukee or whatever. And so last year I got together with Signature Books and the Tribune and we decided, why don't we Just take all of the columns that have been written so far and put them into this book. And so we put them kind of in chronological order with my life. And I have 40 something stories in this book. It's been really fun to go around and talk about this.

Eli McCann [00:02:36] I named the book We're Thankful for For the Moisture, because I think that phrase is just absolutely hilarious. And I grew up in Utah hearing that phrase. And initially, when we were getting ready to put the book together, I told Barbara at Signature. Barbara at Signature Books. Signature Barbara.

Eli McCann [00:02:52] I said, I already know what I want to call this book. And she said, oh, great, what's the title? And I said, I want to call it Word Thankful for the Moisture. Because I write an essay in the book about my husband coming to Utah and hearing somebody say, earnestly, we're sure thankful for the moisture after it had snowed. And he thought it was the funniest thing he had ever heard. And so now he says it all the time. And when I said that to Barbara, this is what I want to call the book, she just stared blankly at me and she said, you want.

Eli McCann [00:03:18] So you want the word moisture to be in the title of your book. And it was so clear, Signature Books did not want me to call this thing We're Thankful for the Moisture. And. And so we spent. I said, okay, okay, fine. We spent months trying to come up with different titles. And Signature just kept saying, we're going to keep coming up with ideas until we find one that you like better than that. And finally we were kind of coming up to the deadline.

Eli McCann [00:03:41] I just kept saying, I really feel like this book should be called We're Thankful for the Moisture. And so my husband one night said, well, why do you think it should be called that? Like, articulate that. And so I thought about it and I said, you know, the phrase we're thankful for the Moisture is this odd, quirky, bizarre thing that I grew up hearing. It's a hilarious phrase, and it's an expression of gratitude over something that is not always easy to be grateful for, which is bad weather. And the way I write about Mormonism and talk about Mormonism sort of feels similar to that. It's.

Eli McCann [00:04:12] I see it as this kind of bizarre, odd, strange thing that sometimes is easy to laugh at, and sometimes having grown up and it doesn't always feel easy to be grateful for that. And yet, at the end of the day, I still find myself over and over again finding reasons to be thankful that I have a Mormon heritage for one reason or another. And so I told Signature that I gave them that spiel and after that they said, okay, we can call. We can call it. We're thankful for the moisture. And so that's where we are.

John Dehlin [00:04:36] I love it. Well, I got to thank Barb Young because I was texting Barb and she's the one that said, why in the freak haven't you interviewed Eli yet? And I didn't have a good answer, but Barb Brown has been pounding on me for at least a few months. So anyway, thanks to both the Barbaras support Signature books. Love you, Barb Young, and most importantly, Eli. Welcome to Mormon Stories podcast. I'm excited to meet you and to hear your Mormon story.

Eli McCann [00:05:02] Yeah, I love talking about my Mormon background and I love talking with people who are interested in it. So I'm really happy to be here.

John Dehlin [00:05:09] Would you believe I'm a sixth generation Mormon and I didn't. And I was born in 69 and I didn't learn. I didn't hear that term for the first time until like 2004 when I was like in my 30s. Because I grew up in Texas and the Mormons. I don't remember the Mormons ever saying that in Texas growing up. And then at byu, I don't remember ever really hearing it. It wasn't until I got done with my tech career, moved to Logan, that I started hearing that term. And in Cache Valley, they say that all the time they call snow moist. You know, if it's winter and it snows, they'll pray in sacrament meeting. Thank you for the moisture, Heavenly Father.

Eli McCann [00:05:48] This has been actually one of the most surprising things about this experience is I've been attending book clubs who read the book. And a lot of the book clubs are in Utah. A lot of them I attend remotely, and they're in other parts of the country. And I just sort of thought that this phrase was something that everybody in the west said, you know, like Idaho, Arizona, Nevada. You know, I thought this is a comment I have learned. It really, truly is a specifically Utah thing. You know, I would talking with this group in Boise of active Latter Day Saints who said they had never heard this phrase before. And I thought that was crazy. They're not that far away from us, apparently. It really is a Utah, uniquely Utah thing.

John Dehlin [00:06:25] Well, let's see if that's the only time in today's episode that we talk about moisture. I anticipate it will be the only time. But, you know, you're a humorist, so I won't put it past you. Okay. So, yeah, today's episode for those. We want everyone to go buy that book from Signature and read it. Cause Signature does great work. And today's episode is not about the book book per se. I just want to hear Eli's Mormon story. I'm particularly. Yeah. For lots of different reasons. And so let's just go ahead and jump into it. Normally I ask people if their parents were LDS and kind of when their parents were married and if they were married in the temple. And that's kind of how I start by saying, where does your Mormon story begin?

Growing Up Mormon in a Devout Family

Eli McCann [00:07:07] Yeah, my Mormon story begins Marmon. You hear that coming out of me. That's how deep my Mormon story goes is. I just said it that way. My Mormon story goes way back. You know, I come from pioneer heritage on both sides of the family. And so both of my parents were raised as active Latter Day Saints. They married in the 70s and they have been active Latter Day Saints my entire life. They're still alive and they're still active Latter Day Saints. And so I grew up in Utah in the Salt Lake Valley in a very active Latter Day Saint family. I was really fortunate as well, though.

Eli McCann [00:07:41] I, I didn't grow up in the kind of home that was, that was very stringent and strict about the, a lot of kind of the rules and cultural aspects of Mormonism. My parents took it seriously. We, we were a. Attend church every Sunday kind of family. We were a don't ever say no to a calling kind of family. But there, I don't feel like my parents raised us in a shame based kind of culture in the house. So it was like there, there are a set of kind of rules and standards that Latter Day Saints abide by, but we use these as sort of a positive compass.

Eli McCann [00:08:14] If we, you know, follow these kinds of things, we think that we'll find some level of happiness, but we're not going to shame anybody for breaking them. So for example, I grew up in a house where we followed the black and white aspects of the word of wisdom and the rest of it was just sort of like. And we don't know what that means,

John Dehlin [00:08:30] you know, or so you're saying no alcohol.

Eli McCann [00:08:32] Yeah, no alcohol.

John Dehlin [00:08:33] Tobacco or coffee.

Eli McCann [00:08:34] Tea. Coffee, yeah. But you know, my parents had, you know, Diet Coke pumping into their veins at all times through an iv. We grew up in a family that thought that the idea of family home evening on Monday nights sounded really great. And so we did it about once a year. You know, that was the kind of family I grew up in. And so it was a let's not take this all too seriously, but we do care about this kind of family, and I think that really benefited me in a lot of ways. I have friends now who look back at their Mormon upbringing as really oppressive.

Eli McCann [00:09:06] And apart from the religious teachings around LGBTQ issues, which I was hearing at church, not really at home, but at church, apart from that, I don't really view my own LDS background and upbringing as oppressive. Okay. And one of the things that my parents did that I think was really, really useful for me, in particular as a little closeted gay boy in the 90s, was I had an uncle who's almost exactly 18 years older than me who came out of the closet in the early 90s.

Eli McCann [00:09:40] He had just graduated BYU. Really, really brave, really brave. And told our gigantic extended family. My mom is the oldest of 10 kids. This is her younger brother. Told the family, I'm gay, and I'm gonna, you know, be out and date. And, I mean, if some of us remember what the world was like in 1991 for gay people, especially in a religious culture and in Utah, and whatever you think of the religious messaging around gay people today in Latter Day Saint culture, it was a whole different ballgame in 1991. Right. You know, I. I grew up, for example, being told at church, no one is born gay.

Eli McCann [00:10:19] People just choose to become gay, and, you know, that's Satan tricking them and whatever. And. And that was the kind of messaging that. That I had always had. And so when my uncle came out of the closet, my extended family responded in varied ways, and some of my extended family responded in a way that was unfortunately, all too typical of that time, which was ostracizing him, telling him, you know, we don't want you around our children. You know, we. We think that you need to go get help, you know, that kind of thing. My parents did me a great favor without even realizing that I was this, you know, little gay boy that they were doing a favor for and only continued to love him.

Eli McCann [00:10:59] He was always welcome in our home. He was always welcome in our lives. You know, they may have respond poorly out, out of my sight, but all I ever saw them do with him was embrace him and love him and say, you know, this is. This is not going to affect our relationship. And so I think that gave me a really, really early indication that regardless of what this religious community around me thinks of this issue and the way they treat people who are gay or, you know, somewhere on the letter spectrum, my parents are never going to turn me away, no matter what happens.

Eli McCann [00:11:37] To me. And I think that that was so instrumental in allowing me now, decades later, to be able to look back at my upbringing and my Mormon heritage with much, much less trauma and angst than a lot of my peers do.

John Dehlin [00:11:54] Love it. Okay, a couple micro questions. Tell me how many siblings and where you are in the birth order. Sorry, if you have to repeat this.

Eli McCann [00:12:02] That's okay. I've got three sisters and I of four children.

John Dehlin [00:12:06] Okay. Third of four. And then what? High school.

Eli McCann [00:12:09] Bingham High School. Go minors.

John Dehlin [00:12:11] You're a minor.

Eli McCann [00:12:11] Go minors. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:12:12] Okay, so that's kind of west side Salt Lake Valley.

Eli McCann [00:12:15] Yeah. South Jordan.

John Dehlin [00:12:16] Okay. And then if you're okay sharing your parents, profession, professions or profession.

Eli McCann [00:12:26] Yeah, yeah, sure. My dad was a pharmaceutical rep for his entire career until he retired over a decade ago. My mom was a BYU music major. She was a joint major. She was a music performance major and an elementary ed major. And then she ended up spending most of her career working in actually it for an engineering firm. Don't ask me how that ended up happening. It just sort of did, but. And she retired about 10 years ago as well.

John Dehlin [00:12:57] So you had a working mom. Okay, so I'm getting, getting progressive Mormon vibes here. Like, I'm already wondering, were they going to Sunstone, Were they reading Dialogue, Were they Democrats, Were they liberal in. Not politically liberal, but maybe. But also just you've already said, they seem to be more nuanced, so. Yeah. Did they think of themselves as nuanced? Were they exposed to sort of the Mormon intellectual liberal realm?

Eli McCann [00:13:29] No, I, I wouldn't say so. And I, I think maybe the cleaner answer to that is I just don't think that they thought of categorizing themselves in anything like that. I, I've always described my parents as hippies who didn't know that, who don't know they're hippies. You know, they just sort of have this, this natural worldview that is very open minded. But I, they're, they're not out marching in parades about it or lecturing others or engaging in, in those kinds of circles on a very intentional level. That's just sort of how they view the world around them. And so, you know, I, I grew up with a mom who was telling us, you know, when we would hear in church somebody give a talk about how like the mother's place is in the home and women shouldn't work outside the home.

Eli McCann [00:14:12] We would get in the car to drive home from church and my mom would say, kids, we don't believe that. You know, I had that kind of mom like families look like all kinds of different things, you know. And you know, I. So I just, I had parents who just sort of naturally were kind of pushing back against those things, but they weren't necessarily going to Sunstone and becoming all academic about it.

Eli McCann [00:14:32] It's kind of hard for me to explain it beyond that. My parents are the kind of people who are very, very politically involved in that. When there is a city council election, they email everybody who's running for city council lists of questions to find out what they're going to do about XYZ local issues. But they're not the kind of political people who are going on Facebook yelling about national politics. And so, you know, maybe that's a good example for a lot of us of just sort of a healthy engagement in your local communities. But that was the kind of house that I grew up in.

John Dehlin [00:15:02] Okay. You mentioned being exposed to some less than helpful LGBTQ principles at church. How was like the book the Miracle Forgiveness used or not used or conceived in your house? And I'll even ask a second part to that question. How were your parents around the idea of prophetic infallibility versus fallibility and either like taking serious every word any prophet has ever said since Joseph Smith versus sort of going, yeah, prophets don't always get it right. So you can take X, Y and Z prophets teachings with a grain of salt.

Eli McCann [00:15:45] What I can say is, and I want to be careful because I don't want to put words into my parents mouths. You know, they're not here to speak for themselves. But I think they would be comfortable with me at least saying this.

