The Gay Seance in the Mormon Tabernacle 🔮 ✨ feat. @mormon.tslur

Happy Pride Month!! We are thrilled to be joined by Hannah from @mormon.tslur on Instagram, who shares her story and experiences as a transgender woman and active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This special Pride Month episode features personal experiences from Hannah and Stella, as well as overview of the Church's stance on homosexuality from the 19th century to present. In the second half of the episode, we'll hear stories of queer Mormons throughout history – their career accomplishments, romantic pursuits, and contributions to the Mormon community. Plus, the true story of a rather queer seance that took place in the Salt Lake Tabernacle. You won't want to miss it! 🏳️‍🌈

TW: self-harm and references to homophobia, particularly in the first hour of the episode. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Loud Laughter Podcast. If it's your first time with us, this is a safe space where we talk about Mormon culture and some of the funny things that arise within it or interesting things. Today we're going more of an interesting route. But if you are a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, if you're not sure where you stand with the church, maybe you are consider yourself ex-Mormon, or you've never heard of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, this is a space for you to come and share some community and share some laughs. Today we have a really exciting episode. We are going to be talking about queer Mormons throughout history because happy Pride Month. Woo! And we have a very special guest today, friend of the pod, friend of mine, friend of ours. Her name is Hannah. And she is a listener of our podcast, but also has a podcast of her own. So I'm gonna turn the time briefly over to Hannah to introduce herself, her platform, um, her niche, and then we will dive in.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

Yeah. Hi, so I'm Hannah. I'm trans and I'm Mormon. So I have this little meme page that I run called Mormon.t slur. Uh just the account like handle is literally just the word Mormon, period, and then T slur. Uh not spelled out, just like the letter T and then slur. Uh, and then I also run a podcast called Desirable Fruit. Perfect. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_04 1:27

So I met Hannah a couple of weeks ago. We met up and we got some chocolate. I got a brownie. What did you what did you say again? I got a milkshake. Okay, we went to this like chocolate shop. It was super fun. Cute. And then we took a walk around Salt Lake City and we went into the Cathedral of the Madeline, which I've always wanted to go to, and it was so fun to go with Hannah because she knows a ton about art history, which I love. I used to study art history, as I've mentioned, and then flopped on all my art history facts. So I will not be sharing any today, but just like it was fun. Uh, right before we started this episode, we were uh like orienting ourselves with our materials and like you know, comparing notes on what we've studied uh regarding this episode. And then my laptop, just like out of nowhere, my Spanish Spotify DJ was like, Hey, welcome back. Today I have a great lineup for you of songs you love, starting with Ethel Kane. And then it started blasting Ethel Kane, and I was like, okay, well, my computer was like ready to go with this Pride episode. So we're eager to get started. Um, we are going to get started with sharing some queer Mormon stories. Incidentally, they are our own queer Mormon stories. Yeah, mine and Hannah's. Uh Hannah, would you like to start us off?

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Uh sure. I I feel like my story is both like complicated and uncomplicated. So, like, I'm trans, I'm a member of the church. Uh obviously, the church has policies on ways in which trans people can be included or excluded in the well, it doesn't really have any policies for inclusion, it's all policies for exclusion. Uh, but I mean I grew up in the church and then I grew up in like the Portland, Oregon area of country and graduated high school, left on a mission back in 2018 when I turned 18. Uh, was in Argentina and then got transferred to Nashville, Tennessee after COVID hit. I just graduated from BYU back in 2025. And I mean, right now I am no longer in Utah, so I'm in grad school elsewhere. Uh, but yeah, that's the big like key points of like the Mormon roadblocks of my life in terms of like queer stuff going on. I let's see, back in like 2022, I got connected with this drag organization called the Divine Sister Misters, which was running in Provo between 2015 and like 2023. And I started doing performance stuff with them. And then from there, I was part of Rainbow Collectives Back to School Pride 2022. And there was like a terrorist presence there. The bad boys showed up. They're like white supremacist jerks. Uh, and then that spring, which is 2023. I had a gay friend who was a coworker of mine, and allegedly a professor may have attempted to kill him using a chemical agent that was only available to him. He's the only person who would have access to it in the Utah County area. So allegedly, that may or may not have happened, and it may or may not have traumatized me, and it may or may not have diverted the way that my life went. And also like got me to a point where like the underlying depression of like gender dysphoria just kind of like wasn't tolerable. And so that fall I started transitioning.

SPEAKER_04 5:06

So yeah, that's where I am now. Wow. I'm I'm glad you're doing well now. That's it's inspiring to hear everyone's stories of like growing up queer in the church, and it yeah, I just always feel for that because that's a really hard experience to have. Yeah, and a little brief background for those who may not be familiar with BYU, um, Brigham Young University. It's a church-founded, uh, church-funded, church-sponsored everything church school in Provo, Utah. There are other campus locations in Hawaii as well as in Idaho. I also attended Brigham Young University the same time as Hannibal, our cross, our paths did not cross. Um, but the Rainbow Collective is a student-led organization that serves queer students, and uh, they face, you know, predictably, unfortunately, a lot of persecution from white supremacists, from other students. And so there are a lot of traumatizing institutions from the institution itself and from professors that allegedly walk free to this day, allegedly. And so um it's a difficult place to be as a queer person, and we are just so glad that you're here now, Hannah, and doing well, and that we can be friends and have you on the podcast. We really appreciate you.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Yeah, I'm happy about that too. I mean, just for clarity, the I mean, the BYU campuses are all church run. They also have the CES Honor Code, the Church Education System Honor Code, which kind of governs the way that LGBTQ people are treated on campus. Among other things, it restricts a very like gendered form of dress and grooming standard. And it also restricts people from dating people of the same sex. And so there's a lot of very pervasive bias on campus from students and faculty members against people who, regardless of the way they identify, are attracted to the people of the same sex.

SPEAKER_04 7:08

Yeah, yeah, precisely. And you can get reported for honor code violations. So if you are a queer student who would like to date, for example, that is can be a very stressful situation to be in. Um, you just have to kind of be on guard as a queer student at BYU. We don't want this episode to be a downer, so I'm gonna try my best not to like fall into that. Um, Hannah and I spoke about that previously. We want to be able to convey the history of queer members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and just really reinforce that queer people have always existed and they've always existed in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, despite um some of their stories being erased. Uh, we are bringing those back up today. I am gonna give a brief introduction of myself as a queer person. I am bisexual, and I've never really done like a how do you say it? Like a like a debrief on your sexuality. I've never done a debrief, like a coming out. The way that I came out was very like phased, I guess. Um, and really just to like people that I trusted, close friends, um, an attempt to come out to family, which I won't get into. And then finally, I'm at a place where now that I've graduated from BYU and it's safe for me, I am in a place where I just talk about it pretty openly. It's not like a dramatic reveal, you know. I feel like I I always expected to write like a kind of like a tearjerker Instagram caption, but I was like, that just doesn't really feel like accurate to my experiences. I texted Anna too that I buy erase myself regularly, which is true. Um could you explain bi erasure? Yeah. I mean, I are also biased.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

Bi bisexure is this phenomenon where people expect people to be attracted to only like one gender of people pretty consistently, which is silly evolutionarily. I mean, like our closest uh genetic relatives are chimpanzees and bonobos, and those are like heavily bisexual in terms of their behavior with one another, uh, which is not to say that humans are bisexual by nature, that's obviously not con like it's not a majority position to be in. Um but the idea is that people are either straight or they're gay, there's nothing really in between. And if you're bisexual and currently dating someone of your same gender or sex, then that must be your sexual orientation all the time. And if you're bisexual and you are dating someone of the opposite sex, then you must be straight. And that's just that's just not how it works. Because we have this dual expectation of monosexuality, whether it's hetero or homosexuality, and monogamy. And so there's just this interesting dynamic there.

