His Right Hand

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  The way Kurt used “she” made me wince, as if it were a knife and he were stabbing at the fabric of Carl Ashby’s life with it.

  “She stole something from me. And I will never get it back. How will I ever trust another man in the church again? I can’t demand they all drop their pants.”

  “Why not?” I said, deadpan. If he was going to be a jerk, then he should be a jerk all the way. “You and President Frost can do it together. Every priesthood worthiness interview. Include a dick check.”

  Kurt stomped off to our bedroom.

  I tried to cool my temper. I knew Kurt was suffering and I wanted to help him through that, but the arrogance of the man! To think that in the process of creating bodies, God could make people blind, deaf, autistic, psychopathic, sociopathic, schizophrenic—he even made Hitler. But that God would allow a person to be born in the wrong gendered body—no, that was impossible! God would never do that.

  I felt faint for a moment as I heard Carl’s voice in my mind, quoting the Family Proclamation as he had at the bishopric dinner. He had been diligent in his church service to the point of obsession. He had not wanted Emma to kiss their son for fear that it would make him weak, or turn him feminine. And yet he—

  What was he? Who was he?

  What made a man a man? Was it a body part? If that was so, then what about the men who were injured in war? Were they no longer men? I was sure Kurt would say they still were able to hold the priesthood, that he would not be ashamed of serving in a bishopric with such men.

  If it was genetics, that elusive Y chromosome, then what about people who were born with unusual combinations? What about those who were XXY, or XYY, or triple X, or fragile X? What about genetic females who developed as males because of some drug their mothers took in the womb? Or genetic males who developed as females because they weren’t sensitive to testosterone? What about people who thought they were female until they took genetic testing to figure out why they were sterile? What about young males who were physically damaged in early childhood and were raised as females?

  There were so many ways in which gender could be confused. Kurt wanted a world where at least this one thing could not be questioned, but it wasn’t so.

  Maybe I had it easier because I had given up the idea that questions were the opposite of faith. I believed in God because I wanted to, not because He had proven Himself to me, not because it was logical, not because it was right. I needed God, and I needed Him to make mistakes, like I did.

  And Carl? The real question here was whether he had been killed for being born Carla and refusing to continue to live as her or if he had been killed for something in the life he had achieved as a man. God would sort all the rest out, I had to believe. But it seemed my job was to sort out this death.

  Chapter 8

  There were reasons that I knew more about LGBT people than Kurt or other Mormons did, and they weren’t only because of my personal beliefs that people should be allowed to be different. My children and almost everyone else believed that Kurt was my first and only husband. It wasn’t true. On August 16, 1981, years before I ever met Kurt, I married my first husband, Ben Tookey. I was twenty years old. We were both students at Brigham Young University, the church-owned college in Provo, Utah.

  I had grown up in Utah, but Ben seemed so much more sophisticated and well traveled. He had been an army brat, and had lived in Japan, Germany, and South Korea. He’d spent a year traveling the United States before he’d applied to college. He was six years older than I was, and I thought he was so confident and assured about what he wanted in life because he’d spent several years working before going back to college.

  He was majoring in engineering, because, he said, he wanted to build up cities all over the world and put his mark on them. He was tall and thin, with curly blond hair that he grew as long as he was allowed according to the BYU dress code—and sometimes a little longer, enough that he wasn’t allowed to go to the testing center until he went and got it cut, or put it into a ponytail and hid it under a hat.

  We met at the BYU bowling alley at a ward activity. He wasn’t in my ward, but he had come with a male friend who was in my ward. I still remember how it felt when Ben tried to show me how to throw a ball properly. His warm breath against the back of my neck, his hand touching the small of my back, the weight of his fingers on top of mine, pressed against the cool stone of the ball.

  I’d fallen hard, and so quickly that my roommates teased me about it endlessly. I was supposed to be the sensible one, the one who was voted most likely to finish college without an “MRS degree.” I worried that I wasn’t pretty enough for Ben, who was movie-star handsome. But he always made me feel like I was the only person in the room. He’d look at me with his brown eyes and I’d melt.

  We spent every minute together from the day we met until the day I went home that summer to talk to my parents about getting married. They were in the midst of arranging the reception for my oldest brother Trent’s marriage, after years of waiting for him to find the “right one.”

  Telling my father that Ben was not a returned missionary was difficult. I knew he would be disappointed. I had been taught all my life not to settle for anything less.

  “We’re getting married in the temple,” I remember explaining to my father that first night home. “Ben already has a reservation for a sealing room. In the Provo Temple,” I said again, for emphasis, because my parents had always insisted on a temple wedding. Provo would be a bit of a drive for them, from all the way north in Logan, but it wasn’t as if we were asking them to drive out of state.

  “He hasn’t even asked me for your hand officially,” my father complained.

  I flushed because I knew that was what he expected. “Dad, I love him and he loves me. We’re both active members of the church. What’s wrong with that?”

  “What’s wrong with it is that he doesn’t have the courage to come up here and announce it with you. Why is he hiding behind your skirts?” At least that’s what I remember him saying.