Eli McCann [00:15:55] I do feel like I grew up in a home with parents who were very, very comfortable with the idea that prophets could make mistakes. And part of that may have come from, honestly, my mom's great uncle was Ezra Taft Benson.

Eli McCann [00:16:08] And so we grew up with a prophet in the family. I don't ever remember meeting the guy. You know, I was pretty young, but, you know, my, I think my parents and my dad had some LeGrand Richards was like his great uncle or something. And so I grew up with parents who sort of had a front row seat to a lot of these people. And we're just like, they're just, they're just guys, you know, guys that my parents I think would say they respect very much and that they look to for guidance and counsel. But one example that comes to my mind is when I was in high school, Gordon B.

Eli McCann [00:16:40] Hinckley went on, I think it was Larry King and Larry King Asked him about, do Mormons drink soda, like Diet Coke or whatever? And Hinckley said, no. And I remember my parents at that time, both with cans of Diet Coke in their hands. And they revered this man. They cared. And it didn't even cause a conversation in our home.

John Dehlin [00:17:03] Home.

Eli McCann [00:17:03] They were just like, huh, that's an interesting thing, he said, you know, and like, they just like, that's cool. But. And so, so that sort of that mentality of, like, the prophets, these are people that we think are, are called of God, and we also think that they're human beings. And so, you know, they can make mistakes. When I, in the 90s, I joke all the time. In fact, one of the columns that's in the book, I joke about a guy, my dad always had facial hair in the 90s. And I don't, I don't know how all active Latter Day Saints view facial hair today, but in the 90s there was sort of this taboo, like, you men shouldn't.

Eli McCann [00:17:34] They should be clean cut and whatever. My dad had a beard and somebody in the ward, or I think it might have even been in the Stake Presidency, said, you know, you'll never be called as a bishop as long as you have a beard. And my dad said, is that a promise? You know, and so they sort of had that kind of like tongue in cheek, like, yeah, we're doing this because we believe in it. But like, all of this nitpickiness around how we're governing every second of our lives surely is not what the God that we believe in cares about.

Eli McCann [00:18:06] And so, so, and then to answer your kind of earlier question, then the miracle of forget forgiveness may not surprise you to hear, considering what I just said. I don't remember ever seeing that book in our house growing up, I think I was a missionary the first time I even heard of that book. And, and read it. And I'm glad for that, because I. That book was not good for me to read.

Eli McCann [00:18:30] You know, it did me some damage and gave me a lot of angst as a missionary. You did read it as a missionary? Yeah, I did.

John Dehlin [00:18:35] Okay.

Eli McCann [00:18:36] Yeah. And it gave me a lot of angst, especially, you know, as a closeted young man who was trying very hard to just put that in the very back of my mind and hopefully never address it to, to suddenly read chapters. I can't remember if it was one or multiple chapters from this prophet of God that I had, you know, quote unquote, believed in. Talking about gay people like they had one, chosen this lifestyle, two were duped by Satan. And three were close to irredeemable because this was at least the second worst sin that you could, you know, be have is next to. Next to murder.

John Dehlin [00:19:13] Right?

Eli McCann [00:19:13] It's murder. And then me. Me, I'm second now. Imagine if I murder someone while being gay, never coming back from that.

John Dehlin [00:19:20] You take over for Satan at that point.

Eli McCann [00:19:22] At that point, I'm pretty sure I've taken Satan's job.

John Dehlin [00:19:27] Satan, you've been demoted. Eli McCann is in town.

Eli McCann [00:19:30] He's truly fallen at that point. That's the second fall. And so, yeah, that kind of thing. But again, that sort of rhetoric and view of Mormonism and Mormon culture was foreign to me. Kind of foreign to me until I was a missionary and was suddenly exposed to religion on a much more intense level than I had been in my upbringing in our house.

John Dehlin [00:19:56] Yeah, okay, that's helpful. Let's jump. Let's jump to a couple other things. Then we'll come back to this theme of being LGBT in the church. Is that okay?

Eli McCann [00:20:06] Yeah, yeah, of course.

Childhood, Adolescence, and Early Faith Life

John Dehlin [00:20:07] So as a kid, what did you love? What were you into? You. And we'll say as a kid going into adolescence, how did you experience being a Mormon in terms of what you loved about it? What. How you benefited from it or not. And then what were you into going into adolescence and even high school? What things made you excited?

Eli McCann [00:20:29] Yeah. What I loved about Mormonism, and especially as I reflect on it now, looking back, what were the pieces that I feel nostalgia for was it's all based around the community aspects. You know, I loved that I grew up in this community with just a bunch of kids all around my age, and we were all kind of engaged in the same sorts of things. Like, I loved roadshows.

Eli McCann [00:20:54] Bring back the roadshow. You know, I would do one right now, or I would at least attend. But, you know, I was Tumbleweed number four in my awards production of oh, South George, which was a loose parody on Oklahoma.

Eli McCann [00:21:09] The titular song was oh, South Jordan, where the wind goes sweeping cross my yard. And then I was at Tumbleweed, and I had to cartwheel across the stage. And so, you know, I have very funny, hilarious, fond memories of that sort of thing, you know, of going on Sundays for three hours at church and just being around all these other kids and teenagers. And we all had this kind of common language, and we were all joking in the same ways, and we were snickering when somebody would say something like, we're thankful for the moisture at the pulpit or, you know, whatever else.

Eli McCann [00:21:40] You know, I loved all of that to be honest, I have really mixed feelings about having been a missionary for the church. I would certainly not want to do it again, but I'm even on this side of it, you know, having completely different beliefs. I'm really happy that I did that.

Eli McCann [00:21:59] You know, I served a mission in Western Ukraine. I have a lot of friends in Ukraine. I speak Ukrainian. I think being in Ukraine for two years changed my worldviews in a really, really positive way. And I just, I can't even imagine what my life would look like now if that hadn't happened. As difficult as it was and as much as I would not want to do it again. You know, there was so much of the process of just kind of making my way through all the hallmarks and benchmarks of Mormonism that really I look back on with fond and nostalgia and

John Dehlin [00:22:31] happiness for, yeah, I love it. And we'll come back to your mission for sure. And I want to hear about your thoughts on Ukraine now because every day I feel sad for Ukraine these days. I'm sure it's worse for you. So were you into reading? Were you academic? Were you in sports, musical performance? What were you into?

Eli McCann [00:22:56] Yeah, I was writing. Yeah, writing. I was, I was always a kid who loved to write, you know, and I never considered myself to be very good in school from a young age. At parent teacher conferences, my, the teachers would frequently tell my parents that I was really distracted. I would just sort of sit and scribble away in a notebook all day. I was always writing these little stories during math or history or whatever, and that frustrated my teachers. And so my grades were fine, but they were never very good.

Eli McCann [00:23:24] In, in high school I ran cross country and track and field. And so I ended up getting a cross country scholarship to go up to Northern Idaho, a school, little liberal arts college called Lewis Clark State where I, I ran cross country and track and field for my, my freshman year. And while I was there I took this history class my first semester and I was really nervous to be in college because again, I was, you know, I had in my head, I've never been very good in some school and now it's college, you know, this is going to be difficult. And I had this writing assignment.

Eli McCann [00:23:55] I was supposed to write some five page essay or whatever in this large class. And so I took this very, very seriously. And I thought, okay, it's my first kind of big assignment in college, I'm going to do really well. And I took it seriously, turned it in. And the professor's name was Professor Martin Graded These papers. And after class one day, he said, I have everybody's papers, so come grab them on your way out. And then he called me out, specifically said, eli, can you come and talk to me, please? And my heart sank because I just thought, oh, I failed my first college.

Eli McCann [00:24:27] He's going to say, like, hey, I'm not sure you're ready for college. And so I walked up to him and he had my paper and he handed it to me and I got an A. And he said, first interaction I'd ever had with this man. Cause it was this big class. And he said, I just wanted to tell you you are a really good writer and you should pursue this. And I started crying on the spot. And it was the first time I could ever remember being proud of something I had done academically. And I walked away from that and I thought, okay, actually, maybe I'm not bad at school.

Eli McCann [00:24:59] It's just that there's, like, one thing that I'm particularly good at, and I just need to make sure that I, you know, pursue a degree that requires me to do this thing a lot. And so I ended up becoming a history major. And I knew I wanted to go to law school because I thought anything that is going to require me to read and write a lot is going to be something I think I can excel at. And so. And that ended up being true, you know, and. And I. I continued pursuing that and then creative writing on the side. And now here I am, a lawyer and creative writer.

John Dehlin [00:25:29] What type of history were you into?

Eli McCann [00:25:32] So I. I did. I became a history major right after my mission. And so I was really interested in Eastern European history and a particular 20th, 20th century kind of Soviet era history. And so that was my main emphasis. Emphasis and focus.

John Dehlin [00:25:44] So Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, things like that.

Eli McCann [00:25:47] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:25:47] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eli McCann [00:25:48] I love them.

John Dehlin [00:25:51] Beautiful. I love that. Okay, so going back to middle school and high school, if it's okay when dating starts to be something that the Mormon your peers are doing, tell me how, you know, you experienced that and how you experienced when you first maybe noticed that you might be a little bit different than your male peers.

Recognizing a Gay Identity Within the Church

Eli McCann [00:26:17] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:26:17] And. And how that was internally and externally for you.

Eli McCann [00:26:20] Yeah, I mean, I'll start by saying I think I knew I was gay as early as I knew anything about myself. You know, not that I was necessarily using that label, but I remember being in kindergarten and having a crush on, like, the boys in class and feeling implicitly like I'm not supposed to tell anybody this. All right, so. So this was never a surprise. By the time I got to middle school, this started feeling really scary to me because I just kept thinking, I'm going to be in high school soon, and I'm supposed to start dating girls, and I don't want to. And I also did not feel like I could tell people that I was going through this.

Eli McCann [00:26:56] That just sounded so terrifying to me. And I remember being 12, 13 years old, and lying in bed at night, could not fall asleep because I had horrible stomach aches. You know, it was just this absolute terror that I was feeling.

Eli McCann [00:27:09] By the time I got into high school, I think. I think there was a piece of me that had found or had come to peace with at least some of this, that I. You know, I just felt like I.

Eli McCann [00:27:23] I'm not expected to get married right now. I'm a teenager, and all of my peers are, like, going on to these dances with girls and whatever. I can do that. You know, I can go have fun going to a dance with a girl. And so I did. And, you know, I would d. And then going on a mission almost felt like a relief, because it was like, okay, two years where nobody's going to be hounding me about dating.

Eli McCann [00:27:42] And it really wasn't until after I got home from my mission that all of this started to feel truly terrifying to me. And, you know, now I'm suddenly being pushed as much as possible. You need to be dating, and you need to get married. And I tried. I really did try dating, and I could never make it more than a few weeks of dating someone before I just would panic, and, you know, yeah, I can't do this. I can't do this. And I think there was a part of me somewhere deep down that thought this thing that a lot of gay men have thought over the years, which is, maybe I just need to find the right one.

Eli McCann [00:28:15] Maybe there's, like, one that I could be like, yeah, this one I can marry, and we'll be so happy, you know? And so I just kept dating and dating and dating. And by the time I was in law school, I think I was in my second year of law school. And I started dating this woman who was a PhD student at BYU and I was a law student at BYU. And she checked every possible box that someone could check for me. I mean, she was really smart, she was really funny, beautiful woman, you know, very, you know, educated, and had just a lot of drive, and we got along really well.

Eli McCann [00:28:50] And I dated her for a few weeks, and that same panic started to seep in And I remember just thinking, eli, if you can't make it work with this one, you're not making it work with anyone. And after that I just decided, okay, well, I, I just am not getting married then, you know, and at this point, I still thought, I'm never leaving the church. I'm never coming out. I'm never leaving the church. No one will ever know this about me. I will just be alone for the rest of my life. And the way I coped with the, the terror of that perpetual loneliness was I just made myself as busy as possible.

Eli McCann [00:29:23] You know, I, I worked multiple jobs while I was in law school. I got involved in every club and everybody, every possible thing I could. I took as many classes as they would allow me to take. And as long as I stayed really, really busy, you know, that helped keep that fear and terror at bay a little bit. And that worked until I graduated law school and moved to Salt Lake City and got a pretty 9 to 5 job that was, you know, I worked for a judge for a year. And suddenly just all this kind of quietness of my life fell upon me. And, and it was at that point, right after graduating law school, that I finally started this very slow, painful process of telling myself, okay, I have to figure out what my religious beliefs and path are here, and I have to figure out when and how I'm going to finally come out because I can't live the rest of my life this way.