SPEAKER_04 10:09

Thank you so much for explaining that. And in my experience too, I am in a straight relationship, and so I don't care that people assume that I'm straight. That's not really like a problem for me. But what is a problem is this attitude that because bisexual people can have the option of being in a straight relationship, that they are therefore not persecuted or have not experienced um things that are typical of a queer person's experience in terms of um, you know, the negatives and the positives. You know, at the end of the day, it's a queer identity. So I am telling my story this way as an attempt to not biase myself, essentially, um is why I'm speaking about this. So anyway, I um realized that I was something other than straight just before my mission. I'd had experiences leading up to them that were pretty telling, but as a member of the church, I just suppressed those. Um and so finally it reached a point just before my mission where I was thinking about things differently. There's a song called Girl Crush, but it's a cover by Harry Stiles. Do you know this? Do you know this one? That's crazy. It gets crazier. So I was at Southern Virginia University, which is a church school. They are not as um strict with the honor code as Brigham Young University is, but it's still there. Anyway, there was a girl there that I was like, oh my gosh, like she's just so pretty. And I was like, oh, like I just want to be like her, whatever, whatever. This is kind of classic for people that don't know that they're gay, where they just think that they want to be like someone of you know the same gender. And so I would listen to Girl Crush by Harry Styles, and I would think of this girl. And it's like, and why did that not signal to me that there was something fruity going on? It just didn't. I don't know. So that's one of many experiences that should have pointed to something. But anyway, I didn't really catch that. And then later on, this is an aside just because I think it's interesting. There was a guy that I dated who cheated on me, unfortunately, and then married that girl. So two people that I had been like romantically invested in are now married and have a baby. And if that ain't the life of a bisexual, I don't know. She's watching it all burn in front of you. Was that the girl crush? Yeah, that's the person that I associated that song with. Yeah. Whoa. Because the song, the lyrics are so good. It's it's a very, it's a very good song. Um, but it's it's basically this girl singing about another girl, and she's like, oh, she's so beautiful. I want to kiss her because she kisses her boyfriend, and I kind of think her boyfriend, like, it's like a really I think it's a very um whether or not it was intended to be, I think it's a great look again into like the mind of a bisexual person who doesn't quite know it yet. So I think it's extra ironic that I was listening to that song.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

What's the one uh song by the Sabrina Carpenter starring Jenna Ortega in the music video? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. What song is that? Oh my gosh. It's it's good. It's a good one. Is it oh taste? Yeah, taste.

SPEAKER_04 13:28

That's a good one. Yeah, that's a really good one. Yeah, similar, similar. So wait, Stelle, who is Girl Crush by originally? Girl Crush was originally by Little Big Band. Little Big Town. No, little big town. My bad. Yeah, because it kind of is has like a country vibe to it, doesn't it? Yes. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. So it's an interesting song. We'll get into it later, but that song actually has like some relevance to the dynamics that we're gonna talk about in like the early church. I feel like it could. Yeah, I totally think so. We'll get into it. I think so for sure. Okay. So basically, just before my mission, I start thinking that there's something a little fruity going on. So I but it but it caused me so much anxiety to think about it. I was dating a man at the time, and so I told him uh, you know, how I was feeling and was like, I just I don't know if I'm straight. And he goes, Yeah, no, I think you are though. Thanks for the help. So this was like another like coming out attempt. Like it's it takes so much courage to even say that much. And he was like, No, you're not. But I was so so anxious about it that at the time that was a relief to hear. Like, yeah, I did feel a little bit shut down, but I was also like, okay, someone object like from you know, third-party perspective looks at me and sees me as a straight person, therefore I must be a straight person. So I went on my merry way, I served a mission, and my parents met on their mission, and I always thought that was so cute. I still do, I think it's really sweet. And so I aspired to do the same. So I was like, I'm gonna meet a man on my mission. So I got called to Brazil and I was like, yes, like I'm gonna meet a Mormon missionary in Brazil, we're gonna fall in love, I'm gonna have the same story. Then COVID hits, and I got reassigned to the only all-female mission in the entire world while I'm in the middle of questioning my sexuality. Wow. So I was like, mmm, not great, not great. I go on my mission. I had a crush on my very first zone leader at Temple Square. Zone leaders are women. And so I do think that I had subconsciously an idea that, and the funny thing is, like, I was accepting of other queer people. I had queer friends before my mission, despite being, you know, a very like strong traditional latter-day saint. I maintained relationships with other queer people. But then when it came to me, I was like, unacceptable, not okay. So I do think that I thought that by serving a mission, that part of me would disappear, that I get on the mission and get a crush on my zone leader. But I was so busy with other things that I didn't even really think about it until I got home. So then when I got home, I tried to dive in a little bit deeper into like accepting that part of me, ultimately have been able to accept it and am now out to anyone that's interested. And now I guess publicly on a podcast. So that is my queer Mormon story in a very brief nutshell. Thank you all for listening.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

Thank you so much for sharing. In almost like a similar vein, like when I first tried to come out to like a family member, their immediate reaction was, no, you're not. I don't know if you know that better than I do. That's that's crazy to exacerbate that. Yeah. Like that coming out attempt was like while I was sitting in a psych ward after like wanting to myself. And like the sequence of events was I get taken to the psych ward, family member comes in, I say, I'm trans. Family member says, No, you're not. I say, Okay. And that night I go to the father-son camp out.

SPEAKER_05 17:11

Yeah. It's crazy. Father son camp out gotta be the worst place for a trans woman. Dad's gonna be the worst place anyway.

SPEAKER_04 17:21

Oh my gosh. And that's the thing. Like in Mormon, like predominantly Mormon communities or areas, I feel like I've had so many coming out attempts. And finally, I was like, you know what? Like, they're not gonna believe me regardless. So I started to make jokes like with my coworkers at BYU. If any of y'all are listening to this, love you guys, you're really fun. But anyway, I would make jokes and be like, oh yeah, like I would totally kiss that girl, and everyone just laughed. And so I was like, oh, this can just be a bit. So I would say like totally authentic, like true things about my sexuality, and everyone would just like laugh and have a great time with it. And I just became kind of the class clown that way. But it was a bit of a relief for me because I was like, oh, I do get to like speak about these feelings and these experiences, and no one's gonna report me because they don't think that bisexual women are out here at BYU. So anyway, that was you know a double-edged sword, a pro and a con. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:17

So yeah, so you were you're just like walking around the Marriott Center, like looking at women, going, I'd tap that.

SPEAKER_06 18:28

You know, in like in like you know, and who isn't walking around the BYU Marriott Center?

SPEAKER_04 18:37

No, I'm just kidding. That is the straightest place on campus. Like, obviously, there are gay people there because I was there and I know other gay people that were there, but like think about a place that just like reeks of of heterosexual sexuality. Maybe they try again in the arts building, try the dance being.

SPEAKER_01 18:54

There's so many options, Stella.

SPEAKER_04 18:55

There are so many options. I was just getting the wrong degree, you know. Okay, just kidding. I love my degree and everything worked out. But I also was like barred from um, I worked at Women's Services and Resources at BYU, which is an amazing place. And I, if if anyone is listening and is currently a BYU student, is queer, is not queer, doesn't matter. Women's Services and Resources is an incredibly safe space on campus where nothing that you say gets reported to the honor code, to the campus police, to any other department. So if you're going through anything and you're at BYU, whatever it may be, even up to like a faith transition, which is very difficult at BYU. Um, women's services and resources is a safe space for you. It's a confidential reporting area. Anyway, that's my plug. But unfortunately, while I was there, we assumed um the role of outreach for queer students in the ways that we were allowed to, which were very little, but we had a meeting with my boss, and she was like, Yeah, none of you guys can come to these events. Like, we have to keep them underground. Um, none of you can come. And I was like, How do you know that everyone in this room is straight?

unknown 19:57

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_04 19:58

I just want to say really quick, um, you said unfortunately we assumed that. And I just want to say the reason it's unfortunate is because they shut down the resources that were specifically um supposed to serve the queer community of BYU. Thanks. So that's why they were assumed by the Women's Services Department. Yeah, and Hannah has some good insights.

SPEAKER_01 20:19

Oh, yeah, yeah, thanks. Yeah. So from my perspective of the way things were going down, I had been doing some collaborative work with Rainbow Collective and their outreach team at that point uh to talk with people who worked for the Office of Belonging and try to persuade them to do more like outward-focused LGBTQ-centered events. Because that's what like the Office of Belonging was basically there for, to offer counseling for marginalized students was the assumption, and to do events specific to marginalized experiences. And they weren't doing that, right? Uh obviously, multicultural student services and the Office of Belonging have done a lot of work and they have done a lot of organizing specifically to like help racially marginalized students, which is fantastic. Super glad that they're doing that. So that's awesome.