  I retorted, “He’s not hiding anywhere. I thought you’d rather meet him already knowing who he is to me.”

  I’d worked so hard to ease the tension between them after I introduced Ben, but it had never worked. Dad disliked Ben, and he made me cry several times in the weeks leading up to the wedding. I thought I would never forgive my father for what he did, both before and after the marriage. It was only when he got sick a few years later that I finally felt all my long-held anger drift away. To this day I still find it difficult to talk to my brothers, and my mother died before I could really have an open conversation with her. My stubbornness in marrying Ben had only made her and my father distant and unsympathetic when I had problems in the years following the marriage.

  During our engagement, Ben was so sexy; I was always eager to touch him. When he took off his shirt, I would look at him and think how lucky I was. I tingled all over. I longed for him to touch me, even if only accidentally, because it gave me a jolt of feverish sexuality. I had dreams about our sex life, and I thought everything was normal between us.

  After a date night, Ben would kiss me dutifully, but only on the cheek, or a peck that didn’t land quite squarely on my lips. He hugged me, but his hands didn’t roam anywhere and I didn’t sense that he was bursting with anticipation the way that I was.

  A few days before our wedding, I was concerned enough about this behavior to talk to the friend who had brought him to that ward party. I was hugely embarrassed, but I worried that we would be incompatible in some way when we were married, because I was so attracted to Ben and he didn’t seem to feel the same urgency toward me. I thought this meant that even though he said he thought I was beautiful, he wasn’t very attracted to me and maybe we shouldn’t be getting married if that was how he felt.

  “You’re kidding, right?” said Charlie. “He adores you. He talks about you all the time.”

>   “But what does he say?” I asked. We were just in the other room while Ben went to get us some Cokes and chips, so I was keeping my voice down. There hadn’t been any other chances to talk to him because Ben and I were always together.

  “He talks about your figure. About your wedding night and how much he’s looking forward to it. He’s a red-blooded guy like the rest of us,” Charlie assured me.

  I felt stupid for questioning Ben’s love for me, and even stupider for how embarrassed I felt when Charlie reported Ben’s lascivious-sounding talk with the boys. “Then why doesn’t he ever really kiss me? Or touch me? I mean, even pull me hard against him when we hug?” I was struggling to put my feelings into words, but they seemed to fail me, though I had always depended on them before.

  “You’re worried about nothing. He’s just holding himself back. He knows that if he started kissing you like he really wants to, you’d both end up in bed and you wouldn’t be able to get that temple wedding you’re so set on,” said Charlie.

  Ben came back then, so I couldn’t ask any follow-up questions, like why Charlie thought I was the one set on the temple wedding and not Ben. Wasn’t it equally important for both of us?

  We went through the temple to receive our endowments together the day before the wedding. Most men would have gone through the temple ritual for adulthood before they went on missions, but a lot of women only went before they got married. We had little colored paper tags pinned to our clothing to mark us as first-timers, so people could help us and make sure we didn’t make any mistakes in the ritual words or motions and handshakes.

  I felt rattled by the ceremony, despite the fact that my mother was right at my side throughout. My father was a temple worker and he helped Ben bring me through the veil, since Ben was so nervous about it after just having gone through himself. Going through the veil is the final part of the ritual, where each person taking out their endowment speaks through a curtain with holes in it to someone representing God on the other side, offering names and tokens to prove worthiness. After the veil, we were allowed to go into the beautiful, open space of the “celestial room,” which was meant to be like going to the highest part of heaven. The furnishings are always in white or beige colors, and there is a big chandelier overhead, and though you are allowed to talk, the room feels nearly silent because mostly people sit and try to feel the Spirit of God and His love there.

  That first time, I felt so confused and wanted to ask questions, but my father refused to answer. I had made so many promises, and tried to learn so many things. When would the promises come up again? What would happen when I came back to the temple without people escorting me and whispering the answers to me throughout?

  Ben hugged me more tightly that evening than he ever had before, and the kiss on my dormroom step was the closest to a passionate one as we had ever shared. I wanted to pour myself into him through our mouths, be one with him in some way beyond the spiritual pledge we would make in the morning.

  “I love you,” said Ben. He was teary eyed. His hair had been buzzed short the day before and I reached a hand to touch it. It had been his attempt to appeal to my father, to try to look more the part of the Mormon missionary, even if he wasn’t one. I missed the curls, but I figured he could always grow them back.

  The next morning was all a rush of getting dressed, making sure I had everything I’d need for the sealing in the temple. I was so nervous I didn’t bother with breakfast. Ben’s parents were coming into town for the wedding itself, and we had plans to go out with them for a luncheon, but I’d be meeting them for the first time at the temple.

  Looking back, I see the signs that there was something wrong with everything that Ben did leading up to the wedding. He made sure I didn’t meet his parents until I was committed; he knew they would have even more reservations than my parents did. But it wasn’t until the wedding night that I realized something was gravely wrong. Until then, I’d kept telling myself that we were just nervous.