John Dehlin [00:30:17] Yeah, beautiful. Forgive me for jumping back and asking some micro questions, but this is great. Thank you for sharing. Was there a point where internally you actually flipped that switch and said, I think I might be gay as an explicit self identifier, or did you just delay even thinking about that thought or decision for as long as you could?

Eli McCann [00:30:43] The biggest flip switch moment that I can think of was in high school, and it was that same Larry King interview that I referenced earlier. I believe it was the same interview. And I must have been 16 or 17.

Eli McCann [00:30:59] Larry King starts asking Gordon Hinckley about gay people. And again, up to this point, all I had ever heard from any church leader or any church lesson was, nobody is born gay. Wicked. Choose to be gay or whatever.

Eli McCann [00:31:14] And Larry King asks Gordon Hinckley, you know what about gay people? And Gordon Hinckley says, well, it's my view that they have a problem and we want to help them. And Larry King says, a problem that they were born with or a problem that they chose on their own. And Hinckley said, I don't know. I'm not an expert on these things. And I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on these things. All I know is that it's a problem and I hope we can help.

Eli McCann [00:31:42] And that answer to me now sounds not great, you know, but at that time, that actually felt very progressive compared to what we were hearing. And I remember when he said that, having this light bulb go off on my head, and I just thought, wait, we don't know if people are born with this. I thought we knew that they weren't. Yeah, I thought that was the thing that we, you know, taught. And when, when he said that, I just thought, okay, I wasn't. I was born this way, you know, And I, I think I was still way too scared in my head to be like, and therefore I'm gay.

Eli McCann [00:32:12] But it just sort of like I almost felt as though I could be let off the hook for a second to just say, I didn't choose this. I, my, I didn't choose this at 5. I didn't choose to have crushes on the boys in, in, in kindergarten. And so from then on, I don't think I ever felt guilt about being gay again. I, But I did feel terror because of the implications for what does it. This mean for my life, you know, so it was like I, I don't feel like I did something wrong. However, I really want to have a family and be a parent and be active in the church and fulfill my callings for the rest of my life.

Eli McCann [00:32:46] I want to do all of those things, but because I'm this, I don't think there's a path for me to do that. And the only feeling that, that produces, that dichotomy produces is terror. And so that's, that's when it shifted from guilt to just terror for me.

John Dehlin [00:33:04] Terror. So, and, and only answer any part of this that you want to. Was there, was there any point before graduating from law school where you felt like you even wanted to try and explore dating men or whatever?

Eli McCann [00:33:26] No.

John Dehlin [00:33:26] Really?

Eli McCann [00:33:27] Really. Well, I'll say this. There was something always deep down in me that was like, I wish that I could date men. There was no point before graduating law school where I ever thought, I'm actually going to do that, or maybe I should take a step or maybe I should connect. I mean, I wasn't even friends with other gay people.

Eli McCann [00:33:48] There was at the time kind of an underground community at byu. I was not tapped into that at all. I didn't know those people. I wasn't trying to find them online. I was trying as I Said to keep myself as busy possible to keep that out of mind. Now, almost the moment I left byu, that changed for me. I moved to Salt Lake City. I was scared and looking down the barrel of my future. And I happened to meet a guy who also was just graduating BYU who was gay. And I really latched onto him. And it was the first gay person that I met and was become friends with.

Eli McCann [00:34:25] And he was pretty closeted, although not quite as closeted as me. But it was pretty instant once I left law school that I was like, okay, I'm going to start exploring this on some level. It still took me a couple of years of very quietly and in a closeted and looking back unhealthy way, starting to explore this part of myself before I finally was like, I'm coming out to my family. I'm just going to live out loud. Took me a couple of years from then, but that was when I started down that path.

John Dehlin [00:34:57] You're. You're kind of making me think about something I haven't fully thought about before, and that's. The Utah high school culture seems to be a particularly compatible culture for a Mormon kid who's gay to not really have to deal with it because dating is forbidden until 16. And even these high school dances and proms and homecomings, there's this weird Utah culture of group dates where eight couples all go together or whatever. And so you could either consciously or unconsciously hide behind this. No. Dating before your mission culture and group dating culture to where it doesn't really force the issue. And then when you're on your mission, you can't date. And then like you said, if you go to BYU and you're super busy. So that's part one. Do you want to talk about that? And then I have a part two.

Eli McCann [00:35:47] Yeah, I mean, I think as far as that's concerned, just the logistics of it, it's Utah in the 90s was not a difficult place to be closeted as a teenager. You know, my husband makes a joke now. Cause he thinks that straight Mormon men all seem a little gay to him. And so he'll always be like, is he, is he gay, Mormon or European? You know, he makes that joke a lot. And so, yeah, great. You know, and I, I was never a particularly flamboyant kid, you know, and so I was able to more or less just kind of blend in with the other boys in school.

Eli McCann [00:36:24] And like none of us were expected to live in any unchaste kind of way. And so it was like they were, weren't Standing out compared to me so much. Anyway, we were all going to the dances with girls and we were all making it home by 10:30, you know, and that was. That was it. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:36:39] Before graduating BYU Law, had you ever had someone suppose that they had gaydar and, like, ask you straight up, hey, are you gay? Is there a chance you're gay? Did you ever get confronted that way?

Eli McCann [00:36:50] Only one time that I can remember. And it was a roommate of mine who is now in the Tabernacle Choir. He and I served a mission together and then we were roommates afterward. And I was trying to date this young woman and I, I started freaking out about it and I wanted to, I wanted to talk to somebody about it, but I, you know, I wasn't going to come out to anybody, but I remember going to his bedroom and I said, I don't think I can keep dating her. And he said, why? I mean, she seems like a really good match for you. And she's, she's gorgeous and, and she's nice, you know, all these things.

Eli McCann [00:37:23] And I said, I don't know, I just, every time I get to this point, I start freaking out. And he looked at me and it was really very gentle. And he said, do you think you might be gay?

Eli McCann [00:37:34] And I, you know, I was not even close to coming out at this point to anyone, to anyone. And so I just laughed and I said, ah, that's it. I must be gay, you know, And I just made a joke about it and he looked at me and he said, it's okay if you are. And I said, it's not that. And then we changed the subject. And that was the only time that I can think of that somebody directly

John Dehlin [00:37:56] asked me, yeah, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, as it's no longer called, historically has had one or two gay people in it.

Eli McCann [00:38:05] Yeah, historically, probably more than one or two.

John Dehlin [00:38:09] Okay, really quick, you probably don't know this, but for grad school, one of the things I did was I studied 1600 LGBT, current and former Mormons, specifically focusing on what the academic literature calls sexual orientation change efforts, which is people's attempt to change their sexual orientation. And one of the things I found is that conversion therapy through a therapist was actually not even the second or third most common way to try and change your sexual orientation. The most common way and the most damaging way way was trying to use righteousness, prayer, serving in callings, almost scrupulous hyper righteousness as a way to bargain with God, to kind of cleanse yourself or purify yourself from being Gay.

John Dehlin [00:39:02] And that's the most common story I've heard with all the LGBTQ Mormons I've known and interviewed where, starting in high school, they're confessing to their parents or their bishop, and they're trying to pray it away, and they're bargaining with God and they're going on their missions and tussling with it and thinking, if I go on my mission, when I get home, God will take it away. And then at their BYU experience, they're probably seeing a therapist trying to go through some sort of perversion therapy, and they're working with their bishops and getting blessings that from their bishop that it'll be taken away. Your story is outside that bell curve a little bit, because it sounds like prior to graduating byu, you never tried much sexual orientation change efforts at all.

Eli McCann [00:39:52] No. And John, it's honestly, looking back, one of the wildest things to think about. I don't even know how I dodged all of these bullets. I'm really lucky. But I never told a single bishop, ever, that I was dealing with this even after byu. Never. None. Ever. And I was still active, active in the church for two years after byu, when I was kind of starting to date, never even felt any inclination whatsoever to sit down with a church leader and say, hey, this is going on with me. And I think it's because I just implicitly did not feel like that was ever going to be helpful.

Eli McCann [00:40:31] Helpful. Just like, why would this. Why would some straight dude, you know, have anything to say to me that would be useful in this situation? You know, I've spent my entire life trying to navigate my way through this and figure this out, like, what. Why would his opinion be helpful in this situation? And. And I'm looking back, I am so glad I never did, because especially when I was younger, if I had done that, I don't know, I may have been pushed into some version of conversion therapy, but I never was because nobody ever knew this about me, you know?

Eli McCann [00:40:58] And so, yeah, I mean, literally to the last time I went to church, I never felt any reason to go and confide in any kind of church leader. And I think part of it is a personality thing for me is that I had felt like I'm not going to come out to really anyone until I know exactly what I'm going to do with my faith, because I did not want anybody to have an opinion about my faith as I was trying to decide things about my faith. And so I didn't come out until I knew, okay, I don't believe that the Church. Church activity is good for me.

Eli McCann [00:41:41] I don't want it to be a part of my future. I appreciate some of what it's given me. I don't believe a lot of the things that I used to believe. And so I am going to come out, I'm going to let people know, and the church isn't really going to be a part of my future future. And there wasn't really any debate or conversation to be had around that. I never opened that up for conversation with, you know, my parents or siblings or anybody in my life. It was just sort of like, this is what I've gone through. This is what I've decided. This is what my future is going to look like, and I would love for you to be a part of that with me.

Eli McCann [00:42:12] And as a result, I. I don't really get pushback from family or friends about the faith aspect of it all. That was not your question, but.

John Dehlin [00:42:21] No, that's great.

Eli McCann [00:42:22] It's just looking back, I. I really. I can't believe I never you told. Told any bishop, and I'm so glad I didn't, you know.

A Relatively Healthy LGBT Mormon Upbringing

John Dehlin [00:42:28] Yeah. Well, that's. I mean, from what I've heard so far, you really are in the 99th percentile of, like, what sounds like one of the healthiest LGBT Mormon experiences I probably ever heard. And that's thousands of stories. So I.

Eli McCann [00:42:44] That feels true to me.

John Dehlin [00:42:46] Wow.

Eli McCann [00:42:46] You know, And. And I don't. I get worried when I talk about this. This is my authentic, authentic, authentic experience. I do get worried when I talk about this that I. I'm making it sound like I'm sort of glossing over the bad. I, again, I had stomach aches that kept me up at night through middle school. I. Terror was the thing that I was living. I had a really bad, bad experiences with this, and yet I. I somehow was able to avoid some much, much worse things that a lot of my peers were not able to avoid. And that's my authentic experience. I'm really grateful for it.

John Dehlin [00:43:20] Yeah. Like, I don't think I've ever heard a Mormon LGBT experience that didn't involve some sort of suicidality. But it sounds like that even. That you may have escaped, which. I'm so happy for you.

Eli McCann [00:43:32] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm lucky.

John Dehlin [00:43:34] Yeah. Okay. And so then you've probably already answered this, but this idea of, like, in front of God, feeling like you're dirty and loathsome and fighting back the sin and the evil desires and repenting and trying to get clean and feeling like you're Close to committing the sin next to murder, or maybe even committing the sin next to murder. That sort of spiritual torment. Did you just escape that as well? Pretty completely.

Eli McCann [00:44:02] Well, as I mentioned, once I realized that I was born this way, I no longer felt that kind of guilt. And that was because for many years after that, I was. I wasn't quote, unquote, acting on it. Right. And so the fact that I had these feelings, I didn't feel bad about that. It was just like, yeah, that's how I feel and it's not my fault. And that was sort of it. Now, I absolutely will say that once I started dating a little bit and, you know, exploring this life, that was a mixed bag for me, you know, and I think I. I started, you know, I would date and I would be like, this feels right. And I also feel a little bit of guilt around it.

John Dehlin [00:44:43] It.

Eli McCann [00:44:43] And I had to navigate through that. And I ended up finding a very good therapist after a couple of years that sort of helped me unpack. Like, where is this coming from? And I don't know. It's really interesting that I think that there is some piece of that that is just always kind of a part of you if you grew up in, you know, hearing this kind of messaging.