SPEAKER_04 21:12

Amazing, amazing people that work in these departments, yeah. They're very cool. Just fantastic, very brave people.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

Shout out Lita Giddens, angel walking on earth, wonderful person. Uh, cannot endorse highly enough, but they didn't do anything for gay people. And so I was working with a few people on Rainbow Collective to just like propose different events that they could do to support gay people. And we would like go through the process, submit it, wait to hear back, hear nothing, submit a new one, and then just like rinse and repeat. Right. And eventually we just like sat down with the leadership of the Office of Belonging and we're like, look, you gotta do something, right? This campus is full of homophobic people, and our generation is 20% LGBTQ identifiant. If the people uh who are graduating from your university don't know how to be kind to gay people, they won't be able to keep a job because you simply can't interact with people of your generation and be homophobic and have that be okay. Yeah, it doesn't work unless you are like being in a very insular place. Yeah. But in any case, we did that. They had meetings, and then what I heard from them was they were uh re-delegating the responsibility of doing LGBTQ specific events to women's services and resources, which first of all, I'm a woman, but like not all LGBTQ people are. Yeah. And so this is not like a woman-specific issue. Yeah. And they didn't give them like more resources to do them with. And so they're not asking them to do more events with the same amount of time, with the same staff, with the same resources. So you don't get any more money, but you have to do more for a demographic, most of which you don't represent.

SPEAKER_04 23:00

I'm like, how dumb do you gotta be? Like knowing that there are genderqueer students on campus and being like, let's put them in women's services and research, like the place is labeled. Why did they do that? Because, like, okay, there's an office of belonging. Why wouldn't like did they give any reason why? Or they just didn't want to like deal with it.

SPEAKER_01 23:21

I'm not cognizant of it. Well, the reason, the best reason that I can see is Carl didn't want to do it and Dorothy did. Oh, wow. That's the best I can see.

SPEAKER_04 23:31

Dang. Yeah. So then it got passed off to Women's Services and Resources. We had a meeting, my boss was in tears about this. Again, these are like amazing people that just work with horrific constraints. Yeah. Like these are people that are really like putting themselves on the line in a lot of ways to stick up for marginalized students, both, you know, racially and also um because of sexuality or gender identity. So my boss was in tears telling us about this that we'd assume the responsibility. We're not given any additional funding. And also, us as students are not allowed to participate in these events. I was the marketer. I was told you cannot market these events. They have to be, you know, like invitation only. How are people supposed to find out about them?

SPEAKER_01 24:17

It's very hush-hush down though. People would send out invitations over like the various LGBTQ discords uh and like group chats, and that's basically how that happened outside of Word of Math.

SPEAKER_04 24:30

Wow. Yeah. So which was very frustrating for me because the justification that was given to us, which I do not believe is the true reason that needs this happened, but the justification that was given is well, people get really violent, which is true, as Hannah has mentioned, people get really violent toward LGBTQ students. We need to keep things, you know, quiet for their safety, which, yes, absolutely, but also there's an entire campus police, there's campus security, yeah, all of these resources that they never tapped into to protect these students, both in this hypothetical case and in cases in the past where students have been severely harmed or, you know, death has been threatened or attempted murder. That that just makes me so mad. I just have to say, really quick, like that just makes my blood boil because I'm like, so instead of educating your students on how to not be a hateful person, you're forcing these marginalized students underground for their safety instead of protecting them or like expelling your students for threatening other people. You know what I mean? Like that's not the solution. The solution is to like punish the people who are threatening harm, not to like force the people who are being threatened further underground while simultaneously telling them you belong at our school, but it has to be a secret that you belong. Wait, what? Like, I don't that doesn't make any sense. Uh that just makes me so mad.

SPEAKER_01 26:01

Yeah, and I think that part of that discretionary measure has to do with like the board of trustees, making sure that BYU keeps all the funding that it wants. Um and then also like just the area that we live in, right? Like I think it was my penultimate year at BYU, penultimate, fun word that people who like serve Spanish-speaking missions know. Um during my penultimate year at BYU, uh, there was a queer bookstore that opened up in like Northern Provo because it was like further away from campus, like it was up by Roncho Market. And so basically no one knew that it existed. There was like a few people that would go to it, but the people who did know that it existed were conservatives. Conservatives knew that they existed, conservatives saw the flyers, and conservatives started sending bomb threats to the owner and to the like venue. That's ridiculous. They're not there anymore for multiple reasons. One is because of the constant threats of violence, and then another is because of like they just weren't profitable. And if you want to have a successful LGBTQ organization in Provo, you're gonna have to be able to find a way to market to the people who are in the know, the people who are part of the community, and keep the information away from the people who aren't. Otherwise, you're just gonna end up with people threatening you all the time.

SPEAKER_04 27:18

Yeah. Wow. So I do see like where they were coming from, but it did feel kind of like a slap in the face. And I was in that room hearing all of that, and then told none of you student employees are allowed to attend or promote this. That's so sad. And I was like, great. So I didn't say anything until I left that job, but I had, you know, an exit interview, and I just said, hey, like going forward, don't assume that all of your student employees are straight. Like, I really could have benefited from having like knowing of other queer people at BYU, because you do kind of have to hide, especially if you're, you know, in the business school. If I were in another department, I think I would have been more comfortable sharing with other people and you know, all those things. But anyway, um, that is a diversion, but a little bit more into um why did I even start talking about that? Because it was part of your your story. Yeah. Go figure. So that's part of my that's part of my story. So anyway, again, we don't want this to be like this episode to be a downer, but it but also I am not the kind of person who will ever sugarcoat anything or skip over important details for the sake of helping other people feel comfortable. So, with all that being said, of course, this is primarily a comedic podcast. And so we do want to celebrate queer members of the church in a more uplifting and hopefully fun way going forward. But I do think it would be a mistake to not share a little bit about where we're coming from and why we are interested in this topic. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

I mean, I'm reminded of like a couple days ago, uh, the like Richard Osler's podcast uh released this post with a long caption, like halfway through it. It's just like her story is a heartbreaking one. And it's just like, look, yes, people's lives include heartbreak. And also being attracted to people is fun. Yeah, just like if you're not constantly ashamed of like how your physical being exists in this world, which according to the like teachings of the LDS Church, we're not supposed to, like, being attracted to people is fun. Yeah, living authentic, being a gender identity is fun. So, like, these should not all be tragedies. Yeah, yes, these some of some stories are success stories, and I feel pretty happy about my life, actually.

SPEAKER_04 29:39

Yeah, yeah, fantastic. Exactly. So you want to platform that, and again, like I really have obviously a very soft space in my heart for anyone who may be at BYU struggling with any number of things. But if you are at BYU going through it, like we have two queer people here who are leading successful lives happily post BYU, and I think that that's amazing and something to be celebrated. And a nod to the queer or maybe queer, queer suspected. I will get into that, but um, people queer, queer, bicurious, shout out to all the bicurious polygamous wives. Oh my gosh, for real. Shout out to them because they were money. Did you're a sister wife?

SPEAKER_01 30:25

Drop a shoulder off her sleeve. Did you notice a little too long?

SPEAKER_04 30:30

Exactly. Exactly. So, to paint the picture, we are gonna give an overview of what same-sex dynamics were like during the pioneer era and then into the 20th century. So, and when I say same-sex dynamics, I am referring to just dynamics, period. I'm not out the gate saying that I'm talking about same-sex romantic or same-sex sexual relationships. We're just gonna be purely talking about how people of the same sex interacted, what was normal, what was not, and um, then dive into queer Mormons who fit into that.

SPEAKER_01 31:06

Right. And we use that framing just so that we can contextualize and say, okay, we have our like framework of how men interact with men now and how women interact with women now. 200 years ago, that was different. And so if we're looking back into the past and seeing, like, okay, what was going on then that we would call gay now? How do we determine what's gay and what's normal? Well, not like it's normal to be gay. And also are you gay or are you normal?

