- ASIN: B0DJYTTC9T
- Language: English
- Print length: 474 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN: 1961471159
- Genre: LGBTQ+ nonfiction Mormon Memoir
The BookViral Review:
Nathan Kitchen’s The Boughs of Love: Navigating the Queer Latter-day Saint Experience During an Ongoing Restoration is a powerful memoir that moves with emotional precision through the tension, trauma, and transcendence of being both queer and devoutly Mormon. Kitchen, a former president of Affirmation and a deeply thoughtful voice within the Latter-day Saint community, offers readers a rare gift: a deeply personal, faith-rooted account of what it means to seek wholeness when the institutional church demands fracture.
Kitchen brings readers into the most intimate moments of his journey—perhaps none more searing than his decision to come out to his wife after decades of marriage. His fear is palpable: the possibility of losing the person he had built his life with, and perhaps even more terrifying, the potential loss of his children’s love and trust. These chapters are among the most vulnerable in the book, layered with anguish, hope, and the raw honesty of a man stepping fully into his truth, not knowing whether it will cost him everything.
The book also explores the delicate and often painful process of coming out to his extended orthodox Mormon family. In a faith culture where silence often feels safer than truth, Kitchen chooses courage—again and again. His journey reveals the power of authenticity, even when it comes at a cost, and he writes with a compassionate realism that neither demonizes nor idealizes the people around him. He allows complexity to live in the narrative, trusting the reader to wrestle alongside him.
The Boughs of Love doesn’t shy away from the difficult. Kitchen details the psychological toll of being closeted in a church that, at times, weaponizes theology against queer members. He explores how policy decisions like the 2015 “exclusion policy” reverberated through LGBTQ+ Latter-day Saint families. Yet what makes this book extraordinary is that it is not, at its core, a book of bitterness. It is a book of love.
Not only of Kitchen’s love for his faith and his family, but of the profound and steady love he finds with his husband, Matthew. Their relationship is presented not as a rebellion against faith, but as the fruit of a life finally aligned—where love and divinity are no longer in contradiction. Through Matthew, through fatherhood, and through community, Kitchen finds the “expansive hope” the gospel speaks of but has not always extended to LGBTQ+ Saints.
The structure of the memoir, interspersed with poetry, historical reflections, and spiritual insights, mirrors the lived dissonance of trying to find wholeness in a divided world. Kitchen’s prose is both pastoral and prophetic: a call to repentance—not for queer Saints, but for a church still learning how to embody the expansive mercy it preaches.
Thematically, the book wrestles with identity, silence, obedience, and the deep yearning for belonging. Kitchen confronts institutional failure without abandoning hope. He does not ask readers to choose between faith and identity but models what it means to live in the tension of both.
Ultimately, The Boughs of Love is not only a memoir but a roadmap for change. It belongs on the shelf of every Latter-day Saint—and every seeker of truth—who wishes to understand how love, when rooted deeply in both faith and personal integrity, can transform pain into purpose.
It is an unreservedly recommended Golden Quill read.
