He's Gay, but Mormon Husband & Wife Say They're Happy
When devout Mormon Nicholas Applegate came out as gay, it was in order to be up front with Jordan, the woman he was marrying. The couple say it doesn't matter; they are happy, UK newspaper the Daily Mail reported.
Nicholas knew he was gay at the age of 12, but given Mormon proscriptions against sex outside of marriage, he had little trouble blending in as long as he stayed in the closet.
Nicholas and Jordan has been childhood friends. When they met again as adults in March of 2020 and subsequently started dating, it wasn't long before Nicholas proposed. He also revealed his sexuality to Jordan. His disclosure didn't change anything; the couple decided to move forward with their relationship and get married.
"They are expecting their first baby next month — and Nicholas believes he can suppress his sexuality in order to stick to his religious beliefs," another British newspaper, the Daily Star, detailed.
"Nicholas made a brave declaration on Facebook about his sexuality and why he chose to marry Jordan and the post has since racked up almost 12,000 likes, shares and comments," the Daily Mail relayed.
"A lot of people at the church were quite surprised when they found out that I'm gay," Nicholas posted, "but they were mainly impressed at the sacrifice I'm making" in order to remain a member of the Mormon faith.
Said wife Jordan: "This is the life we both have prayed for, and it is the one we choose."
In his Facebook post, Nicholas declared that "at the core of myself, I am not a gay man; I am a child of god, a priesthood holder, a husband, and a father. I am not denying my true self by living the tenets of the Church. I would be denying my true self by not living the gospel and leaving the Church to live a gay lifestyle."
Nicholas went on to add: "I don't endorse mixed-orientation marriages for everyone who deals with same-sex attraction, but for me it has given me more joy and peace than I thought possible."
The story echoes similar headlines from 2012 when Josh Weed, a gay Mormon married to a woman, Lolly, came out publicly and mulled the possibility that his being gay didn't really matter when it came to the prospects for his marriage.
"Was it possible that my sexual orientation was beautiful?" Weed posted as he publicly reflected on his status as a gay man in a heterosexual marriage,Buzzfeed News recalled in a 2018 article.
"That it was beautiful in the same way blue eyes can be beautiful?" Weed's post continued.
Every marriage has its own prospects for success and deserves to unfold in its own natural course. In the case of Josh and Lolly Weed, the eventual outcome was divorce, but the wider story is one of ramifications beyond their own relationship. The Weeds apologized in a blog post for the way relatives of LGBTQ+ people had seized on their example "to pressure them to get married to a person of the opposite gender — sometimes even disowning them, saying things like, 'if these two can do it, so can you.'
"Our hearts broke as we learned of the ways our story was used a battering ram by fearful, uninformed parents and loved ones, desperate to get their children to act in the ways they thought were best," the Weeds added.