SPEAKER_05 31:34

Who said that? There's like a meme where someone said that, like in all seriously, oh yeah, are you serious?

SPEAKER_01 31:41

But in any case, uh that's kind of what we're trying to get at is like, are people straight or are they gay? Those categories were not things that people like used in the 1800s. Yeah. And so we're trying to figure out like, are these typical, atypical, frowned upon behaviors within the like the groups that they exist in at the time that they existed.

SPEAKER_04 32:03

Yeah. So in general, people were more accepting of what we might interpret now as like romantic behavior between people of the same sex. It was common to share a bed, to cuddle, even to kiss someone of the same sex, both for men and for women. Men, LDS men who served missions would share beds with their companions, and they were encouraged to have like a certain level of intimacy um to be like productive on missions and to get along. And all the while they're sharing the same bed. And none of that had a gay lens on it or a gay interpretation. That was just the way things work. And Hannah had some really interesting insights um at the beginning into um sharing homes and things. Could you go into that?

SPEAKER_01 32:48

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So we know there's like the Missouri period of church history, right? And in like Jackson County, Independence, Missouri, uh, the areas where church members went to uh fleeing persecution, Kirtland, uh, a lot of people were homeless. Not a lot of people owned homes, not a lot of people had beds. And so if you had a bed, chances are you were gonna share it with other people. If you had a family of eight, a lot of those would all be crammed onto the same bed. And so we were just looking at a very different like home structuring model because like home wealth looked very differently. Families lived in very different ways. If you had a bed and there were three people living in your house, maybe all three of those people would be on the bed at the same time, right? We have like diaries and journals from Brigham Young and Wilfred Woodruff talking about how, well, Wilfred Woodruff was talking about how he would often spend multiple days sleeping together with the prophet Joseph every night in this warm embrace and like talking for hours into the evening. I did not know that. And that was a totally normal friendship thing to do. And we have like Brigham Young writing in his diary, like years after Joseph Smith's death, that he like had dreamed of seeing the prophet Joseph and kissing him many times and telling him how much he missed him. And today, if people did that by our modern standards, we would call that pretty gay. But in the 1800s, that would not be contextually appropriate.

SPEAKER_04 34:22

That's so interesting. Yeah, so it's really interesting, and in particular because the church today is so um anti-LGBTQ, it's really interesting to look into the history and see where that unfolded, kind of what the limits were even back then of like, okay, you can kiss your friends, you can cuddle with your friends, you can share a bed with your friends. Where is the line drawn? And then suddenly this is not okay from a church perspective.

SPEAKER_01 34:48

Right. I mean, how many like people have been told that they can't dance with members of their same sex at a youth dance? Yeah that was all the rage at the Kirtland Temple opening and at the Nauvoo temple opening. Like a lot of the dances that were being done in Western states at that time and western expansion were between same-sex partners. I mean, that's just what cowboys would do. The Western styles just had that pattern to them. And so Dragum Young would dance exclusively with men at these temple openings, right? These are just like normal things that people would do.

SPEAKER_04 35:18

Yeah. And even um cross-dressing, which again is a modern term being applied uh retroactively, but um at these dances, these all-male dances, it was common for some men to dress up as women and then dance at an all-male dance, and they're, you know, just having a great time and they didn't think anything of it. And now we look back on that and be like, oh, that's cross-dressing, that's gay, that's X and Y and Z. And to them, it was just living their lives.

SPEAKER_01 35:45

And as we get later into the 1800s perceptions of cross-dressing or uh dressing like a member of the opposite gender or what have you, have this very like volatile dynamic in how they're seen by missionaries, how they're seen by like upper church leaders. Uh, we have, for example, B. Morris Young, who is one of Brigham Young's sons, who would be cross-dressing as an entertainer and would like to go on tour singing. And one of his most famous performances was for the final birthday of his father-in-law, Lorenzo Snow. Interestingly, B. Morris Young, also known as Madame Paterini, was also a co-founder of the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Association, now known as the Young Men's Organization. Wow. So that's cool. Uh, additionally, you have like Evan Stevens, who was the uh temple choir director, who would like dress up as a woman and direct the children's choir. And that was seen as like totally appropriate as a form of entertainment, totally fine. And outside of the church and outside of like the Utah corridor, you have missionaries going out, finding indigenous groups, and discovering that people had different and interesting like gender dynamics in their marital relationships, or what we would perceive as marital relationships, including like people who were labeled as female husbands or male wives and things like that. And that complicated the way that they perceived families in those areas, but the missionaries were fine with it. Upper church leaders, not so much. But the missionaries who like interacted with these indigenous groups in South America, in the Pacific Islands, and the Western states were perfectly chill with it.

SPEAKER_04 37:38

And really quickly, um, the source that we're using for a lot of this information, especially here at the beginning, as we establish a background, is from a book called Same-Sex Dynamics.

SPEAKER_01 37:48

Same-sex dynamics among 19th century Americans. Subtitle, a Mormon example by D. Michael Quinn, it's received criticism. Most of its criticism has been kind of invalid. The sources that he uses and polls from are authentic primary sources and say the things that he says that they say. His interpretations of their meanings have more flexibility to them, but the things that we are saying are mostly just reiterations of the primary sources that he uses.

SPEAKER_04 38:21

Yeah. So I just wanted to mention that during the this time of like the late 1800s to the early 1900s, when polygamy was being practiced by Mormons, most of the country saw polygamy as like a very lascivious sexual practice. Um, it was seen as a form of abnormal sexuality. And so the church was constantly, and the church members were constantly fending off attacks. Uh, they were defending polygamy. And I just think it's interesting that they would defend their own, what's the word, like minority sexual practices, sexual practices that were outside of the norm for like most Americans, they would defend that while simultaneously condemning homosexuality. Um, and that, I don't know, continued to be the case for many years. So I just think it's interesting that even though the church for many years was um persecuted for the way that um members practiced sexuality and for the structure, their family structures, they didn't extend the same sympathy that they wanted for themselves to homosexual people as much.

SPEAKER_01 39:38

I think correct me if I'm wrong. As far as I can tell, you're right. There's a few nuances that I want to add. One is that, like, along with accusations of being an adulterer because of polygamy, Joseph Smith was also accused of engaging in same-sex acts. The term that was used at the time was buggery, which buggery is like the 1800s way of saying factory. Um so like the same person who did like the Navo Expositor reports also accused him of having like gay sex with people. Um so that's also there as like a thing that they might have been doing, might not. I have no way of knowing. I wasn't there. Um, but it was something that church leaders had had in mind since like the beginning as something that painted them in a negative light.

SPEAKER_03 40:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:29

Right. And then a lot of the emphasis on the nuclear family, the so-called traditional family, and like anti-homosexuality has happened since the retrenchment period started by J. Ruby Ben Clark in the 1930s. So these are things that are happening kind of almost like in completely different periods of time where we stop doing polygamy and start doing American assimilation. Yeah. And part of that is anti-homosexuality.

SPEAKER_04 40:54

Yeah. Yeah, it's uh a lot of this mirrors like general American sentiments, not necessarily, because obviously there are some exceptions, like the church's practice of polygamy did not mirror that, which caused a lot of problems and tension for them. But speaking of that shift, could you speak to that like when it became more condemned to be homosexual from a church perspective? Like we come from this background of like, whatever, you know, you can kiss, you can cuddle, share a bed, whatever you want, and then things kind of shift and become a little bit more um strict, or doing that means that you are gay. Uh, when did that happen and why?

