Believer. The young gays Mormoni told by singer Dan Reynolds

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Hilton Dresden interview with the singer Dan Reynolds published on the monthly Out (United States) website on January 21, 2018, freely translated by Giacomo Tessaro

Over the past 20 years, the suicide rate among adolescents in Utah (the state of the United States by Mormone majority) has tripled: today in this state suicide is the first cause of death among young people. This is largely due to the refusal of homosexuality by the Mormon religion, which brings many homosexual teenagers to prefer to prefer death to coming out.

We present Dan Reynolds, frontman of the award -winning rock band Imagine Dragons, Probably the most famous living murmur of the planet. Saturday there will be the first of his new documentary, Believer (the believer) at the Sundance Film Festival.
Believer, directed by Don Argott, tries to discover together with Reynolds as the Mormone Church treats its LGBTQ members, especially young people, and how harmful their teachings are for those trying to reconcile faith and sexuality. The film analyzes the last year of Reynolds, in which the rock star organized the Loveloud Music FestivalIn Orem, Nello Utah, an event in support of the LGBTQ community."I am Mormon and I want to tighten my arms around my Mormoni brothers and sisters and say 'Hey guys, we can do more, we have to do more'" Reynolds says in our exclusive interview.
The film, which will be broadcast this summer on HBO, sees the participation of the Neon Trees Tyler Glenn frontman, former Mormone and Gay, with the soundtrack of Hans Zimmer and two new Reynolds songs.

Without wanting to spoiler, how did you live youth in a mormon environment?

Dan Reynolds: My family is at the forefront of the Mormone church. We are a very large family, with eight children and a daughter. Very conservative. I probably been the most rebellious of the children. At high school I had to hide my relationship with my Catholic girlfriend, because my parents would not have accepted a serious story with a non -murmur girl. He kept her hidden for four years; After the high school, I did the admission exam at the Brigham Young University [Byu, the Mormone della Utah University, Ndt] and I was accepted, but before I could set foot you had to have an interview with the bishop [the head of the Mormon parish, Ndt] and I told him to have had sex with my girlfriend. So I was hunted by Byu a week before starting the course.
This experience rose me crazyly: everyone was murmurs where I lived, all my friends were murmurs and everyone had understood that I was a sinful individual, who could no longer attend the university. So I stayed at home with my parents and had to go through the repentance process developed for the members of the Church.
It is a devastating experience for a nineteen year old ready to leave home to start a new chapter of his life. Every week I had a meeting with the bishop, with whom I had to focus on the spiritual side of things. After a year, I could enroll in Byu with the approval of the bishop, then, for two years, I went on a mission.

What exactly consists of a mouth mission?

They sent me to Nebraska: you can't choose where to go. It lasts two years and is a very severe regime: wake up every day at 6, two hours of study of the Scriptures, and you should never escape the eye of her partner. You can call home twice a year, for Mother's Day and Christmas, and send a single letter, or email, per week.
You cannot have engaged or girlfriends, you just have to knock on the doors and talk about murmurism, then do the service work. I liked the latter a lot because I was looking for myself, I felt lost in my faith.
I met many interesting people, I listened to their stories, I helped them fight the dependence on heavy drugs ... in the service work you can lose yourself.
Then I went home, and here I began to find myself, to find my way: I set up a musical group ... I had new friends, who were queer and murmons, I saw how infernal their life was, the mental stunts who had to do and how devastating all this was. They had to fight depression and anxiety, at much higher levels than I had lived. Many of them had hidden their homosexuality for many years, because there was no place for a coming out in their families.

What He says Exactly the Church murmous on homosexuality?

So now they say that there is nothing wrong with being gay, but that one should not act accordingly. They are mental acrobatics. They demand that homosexual people remain celibate throughout their lives, or that they make a mixed marriage, which we know be extremely dangerous because it can lead to depression and anxiety, up to suicide. Numerous studies have shown how dangerous it is.

A mixed marriage: do you mean a homosexual person who marries a heterosexual person?

Yes, get married outside your orientation. A gay man who marries a woman. They have a website, which is called Mormongay, who publishes stories of gay men and their happy marriage to a woman. Then there is the story of a queer girl who writes "By now I have given up and I am focusing on sport, rather than on love". It is a devastating and enormously harmful thing.
My goal is to show this reality in full light, showing what these young people must pass who want to keep their faith desperately. Many people, who grew up outside the murmurism, who looks at all this from the outside, will say: "Well, it's easy. Go to tell the young Mormoni to leave the Church ".
In reality it would be a very dangerous thing to say, because in practice it would mean advising them to abandon the family. Many of them would be hunted at home, which would be even more dangerous. It is not so simple. Even if they had no faith, if they did not believe in murmurism, it would still be a very complex and delicate question. Many studies have shown that a young man who is not accepted by his family or community has an eight times greater probability of committing suicide.

What do you hope that spectators from this documentary are obtained?

