RAIN at School

When one of the students at my school walked in the door last Thursday morning and saw the above poster on the wall in the main foyer, he said that he almost cried tears of joy. Another student said he smiled and took a photo of it with his cell phone. The poster was there among banners for other clubs as part of "club rush", where students advertise the clubs that are available for the kids to participate in at our school.

Let's back up to Wednesday morning. I asked a student if she had ever asked the administration if the club was approved enough for them to participate in rush. She immediately went down to talk to him, and came back with great news. His response was that he thought everything was go, and that he saw no reason why they should not be able to participate along with the other clubs.

So, Wednesday afternoon, 4 or 5 of them got together and created these masterpieces.



As you can see, the name of the club that we decided on was RAIN, which stands for "Rising Against Intolerance Now".



Today some of the students at my school (probably 10 or 15) met together to informally vote on officers and then get some plans in place for their first official meeting next week.

The adult supervisors were a bit awkward, trying to give them guidelines and advice, while still adhering to the fact that a non-curriculum club must be run by the students. After the last of them had finally left the room, excited and happy that this was actually happening, the 3 of us stood by the door, just as excited, almost like we were in a dream. I just know this will make a difference to the students, families, and community.

Advice on blogging from a gay Mormon blogger

I was talking to a friend about my decision to start this new blog. He laughed and told me about this blog post from "Soy Made Me Gay". As he read it to me, I had a much needed laugh, so I had to re-post it here for your viewing pleasure!

How To Be A Gay Mormon Blogger

Some of you may be asking yourselves, “But, Clint, how can I be a gay Mormon blogger?” Why with my new patented 21 step program, you too can be blogging your gay little heart out.

Step 1 - Get baptized on your 8th birthday.
Step 2 - Realize you are gay while memorizing your high school’s cheerleader routine.
Step 3 - Have a panic attack.
Step 4 - Try to act as straight as possible for about ten years.
Step 5 - Start reading the blogs of gay Mormons on the internet.
Step 6 - Feel an enormous kinship with people you have never met.
Step 7 - Join an online support group for gay Mormons.
Step 8 - Decide that you aren’t going to participate any more in the online support group (this is best done within two weeks of Step 7).
Step 9 - Sign up for a Blogger account.
Step 10 - Start posting several times a day.
Step 11 - Revel in your new discovered gayness and feel the rush as your challenge your belief system (this is best accomplished by using words like “bubble”, “Prozac Valley”, and “Mormon Corridor” as much as grammatically possible).
Step 12 - Freak out by the “realness” of it all and shut your blog down.
Step 13 - Repeat Steps 9-12 at least twice.
Step 14 - Decide you are going to start a blog with a different tone and for a difference audience than you have previously written: an unabashedly gay Mormon blog for straight Mormons.
Step 15 - Start getting more traffic than you have ever gotten with major traffic spikes when large LDS blogs link to a post (at this point you should notice how the people who comment on your site are much more civil that they are on other sites).
Step 17 - Wonder how your post “5 Things That Straight Guys Do That Are Really Gay” still gets the majority of your search engine traffic.
Step 18 - Have the Church enter into a major political battle with gays in California.
Step 19 - See the worst sides of the two groups of people that make up a large part of who you are - this should change the way you view both of them.
Step 20 - Get one of your posts published in an LDS magazine.
Step 21 - Decide that you want your writing to go new directions. Seeing that your gay Mormon blog has reached the end of it’s usefulness, you decide to bring it to a close.

So that’s it, that’s how you become a gay Mormon blogger. Be sure not to skip any steps however, otherwise you have to start all over again (and Step 1 is way harder the second time around).