Eli McCann [00:45:06] Because there will be. It's very rare for me at this point. You know, I'm in my 40s now, and I've, you know, I'm married, gay dad, and a really happy marriage and a fulfilling life. And every once in a while there will be like, some kind of feeling of guilt that will pop up very, very deep back down that I have to be like, oh, this is that residual kind of harmful messaging that I got from that piece of Mormonism that just still somehow is somewhere embedded in there that I'm still probably going to have to keep dealing with for the rest of my life.

Eli McCann [00:45:36] And I don't think that that's an uncommon experience, and not necessarily just in gay relationships, but if you grew up in a. In a really intensive religion, even if you no longer believe in that religion, I think it's hard to fully rid yourself of all messaging that you now think is harmful completely whatsoever. And so that's been kind of an interesting thing for me to continue to occasionally navigate.

John Dehlin [00:46:04] Yeah, I'm. So this is great. This is a story I haven't heard, and every story is different. Let's switch tracks a little bit and talk about your Mormon faith as it progressed. So there's God, there's Jesus, there's the atonement, there's Joseph Smith. There's the Book of Mormon, there's the Restoration, there's modern day prophets. By the way, I didn't mention we must be cousins because I'm a cousin of Ezra Tepz.

Eli McCann [00:46:31] Oh, okay. We're gonna have to get out the family tree.

Peak Orthodoxy and the Beginning of Deconstruction

John Dehlin [00:46:34] But so talk about the. How orthodox did your. And literalistic did your testimony get? Sort of at its peak, your Mormon testimony, and then talk about your deconstruction as its own process to the extent that you're comfortable.

Eli McCann [00:46:51] Yeah, okay. You know, I would describe myself at my peak as quite mainstream Latter Day Saint. Never orthodox, but very practicing. You know, I was. My peak of this probably would have been as a missionary, you know, and I, I believed that, you know, Joseph Smith was a prophet, Brigham Young, all of the rest of them that came through that line, all prophets, not perfect men, but by and large telling the word of God.

Eli McCann [00:47:27] I believed in, you know, the Book of Mormon as a divine, you know, revelation, doctrine and covenants and so forth. I certainly believed in God, Jesus Christ, you know, all of, all of this, the mainstream kind of Latter Day Saint belief system. I subscribe to all of it.

Eli McCann [00:47:44] Looking back, I don't know that there was ever a time in my practice of the religion that I had an extreme view on any of it, it one way or the other. When it came to the revelation around gay people, that was sort of a, you know, I sort of addressed it in the way I think a lot of Latter Day Saints do, which is like, we just don't have all the answers on that one yet, you know. And the further and further along I went, the more frustrated I became with that because it was like, this is my life and like, I would like to have some answers on this before it ends, you know, But I was sort of okay for at least a time of saying there will be some kind of answer on this and we just don't have it yet.

Eli McCann [00:48:28] And the Lord, you know, reveals line upon line and precept upon precept, you know, that sort of thing. And so I think I, you know, I came home from my mission. I remained, you know, really active in the church. I served as an elders quorum president. I served in a number of other callings. I was the ward organist almost every ward I was in. And. And then, you know, went through law school and the same after law school,

John Dehlin [00:48:53] what year did you graduate law school?

Eli McCann [00:48:54] 2011.

John Dehlin [00:48:55] So this is four years before the November 2015 policy, correct? Okay, yeah.

Eli McCann [00:49:01] And I can get into that after law school. I You know, I moved to Salt Lake City for a year, and I was a Sunday school teacher in my ward. But in starting to date this guy on the side very quietly.

Eli McCann [00:49:17] And after a year of that, I, you know, I think at that point I was very, very, very slowly starting to deconstruct some of the belief system. And it was around that time that I started saying, I, I think the church may just be dead wrong on this gay issue.

Eli McCann [00:49:35] But I still largely believed in the rest of it. You know, it's still like. But, you know, I think these are. These prophets are, you know, real prophets. And I think the, by and large, the belief system is accurate. I just, I think maybe the church is wrong on this issue. And around that same time, I started thinking and I, you know, I think the church may be wrong on issues pertaining to women and the priesthood. You know, it was very slowly starting to feel like some of these things just don't. They've never honestly felt right to me. But now that I'm kind of exploring this part of myself, I'm letting myself think a little bit more about what the church is actually teaching about these.

Eli McCann [00:50:15] And so at the end of that year of living in Salt Lake City, I ended up getting a job in the equatorial Pacific, a little tiny island nation called Palau. And this guy that I had was very secretly closeted dating, he graduated BYU right at that exact same time and was looking for his next adventure. And he said, what if I just, like, move to plow with you and find a job down there too?

Eli McCann [00:50:41] And I was like, that would sound, you know, that sounds great because I didn't want to go alone. And so the two of us moved to this country together, these two closeted gay boys, and kind of all of our friends and family were like, oh, that's so awesome that you guys are, you know, can both go do this together. And, you know, in hindsight, our family and friends were like, oh, obviously you were like a gay couple moving to another.

John Dehlin [00:51:02] Out to your parents?

Eli McCann [00:51:03] No.

John Dehlin [00:51:03] Or siblings?

Eli McCann [00:51:04] No. I mean, I wasn't out to really anyone. And he was only out to a few very close friends. And so we moved to this country. He got a job that was relevant to his major. He graduated in. I was a lawyer down there working for the court system, and I was still active in the church. And I went to this little Palawan branch. There's only one branch in the entire country. Country has 17,000 people, so it really is a small town. And I immediately get called as the young men president in this branch. And so there I am for a year, serving as young men president. I was also the pianist, branch organist or whatever. My boyfriend was the seminary teacher. And we're this gay couple, you know, living in this apartment. And. And it was.

John Dehlin [00:51:56] And you're how old you say we were?

Eli McCann [00:51:58] In our late 20s?

John Dehlin [00:51:59] Yeah.

Eli McCann [00:51:59] Okay, late 20s. And we're living down there. And it was just this wild experience because I'll tell you, on the one hand, I'm kind of living out my, like, gay dream, right?

John Dehlin [00:52:10] Mormon gay dream.

Eli McCann [00:52:11] My Mormon gay dream.

John Dehlin [00:52:12] Gay Mormon dream.

Eli McCann [00:52:13] On the other hand, I'm the young men president. And by the way, I've really enjoyed doing that. You know, I loved this branch. I love. I loved this little branch. But while I was there, I think my deconstruction of a lot of it really started to happen in earnest. You know, there was something about kind of being away from Zion, down in this island and living in this partnership of sorts that was not healthy because it was closeted, you know, And I just. Closeted relationships are never really going to be all that healthy.

Eli McCann [00:52:44] But it was what we were doing, and we were there for a full year, and this all finally culminated at the end of this year. My. The. Oops. The. The guy that I was down there with, his name is Daniel, by the way. Terrific guy. The guy I was down down there with had left the island a couple months before I did move back to the States for a job. And our relationship kind of ended with that as well.

Eli McCann [00:53:10] But he. He moved back to the States, and I'm still there. And I'm starting to get a little bit depressed. More and more depressed because I'm. I'm. I'm. I'm about to move back to the States, and I'm. I'm still thinking like, okay, what's next for me? I'm still not. Haven't come out to people. You know, my family still doesn't know. Do I go back? Do I, like, get into another closeted relationship? Surely that can't be how I spend the rest of my life. You know, what do I do with the. The faith of it all? And because I'm. I really am enjoying the community aspect of being in this branch.

Eli McCann [00:53:40] And I loved these teenagers in this branch that I was, you know, working with. I just. I love, loved all of that aspect of it, but, like, this can't be sustainable either. You know, like, something's got to break. Something has to break.

Eli McCann [00:53:52] And one Saturday evening I was in my apartment and I was feeling really down, really Depressed and I thought I'm gonna end up going to hell over all of this and I don't even know what wine tastes like. You know, I had that thought come to my mind. It's like I'm go to hell without even knowing what wine tastes like. And so I just thought, well, I might as well go drink wine because I might as well know what wine tastes like on the way to hell. And so I drove down to this little market in my white old beat up Suzuki with the steering wheel on the right side.

Eli McCann [00:54:23] And I drive down to this market, I go in and I, I don't know what I'm doing right, and I just grab a bottle of white wine. I didn't know there were different kinds of wine, you know, and. But I grab one and I buy it and I go back to my apartment and I realize I don't know how to open this thing because I don't have a corkscrew and wouldn't even know how to use one. And so I end up breaking the top of the bottle off with a butter knife. And I drink this entire bottle of wine or what, you know, at least what didn't spill when I broke it.

Eli McCann [00:54:53] And I end up in my apartment, staying up late, just kind of like laughing. And I had a guitar, I playing my guitar and it was just sort of that know, I was suddenly tipsy. Well, the next morning, it was Sunday morning and I woke up and I realized we had a general authority that was visiting our branch that day. It was like the area president or something. And I was supposed to be speaking in sacrament meeting, playing the piano, teaching a combined Sunday school lesson and then for third hour teaching the young men's group and. And here I was waking up like still a little drunk from the night before.

Eli McCann [00:55:33] And I hurry and get dressed, I jump in my car, I'm speeding down the hill down to the branch house to, to do all of this stuff. And I get there and I, I do all of the things I speak and you know, teach and whatever else.

Eli McCann [00:55:45] And I remember during Sunday school I looked at the congregation, the people sitting there, and this general authority was sitting there with his wife and the two of them were holding hands and they were just like watching me and both of them of them were smiling at me, just like beaming. And I remember thinking, oh, they wouldn't be smiling at me if they knew that I was a wicked gay dude who was drunk 12 hours ago and might still be a little drunk now. And the services end that day and the area authority the general authority wanted to have a meeting with the branch leadership, and I qualified as branch leadership. So we all go sit down with him together. It's a group of like six or seven of us.

John Dehlin [00:56:26] Us.

Eli McCann [00:56:27] And we say an opening prayer. And then he says. He makes a joke, and he says, well, I think we can all agree that Eli was the MVP of church today. Because I had just, like, done all of this stuff that day, you know, and everybody laughed. And then he said. And all. I will never forget him saying this or how I felt when he said it, but he said, if only every branch and ward in the world could have an Eli in it, wouldn't that be great?

John Dehlin [00:56:52] Great.

Eli McCann [00:56:53] And when he said that, I felt this rage, this absolute rage bubble up in me, and I wanted to just scream at him, every warden branch could have an Eli in it, but you are kicking us out. But I didn't say anything. I just sort of smiled and nodded, you know, grit my teeth. And we finished the meeting, and I went and got back in my Suzuki to drive back to my apartment. And I audibly said out loud as I was pulling away, eli, this is not going to be your life anymore.

Eli McCann [00:57:22] And that was the end of my church activity. I was just like, I'm done. I'm out. And after that, I came back to the US And I came out to my family and my friends, and I let them know, like, hey, church is not going to be a part of my future. It's not something that I want to put my time and energy into anymore. I don't feel like it's good for me. I don't believe in most of the things that I used to believe in. And so now I'm going to go find a different. Different path of peace, because this one was never a path of peace for me.

Coming Out to Family and Navigating Church Life

John Dehlin [00:57:53] How were your parents and sisters to your coming out and other people that mattered to you?

Eli McCann [00:57:57] Really good. My parents, you know, I came out to them first and then my sisters right after. And I knew my sisters were going to be very cool about it. I worried. And I knew my parents would be loving about it, but I did worry that it was going to stress them out. You know? Know, I was really surprised when I. I came out to my parents. I went to their house on a Saturday morning, and I told. I told them, I need to tell you guys something. I am incredibly gay. And my mom looked up at me over her glasses, and she said, is that different than regular gay?

Eli McCann [00:58:32] And I said, no, I just. I just want to make sure, you know, like, there's no question about this. And my mom said, oh, okay, got it. And the first thing she said to me, me was, well, now that you finally told us, I hope you can find some peace.

Eli McCann [00:58:45] And that was sort of how my parents approached it from the beginning, was like, I hope our son finds some peace now. And so they, they were really terrific about it. And, and my sisters, of course, were just like, oh, great. You know, we, we'd wondered, you know, and it was just.

John Dehlin [00:59:01] They had wondered.

