About Pono, the gay LDS fashion designer whose story is dividing church members online

“I have a boyfriend,” the former missionary says, “and I still like going to church every Sunday.”

Salt Lake Tribune/July 15, 2026

By Tamarra Kemsley

If Latter-day Saint fashion designer Pono Skousen is being totally honest, he “like low-key forgot” he had even posed for the church’s social media team more than a year ago.

That is until late June, when his picture appeared alongside a brief bio on the official Instagram and Facebook channels of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

By day’s end, the 25-year-old openly gay, active member found himself in the eye of the ever-churning storm that is the online debate over the place of LGBTQ+ members in the Utah-based church and its teachings surrounding gender.

“If you really want to strengthen the church and retain members, you don’t go after the 15 people that are super femme fashion designers who might not feel OK at church,” influencer Jacob Hansen complained on an episode of the “Ward Radio” podcast after the faith’s posts went live. “You know who doesn’t feel OK at church? It’s the core of the church.”

Wrote one commenter, @maga_mormon, on the church’s posts: “Surprise, surprise. More woke brainwash from the church. Who could’ve guessed?”

When asked, the church did not provide a comment in response to questions about the decision to share Skousen’s story.

But the designer isn’t shocked by the response. After all, his body of work includes a T-shirt with an image of two women kissing, the words “Love one another” written in cursive above, and another of two Boy Scouts kissing.

“I totally understand,” he told The Salt Lake Tribune in a video call, while tossing a spool of thread back and forth between his hands, “where [the pushback] might be coming from.”

Nonetheless, he disagrees with the contention that the church was caught promoting someone trying to build a brand by mocking its teachings.

Rather, Skousen said, his work is meant to “be a bridge between these two identities that I think some people think contrast each other but, to me, can’t really exist without the other.”

There is little to hint in the church’s social media posts themselves of the drama that has since unfolded.

The image shows Skousen, dressed in a plain black T-shirt, looking straight into the camera while standing on New York’s Brooklyn Bridge — his face clean-shaven, his hair cut short. His first-person bio recounts how Skousen learned to sew from Relief Society women at church and his efforts to maintain his religious beliefs and identity within the world of fashion.

“There were times in fashion school when I felt different from everyone around me,” it reads, “but I learned I do not have to choose between being creative and being a disciple of Jesus Christ. Both shape me. Both matter.”

Skousen did not mention his sexual orientation in the posts.

The subsequent fury stemmed instead from the nascent fashion brand Church of Martin, which Skousen said he launched after the photo shoot for the church with a fellow Latter-day Saint, Charles Robertson.

The designs are casual, steeped in 1990s nostalgia and rife with Mormon cultural relics — Boy Scout sashes and prairie shirts, the latter a nod to the global faith’s pioneer past.

‘The gospel is for everyone’

They are also meant to be LGBTQ-affirming.

“Currently struggling with same-sex attraction,” reads one shirt, Skousen’s way of “reclaiming” a phrase he said he often heard growing up.

“For the longest time,” he said, “I have felt that I’ve had to choose between being a disciple of Jesus Christ, a child of God — all the identifiers of what a member is — and using the word gay.”

When he did, Skousen, who has lived all over the world as a military kid, said other members would respond with something to the effect of: “‘Oh, you’re not gay. You just struggle with same-sex attraction, and that’s something that you’re going to endure in this life.’”

Skousen, who recently served as a counselor in a lay bishopric for a congregation of young adults (he was released from his assignment when he aged out of the ward), disagrees with that framing.

“I have a boyfriend,” he said, “and I still like going to church every Sunday.”

The former Boy Scout and missionary added: “The gospel is for everyone.”

Backstory

Skousen said he was shy as a kid, someone who struggled to make friends with every move.

Enter Beatie and Deedie, two older women in his congregation outside of Sacramento, California.

“They really took me under their wing,” he said. “I’d go over to their house, and they’d take me to Jo-Ann Fabrics to buy patterns.”

They were the ones, he said, who taught him to sew, starting with a pillowcase and progressing to tailoring. Pretty soon, Skousen was designing costumes for church-sponsored films based on the Book of Mormon. The latter experience, he said, helped to cement his testimony of the faith’s foundational text before he set off on his mission to Brazil and, after the arrival of COVID–19, Salt Lake City.

“The church motion pictures group,” he said, “is a very diverse group.”

It was also a “pretty queer space, too,” he noted — one where everyone “loved to create and loved the gospel.”

The church in New York has felt similarly embracing, a place where Skousen said he doesn’t feel like he has to splice himself in half.

In practice, that means he finds himself fitting in service as a volunteer counselor in the elders quorum for men in between his work designing for brands like Diesel, Maison Margiela and Jil Sander.

He explained: “I have just felt like I could authentically live my life here in New York.”

The backlash

But for some Latter-day Saints who view traditional gender roles and man-woman marriage as part of the core of the faith’s teachings, messages like the one Skousen is championing are, they argue, misleading — and the church’s seeming endorsement of them an act of betrayal.

“It’s like we’re so concerned about the marginalized or the people that don’t fit the mold … the rest of us are all sitting here [asking] ‘Well, what are we then?’” Hansen said in a “Ward Radio” podcast clip with nearly 2,000 likes. “Well, we have to dumb everything down because Pono might be offended.”

Hansen and others have tied their frustration with the June posts to one from April in which a member described taking a back seat to his wife’s medical career. It, too, resulted in an outcry from conservative members accusing the church of shaving off meaningful parts of its doctrine to fit the world’s mold.

These commentators often invoke “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” to defend their arguments. Published in 1995, the document declares that husbands “preside” in their families, mothers should “nurture” and that the only acceptable form of marriage in God’s eyes is one between a man and woman.

Given statements like these, it is perhaps unsurprising that the posts have created a “mountain of cognitive dissonance” for some, as one Instagram user wrote on the church’s posts of Skousen.

Conservative influencers have also tied the posts to a much larger argument, one that extends well beyond Latter-day Saint pews.

Men around the globe, they argue, are in crisis because “real masculinity” is under attack by the political and cultural left. By promoting voices like Skousen’s and the man supporting his wife’s work outside the home, the church, they believe, is only adding to the problem, all while alienating its male members.

“In a world where … the destruction of masculinity is happening all around us, to join in on those types of things is very concerning to me,” Latter-day Saint influencer Greg Matsen said on social media in his reaction to the posts. “It smells a little bit like, in some of these posts, that there is simply [an attitude of] we’re going to go along with what the world is teaching here in the name of inclusiveness.”

“I have a relationship with God and with Jesus Christ and with the Holy Ghost,” he told The Tribune. “And there are so many experiences in my life where I cannot deny that they know me, that they have a plan for me, and that is enough for me to continue to show up and believe and love the gospel.”

Recently, he said, he happened to show up early to church and was asked to bless the sacrament. He happily obliged, wearing a dress shirt with the T-shirt “Currently struggling with same-sex attraction” over it.

After he returned to his Manhattan apartment, his phone came alive with message after message from other congregants celebrating the moment.

He recalled, “They were like, ‘You really brought me closer to Christ just seeing you wearing the shirt while blessing the sacrament so reverently.’”

And so, next Sunday, he said he will once again set aside the sewing machine and take the subway to the nearest Latter-day Saint meetinghouse, carrying his scriptures in the case he designed, the red Church of Martin “M” emblazoned on its side.

Meanwhile, his latest project? A series of Book of Genesis-inspired dresses for New York Fashion Week.

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