SPEAKER_01 41:32

Yeah, so there's various explanations that scholars have given for why this like anti-homosexual, homo tactile, homoerotic like sentiment has arisen in the United States and how the Church of Jesus Christ of Laterity Saints has like followed that. There's arguments that can be made that like homosexuality and same-sex like intercourse specifically has been condemned by church leaders from the beginning. I don't want to argue that at this point. I haven't really focused on that specifically. I've mostly been focused on this like retrenchment period and the way it's affected modern Mormonism as opposed to like Mormon fundamentalism. But really, what I see going on is in the like end of the 19th century, going into the 20th century, we have this abandonment of polygamy, this accepting of being American as like a core value of Mormonism. And we start seeing like American patriotism as part of Pioneer Day, completely forgetting that people left the larger United States because of American persecution, because the United States refused to protect the people in Nauvoo and Missouri and Kirtland and just allowed them to be persecuted almost to the point of death. And now it's this American patriotic festival. It's very left. Now we're part of this. Yay. It's totally ironic. Yeah, this idea of like we went out and found our own space away from the American colonial project, and then the American colonial project wanted us to be part of it. And so we let them accept the colonization that we did now on their behalf. Wow. Crazy. And then this really like expands and gets exacerbated under Kimball and Benson. And we have these like very family-focused projects that start in the 1970s and center this idea of the family, not only as like a doctrine that is supposed to be central to the LDS church, but also as something that is very popular among the American populace at the time. So the church would start putting out all of these like family focused ads that were very popular among Americans and that the American government liked a lot. And that gave us a lot of money in terms of like free airtime to push these ads. And so this starts to become like this key central piece of church doctrine as a lot of the people who are in upper church leadership right now start getting into those ranks of church leadership.

SPEAKER_04 44:11

Yeah. Super interesting. So would you say that part of the reason that the church shifted toward being more homophobic and kind of uh more strict with these lines and um whether or not someone is gay and that becoming the church's business, would you say that a big part of that is trying to be patriotic and trying to assimilate into Americanism?

SPEAKER_01 44:30

I would say that like the assimilation project and the correlation project of modern Mormonism has created what it is as a whole. It would be impossible for me to say this is like a causal relationship. Yeah. But I do see them as connected.

SPEAKER_04 44:45

Totally. Yeah. That makes total sense. And makes sense too, given in the United States at least, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints tends to be very patriotic. Um, again, those Pioneer Day celebrations, that's a holiday that's celebrated in Utah to commemorate the Mormon pioneers arriving in the Salt Lake Valley. That tends to be a very Americanized holiday, too. Like it's the colors are the same as the Fourth of July, red, white, and blue. You send off fireworks. There's a lot of parallels between how Americans celebrate Independence Day and how Mormons celebrate Pioneer Day. Yeah, even though at the time it wasn't even America.

SPEAKER_01 45:23

Yeah. Utah doesn't get like incorporated as a territory of the United States until 1848, which is the year after Brigham Young got to the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. And there's just a very like clear disconnect, distrust, violent conflict between the United States federal government and the Mormon pioneers who existed in Utah at the time. Obviously, the Mormon pioneers were committing their own atrocities to the indigenous people of Utah, but there is this like very clear irony of Pioneer Day being celebrated as an American patriotic holiday when the pioneers got there, at least a lot of them, not the handcart pioneers, but like the first wagon chains, it was not part of the United States. It was part of Mexico because the pioneers were fleeing the United States.

SPEAKER_04 46:08

Yeah, precisely. I mean, essentially, these Mormon pioneers fled the United States to go to Mexico. Yeah. But that's fine. No one ever talks about it like that. Yeah. Yeah. They're like refugees in Mexico. Yeah. So I guess I'm curious with the did you call it retrenchment? Yeah. Can you define that term? I was just curious what that meant.

SPEAKER_01 46:31

Yeah. A retrenchment is when a population, a community, a group of people goes through a period of being seen as more like politically regressive or conservative. So for example, like right now, America is in a political retrenchment. We see that in a lot of the policies that are happening right now in regard to LGBTQ policies, but also in regard to like economic policy. And we go through this cycle politically every few election cycles, right? And at that point in LES history in like the 1930s, we started through this period of retrenchment and assimilation to Americanized culture and to white culture. At the point of high-near departures, people in like the eastern states, the United States, had determined that Mormons didn't get to count as white anymore because of like how polygamy was supposed to have affect like their phrenology. And we know from historical record that like Mormons still considered themselves white, but Easterners did not. And there's a bunch of like political stuff to go over that. Religion of a different color is a great text to review like exactly how the Naemic There worked. But that's kind of how people were seen. And this retrenchment project took away some of like the oddity, the peculiarity of Mormonism and made us the whitest of the whites as we are now.

SPEAKER_04 47:55

Interesting. It's really interesting that it was like an intentional thing that the church had to do, like kind of like a PR effort, you know, to change public perception and fascinating how race was applied. Definitely.

SPEAKER_01 48:08

And I think part of that is just like Jay Ruben Clark, who is like this hinge figure in Mormon assimilation and the political retrenchment starting in 1930. Part of that is the fact that before he was a member of the Corma the Twelve, he was the United States ambassador to Mexico. And he hated Mexicans. And I'm assuming part of this was because the relationship between the Mexican government and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at the time that he was the ambassador was very tense. There was the Batista movement going on with the Zapatistas, who were like Mormon separatists who were fighting on like the liberation side of the Mexican Revolution or the Mexican Civil War. And then there were like the white Mormon colony areas where it was very conservative. And so there was like this division of like fundamentalist groups in Mexico that created this separation and core relationship between the church in Salt Lake and the like more Chicano saints in Mexico at the time. This isn't the topic of the podcast, but I think it's fun and informative. So I'm gonna keep yapping. There are experts in the field. I would have to do more research in order to like give more good information there. That's the extent of my knowledge. What I do know is that there were some of them that like eventually rejoined to Mormonism and like an official convention, but there was a lot of political discord going on in Mexico at that point, which then probably transferred to the way that J. Rubin Clark viewed the utility of retrenchment in American assimilation when he became an apostle and later a first presidency member.

SPEAKER_04 50:13

Interesting. That's so cool. I think, like from what I was reading, the Red Scare and like McCarthyism also had something to do with it, of um just trying to root out anything that was seen as anti-American. And I think at the time, and correct me if I'm wrong, um, the queer community was often grouped with like communists and sort of like anarchists and anti-American sentiment, whether or not that was true. And people, even at BYU, there were sort of like witch hunts for um, you know, like communists as well as queer students, and those were kind of seen as similar. Like we're trying to root out anti-American sentiments, and queer people were like part of that for some reason.

SPEAKER_01 51:05

Yeah. One component of the red scare in American McCarthyism was the lavender scare. Oh, yeah, is basically what you like referred to as gay people being suspected communists and agitators. And this is, of course, exacerbated during the AIDS pandemic. But during the 60s and 70s, this is also very prominent. And Wilkinson and Oaks, both like, whether or not it was directly under their supervision, did have like little student spy rings and work with like local police departments to try and run out who was uh spreading like dissidents among BYU professors and students, try and track people who were going to gay bars and get their license plates and things like that, invite people out on fake dates. There was a uh BYU professor who taught music who was publicly outed by the police department and then killed himself. There's like there's a lot of stuff going on. And a lot of it had to do with like these kind of secret spy rings of students and police officers.

SPEAKER_04 52:11

Yeah. And I'm glad that we we opened talking about BYU because, in my opinion, it's at least if you're talking about Utah, if you're talking about being queer and Mormon in the United States. And I always want to make that caveat because we're not touching on being queer and also Mormon in other countries, but when you're talking about the United States in this way, I think it's impossible to skip over BYU and skip over, you know, the spying and the conversion therapy and all of that. And while we might not dive into it more deeply today, um, I would invite people to look into that. And I think it's just impossible to skip over all of that as part of this conversation of queer Mormonism, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_01 52:46

Yeah. There's also a fun queer Mormonism going on outside of Utah and like the Jell O corridor, where like Can you define jello corridor real quickly? It's such a fun term. It's a fun fun term. It's a term that like some goofy academics use to refer to like between Alberta, Canada, and like Phoenix and Gilbert, Arizona, where you have this relatively high concentration of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other Mormons. You also have like other areas of the United States where there's kind of an unexpected concentration of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other Mormon groups. So, like Kansas City, for example, and Jackson County, Missouri, also have elevated populations of Mormons. But the Jell O Corridor is generally where people go to do like concerted research on high-density Mormon groups. But a lot of people who interact with the LDS Church do so outside of Utah, right? So, for example, like I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and I've spent most of my like being alive time outside of Utah, but most of my time being an adult inside of Utah. So there's like this interesting balance of my experiences of Utah and Mormonism as connected.