Eli McCann [00:59:02] Yeah. Like, I think a couple of them said, like, who you've been wondering, you know, if, if there was, if you were. And because you remind us of Uncle Will, you know, my uncle that's gay. And we are a lot alike, you know, but, but no, you know, there was never any awkward conversation about the religion of it all either. And I, I, I've always approached it with them that, you know, I. Your faith journey is your own, and I'm never going to judge you for what that looks like. I'm never going to lecture you on what your own faith journey looks like. It's none of my business, you know, that's for you to navigate.

Eli McCann [00:59:38] And they've never, you know, they've returned the same to me. We just sort of are there for each other and support each other and that's kind of it. It's really never been a point of contention in my family, fortunately.

John Dehlin [00:59:51] Love it. Okay, a couple micro questions, isn't it? I don't know if this is a statement about human nature or Mormonism in particular, or both, but isn't it interesting that you make it all the way through your BYU undergrad, all the way through law school, into multiple years in your profession, having not, you know, done the quick marriage to a woman kind of thing, and you're who you are and your organist, you know, there's lots of potential tells that you're not on the normal track for a Mormon male and you have this family that you love and who loves you, and you can make it, although, and there are people with suspicions, and yet you can make it the 27, 28, 29, including moving to an island with another man and living with that man, and somehow the conversation never comes up. I mean, what does that say about humans or Mormons or both?

Eli McCann [01:00:49] Yeah, I mean, that's a really interesting question. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. I mean, one of the answers is there, there must have been more people who had figured it out and were just too polite to, to say it to me. There must have been.

John Dehlin [01:01:03] Or afraid.

Eli McCann [01:01:04] Or afraid. Or, you know, whatever. Whatever it is that they just never. They never said anything to me. I think the other thing is in. In hindsight, when I lay out all the details, the way I just have, it all feels really obvious. I think I was better at hiding it than those details. Sort of suggest you could.

John Dehlin [01:01:28] What's the term? Present? Or you could present more straight maybe.

Eli McCann [01:01:32] Yeah, back then. I don't try as hard now because whatever. But I think I could present a little more straight back then. And I had really good reasons for all of the life choices that I was making. It was like, oh, I do date, date. Just that, you know, I've been so busy and like, I'm. Maybe I'm just one of those people who just marries a little bit later. You know, I would approach it that way. Or like this guy moving to Palau with me. It was like I was moving to Plow. And I just kept saying, like, I'm just trying to recruit like, any.

Eli McCann [01:02:01] Because I have this big apartment down there. I'm just trying to recruit any friend who wants to move down there with me. And. And I would talk about it with friends and like, do you want to take a year and just like come down and whatever. And. And then finally I was able to say Daniel just finished school and he said that, like, he has time and he's at least going to come down and look for a job because he has free boarding anyway. And. And it was like, the people in my life were like, that's amazing. If he can find a job down there, that would be so cool for you guys to both be down there.

Eli McCann [01:02:25] It just, I think for a lot of people in our lives, it just never looked that obvious because there was always kind of an excuse for why my life was going the way it was going. But then in hindsight, it's like, oh, obviously you were a gay couple moving down there together, you know.

John Dehlin [01:02:41] Yeah. Well, that, you know, that takes me to the next thing that comes to mind. One of the funniest. You've probably never seen this, but one of the funniest moments in over 2100 episodes on Mormon stories and 10,000 hours was when my friend Gerardo Sumano tells the story of falling in love with his now husband at byu, Idaho.

John Dehlin [01:03:06] But as BYU students, they move in together and how they hide that from their bishop and from everyone around them and how one blames. When the bishop confronts them. Finally, one blames the other and says he's gay. I'm not I'm trying to help him. You know, it's a phenomenal story, but it reminds me that, you know, that idea of two BYU Idaho gay students getting legally married while they're BYU Idaho State students and living together is mind blowing.

John Dehlin [01:03:35] I'm kind of mind blown by the idea of a gay Mormon young men's president because when I was going through my faith crisis, they wouldn't let me near the young men's because they viewed that as like the most sacred calling of all is being over the youth.

John Dehlin [01:03:52] Because, like, that's the most important thing to the church is that the youth become faithful Mormons as adults. And so the idea of a actively gay but closeted young men's president in modern Mormonism is kind of blowing my mind.

Eli McCann [01:04:08] Well, you know, what's really remarkable about that story is, you know, again, we were in Palau pretending to be straight, right? And you know, we, as far as we knew, the whole, the entire branch just thought we were like a couple of like roommates who just finished college and were like bunking together.

Eli McCann [01:04:27] And Skyler, my husband and I went back to Palau for our honeymoon a number of years ago. That was the only time I had returned to the island. And while we were there, I said I was no longer in the church. I'd left. But I said, we do need to go to this branch on Sunday because there are a lot of people I want to see and this is going to be the most efficient way to see them. So I brought my husband on our honeymoon to this branch and gave. And they were, you know, wonderful. They welcomed us. They had me introduce Skyler. I was very open about that.

Eli McCann [01:04:58] I said, I just married him. This is our honeymoon. People hugged him, embraced him. It was, you know, it was really, really went really well. And at the end of services, I was standing over in the corner with this boy now man named Scarli, who was one of the young men that I had taught. And I said to him, do you think everybody is shocked that, you know, I'm gay and I'm married to a man now? And Scarli laughed and he said, they called me Skull Bettong. It was like the nickname they had given me. He said, oh, Skobaton, we all knew you guys were gay the whole time. And I said, really? Like everybody knew.

John Dehlin [01:05:36] Like, I'd say the branch president knew everybody.

Eli McCann [01:05:39] He said, oh, Scobatong, the branch president knew the branch. Everybody knew you were gay. He said we'd all talked about it. And he said we, we were all just hoping that you would one day finally be happy. And. And you know, I think, wow, beautiful. Yeah, it was really beautiful. And I think that a little bit of that is cultural down there, that the. These are just like. I hate how patronizing it sounds when we do we to go to like islands and like, oh, these are the most salt of the earth people. I'm not trying to do that, but my experience with Palauans and with this branch of Palauans is that they are just like an incredibly loving, empathetic people.

Eli McCann [01:06:17] And so, like, it doesn't surprise me that that was the case, but it was kind of funny that I was like, you guys all knew I was gay and living with a man, and yet you still let me be the young men president. Like, that's. I don't think that would happen in

John Dehlin [01:06:30] Utah or it would. In fact, I was just going to. This may not blow you away. I'm sorry. I'm scheduled to interview a man who I've met who was growing up in, you know, raising his family in Utah county, married to a woman, lots of kids, privately enters into a gay relationship with another man and then is called as a bishop while he's in a secret relationship with the man. And he serves five years as a Mormon bishop in Utah county while he's in a relationship on the side with another man. Wow. I haven't interviewed that person yet, but that's coming. And anyway, it's just I'm finding graduated stories that kind of blow my mind. But anything's possible in a culture where you don't talk about the hard stuff. You know what I mean?

Eli McCann [01:07:21] Yeah, yeah, I think that's true. That's really interesting though.

John Dehlin [01:07:24] Isn't that wild? So you've never heard of something like that?

Eli McCann [01:07:28] No.

John Dehlin [01:07:29] A gay Mormon bishop?

Eli McCann [01:07:30] No. That's a first for me.

John Dehlin [01:07:32] Yeah. Well, that's common. Unless this person changes their mind and gets cold feet, which I would get really quickly. And this isn't some sort of gotcha. But I am curious, you know, did you just not ask for a temple recommend? How did you handle the worthiness interview questions? Were you ever put in a position where you had to be dishonest or lie to your bishop to be a gay Mormon young men's president, or did you just find a way to just never have to have that conversation?

Eli McCann [01:08:03] I think the last temple recommend I got. I might be misremembering this. I think the last temple recommend I got was before I started dating a man.

John Dehlin [01:08:14] Okay.

Eli McCann [01:08:16] I don't remember having a worthiness Interview to become Young Men president.

John Dehlin [01:08:22] Yeah.

Eli McCann [01:08:23] I think I may have been asked if I had a temple recommend, and my answer truthfully was, yes, I have a temple recommend. I'm not using it, you know, and I probably wouldn't get one now if I answered all of your questions very literally. I don't recall ever lying in a temple recommend interview. And I. If I had, I would. I would own up to that because I wouldn't feel bad about it at this point. Truly, this isn't me like. Like pretending anything otherwise, but I don't recall ever having to lie in a temple recommend interview.

John Dehlin [01:08:56] I mean, it's kind of a. For you, it functioned as a don't ask, don't tell culture in both ways. And that's not terrible, actually. I mean, at least it sounds like it wasn't for you.

Eli McCann [01:09:08] No. And I think the further and further along I got in my church activity, the more I had taken on kind of a personal philosophy of. Of I know my own heart. And so to the extent that I believe in this and I'm being asked, am I worthy to participate in these things that I believe in, yes, I do feel like I am worthy to participate in these things. And, you know, this is a religion and a culture that doesn't actually demand that you be perfect in order to participate in the rites and ceremonies. Right. Otherwise, nobody could do it because we're all imperfect. And so it was sort of in my mind, I was just like, well, nobody who's going to the temple and getting a temple recommend is following every single commandment exactly to the T.

Eli McCann [01:09:52] And so if I feel like I believe in this thing and that I personally feel worthy to. To participate in it, and I feel worthy of God's love or whatever else, then I'm not going to let my little thing, whatever it is, be the thing that keeps me away from participating in the religion and the way everybody else gets to.

John Dehlin [01:10:09] I love it. Okay, I'm going to return to a question I asked earlier, and then I want to talk about prop. Sorry, about the November 15 policy and its reversal. It's a very different thing to have the LGBT Mormon experience and to process your own beliefs in your faith. And there's this whole narrative that almost everyone I've ever interviewed has to talk about when they talk about. About deconstruction, which is their belief in God, their belief in Jesus and the atonement, and specifically, like Joseph Smith's polygamy and the Book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon and the truth claims of the Church and that sort of thing.

Leaving the Church and Resigning Membership

John Dehlin [01:10:50] And you can stop going to church but still believe all those things, or you can even be mad at the church and still believe all those things and be like what they would call a Jack Mormon. But. But people oftentimes aren't able to fully heal and move on until they've also had that parallel faith, belief and even history and truth claims, reconciliation. And I don't want to make presumptions about you, but have you had that ladder or not really?

Eli McCann [01:11:18] I feel like in some ways I took a third path on this. And what that was was as I started dating and whatever, and I felt like. Like, yeah, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. Around that time, a lot of the truth claims started falling apart for me. And I did spend some time trying to think about them. Like, okay, well, what do I believe if I don't believe the church is right about this thing? Do I even believe in prophets? I'm not sure. Maybe. What about Joseph Smith? How did the Book of Mormon come? You know, I was asking myself a lot of those questions.

Eli McCann [01:11:49] I eventually got to a point where I realized that I just honestly didn't care and that this is where I am now. For the most part, I just don't care whether it's true. I don't care whether there's a God. And that may sound so flippant, and I don't mean for it to be, but the reason why I got to a point where I don't care is because I'd spent so much of my life thinking about God. What is God? What does it mean in my life? All these things that surround that belief and the belief system and the navigating the beliefs themselves, as opposed to the culture surrounding it really mostly only ever brought me angst.

Eli McCann [01:12:38] It made me feel really worried and scared about my future. And I sort of have developed my value system that matters to me, that feels right, that brings me peace. You know, I feel like it's important to invest in my community, to be kind to others, to try to have empathy, you know, all of these things, build a family, raise my child, to be a good contributor to the community around them, to see other people as people, you know, all of this stuff. And I got to a point where I thought, okay, this is how I'm going to live my life, whether or not I believe in God.

Eli McCann [01:13:19] God, this is how I'm going to live my life. Whether or not God is a thing that is even aware of me. And once I get to the end of my life. If I discover that there was as a matter of fact this God that was standing by the whole time ready to judge me for my life actions. If I've lived my life this way, I don't see why I would have any problem saying, oh, didn't know you were real. Nice to meet you. I stand by this entire life that I just live, lived. And so if that's how I feel in that scenario, why am I spending any of my time, my personal time?

