I stood huddled in a small group of friends and a flamboyant tour guide in the middle of a hot and humid Sistine chapel while hundreds of other tourists shuffled by us. In hushed whispers, Jerry, the guide, pointed out the prominent motifs in the frescoed ceiling and The Last Judgment, an epic depiction of Christ’s second coming which adorns the front wall of the chapel.
As Italian guards urged us to be quiet and move along, Jerry quickly gestured toward the middle right of the painting. There, a muscular nude figure, strategically covered thanks to papal censors, holds what looks like a morbid deflated body.
“That,” Jerry whispered, “is Michelangelo’s self portrait.”
A long melting face with mouth agape and dark cavernous eyes, hanging in dramatic contrast to the beautifully proportioned bodies of the exalted figures surrounding it, is the signature the artist left on one of his finest works. I brushed away tears as I stared through the crowd of busy tourists at the long, tortured face of Michelangelo.
I first told my sister I was gay in the parking lot of the Timpanogos Temple on a rainy April evening three years ago. I felt years of pent up fear and self-judgment melt away as I experienced her perfect love. This love, perfect in its patience, kindness and willingness to empathize with something unknown, was more than I hoped for in the years I spent agonizing about coming out.
A few weeks later, when I told my parents, I felt this same love and pride in the life I led. But despite my family’s compassion, I mourned the life I knew they wanted for me, but which I no longer felt I could live.
I expected that saying, “I’m gay,” for the first time would be the conclusion to my long, tormented journey. I didn’t realize then that “coming out” is a process that begins with the first uttering of the words and ends … never.
As months and years pass, and I continue to clumsily confess my sexual orientation to new friends, coworkers, or the occasional Uber driver, I understand more and more that loving and accepting oneself despite the hurtful labels one believes come with being gay, is a constant and arduous battle.
I didn’t fully realize when first coming out, just how much of my self worth I had previously tied to being a “good Mormon.” I had always known and valued myself as an obedient missionary, entertaining Sunday school teacher and worthy temple-goer, and I trusted that the friends, ward members and bishops, who had also known me my whole life, could learn to love and accept me as all these things and gay. I didn’t anticipate the self-doubt and fear I’d feel as these Mormon labels started to be forgotten, and I just became labeled as gay.
In an attempt to counter this, I sought new labels, ones I felt were important or powerful enough to drown out this fear. I believed that a prestigious company or important job title would make me worthy. If I served in the right volunteer capacity, or built something utterly beautiful, then maybe my life could be enough to make my friends and family proud.
As I stood teary-eyed under one of the most moving works of art I’d ever personally encountered that day in the Sistine Chapel, I couldn’t look away from the face of its creator — a man searching for penance from the things he saw in himself which he despised.
Every day I see Michelangelo’s tortured face in some of the most beautiful humans I’ve met. Men and women who identify as gay and have committed their lives to bringing beauty and goodness to the world. Though their lives are works of art, the self they see is shameful, broken, and searching for redemption. The Sistine Chapels they build to assuage their pain, are prisons.
In the middle of The Last Judgment stands another powerful figure who, with arms held high and a piercing gaze, looks down toward Michelangelo. I am reminded that this man was one of the most rejected and most despised. A man whose life was also acquainted with grief. A man whose stripes are meant to heal, but whose words are used to imprison. I feel his grief, and see his tortured face, and recite his words, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Brandt Hill grew up in Farmington, attended Brigham Young University and recently earned an MBA degree from the University of Southern California. He lives in San Francisco and works in tech marketing.