Neon Trees’ Tyler Glenn: Gay, Mormon and Finally Out
This happens a lot to Glenn in Provo. Neon Trees are the city’s biggest export, a New Wave-pop powerhouse with two double-platinum singles, a Buick commercial and a couple of big Glee covers. At one point, a bespectacled young guy presses his face to Glenn’s hands and reverently sighs, “I should be on my knees.”
“I wonder how he’ll feel in about a month,” Glenn muses when we clear the throng. In five weeks, Provo - an 88 percent Mormon town, in which rock clubs don’t sell alcohol, only soda - will get the news, along with the rest of the world, that Glenn has been quietly sharing with friends and family for a couple of months: He’s gay, has known he’s gay since he was six years old and has been living a closeted life for decades that choked his spirit and threatened his sanity.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially calls gay sex a “serious transgression” - the same category in which it puts rape, murder and theft - and spent an estimated $22 million fighting LGBT rights in California in the battle over Proposition 8. But, perched on a black sectional couch in his living room, Glenn says that he still identifies as a Mormon.