COURTSEY OF SALLY FARRAR
BIG LOVE
Mormonism takes the idea of family togetherness to another level.
The main role of the Mormon
temple is to perform ceremonies
that bind families together for
eternity, ensuring that they’ll enter the celestial kingdom as one.
To some families, this may
sound like a nightmare. Sally’s
family made it sound like a Club
Med vacation. “My mom’s joke
was, ‘I’m going to find the best
beach house I can in Heaven, and
get all the land I can around it so
you all can come and live with
me,’” Sally recalled. Unfortunately, Sally’s same-sex relationship means that she and Brenda
won’t be spreading out a beach
blanket on her family’s celestial
plot — gay couples aren’t allowed
into Mormon Heaven. In a departure from the church’s previous
condemnation of homosexuality
as evil, LDS leadership did put out
a pamphlet in 2007 claiming that
gay people could go to Heaven so
long as they remained celibate —
for which they would be rewarded
in the afterlife with a heterosexual
relationship. Sally and Brenda had
already been enjoying the benefits
of a non-celibate relationship for
more than two decades.
Sally wasn’t born a Mormon.
HUFFINGTON
03.09.14
She grew up in Georgia, and her
parents joined a Mormon church
when she was 3 years old, repudiating their Presbyterian and Methodist backgrounds and setting
themselves apart from the Southern Baptists and evangelicals who
lived on their street. Sally’s classmates in grade school would ask
whether she had horns or multiple
moms. So she already knew what
it felt like to be an outsider when
at age 17 her mother, fed up with
Sally’s habit of kissing other girls,
handed her a trash bag filled with
clothes and told her to leave.
The annals of gay history are
filled with stories of teens in
similar situations striking out for
San Francisco or Greenwich Vil-
Sally and
Brenda’s
children,
Madison, 21,
and Ben, 18,
in New York’s
Times Square
in 2012.