Welcome to Questions from the Closet. I'm Charlie Bird and I'm Ben Shalati. Each episode

we discuss a question that we commonly get asked as LGBTQ

Larity Saints. We are not trying to answer this question or come to a

consensus but simply sharing our perspectives. Today's question is, did

pornography make me gay? Charlie and I are not terribly diverse and we share many opinions and life experiences.

For example, we both grew up with dial-up internet in our houses.

However, there are some pretty big differences.

For example, Ben's parents graduated to Wi-Fi and mine still have not.

Which is kind of crazy because my parents are both very old.

I'm like, it's 20-20 people and actually my parents are divorced so they, I mean mean live in two different places and neither of them has Wi-Fi still.

It's really amazing. My parents have Wi-Fi and my dad actually just got his first smart TV which he loves he was like yeah I watched like 10

episodes of this show the new girl I think it's called and like one day I said dad that's called

binging he's like oh it was fun so that's awesome

we would like to provide a variety of voices and perspectives so today we're joined by

Liam Essig welcome Liam thank you I'm happy to be here.

Great well tell us a little bit about yourself.

I'm currently a graduate student at Penn State University, but for several years I was studying

addiction and pornography use while at Utah at Brigham Young University during my undergrad and master's degrees.

Through that, you know, it was never my intention to make that something I really did, but it kind of happened organically and ended up, I ended up presenting across the United States and traveling to Europe to present to church leadership and members on

addiction presented to at church headquarters and to the Mission Presidents and MTC Presidents

through the Mission Department as well.

So it, yeah, it was kind of an interesting experience

...