SPEAKER_04 54:01

And Sophia and I also like we have spent most of our lives outside of Utah, but also for me, like I've spent most of my adult life in Utah. So it's similar. It's really interesting that dynamic that comes up because Utah is kind of like a Mecca for Mormons. And so it's, I I almost call it like an unavoidable like phase of life that you go to Utah and spend at least some time there and have formative experiences here. Yeah. So we have talked about early church sentiments towards same-sex behavior, whether that be romantic, sexual, or just being besties. And then we've talked a little bit about uh how the church wanted to assimilate into American culture in certain ways and thus the rise of homophobia in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. So, where does that leave us today? And obviously, we're skipping a couple of centuries, so just for the sake of brevity, we're centuries. Yeah, we're oh my gosh, my brain. It's okay. So one major shift happened in the October 1952 General Conference, where homosexuality became a major spiritual and societal threat. So that's when it was kind of formally condemned over the pulpit by a church leader. And that, of course, followed the general American shift. This spiraled into the 1970s and 80s conversion therapy, which we mentioned that uh happened at BYU. And then in 1995, the Family A Proclamation to the World is born. If you're not familiar with the Family Approclamation to the World, it is a canonized document. Uh really canonized. Yeah. Really? No, it's not.

SPEAKER_01 55:34

It's not if it were canon, then it'd be included in scripture. Yeah. I thought it was at the very end. Like, no. It's not. So most church leaders have referred to it as being based in doctrine. Recently, Rasband and Oaks have said that it is doctrine, but it's not canon. Interesting. Okay. Canonical is used to refer like strictly to scripture, and it's not classified as that.

SPEAKER_04 55:59

Okay, okay, good to know. I thought they like added it to the doctrine and covenants. Didn't they add something to the doctrine and covenants? Official proclamation too. Okay, okay, okay. So those would be consumed. Official proclamation too is recently priesthood. They added that one to the doctrine and covenants?

SPEAKER_01 56:12

Yeah, that's official declaration two. Right there at the end.

SPEAKER_04 56:16

Okay. Yeah. So that was the most recently added one.

SPEAKER_01 56:19

Up to my knowledge, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 56:20

Yeah, but it has been a topic a lot of people have talked about, um, like, you know, wondering if they're going to canonize the family proclamation, but it hasn't been officially canonized yet, although they've hinted at it being doctrine, like you said. But anyway, I feel like it doesn't really mean that much whether or not it's in your Doctrine and Covenants book. You know what I mean? It more matters how they're talking about it and enforcing it and applying it. Yeah. Totally. Yeah, yeah. I agree with you. Um, so you were talking about what the family proclamation is. Sorry. Yes. So the family proclamation to the world is exactly what it sounds like. It is the church's view on a family, what a family should look like, what that means. And it's telling the whole world this is what we think, and this is how I have different people view it different ways. I view it as the church saying this is how your family should look, unless you have some sort of extenuating circumstance. Exception to the rule that's also somehow approved by Mormonism.

SPEAKER_01 57:18

That's my perspective on it. Um, yeah, go ahead. Yeah. I mean, you're allowed to think what you want about the family of proclamation to the world. It's got a lot of outclauses in it. My personal perspective on it is that it serves as a legal document to say this is the theological justification for the LDS church's involvement in different political projects.

SPEAKER_04 57:37

And that's a really important point to bring up because following the Family of Proclamation to the World, the church began to participate in more political activism against the LGBTQ community. So most notably, uh, the church was the primary supporter for California's Prop 8 in 2008. And an estimated 50 to 70 percent of funds and volunteer force came from LDS church members or from the church itself in support of this bill.

SPEAKER_01 58:02

And this is part of a broader political project that the LDS Church has been working towards uh throughout the like back half of the 20th century and now in the beginning of the 21st, where there's an attempt to get like favor with evangelical Christians and assimilate into the so-called moral majority political coalition. And I see this beginning with the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1980s, uh, which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' leadership was firmly opposed to. There were people in the church who were very much in support of the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have offered equal treatment under the law guaranteed to women as for men. Uh, and that was opposed by the LDS Church. And then that was a huge project for the moral majority that the LDS Church was supporting the conservative position on, very assimilatory towards evangelical Christianity. And that political project we see expanding through the end of the 20th century in court cases against Hawaii having same-sex marriage and other areas. And then we also see in Prop 8 and now in other different political projects. It's my perspective that evangelical Christians and the moral majority don't care what Mormonism does. We're never going to be Christians to them. They don't really care about us. Yeah. They just want our money.

SPEAKER_04 59:21

Is there anything else that we want to add to that before we talk about some specific gay Mormons throughout history?

SPEAKER_01 59:28

So the church was recently involved in the passage of the Respect for Marriage Act, which should to some degree protect gay marriage under federal law and also provides religious protections for religious organizations to deny the institution of marriage to same-sex couples within the like recognition system of those religions.

SPEAKER_04 59:55

So that's probably why they did it. Yeah.

unknown 59:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 59:59

Interesting. So all of this to say the church's stance on gay people has in some ways shifted throughout history. I think a lot of it is just because gay people were not recognized for a lot of history. There weren't formal terms for those people didn't have these different ways to identify. And so therefore they were not analyzed externally with these different identities.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:21

Right. I mean, like the phenomenon of sexual attraction to people of the same sex or feelings of gender dysphoria or like these different issues of self-conceptualization and like attraction to other people have existed as long as there have been humans, and we can see patterns of that in the archaeological and historic record. However, a lot of the terms that we use to refer to these people are very much like 20th century terms. And some of them are even 21st century terms. Like many people have probably heard of the term pansexual, which is a term that came out of the Mo Gai movement, which was founded in Tumblr during the 2010s.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:01

Oh, I did not know that. Wow. Super interesting. So again, with that, reiterating here, we are not necessarily saying that any of the people that we mention, unless they have explicitly said so themselves, unless they've attached an identity, a sexual or a gender identity to themselves. We are not saying that these people are gay, are lesbian, are bisexual, are transgender, but they do have really interesting stories that are very worth mentioning and that are very queer-coded, as the kids say these days. And so we want to talk about them because queer people have always existed. These um kind of like deviations from heterosexuality have always existed. So you probably haven't heard of a lot of these people, and we want to bring their stories into the spotlight.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:45

Yeah. To put it in like a nutshell, we're looking at people's stories and going, huh. Oh, cool, guy.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:53

Yeah, exactly, exactly, exact, exactly. That will be the remainder of this podcast episode. Yeah. I wish I had a mallet so that you can determine how we can read their stories and then I declare homosexuality. Homosexual.

SPEAKER_06 1:02:07

Shall we start at the top?

SPEAKER_04 1:02:09

Let's start at the top. And these are somewhat in chronological order, maybe not totally in chronological order, but we're gonna start from around the late 1800s, I think. So first we're gonna talk about Evan Stevens, who Hannah mentioned. And whenever I read his name, I keep wanting to say Evan Stevens. It's really hard not to. But Evan Stevens, yeah, we talked a bit about him. He was the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Director from 1890 to 1916. And a story that I thought was cute and interesting about him. So he lived in Willard, Utah, which is north of Salt Lake City. And at some point, all of the Mormon settlers in Willard decided to move to Idaho for some reason, um, except for one family, and it was the Ward family. And Evan Stevens had a special friend in the Ward family. So we are he didn't want to leave John Ward. He really didn't want to leave him. So instead of going with his family to Idaho, he decided to stay in Willard with the Ward family, and then he and John built a cabin together and they lived together for a few years. I don't know how many years they were. He was 20. So, and he called him one of his life partners. So I think that's a little gay.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:36

Just a little bit. And also it's important to know as we talk about Evan Stevens. He was also a hymnist. So, for example, some hymns that you might recognize that Evan Stevens, who lived with his chum from the ward out in his cabin that they built together, uh, are, for example, in remembrance of thy suffering. No way. Today while the sun shines.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:57

That's not oh, I love that. I did not know that. That's so important. And chum, you mentioned the word chum, and that's uh what he called his friend John Ward was a chum. And that was another sort of underground gay word back then, at least from what I read. It's one of those words that could be gay or maybe not gay, depending on who was using it. I think in this case, probably gay, but who knows? Yeah, yeah. Also, apparently he performed in drag. Can we talk about that? Uh yeah, and Hannah mentioned this. I didn't know he dressed up as a woman to direct the children's choir. Is that right? If memory serves, yeah. Okay. He also performed singing in a high falsetto as a woman, and at least two of his performances in drag were in the tabernacle. Oh, that's cool. So yeah, really cool. Different times. And uh he was rumored to have had a lot of relationships with members of the tabernacle choir.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:00

