Finding Belonging as a Gay Samoan (with Wallace Pelesasa)

All Out in the Open

All Out in the Open, Questions from the Closet

Latter-day Saint, Christ, Society & Culture, Mormon, Gay, Religion & Spirituality, Faith, Lgbtq, Transgender, Church Of Jesus Christ, Christianity, Lgbt, Lds

5 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 March 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode of OUT and About, Iese Wilson interviews Wallace Pelesasa—a fellow Samoan and gay Latter-Day Saint. Growing up in a large family, Wallace attended church mainly to appease his father. His testimony didn’t truly ignite until his military service, where he met people whose faith inspired him. As he built a relationship with God, Wallace also embraced his own identity and discovered his mission to build bridges between the LGBTQ+ community and his Samoan church congregatio...

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to All In the Open. I'm Ben Shalati here with Charlie Bird. And on this out and about episode, Yese
0:04.8	Wilson takes us on a tour of the LGBT experience around the church. This week, he interviewed Wallace Pelesasa about his experience growing up Samoan in America and kind of just like a lot of different things about how family dynamics and Samoan politics played into his personal journey to
0:22.0	understand who he is and then help others.
0:24.3	And the thing that was most surprising is all the Samoans that live in Alaska, I never
0:29.4	would have guessed.
0:30.6	But live where you want to live.
0:32.4	So that's pretty cool.
0:33.6	So enjoy the episode.
0:46.5	Yeah. So enjoy the episode. Aloha, everybody, welcome to Out and About, the podcast where we're going to go and explore
0:51.2	about cultures in the church throughout the world.
0:55.0	Today, we're actually going to be hanging out with one of my dear friends from back when I was
1:00.0	at BYU-I-Y-Hawai.
1:01.5	And what's interesting about this fellow is he is Samaun, full Samaun, I'm half Samaun,
1:09.6	but he was raised here in the U.S. He was born in Hawaii, and then he's
1:14.6	traveled around. He's done a lot of different things. He's going to talk about his conversion story today,
1:20.9	a little bit about maybe even talk about doing some military service. But one of the really
1:26.1	really cool reasons I wanted to have this human being on is he has done a lot
1:31.1	of efforts in Alaska where he resides of trying to build bridges with the LGBTQ community
1:37.0	within a Salman ward, a feat that is very, very difficult for our Polynesian people.
1:46.2	It's one of those taboo topics.
1:48.5	So we're going to dive into that later on in our conversation.
1:51.5	So today I'd like to welcome to the podcast, Wallace Pelesasa, my dear friend, Dalafa.
	...

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