The year is 2002 and I am 18 years old. It’s the summer after my high school graduation. I’m in my room, which is located in the 3rd port of the three-car garage in the house I grew up in, and I have my bright yellow fast food uniform on as I have just gotten home from the grease-stained doldrums that is working a fast-food job. I’m on my knees, arms folded on my bed and my head low, tears rolling down my face. I am praying to who I think is God, but at this point I think I’m just praying to anyone that will listen. Maybe it’s my walls that are hearing me? Maybe the dozen or so posters of rock-star idols on my walls: Bruce Springsteen, Joe Strummer, Gwen Stefani or Beck, maybe they can hear me? Or maybe, hopefully, my mom is in the garage and can hear me talking, so she will finally understand why I’m depressed and why I barely graduated high school and why I don’t know where to go now that I’m 18 and have to face my future.
The reason I’m crying is because I feel – have felt for a long time – like I’m two different people. One of those people is a deeply spiritual questioner, wanting to seek out the mysteries of the universe and know my father in heaven. Then there’s the other one, the one I naturally feel the most comfortable as. The one that’s telling me: “You’re in love with the boy in your journalism class, almost to the point of obsession, and you don’t know what to do about it.”
Despite knowing I was gay for most of my life, I had learned quickly that society as a whole doesn’t approve or accept that way of life ... and that religion and prayer didn’t work for you when you felt that way either. So why was I on my knees praying for a way out?
I am now 30 years old and the singer of a band that, at least in some parts of the world, has had major success. I’ve played for thousands of people and written songs that have sold several million copies. I’ve been photographed and interviewed and gushed over and idolised. It’s been the grippiest four or five years of my life. Yet at some point, even through all the success and so called happiness, I found myself divided. I still felt this immense weight because I was living as two, three, sometimes four different people: one as an outspoken, flamboyant rockstar, one as a moral crusader and religious “celebrity”, one as a gay man living out sexual escapades in secret and the other as a gay man just wanting to be Tyler and find love and raise a family.
This past year I decided to come out, and since doing so – on my own terms, and in my own way – I have met and heard from hundreds of other men and women like me who feel deeply connected to their religious beliefs and yet are proudly, or sometimes shamefully, gay. As a proud gay Mormon man, I’ve received a lot of questions: How can you be Mormon and be gay? How can you be a part of a religion that doesn’t accept you?
I don’t have those answers. What I do know right now, is that I believe even more in the teachings of Jesus Christ. I pray more than ever, I love more than ever and I want to live more than I ever had before. I also know that I’ve never been so deeply happy in my entire life; that I’m finally free from the trappings of self-doubt and self-sabotage due to not accepting myself as a whole. Because, since coming out, it feels like I’ve merged all of the identities I was juggling, into one person. I don’t think I ever really got to know Tyler Glenn before, because he was unable to be seen among everything else I was trying to figure out and keep secret. Now that I know him properly, I really like him. For that, thank God.
Neon Trees play V Festival in Chelmsford and Stafford this weekend, at 3.15pm on each site
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