  My dad had offered to pay for us to stay one night at a hotel in Park City before we drove to California for a week-long honeymoon at a beach house that Ben’s parents were paying for. In the hotel room, I kept waiting for Ben to kiss me. Instead, he held my hand casually as we sat on the bed and looked at a list of restaurants that we could go to that evening. There was no kissing, no scrambling for clothes. No desperate release of pent-up sexual feelings.

  “We could go shopping at the outlets after dinner. I think they’re open pretty late. And there’s a midnight show at the theater. What do you think?” Ben asked me.

  “Don’t you—? Isn’t it—?” I choked out.

  “It will be fun,” said Ben. He must have known what I wanted, and he ignored it.

  When we finally got home, I was so exhausted that I fell asleep easily. I wore the fancy white negligee my roommates from college had bought with me, a giggling shopping trip I remembered with equal portions of humiliation and hilarity. There were dozens of tiny buttons and bows he would have to undo to get it off. That had been the point of it, to make things difficult. But in the end, the only one it made things difficult for was me.

  In the morning, we woke up on opposite sides of the huge bed and went to the hotel breakfast.

  “We’ll have to hurry,” said Ben. “They close at nine. And we want to get a head start on our drive to California.” He went into the bathroom, locked the door, and stepped out again twenty minutes later, fully dressed.

  I showered too, feeling dejected and exhausted. We drove in near silence for ten hours, then collapsed again after a fast food dinner into the lumpy bed of the beach house.

  By the next morning, I was sure that I must be hideous. I wished I had brought clothes that hid me better, with long sleeves. I refused to get into my swimsuit, sure that Ben was embarrassed to be with me. What other reason could there be for his lack of sexual interest? He liked me. He enjoyed my company. I made him laugh. That was all clear. But why he would marry someone whose body made him want to run away, I couldn’t figure out.

  I spent another month sure that it was all my fault.

  Then I decided to take matters into my own hands. I lay on the bed completely naked one night. Ben turned off the light, rolled to his side in his flannel pajamas, and made no comment. I tried to massage him, but he pushed me away once I moved below his waistline. I turned on a pornographic movie that was recommended by a clerk in the adult section at a video store. Nothing worked.

  That was when I started going to the library, listening to talk shows about sexual problems, and asking questions of my friends. For the first time, I heard about homosexuality, something that truly had never been on my radar before. If Ben was gay—if he was only sexually attracted to men, and not to women—it would explain his behavior toward me.

  Once I hit upon this possibility, I became convinced that that must be the secret Ben was hiding. But at the time, Mormons described homosexuality as some kind of sinful and debauched choice, probably caused by watching too many naked guys in the locker room or by being abused by an older man as a child. I felt horribly sorry for what I thought Ben must have gone through, and more determined than ever to love him no matter what.

  Because there were explanations of “reparative” techniques, I kept thinking that I could help “cure” Ben, or that he could get treatment at a hospital or from a clinic doctor.

  But Ben refused. “I don’t have a problem,” he said to me.

  “How are we ever going to have children?” I asked, trying to get him to see past what I thought was his embarrassment.

  “We’ll figure it out eventually,” Ben said vaguely.

  “Sex isn’t a bad thing, you know. It’s supposed to draw couples together. Even if you’re not trying to have kids, it’s a good thing.” That was a line from one of the books I’d read, about people who lived Christian lives and had spent too much time hearing about how sex was bad,
so they struggled in their marriages to enjoy sex.

  “I don’t want to right now,” Ben said. “If you want sex so much, don’t you think that’s a problem you should deal with on your own?”

  He always reflected it back onto me. He didn’t tell me I was ugly or unattractive, just suggested once that I was a nymphomaniac. I looked that up at the library, too, trying to figure out if Ben was right and the problem was mine. Was wanting to have sex in the first six months of marriage that unusual? How often did normal couples have sex? Did it take them a long time to figure out how to do it?

  I bought some books and taught myself about my own body and figured out some tricks to give me sexual release, but I felt guilty about it, even though I was married. Ben refused to look at anything I tried to show him, and started telling me that I needed to talk to our new bishop to repent. I tried to do that once, but the bishop wouldn’t listen to me. He said that men always want sex more than women do, that I must just be misunderstanding the situation. He said I should pray and ask God how to proceed, and then stood up and walked me to the door. I was terrified to talk to anyone else in the ward about my sexual problems, and I doubt any of the other women would have known what to tell me, anyway.

  I felt as low as I ever had in my life, but it wasn’t as if Ben were doing fine, either. He’d lost the job we’d moved to California for and basically sat around all day in his pajamas. I was working full-time, but having trouble coming up with enough money to pay rent and for food for both of us. I finally called my father.

  In tears, I poured out everything over the phone. I was hoping my father would be able to give me some magic fix for everything. But he told me that I was married now, that I had to “cleave unto your husband” and not go running to my father with every problem. He said I’d chosen Ben against his objections, and now I was going to have to live with that choice eternally.