Eli McCann [01:13:54] This is very personal to me. I can totally understand why other people want to find answers on these religious questions. Why would I want to spend any more of my life trying to figure out who this God person, figure is and whether or not they have any hand in this church. That was a big part of my upbringing bringing.

Eli McCann [01:14:14] And at this point, I don't feel compelled to spend my time on that. It's not something that is all that interesting to me anymore. And so yet to answer that, the question of do you still believe in God? My answer is I don't know and I don't really care.

John Dehlin [01:14:33] And then how do you reconcile this idea of if you're wrong, maybe he sends you to hell, or if you're wrong, maybe he sends you the celestial kingdom because you weren't part of the right, one true church that had the authority, that kind of thing?

Eli McCann [01:14:46] There's just no part of me that can even fathom that there would be some God figure who is hiding away and hid away from me for 30 years, despite my diligence in trying to understand him and follow the commandments and so forth. That made me so miserable to the point that I was living my life in absolute terror that, that God would then be mad that I went on and left, lived a fulfilling life and tried to make the world a better place around me and would send me to some sort of a version of hell. There's no part of me that can fathom that that's even a possibility. And if it is, I just, I don't want to spend my life engaged in believing in that kind of God anyway. So let it be what it is. But I just, I can't even fathom that that is the actual path for me.

John Dehlin [01:15:31] Yeah, I'm feeling some dissonance in how I'm processing your story because I said earlier you're in the 99th percentile of like what appears to be a healthy gay Mormon experience. And you just said that you lived your entire first couple decades in terror.

Eli McCann [01:15:46] Yeah, yeah. And I'm talking about in Particular as it pertains to the belief structure. Right. Like, again, I had plenty of happy moments as a child, but none of those happy moments were a result of me believing in God. Right. It was all a result of me having very loving parents and a community around me. That was terrific.

John Dehlin [01:16:08] Yeah.

Eli McCann [01:16:09] When it came to navigating my feelings and beliefs around what the church was teaching, that mostly just produced terror for me.

John Dehlin [01:16:17] Right. My wife often now says beliefs are overrated. And it just sounds like you kind of consciously or unconsciously kind of figured that out and you never allowed yourself to get too invested in the belief parts of Mormon.

Eli McCann [01:16:34] Yeah. I mean, I think I feel that true, especially on the back end of navigating all of this.

John Dehlin [01:16:39] Yeah, yeah. I mean, relative to other people, because you were in terror, so clearly they affected you, but not like they have other people.

Eli McCann [01:16:48] Yeah. And I also, I want to be careful about how, again, I'm talking about my own experience here. I know I have people in my life who have a lot of beliefs around this, and those beliefs bring them comfort. And I never want to discount that. You know, we. You and I both know plenty of people for whom a belief in God brings them an immense amount of comfort and direction. And. And I believe that experience is very valid. It's just that the experiences that I've had with religion, that's not. That's not the way I feel about any of this at this point.

John Dehlin [01:17:26] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Beautiful. Thank you so much for everything you're willing and able to share with us. Really. Let's talk. So you're losing your faith. My calendar puts you at like 2012. 2013, starting in there.

Eli McCann [01:17:42] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:17:43] And do you remember what year you resigned? Was it after the November 2015 policy before?

Eli McCann [01:17:49] I mean, I said I stopped going to church altogether in 2013. That was the last time I attended. I waited to actually resign until it wasn't until 2022. So it's been like four years.

John Dehlin [01:18:00] Okay. Okay. So talk about now. You've left the church by the time the November 2015 policy comes out and same sex marriage is legalized throughout the nation. By the way, do you want to talk about how you experienced the November 2015 policy and its reversal afterwards?

Eli McCann [01:18:16] Yeah. You know that. So that happened 2015. That was the same year that I met my husband. And, you know, by this point, it didn't affect me on a personal, practical level because I was never going to try and raise a kid in the church anyway. You know, and I didn't see any scenario where, like, I had A child. And that child wanted to get baptized and disavow me, you know, I guess that's a possibility when, see, my kid is two now. Check back in a few years.

John Dehlin [01:18:46] What about just as someone raised Mormon, when you heard the news that the church was making same sex marriage mandatory excommunication and that kids couldn't be members, kids of gay Mormons couldn't be married, couldn't get baptized, had to renounce their parents at 18 to get baptized. Just emotionally and culturally as someone who loves our people. Yeah. How did you receive that?

Eli McCann [01:19:12] It pissed me off. Yeah. I think that was probably the most angry I've ever been at the church institution was that period and that particular moment. And because it felt to me at the time like just twisting the knife, you know, it just sort of thought like what I remember thinking, what is the point of this? You know, what are you actually accomplishing? I know the church had its reasoning, supposedly that they. Well, this was to help keep families together and not make difficult decisions. And. No, no, it wasn't.

John Dehlin [01:19:50] Children wouldn't be confused.

Eli McCann [01:19:51] Yeah, no, it wasn't. That was never what that was about. And to me, you know, I don't think that every church leader is cruel by nature, but I do think that that was a cruel thing to do. I felt that at the time. I still feel that now. I am not surprised it was reversed. I think public pressure is the result is why it was reversed. You know, I, I know the church institution says over the years, you know, we, we listen to God, we don't succumb, succumb to public pressure. Yes, they do. We've, we see it all the time. It happens all the time.

Eli McCann [01:20:25] And this was one of those instances where I think they got a lot of backlash and they were just, we have to walk this one back. And when they walked it back, it was just sort of like, okay, well good, but you shouldn't have done it in the first place, you know, whatever. But all of this to say, I think 2015 was the first time where I thought, should I actually even get my records removed? Because I was sort of resigned to just like, I'm just going to go away and just be done with this.

Eli McCann [01:20:50] But I had never intended to remove my records and I thought about it for a bit there and the hesitation for me me was, does this really matter? Like, does it matter if I'm on their records and if I get my records removed, might it make my parents feel bad? And you know, and I didn't know the. I truly didn't know the answer to that. I didn't think my parents really thought I was ever coming back. But it was just sort of like one more thing that if they're not seeing my name on the list of family members anymore, like, it might make them sad.

Eli McCann [01:21:23] And so there was a big part of me, it was like, is this even worth it? Maybe it doesn't matter that I'm on this. And so I ended up going through several years of that back and forth that is probably familiar to a lot of your listeners, where I would get myself riled up and I'd be like, I don't want to be on. You know, the church would do something that made me mad. I don't want to be listed among their ranks. I don't want to be associated with this anymore. And I want to communicate to them that, you know, I don't approve. And this is the best way that I can do that, is get my record removed.

Eli McCann [01:21:48] And then I'd be like, but is that in a way, you know, giving the church power over me? Because I'm telling them that I think it matters whether they consider me a member. You know, I would go back and forth and what if it makes my parents feel bad? No, they probably don't care about this, you know, and it just almost felt schizophrenic about the way I was dealing with this. And I would talk to my husband about this, who had never been religious, who was just like, what does any of this matter? You know, I remember him one day saying, eli, I am so sorry if this is disrespectful, but this to me seems as momentous as canceling a Netflix subscription. And I don't know why we're still talking about this, you know, and so.

John Dehlin [01:22:21] Wow.

Eli McCann [01:22:22] So we, we finally get to. I had my, my church records had been like transferred to my parents ward at some point. And so I would occasionally get emails asking me to like sign up for tithing settlement or sign up for the ward talent show. At one time signed up my parents to do comedy magic and drag. Like, I just went in and signed them up for that. So like I was having a good time with these emails, but. But I would periodically email the person back who had emailed from the ward and say, hey, I'm not in the church anymore. Can you please remove me from this list?

Eli McCann [01:22:53] And I would never hear from them. Like, they would never respond to that. I would just get the next mass email. And I think it was just disorganization in the ward. Well, one day in 2022, I got an email from the bishop of this ward and I didn't know him, it's my parents bishop. And it was an email, as I recall, about the proclamation on the family and about how it was divinely inspired.

Eli McCann [01:23:17] And here I am in 2022, this gay man in a marriage and I'm getting an email about like, isn't the proclamation of the family so great? And we all know the implications of that. You know, the proclamation being used as a weapon against gay families for three

John Dehlin [01:23:33] decades now, men and women and only legitimate marriage is a male marriage of the male and the female.

Eli McCann [01:23:39] Right?

John Dehlin [01:23:39] Yeah.

Eli McCann [01:23:40] And I got this email and it just, just pissed me off. And so I emailed this bishop back and I just said, I have been asking you people to take me off this email list for years. Nobody is responding to me, nobody is being respectful. I do not want to receive this bullshit anymore. I don't know if I can swear here.

Eli McCann [01:24:00] And, and I said, what, do I have to actually get my church records removed in order for you guys to leave me alone? And I hit send and then I went to bed. And then the next morning I woke up and I regretted it because I was just like, that was more regret. And this is my parents neighbor and now it's going to be awkward with them between them. And this bishop emailed me back and he was really apologetic and he just said, I am so sorry. I did not know you had been asking to be taken off. Absolutely. I'll make sure you don't get these emails anymore.

Eli McCann [01:24:31] And he said, I'm a brand new bishop. I'm not totally sure how the record removal process is new to me, but I am happy to help you navigate that if that's something you want to pursue. And so at this point I just thought, you know what, I, I'm sick of thinking about this and talking about this. Maybe I should just get this over with.

Eli McCann [01:24:48] And so I ended up, he, he said, you can send me a notarized letter or if you want to meet with me, I'll meet with you anywhere. And you can like sign a letter in my presence and I'll take it from there. And I said, well, you know, you're my parents neighbor. I'm to be in my parents neighborhood on Thursday. Can I just stop by your house and just like do it? I, I'm happy to just stop by. And so he said, great. And so I, I go to my parents house and I felt like I needed to tell them, you know, I'M going to be doing this.

Eli McCann [01:25:14] I don't want you to be caught off guard. And sure enough, my parents were, like, completely supportive. And my. My mom was like, well, Eli, you left. You haven't gone to church in, like, a decade, you know.

John Dehlin [01:25:25] And.

Eli McCann [01:25:26] And I said, yeah. And she said, said, why would we be worried about you doing this at this point? And they were very supportive. And so I end up going to this bishop's house, and I go sit in his living room, and we have this small talk for a while. It felt like a home teaching.

Eli McCann [01:25:44] And I can hear his family in the other room all kind of whispering. And I'm sure they all knew this awkward meeting was happening and whatever. And after about 20 minutes, the bishop finally said to me, I'm sorry to. Did you. Did you bring. Did you bring it? And I said, bring what? And he said, the letter. Like, you were. You're supposed to give me a letter to resign. And I said, oh, no, I didn't bring anything. I just thought you had, like, a form I could sign or something. And so he said, oh, no, no, no, you need to write a letter. But I'll go get my laptop.

Eli McCann [01:26:13] We can just write it right now. And so he hands me his laptop, and I go to type this letter. And I said to him, well, what is it? Like, what do I say? Like, what are the words I use here? I've never done this. And he. He said, well, I don't. I don't know. And he's like, let me look up something. So this poor bishop starts Googling, like, anti Mormon websites for how do you resign from the church? And as he's doing that, I start typing. And as I'm typing, just the most formal, like, religious language starts coming out of me. And I'm just like, dear the church from the mountaintops, I hereby relinquish forevermore unto you my everlasting covenant.

Eli McCann [01:26:52] You know, I'm just, like, writing all of this. I'm like, what is coming out of me right now? It was like I was killing a Horcrux or something, and it was just pouring out of me. And I turned the laptop to the bishop. I'm like, will this work? And he looks down and he reads it, and he just looks so puzzled. And he said, well, I think they'll get the point. And so I was like, okay, great. So he goes and prints it, comes back in, hands me the piece of paper and a pen, and I'm sitting on his couch in the living room, and I see said do you have a book or something I can sign this on?

Eli McCann [01:27:19] And the bishop is like, sure. So he reaches over to this table next to me and puts his hand on this book, and then pauses, and I look down, and he has his hand on the largest copy of the Book of Mormon I have ever seen in my life. And I can see him, like, calculating in his head, like, should I should. Should I hand him a Book of Mormon to sign his resignation letter on top of as a table? And I start laughing. And I said to. To him, actually, I think that's perfect. And he said, what? What do you mean? And I said, I mean, it's really poetic that that's the book that started it all.

