Sarah Mosteller is a lesbian in her early 20s. She spoke about how she came out somewhat unexpectedly in her teens, and about how her church community reacted.
Alphabet Soup shares LGBTQ+ Missourians’ stories through portraiture and personal narratives.
Sarah Mosteller: My church never really took a stance on queer people. They just never spoke about it, and they didn't really say anything about gay people being wrong or whatever.
They didn't say anything explicitly like that, so I never knew what their stance was because they never said it. Looking back, that's kind of saying a lot, that they never really spoke about that.
So, part of like my coming out was I had a friend, a close friend, in the church, and I was very involved and active – my mom was the lead singer at the church, and I was a singer in the youth band, and my friend was the drummer.
They came out as lesbian, and they were one of the first people to come out in, like, the youth area of the church. They came out as lesbian, and they came out to me, and I just said, “Me too.”
I didn't know that I was gay, like, I just instinctively said, “Me to,” and it just like fell out of me. I, like, looked behind me, like, “Who said that? Who said that? I don't, I don't recognize that,” and I kind of feel like my body and my mind knew that I was gay before I did, which is kind of crazy.
And I was like, “Oh my god, did I just say that?” And then they look at me, and they're like, “Oh, really?” And I was like, “Yeah, yeah, totally, yeah, sure.”
But no, I really think it was just me subconsciously knowing and just like blurting it out, and I think that they're coming out actually triggered my coming out in a way, which was really beautiful, and I honestly don't know if they know this story.
![Sarah Mosteller’s Canon EOS 6D Mark II camera sits on her kitchen table on Wednesday, April 24, 2024, at her apartment in Columbia. Mosteller owns her own photography business, Mosteller Visual Arts, and said she is working to diversify her audience and who she is documenting in her work. “I do think as a photographer, and as an artist, it's really important for me to document the queer experience and use my skills to create queer representation that I needed when I was growing up. I think that that's kind of not just a responsibility of mine, but like, it's something that I want to do. If I could only work with queer clients and make money like that, I totally would,” Mosteller said. “I wish that there was more representation, and I wish that my only representation [growing up] did not come from TikTok. But being on the creating end of that is really interesting now because I do feel obligated to be that representation. And, I don't think I do as good of a job being that representation with my photography business because it's something that's kind of more monetized. So, I kind of just have to do what makes me money instead of what I really would like to be doing, which would be just taking pictures of queer people all the time. That would be great.”](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/313f5cf/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1750x1169+0+0/resize/840x562!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fac%2F23%2Fffa9e5b54650a59700584ccfceb2%2F20240424-bas-queer-joy-sarah-mosteller-0096.jpg)
But after that, I was like, “Oh my gosh, I am gay.” The more I like, thought about it, I was like, “Yeah, I am a lesbian. This is actually really fitting.”
They were the first person to come out, but now there were two of us coming out, and both of us in the band, so this was kind of a big deal. You can't just brush both of us under a rug.
The way that my church approached this was not good. They basically monitored us. They told us that it's okay to be gay, but it has to be a secret.
They would legitimately check our social media and monitor our outfits to make sure we weren't looking too gay, acting too gay – whatever that means to them.
We were on surveillance with adults, like, monitoring us as children, and then they had meetings with my parents and told them how much of a disgrace I was and how much of a burden to the ministry I was.
All the while, I'm just in high school trying to earn good grades and do my best, and they're talking, you know, shit about me to my parents.
So, that was really hard to go through, but I am very grateful that I had someone to experience that with.