Wow. So interesting. A lot of the members of the different years of bohemian societies of Salt Lake City had connections to the Mormon Tabernacle Orchestra or choir, the Utah State Orchestras and choirs and such.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:14

Cool.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:14

Yeah. Gays get creative. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:18

The art community and the gay community being almost synonymous in a city is still, I feel like, something that happens today. Yeah. And one thing that I love about reading these stories is how many contributions queer Mormons have made to the church and to the Mormon community throughout history. And I think it's lovely that many of these people in like the early days of the church in Utah were able to live authentic lives, at least to a degree, and still make amazing contributions to the church. And I think it's an example of just what the church could be if we just allow everyone to be themselves, embrace who they are. And anyway, I just think it's nice. Yeah, that's a great thought. So what does the council think? Gay? I would say gay. I would say gay. I want to call out and definitively say yes. That's okay. Fair, fair, fair. But we think there's a gay. We think there's a gay vibe.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:19

Hmm.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:20

That might be that might be here. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:22

A gay is among us. A gay is among us.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:26

Sophia, did you research Louis B. Felt? Yes, I did. But um, Hannah, if you want to talk about Louis B. Felt, I'm guessing you know more about her than I do.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:35

Sure. Potentially a smooth transition between these. Uh, so Evan Stevens has a lot of like writings, diaries, and journals that we can look into to learn about his life. One of the cool things that he did was he wrote a series of articles in what was then called The Children's Friend, now The Friend, talking about his uh very close friendships and uh relationships of admiration that he had as a young boy with other boys, and how that could be very healthy and uplifting in his life and have the sort of impact that that had made. Um, notably the founders of the children friend, Louis B. Felt and Mae Anderson, were the president and first counselor in the primary presidency at the time, the first ever in history uh general primary presidency. And they uh very innocently lived together and shared a bed for 40 years.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:32

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:33

Yeah, yeah, extremely heterosexual behavior. Yeah, no homo there. No, no, absolutely not. I think it's important to note that, like, first of all, a couple things about Lou Bifelt, her husband uh took plural wives. Oh, yes. She contributed to like informing who he should marry, selecting and saying, hmm, I think this one's the right one. Yeah. Uh is sort of the the record rumor that we have around that. And at the time that Mae Anderson moved in with her, she had fallen sick. Mae Anderson came to visit like a few days in a row, like to take care of her and her illness. And then all of a sudden, her husband moves out, and Mae Anderson moves in. And her husband back in. And then all of a sudden, you have Louis Bief helping to raise Mae Anderson's children, and they live in the same house and share a bed, and edit the friend together into the wee hours of the night. And in the same article of the children's friend, where Evan Stevens is talking about his very close friendships with other boys when he was growing up. We have Louis Biefelt and Mae Anderson giving a little like abbreviated memoir of themselves in which they refer to each other as the David and Jonathan of the primary and the most ardent of lovers. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:53

Yeah. I think it's a little gay.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:57

I think I might be a little gay. I don't think so.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:01

A little bit fruity. It's fruity. Something fruity here among us. Yeah. Get out your mallet. Okay. I think it's interesting that there were at least two women that she asked her husband to marry that he did, and then they like became part of the household. But then for May, it was like, this time you're out. Like the hospital. It's like this hasn't been quite good enough so far. I think this time you're just gonna have to leave. And it's just gonna be me and May here. Oh, but that's the girl crush thing that I was gonna mention. Is like, um, and this is something that I read about from um, what is his name? Connell O'Donovan. Yeah, Connell O'Donovan. Yeah, he he authored a book that was published by Signature Books about a history of queer Latter-day Saints. And um, he talked about women seeing each other in a sexual way through polygamy. So, like, um, and similar to Girl Crush, where it's kind of like talking about a woman from the perspective of like a male lover, those were the dynamics that he was talking about of seeing another woman in a sexual way because of a shared partner, I guess. And that also sometimes leading to like maybe gay relationships within polygamous families, like between sister wives, as was I I think was the case with Louis Biefelt. I don't know. Yeah, do you guys have anything to say on that? Sorry, I probably didn't do the best job. I mean, Louis Biefelt and May Anderson were never sister wives.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:47

They weren't, yeah. They were always just like people who lived together and shared a bed for 40 years.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:52

Yeah. Um, yeah, sorry, I said the wrong thing. I should have said Louis Biefelt and her other sister wives.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:59

And her other sister wives. Yeah, I do wonder how common that was. Yeah. I know Blair Osler in Queer Mormon Theology does talk about this concept that they refer to as queer polygamy and this like aspiration that they have had growing up of like, yeah, I would like to have sister wives because I like girls.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:19

Um like I don't know.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:21

It's great. If I mean in that time period, that was probably fantastic for those people. Nice little out. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, in that in that way. Also, I was I was reading about some of the plural wives of Brigham Young and how I don't I don't know how to express this, but um sexually neglected they felt because you know, Brigham Young had so many wives. There's only hate to put it this way, there's only so much to go around. Um and so I think that that gave rise to some of these relationships as well, is these women reflecting on more of a need for romantic attention and sexual attention.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:58

Right. And I mean in the lion house under Brigham Young, you have what some of the most powerful women in the state under the same roof living across the hall from one another, regardless of like the dynamic between them. That's pretty cool just to have that many powerful women in proximity. Yeah. One figure who we could talk about briefly is Kate Thomas, who was a poet who wrote a lot of stuff for the church back in like the late 1800s, 1890s to early 1900s, so probably like 1900 to 1920. She did a lot of her publication in like relief society manuals, young women's teaching manuals, and the young women's journal. And her poetry can be found today. Uh, one of my favorites of her poems is song, which was published in January 1903 in the Young Women's Journal of the LDS Church, which I'm gonna read now because I want to. Keep in mind, she was living in Greenwich Village, New York at the time, uh, which is New York City's neighborhood. It's like where Stonewall Inn is and things like that. Anyway, the poem goes. A scarlet west, an east merged into Eden Tide, a bare brown plane, and by my side, the one, the one in all the world I love the best. Last night's gay mask, the outward wildness, and the inward ache. I cast forever from her lips. I take joy never ceasing. Brown plane and her kiss are all I ask. Beautiful. So that was published in the Young Women's Journal in 1903. So I think that's kind of gay.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:34

It is.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:34

What do we think, guys?

SPEAKER_04 1:13:35

What's the verdict? I think it's gay. I think I'd say I'd say pretty gay. I need a malice.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:40

Gay. We rule gay. The verdict is homosexual.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:48

But I mean, that's a very like cut and dry way to put it. But yeah, I mean, she was living in the neighborhood. She came back to Utah, never married. Uh at the time in Utah, gay meant happy. And at the time in Greenwich Village, New York, gay meant gay. Yeah, that's a fascinating. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:09

So it's almost like a coded way to kind of slide under slide under the radar if that was her intent. But that's super, super interesting that I didn't know that she was living in in New York during that time that poem was written. So that's really interesting. Yeah. Oh, another um, there was another woman named Cornelia Casey. She went by Cora. She was born in 1897. And from what I can tell, she was openly gay. Like she was a lesbian who left Utah for New York City. She started out living in Ogden and she was a social worker. She was also the assistant general secretary to the Relief Society. Um, but she ended up moving to New York City and she served on a lot of faculties, like for NYU, Columbia, and the New York School of Social Work. And then she was actually appointed as the welfare liaison officer to aid in the rehabilitation of Holland after World War II. And she got a lot of awards for her uh social work, and she contributed to the Women's Exponent, which was like not an official church publication, but like a church-sanctioned publication, I think. Yeah, so that was um another story I wanted to mention was Cornelia Cora Casey, who, similar to Kate Thomas, also spent time in New York City. Yeah, anyway, that's her. Beautiful. So Hannah mentioned all of the powerful women living in the Lion House. It reminded me of Edith Mary Chapman. Do you know about her her lesbian boarding house in Salt Lake City?