Eli McCann [01:27:50] It might as well be the book that ends it all, too. And so he started laughing, too. And he handed me the book, and I signed my letter, and I'm laughing so hard by this point. Just that, like, it just. This was so silly to me. And I hand him the letter, and he wishes me luck and walks me to the door, and I left. And it was the most joyful resignation I could have ever possibly imagine happening. And I. And I will tell you the funny thing about all of this is I left, and I honestly wasn't happy I did it or regretful, and I've never.

Eli McCann [01:28:19] Either way. Like, I'm just like, yeah, whatever. It. I did it, and I don't. I didn't feel empowered by it, and I haven't regretted it. It's just, like, a thing I did, which suggests that my husband was correct. I was overthinking all of this way too much. But, yeah, that was how I. I resigned from the church in 2022.

John Dehlin [01:28:36] Love that story. Love that story. That's, yeah, probably the most joyous resignation. He was supposed to make you have a notary public sign your letter, by the way.

Eli McCann [01:28:49] Oh, he was, yeah. Oh, funny.

John Dehlin [01:28:51] But it's fine.

Eli McCann [01:28:54] It seemed to work. I did get a confirmation letter from headquarters.

John Dehlin [01:28:58] Yeah, they can do what they want. Really. I've. Obviously. So I'm just reflecting. It's kind of interesting because I had a couple cousins, Mormon cousins from Utah, come out as gay in the early 90s, like your uncle. And that's when I first started paying attention to this issue. And then when I learned about Stuart Mattis suicide in 2000 and Prop 22 and then Prop 8. And then I moved to Utah in 2004, and I started learning about what I. I perceived to be the suicide crisis of LGBT men, mostly in Utah, as early as 2004, and then I learned about the history of conversion therapy and even the electroshark therapy.

John Dehlin [01:29:41] I was furious as a straight guy, as a Mormon straight guy that was still trying to make the church work. So there's a part of my brain that struggles to wrap its mind around the fact that it. And this is in judgment that it took you until the November policy to get angry, especially after you've graduated from law school. There could have been a lot of points where you might have been able to come across that history and really start wrapping your brain around it and getting angry, as I did. But of course, the brain can compartmentalize, and motivated reasoning in the brain can be a powerful thing.

John Dehlin [01:30:16] And you were enjoying your Mormon experience until you weren't. So how do you make sense of the fact that it took you so long to get it angry? Well, I'm not judging you.

Eli McCann [01:30:25] No, no, no, no, I. I get it. To clarify, 2015 was the peak of my.

John Dehlin [01:30:30] Okay, okay, the peak.

Eli McCann [01:30:31] Maybe I misquoted.

John Dehlin [01:30:33] Maybe I misquoted you.

Eli McCann [01:30:34] No, no, no, no. You're, you're. And maybe I misquoted myself, but I had moments of anger before that. You know, I mentioned the experience in Palau when I felt rage about the general authority, for example. You know, I. I had moments like that. Honestly, I didn't know. Know really anything about conversion therapy until after I came out, because it wasn't my experience. I didn't know that was something that people were engaging in or what that looked like. You know, I think in. On a.

John Dehlin [01:31:00] You didn't do it?

Eli McCann [01:31:00] No, I didn't do it on a theoretical level. Like, I, I knew the concept of pray the gay away, you know, but, you know, beyond the fact that people might have been praying to not be gay anymore, I didn't know that, you know, electroshock therapy, I don't think I had ever heard of that until after I came out.

Eli McCann [01:31:20] Once I started learning about that, that really angered me quite a lot. And I would say I went through a period probably from about 2014ish until 2018ish, where I felt pretty angry at the church. It started subsiding after that. And that was a very personal choice that I had made because I was just. I just didn't want to. I didn't want to live like that. It didn't feel good.

Eli McCann [01:31:46] And I decided around then I wanted to make a very conscious choice to try to understand what exactly am I angry at and not paint everything with a broad brushstroke. And what, What I did that was healthy for me is I said, okay, I think that I can separate three really distinct things here. One is the church institution, the corporation, and the vast majority of the anger that I have ever felt is at that.

Eli McCann [01:32:11] And I personally don't want to spend a lot of my time raging against that piece because it doesn't feel good. It's. I don't like. I've spent time, spent so much of my life thinking about the institution, I don't want to spend the rest of it still thinking about the institution. That's not to say I'm not staying abreast of what they're up to and sometimes being outspoken and vocal about it. But from a day to day perspective, that is just not something that I want to put my time and energy into. Piece two is the people.

Eli McCann [01:32:37] And by and large, I don't have a beef with the people. Mormon Mormonism is like any other group that you can find. There are some terrific people in it, and there are some people I don't want to live next to. And I. I've had a view of religion for a long time, that religion doesn't tend to make people good or bad. It just magnifies who they are. And I know a lot of active Latter Day Saints who use their religion to magnify the absolute best parts of themselves. And that's who I surround myself with. And I love them.

Eli McCann [01:33:05] Number three is the culture. And I mostly just find the culture funny, you know, and. And so. So I have tended to want to spend. When I'm thinking about and talking about Mormonism. I wanted to spend most of my energy around those second and third pieces because that feels healthy to me. But, you know, make no mistake, I do find plenty of reasons to be angry at what piece number one does.

John Dehlin [01:33:28] Beautiful. So well said. Thank you. There was this sort of momentum for LGBT advocacy in Utah that kind of peaked around the Love Loud Imagine Dragons, Tyler Glenn in Circle House sort of stuff. Even equality Utah, let's just say again, 2016, 2017. And then it just kind of a few years ago, just took a dark turn where Utah was just, you know, Governor Cox was declaring Encircle Day for the entire state. And, you know, everyone was. It almost seemed like everybody was going to Utah Pride and marching, including Mormons, you know, active, faithful Mormons.

Eli McCann [01:34:17] Mormons building bridges.

John Dehlin [01:34:18] Mormons building bridges. Right. And then like, as the, as the political culture kind of shifted, it almost feels like we went backwards and regressed in many ways as a culture to where I feel more hostility sometimes in Utah towards LGBT people and faithful Mormons now, especially on YouTube, than I did in 2004. I'm wondering if you have, you know, you chosen to live here in Utah with a husband after you've resigned from the church. I'm wondering why you've chosen to stay in Utah when so many others move and then how you've experienced that cultural shift. If you've experienced it as I have.

Life in Salt Lake City as an Out Gay Man

Eli McCann [01:35:07] Yeah. Question number one, why stay here? I. I do. I love it here. We live in Salt Lake City. We have a really, really strong support network around us, and I feel like there's a lot of work to be done, and I'm actively engaged in that work.

Eli McCann [01:35:21] And so, you know, that that's kind of the simple answer to that. The have we regressed? To what degree have we regressed? Question is a lot more complicated to answer, in my view. I. I agree that in kind of the mid teens era, it did sort of feel like this kumbaya that we had never seen before, and that to some degree, we are not seeing right now.

Eli McCann [01:35:50] I also would caution us to think that we have regressed more than we actually have in our state, in our culture, on LGBTQ issues. For example, it was only about two years ago that our legislature passed a unanimous ban on conversion therapy. Unanimously passed it, and the governor signed it proudly.

Eli McCann [01:36:17] We are still actually actively seeing some progress on the legal and policy issues here. Here. When I was in college in 2007, I was in a conflict resolution class and we were supposed to debate together controversial issues. And one guy in our class asked if we could have a debate about same sex marriage. And the professor said, I'm not sure if that's something appropriate to talk about here. And the guy asked, well, can we please just debate it? And so the professor allowed it it. And this guy said, I think that same sex marriage should be legal. And this entire class of people shouted at him for the next hour about they could not believe he should have his ecclesiastical endorsement revoked and his temple recommend for even suggesting such a thing.

Eli McCann [01:37:07] That was 2007. I guarantee you, if you went to a BYU class today and said, how many of you are in favor of same sex marriage? Most of those classes, you would have a majority of students proudly raising their hand.

Eli McCann [01:37:21] So I want us to be really, really careful when we talk about have we regressed? I would, as a gay man, be so much more comfortable being a student on that campus today than 20 years ago. I might be more comfortable being on that campus 10 years ago as opposed to today. I'm not sure.

Eli McCann [01:37:40] And so I do think there is a little bit of steps forward and backwards that are happening here, but the pendulum is swinging, bringing more in the direction of progress. Even if we sometimes are seeing some setbacks in our culture, it'll be really interesting to see what happens in the coming years. Now, of course, a lot of what is driving this feeling of regression is a deep division on trans issues in particular.

Eli McCann [01:38:04] And I think, you know, 10, 12 years ago, the focus was really on gays and lesbians and rights around gays and lesbians. And I think think a big chunk of our culture, including active Latter Day Saints, had been moved finally to a degree that they. They didn't feel nearly as conflicted on rights as it pertains specifically to gay and lesbian people. They weren't yet thinking about trans issues. And so as trans issues have kind of come become the forefront of these debates, I think that that has bled over into just a general sense of division among a lot of people about how should we be thinking about any LGBTQ issues.

Eli McCann [01:38:44] It'll be interesting to see how that settles out. And, you know, they're going to continue to be hopefully, really thoughtful conversations on these issues. But as somebody who engages in the advocacy space, I work with Equality you Time. I'm on the board of Equality you, Time, very actively engaged there, and I am an optimist at nature. But I do feel like, in the grand scheme of things, we are going to continue to see progress, even if we feel setbacks along the way. That's how I feel about it right now. Now.

John Dehlin [01:39:13] Beautiful. I love it. This may be something you don't want to comment about, but I am curious. I think it's fair to ask. When Governor Cox declined to declare whatever June is, Pride Month, and instead called it Fidelity Month, did you speak publicly about how you felt about that? Is that the type of thing where you think it's wiser to maybe not speak publicly about that? That for the sake of the overall progress?

Eli McCann [01:39:45] I can't remember if I personally said anything about that one. I'm going to get myself into trouble. But a lot of these kinds of issues, the declaring something Pride Month or Fidelity Month, the flag wars that we engaged in, a couple of legislative sessions

John Dehlin [01:40:02] with, the rainbow flags.

Eli McCann [01:40:03] Yeah, I mean, a lot of it. And. And I know symbols are incredibly important for people. A lot of the fights around these symbols, especially when the legislature is putting time and energy and attention and money into these things, there is a feeling in me that is just sort of like, really, we have nothing better to talk about here, and I think I feel a little bit about that around declarations. I think it's great when the governor is willing to recognize Pride Month. I think it's meaningful to a lot of people.

Eli McCann [01:40:33] I'm not gonna personally lose sleep over what Spencer J. Cox has to think, has to say about Pride Month. That's just me, personally. I. I feel like there are other much more pressing issues, including within the LGBTQ advocacy lane, that just feel like a much bigger deal to me now. If. If there are others who are listening to this who are very vocal about that, please don't be offended. Like, by all means, speak about whatever is. Whatever compels you. That is an issue that just for me personally, has not been something where I put my time and energy. Cue the angry emails.

John Dehlin [01:41:07] No, that's great. Thank you for that. So let's talk quickly about you becoming an author and writing your book and working for the Trib as well. Well, how did Peggy. I had no idea the connection between you and Robert Kirby and Peggy. How did you get identified as a talent for writing and what's it been like to write for the Trib? And then we'll talk about your book.

Eli McCann [01:41:40] Okay. Yeah. So I have a website that I've been writing out for years, like a blog, personal blog, called it just getstranger.com and I just write humor stories there. And it's developed a following over the years. And one day, Peggy reached out to me on Twitter and she said, hey, we'd never met before. She said, hey, I'd really love to meet up with you. I'd love to meet you. And we got lunch together, and at the end of lunch, she said, I've read a lot of what you're writing. We used to have this humorist at the Tribune, Robert Kirby. He retired, and we really need somebody to replace him.

Eli McCann [01:42:18] And I feel like you might be the right voice for the next kind of iteration of what this looks like for the Tribune. Would you have any interest? I love. I love the Salt Lake Tribune, so I was happy to do it. And so I started writing these columns for them. And it. It has been an incredibly therapeutic thing for me to write these columns because they're. They're really an exploration of largely how Mormonism has impacted my life. And there's. It's stories that I'm sharing, you know, a lot, you know, from childhood, some present day and so forth. And I think in writing these columns, it has helped me process some of the aspects of my Mormon upbringing that I Hadn't even realized I hadn't yet processed.