My goal is to make the Church and other Orthodox religions reflect, because it is not only a mormone problem (and murmurism remains my faith, because there are many aspects of this faith that I love and I cannot give up), and I believe that the change can only come from within. There are many murmons that desperately await this change, who want our young people to be accepted and considered pure, worthy and loved in the eyes of God.
All Orthodox religions teach dangerous things like this. I absolutely want to create a healthier environment for our young people, that's why I created the music festival Loveloud. It is a festival that speaks of gay rights in the Utah, a place where there is nothing similar, and the Mormon Church has agreed, an unprecedented fact.
They had never written anywhere the acronym LGBT; In their declaration, however, they wrote "Loveloud, an LGBT festival": it is the first time that I see them use this acronym, they usually say "Homosexual attraction". They are small steps.

Could the change that hope could be found in the Mormon Scriptures, or are these intangible?

The pussy part of murmurism is that revelation may also take place today. If in our time there is a prophet, God may appear to him, so the prophet can say “Hey, God appeared to me. You had wrong, being gay is fine. To tell the truth is something approved by God, pure, perfect and acceptable ". The Church has already acted in this way. The murmons practiced polygamy, then the government began to make them feel breath on the neck and said "Hey, we don't like this at all". So, suddenly, God appeared to a prophet of that era and said "Hey, enough polygamy".
The same thing happened with the priesthood. Only to white men was granted to be a priest, then the Church began to receive more and more pressure, so God revealed "Now even blacks can be priests". My Church is used to change.

So the Church can really change, if we make the right pressures.

Yes, certainly. I received hundreds of letters after the Festival. A mother wrote to me that her son came out with her after the festival, because she felt safe to do it. Some said that, in their community, after the Five People's Festival they came out with their families. This means creating a change, even if slow. Today, in the last twenty years, more or less, the suicide rate in Utah has tripled, and is the first cause of death for teenagers. It is a serious, devastating problem. My goal is to shed light on this, even if there are people who have started to do it before me, believers who fight this battle.
But the Mormone Church knows me well because they are probably the most famous murmur in the world after Donnie and Marie Osmond. They just told me that the church's head of public affairs will be present at the first and I am quite nervous, because this demonstrates the raw reality of the Church.
Young people are not happy, many suffer from anxiety, the suicide rate is devastating and most of all this has to do with the Church war against the LGBT community. This battle is superimporting and decisive. I am Mormon and I want to tighten the arms around my Mormoni brothers and sisters and say "Hey guys, we can do more, we have to do more".

How was the idea of ​​the film born, was the director who turned to you?

It was a really bizarre matter. I wanted to shoot a documentary on Fremont Street, the Viale di Las Vegas from which I come, on the people who live there. I met numerous directors but they never went well, I didn't know what to do, I just wanted to do a documentary that described the life of Las Vegas. At one point I met Don Argott, the director of Believer: We felt connected to a deep level, he wanted to come to stay with me to understand who I was, because I, because I wanted to deal with these things. It was a trip, he interviewed me for hours, he allowed me to open myself in an unpublished way for me, made me talk about my faith and things I haven't been talking about for years. We went to the heart of anxiety that is in my life, a lot of which it is caused by my faith. I often had to do with depression, which began into practice when I was expelled from the Byu. We followed that trail of spiritual wounds and the result is our film. As I said, many of my old friends are gay.

Did any of them come out?

One of my middle schoolmates was gay and murmurs: we knew it, we all knew, but we didn't want to recognize it. He went to dance with the girls and his family was very murmur. One morning his mom entered his room, he was sixteen, and said “I made a nightmare, you were gay. I couldn't believe it. It was terrible ".
He confided to me this and told me how devastating it had been to hear such a thing. It is a story common to many young queer. Being homosexual is almost like being a murderer. This is what Mormoni teach.

Tyler Glenn, the Neon Trees singer, is openly gay. Is it also part of the project?

Yes, we went on a mission together in Nebraska. When he finally got out he wanted to be a gay murmur, he wanted this combination to work, he wanted the church to change his position on gays (that is, that they cannot be baptized and that he must be reported to the Church at the age of 18), and therefore he then abandoned the Church.
The entire Mormon community had it to death with him because in one of his albums he criticized the church. The documentary explains it better than I know how to do it: to make it short, the director pushed us to follow the trail, to express things that had always been difficult to express, and this is the result.

Do you think the Mormoni, or at least some of them, have an opinion of the gays other than that of the Church?

Yes, I think that the bigoted murmons are few, but also that there are many who are silent, who are confused or think "This thing does not concern me directly". This is the problem that brought me here, because I too was silent about it. Today I feel many guilt for all these years of silence, because in many respects they are the face of the Mormon Church in the world of music.
There are few famous mormones, not only in music. Staying silent would have meant bigotto activism. Today I feel the need for change, the need to speak, to be an activist. Mormons are good people, they go to the world to help others. I love my mission, because it is service.

Original text: Mormon Superstar Dan Reynolds' New Film Shows Why the Church Must Embrace Its Lgbt Members