BYU Professor quits after years of hiding sexuality.
Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2022 11:45 am
https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2022/10 ... ted-years/Chad Emmett has spent his professional career standing up for underdogs and victims, the marginalized, those in peril and those seeking peace — Palestinians, religious minorities and women, to name a few — but now it is time to stand up for himself.
On Sept. 30, Emmett announced on his blog that he had retired as a geography professor from Provo’s Brigham Young University, had taken a job as an adjunct at Orem’s Utah Valley University, and, though married to a woman for more than two decades, is attracted to men.
“In 2011, I finally admitted to myself that I was gay. It took me a few more years to come out to my family. I have refrained until today from coming out more publicly because I didn’t want to draw attention to my new reality, nor did I want to jeopardize my job (for house payment and insurance reasons),” he wrote. Ultimately, though, the “mental trauma of trying to balance being employed at BYU with being gay took its toll. I needed my job (efforts to find a job elsewhere all failed), but to keep my job I felt I had to remain closeted.”
“It was eating at me and getting worse,” he said. “I submitted my retirement papers last October and after that, there was a continual stream of statements and policies that convinced me I didn’t want to be there.”
But there were no Utah jobs in his field — human and political geography — and he didn’t want to move his kids. And it was too challenging to function at the flagship Latter-day Saint school as an out gay man.
So he kept his head down and stayed in the closet.
“I wasn’t doing anything that would jeopardize my job,” he said, “but I felt burdened by being gay at a school that would never accept me.”
Holland is directly responsible for making people feel unwelcome at BYU.In recent years, however, Emmett believed BYU was treating its LGBTQ students unfairly.
“I saw the joy of the gay students when they first thought that they would be able to date like heterosexual students,” he said, “and then when that was removed weeks later, how deflated they were.”
Some young people responded by lighting the Y in rainbow colors as a gesture of love and respect for LGBTQ students.
BYU noted that the school did not authorize the lighting and, a year later, blocked access to the site.
Why couldn’t the school have tweeted “BYU didn’t approve the lighting of the Y but congrats to the students for creatively letting their light shine?” Emmett asked. “What does it hurt to put up a symbol of support for students so they know you are a safe place?”
In solidarity until his final year, he posted a rainbow with the statement “I’ll Walk With You.”
A talk by apostle Jeffrey R. Holland in August 2021, decrying some faculty members’ public advocacy for same-sex marriage “was the final straw,” Emmett said. “I was not threatened, but was just watching it and realized we are really not wanted here unless you remain quiet and closeted and don’t say or do anything.”
He began to write to gay students to say, “I support you. I am gay, too,” offering to help them “navigate being in the church.”
The day before Emmett began teaching political and world geography at UVU, he got an email from a student, saying, “I am transitioning to male, and here’s my new name.”
Emmett could reply without fear: “I’m gay. Glad to have you in class.”
It felt good.