Eli McCann [01:43:00] And so, you know, we, after four years of doing this, I mentioned, you know, we decided to put it together into a book. And the way this book actually came about was I. I simultaneously was writing a novel that's coming out on September 8th, and the novel's called Stitched, and it's inspired by my mother. It's about older women quilting together for decades and then preparing for a competition against their bitter rivals. And so I was kind of getting ready to sign a publishing contract for that book. And I started having conversations with Signature Book who they were interested in that novel. But I had already had a publisher for that, that and Signature Barbara said, well, if you tell us when you're ready to publish something else, because we would love to work with you.

Eli McCann [01:43:44] And I said to her, well, I wonder if we could just take my humor columns and just put them in a book together. I'd really love to do that. And the Signature was interested. The Tribune was thrilled to do it as well. And so that's how this book came about. And it was so interesting putting the columns together because I had to go back over four years and take them and organize them. And I first went through the columns and I read them in chronological order of, you know, when I wrote them. And I realized that first of all, my. My child was born kind of around the two year mark of this, four years of writing these.

Eli McCann [01:44:21] And I saw, I noticed my columns became noticeably sappier after he was born. I was like, oh, fatherhood has changed me, you know. But I also noticed that the writing felt healthier and healthier as I went along. And I don't think I had even realized until I just kind of read them as a collection that, oh, I think that this has been a healthy practice for me as I've looked back at my childhood and found things that I'm now reflecting on that I'm like, I'm actually really thankful for that piece of my childhood that I've never really thought that much about before. So I think that's been really good for me.

Eli McCann [01:44:56] And then I really reorganized the columns to be chronological with my life so that childhood stories are more at the front and adult stories more at the back. And we released this book, We're Thankful for the Moisture in February of this year. And so I've been going around and talking about it and it's been an awful lot of fun.

John Dehlin [01:45:13] What are some of the essays or the chapters? Hold up the book really quick. Hold it up towards your face so everyone can see it. There's the book. Everyone go buy it right now. Go to Amazon, go to Signature, go to Benchmark Books. We love Benchmark Books. Buy this book. Buy it for friends and family, cousins, everyone.

Eli McCann [01:45:33] I also recorded the audiobook for it.

John Dehlin [01:45:34] Oh, that's amazing. So you can listen to it on audible as well. Yeah, just to give people a flavor. Pick maybe five or so of the most popular, well received or your favorite chapters or essays so that people can feel enticed to want to.

Eli McCann [01:45:50] Well, I. I wrote a story in the book about being 10 years old and my childhood best friend Sam and I were obsessed with the Sound of Music and the nuns from the Sound of Music. He's also gay now too. And we would sing operatically like we were the nuns from Sound of Music. And so when Halloween was coming, we asked our moms like, please, can you please make us non costumes? We want to be the nuns from Sound of Music. And this is before the Internet, really. And so our mom moms had to figure out how to make nun costumes without consulting the Internet.

Eli McCann [01:46:19] And so the story is about our Latter Day Saint mothers turning us into holy drag queens for Halloween. And we marched up and down the street singing how do you solve a problem like Maria? And we were such a hit in the neighborhood that there was an encore requested. And so we were nuns again the next year. And so the essay is about that and about now being adults and both of us became dads at the same time and, and reflecting on that and, and just sort of how remarkable it was that we two little flamboyant gay boys marching up and down the street like nuns from the Sound of Music.

Eli McCann [01:46:54] You know, everyone was just so sweet about it and so supportive. So that, that's one of the essays in there. I wrote an essay about my resignation. That story that I just told you is, is in there about resigning from the church. I wrote write a story about living in Palau and being young men president.

Eli McCann [01:47:11] I write the story about how I met my husband, which was a really hilarious experience. And our first date, just a teaser, our first date was at the Kirtland Temple. We were dating long distance and we happened to meet in Cleveland for a wedding. And that was where we met up in person for the first time. And we ended up going to the Kirtland Temple on this museum, to this tour at the museum. And. And that was how we dated. And I have stories in there about new fatherhood and what that's feeling like as well.

John Dehlin [01:47:40] Beautiful love It. All right, so everyone go buy the book and let's make it number one on Amazon's list for Mormon related books. Perfect. No offense, John Turner. Okay. And all the other authors that I love and support, kind of closing question or two. Do you still consider yourself Mormon? And you know, obviously we're in a lawsuit where the church is suing us. We believe well to silence and bankrupt us, but also because we think the church feels really torn about that word and it wants members not to use the word and it wants to still control the word. I would love to hear your thoughts on both the term Mormon and what you think it means and whether you still choose to identify as Mormon or not.

Eli McCann [01:48:28] I love the word Mormon. Now if I'm out in the wild and somebody says, are you Mormon? I will say I grew up Mormon because I think for a lot of people that implies that you're still active in the church. But I love the word Mormon. I love when I talk about my childhood, saying my Mormon upbringing, my Mormon family, I think that that is a word that should be used. To me, it's a word that is much, much, much broader than, than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Eli McCann [01:48:58] There are people who feel a connection to Mormonism who have never been members of the mainstream church. And so, yeah, it's a word that I assign myself on some level. I don't go around saying I am a Mormon because I think it implies that I practice some kind of faith and I don't. But I come from Mormonism, I descend from Mormonism, and I. I'll go the rest of my life describing it that way internally.

John Dehlin [01:49:28] Do you kind of self identify as a Mormon still as. As culturally Mormon, Like a Jew?

Eli McCann [01:49:34] Yeah, culturally, yeah. I would say so, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:49:38] Do you even. You talked about not really feeling invested in spending a lot of time on the institution itself. And yet it seems like the church is kind of in a cool down moment. I don't hear about a lot of LGBTX communications. You hear about LGBT Mormons serving in wards and even getting married and not, you know, same sex married and not being punished or excommunicated for it. Do you have thoughts or feelings around the future of the church as it relates to the LGBT community or not really.

Eli McCann [01:50:12] It's hard for me to imagine a path for the institution that doesn't become more progressive on this issue. I just. It's been my view for 20 years or so that this is a loser issue for them. And I think as leadership dies out and new leadership comes in we're going to see slow, incremental changes. I may be wrong about that. You know, I'll. I'll be watching with some curiosity, but not investment

John Dehlin [01:50:38] as a. As an attorney. Does the fact that the current prophet, Elder Oaks is also an attorney pull any special emotions for you or. Not really.

Eli McCann [01:50:47] Here's what I'll say generously. You know, I don't. There are certain church leaders dead and alive that I have more positive feelings about and more negative feelings about and so forth with him. He's made comments over the years on the gay issue that really were unhelpful. I do appreciate his intention and his efforts to talk about preserving democratic institutions and constitutional principles. And I think his background as a Supreme Court justice and a practicing lawyer, should he continue to use his platform to talk about those issues in a time when we desperately need people to talk about those issues? I applaud that.

John Dehlin [01:51:38] Nice. That's very generous. Okay, let's say there's a young BYU student or a young man or young woman out there who's Mormon and who's gay and who found this in their YouTube feed and is trying to figure out if they can be happy or is feeling tormented or is even questioning whether they have a future at all. Any final words for them?

Finding Peace, Hope, and Looking Forward

Eli McCann [01:52:06] In the words of my good friend Dan Savage, it gets better. I will say there was a time when it was difficult for me to imagine a happy future for myself. And at this stage, I am happy to report that I live an incredibly fulfilling life that I wouldn't trade for anything.

John Dehlin [01:52:33] So have hope. Sounds like you're saying, give them hope.

Eli McCann [01:52:37] Yeah. Have hope.

John Dehlin [01:52:39] Yeah. Okay, what about to faithful Mormon parents or family members of LGBT youth or adults.

Eli McCann [01:52:50] Love them. And, you know, there's nothing that you can say or do that is ever going to change who they are. But there is plenty that you can say or do that is going that can change the relationship you have with them. And so anytime you are navigating what feel like complicated issues to you because of your faith and because of the identity of your child or friend or person that you love, ask yourself, what is the action that I can take that is going to strengthen the relationship with this person the most and let that be your guide it.

John Dehlin [01:53:35] So really quickly, we're at a time where a lot of, let's just say, Gen Z or millennial people are choosing not to get married and choosing not even if they get married, choosing not to have kids. What do you want to say about the choice of getting married and of having kids.

Eli McCann [01:53:54] I mean, I, for you, for me, marriage has, marriage has brought immense happiness to me and parenthood has brought immense happiness to me. I don't think everybody needs to be married to be happy. I don't think everybody needs to be a parent to be happy. I can just say for myself that those have been incredibly worthwhile pursuits in my life. And I don't, I just can't even imagine my life without my husband and my child at this point. So that may be a path for you as well. Well, and I, you know, think about it.

John Dehlin [01:54:26] Yeah. All right. Hold up your book one more time and then I want you to promote your book coming out one more time.

Eli McCann [01:54:32] So tell so this is we're thankful for the moisture. This is my humor collection of essays and then my novel that's coming out on September 8th is called Stitched. And I'm going to be on book tour all this fall around the country. And very it's a New York publisher.

John Dehlin [01:54:48] Right.

Eli McCann [01:54:49] It's, it's Toryhouse Press. It's a local publisher, but it is topping national bestseller list and has all summer on, on pre orders. And so it looks like it, it's going to do pretty well. And so we're really excited about it.

John Dehlin [01:55:02] So you've got a, you told me you got a pretty packed schedule.

Eli McCann [01:55:05] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:55:06] So that's fun.

Eli McCann [01:55:06] Yeah. I'll be traveling around quite a lot September through December talking with people about the book and yeah, we'll, we'll see how it goes.

John Dehlin [01:55:16] I mean, I'm happy we got to help you promote that before the release, but maybe we'll have you if you want. Maybe it makes sense to have you back.

Eli McCann [01:55:24] Yeah, I'm happy to come back and I had a great time, John. Thank you.

John Dehlin [01:55:28] All right. Well, it's Eli McCann if people want to buy pre Amazon pre sales, is it available yet?

Eli McCann [01:55:35] You can find Stitched anywhere you like to pre order books. Barnes and Noble, Amazon Bookshop through your favorite local bookstore. It will be available in Barnes and Noble across the country and in Walmart across the country. So if you love shopping at Walmart in person, that will be available to you next month. And I also recorded the audiobook for Stitched. Currently that's available for pre order on Libro and it should be available any day on Audible as well.

John Dehlin [01:56:02] Okay. And you already said this, but the official launch date of Your book is September 8th. September 8th. All right. That's, it's only a few weeks away.

Eli McCann [01:56:09] I know. I can't wait.

John Dehlin [01:56:11] Congrats.

Eli McCann [01:56:11] Thank you.

John Dehlin [01:56:12] Eli McCann I. I'm so delighted we finally got to meet and I loved hearing your story. And you've broken a land speed record because we did this interview in under two hours and I'm usually like three to five. So I think you might win the record in over 2,100 episodes of economy of like impact and value per word.

Eli McCann [01:56:33] You know, I'm going to take that as a compliment. Can I put that on the back of the book?

John Dehlin [01:56:36] Okay. Yeah. McCann, thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories.

Eli McCann [01:56:39] Thanks, John.

John Dehlin [01:56:40] All right, thanks everyone for joining us today. Please like and follow on all our channels. Thanks to our donors that make this possible. If you value this type of content and you want to see Continue, go to MormonStories.org donate and become a monthly donor. We love your feedback@mormonstoriesmail.com, we love your comments. A huge thanks to Barb Young and Barb Brown for helping to make this interview possible. Please support Signature Books And Barb Brown, please support Barbara Young because she's amazing. Thanks, Barb. We love you and Steve and yeah, we are always looking for people to interview on Mormon Stories. Go to MormonStories.org apply to fill out your application.

John Dehlin [01:57:20] And again, if you want to see this type of content continue, you can become a monthly donor@mormonstories.org donate. Be good to each other. Be kind to each other. If you're not liking liking that we're talking about LGBT people, don't bother sending me those emails. I don't want to hear those emails.

John Dehlin [01:57:38] And be good to each other. Be kind to each other. We'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care.

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