SPEAKER_01 1:15:53

I know more about Mildred Berryman than I do about Edith Chapman. I should know more about Edith Chapman, but I don't. Please educate me.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:00

Enlighten us. Okay, so Edith Mary Chapman, her mother was a pioneer, and her mom had lost most of her family while crossing the plains. But then she was married polygamously at the age of 14 to a 42-year-old. Oh, wow. What a match. Yeah. Yeah. This is Edith Chapman's mom. And then, sadly, well, sadly or not sadly, depending on how you look at it, her husband passed away. Yeah, I mean, that's probably not too sad. But what was sad is that it was it left her widow with four young children to raise. That is really sad. Yeah. And so then what happened was she, even though she was a pioneer, she ended up leaving the church because of the understandably terrible experience of being married off as a child. And she joined the Episcopalian church. Nice. Yeah. And this part was really sad. Her children were actually taken from her by her late husband's relatives to be raised Mormon under orders from LDS leaders. So after she decided to leave the church, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:15

Kids got kidnapped by the church. Yeah. That's devastating. I mean, it was more prominent for native people, but yeah. Yeah, true. Also terrible when it happens to white people. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:25

Yes. Don't kidnap people's kids. And yes. Here at Loud Laughter, we're opposed to kidnapping children. We artificially opposed across the board. But yes, that is an important note that this was something that very commonly happened to native women and native families. Yeah. So anyway, um, she ended up remarrying a man named Arvis Chapman, and then their child together was Edith Mary Chapman. And so Edith was raised Episcopalian, even though her mom was a pioneer, if that makes sense. Yeah. So Edith ended up later after her parents passed away, she converted their house into a like a boarding house for other lesbians. Wow. Um and she said herself that she fell desperately in love with a woman named Mildred Berryman, which is who Hannah mentioned. And Mildred Berryman was also raised Episcopalian, but she did convert to Mormonism in her youth and got a patriarchal blessing. So we know that she was Mormon at one time. But anyway, these two women with Mormon Episcopalian backgrounds got together and lived in this boarding house. And then Mildred Berryman went on to do a study of the homosexual community in Salt Lake City. So Hannah, you can expound on that if you want to give more information.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:52

Yeah, the build the Mildred Berryman study was the first study of its kind to study the experiences of homosexual people in the Western United States. And it was, I mean, it was it's impactful, right? It goes over the different ways in which people have experienced same-sex relationships, be those uh platonic or long-term romantic relationships and the ways in which people in their life have influenced those uh systems of abuse, ways in which people have been traumatized in relationship to their sexual orientations. Mildred Berryman was very much uh in support of the idea of lesbian marriage, and also thought that gay men could not have stable relationships with one another. So wow, potentially problematic in that way.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:44

Interesting. But she's like, Men cannot do what we do.

SPEAKER_05 1:19:47

She had her opinions and she had her for those four eyes could never replicate this.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:52

That's so funny. Wow, that is really funny. Gay marriage, but only for women. Yeah, that's so interesting. She almost was like woke. Yeah, almost. She fell short. Um, just like the guy who was almost handsome in our last episode. Oh my gosh. That poor guy. I know. He just barely escaped being handsome.

SPEAKER_05 1:20:15

That was what was in one of the church magazines about a guy. They described a guy like that.

unknown 1:20:20

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:22

Um, yeah, so there were many um other interesting boarders, and I don't know if she advertised it as a lesbian boarding house. I don't know how those things were talked about back then, but from what I read, that's what it was was like a boarding house for people who were lesbian. And uh fascinating. One of the people who lived there was actually Thomas S. Monson's aunt, Carline Monson, who never married. Um, and she was the live-in cook there for the boarders. And actually, when Edith Mary Chapman um eventually moved to California, she left the house, the boarding house to Carline Monson. Oh, cool. So she like inherited it. Yeah, maybe Thomas S. Monson went there.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:06

We should go there on a trip.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:08

Yeah, that'd be so fun. Field trip. Yeah, I don't know what it is now.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:12

Yeah. I know the Mildred Berryman Institute is like the foundational organization for queer Utah history. And I read the people who run it and they're cool.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:22

Cool. That's awesome. Also, Edith Chapman, the woman who ran the boarding house, her aunt, Ann Chapman, was also lesbian. I don't know what the sources are on that, but she that's what I read. And she was Utah's first public librarian, and there is a branch still of the Salt Lake City Public Library called the Chapman branch, and it is named after her. So lesbian librarian and E. Chapman.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:51

Oh, the lesbians I know do the upgrading.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:53

Yeah. Oh, also another boarder of the lesbian boarding house was Dorothy Graham. She was the manager of a restaurant in Salt Lake which featured male drag performers in the 20s and 30s. I'm learning that drag was extremely popular back then. It was. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:11

Connell O'Donovan has a good photo of, well, I don't know if it's like in his possession specifically, but in his timeline of Clear Mormon history, there's a cool photo of like a fraternity at BYU doing a dragon. I think that's where like there's these like burlesque dressed like boys who have like these little top pads and their mini skirts and their tank tops. And the act was to have like their nice little loose lipstick on, walk in a circle around the one person dressed like a boy in the center in a chair, and just like kiss his face to the music. And that was uh that's so interesting. They took a photo and put it in the yearbook.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:53

So that's awesome and kind of popular. That's so interesting. Um, put it on the Instagram. That's really cool. So, what of Natasha Rambova? Okay, this is so interesting. I'm gonna do a little bit of genealogy here. So, Heber C. Kimball was one of the first apostles of the church. One of his daughters was named Helen Mar Kimball. She was one of the plural wives of Joseph Smith, and one of the more controversial plural wives because she was sealed to Joseph Smith when she was 14 years old. She was married off to him by her father and by Joseph Smith. Yeah. That's just some background on the family for anyone who's listening and like doesn't know who the Kimballs are. But anyway, that's Heber C. Kimball. So he had a lot of kids, a lot of wives. But anyway, one of his granddaughters was named Winifred Kimball, and she got married and had a daughter who was also named Winifred. But this Winifred, who is now the great-granddaughter of Heber C. Kimball and Violet Kimball, um, she became an actress and a ballerina. And um, she ended up marrying silent film star Rudolph Valentino. And she identified, well, I mean, I guess I can't say she identified, I just read that she was bisexual. So I don't know exactly how they got the sources on that, but um what I read, she was bisexual, and Rudolph Valentino, her husband, was also known to be bisexual. Um, but her stage name was Natasha Rambova. So put a pin in that. She had a friend who was named George Benjamin Wayner, and he was from California. He was a gay psychic, okay? So a gay psychic. This whole regular thing start to finish. We've got a bisexual woman with like with a gay husband named Rudolph. Yeah. Well, another bisexual. Two bisexuals together. Yes. And then we've got a gay psychic.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:03

He can read your mind, but he's gay. Are you having gay thoughts? We've got just the person for you.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:14

Um, so he was like a friend of the family. So he was friends with Natasha and also her mom, Winifred, who is the granddaughter of Hubercy Kimball. And they invited him to come to Salt Lake to do his thing. He was also a composer and an actor. So it's the gayest thing I've ever heard. Every one of these people is like also an actor on the side. They're very artistic. Yeah. So creative. Yeah. So they were like, George, please come to Salt Lake City. We want, everyone here wants to see you do your thing. So he comes to literally the tabernacle, the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, and he does a seance. And I once I read that, I was like, wow, this is already crazy. But to make it even crazier, like during this seance that he conducted in the tabernacle, he experienced visions and messages from Heber C. Kimball, Brigham Young, Joseph Smith, Lucy Smith, Emma Smith, and finally the Angel Moroni. Angel Moroni popping up in a queer space is crazy to me.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:23

Amazing. Did he confirm Angel Moroni? Is he shaped like a white sounder or no?

SPEAKER_04 1:26:28

He said, so he basically described what he was seeing. And this whole um experience that he had started with Natasha's brother playing the organ in the tabernacle. And so he started feeling some spiritual vibrations as the organ was going on. And then he started having this vision. And at the end of the vision, after he had already had these messages from Joseph Smith and Hebrew C. Kimball and whatnot, he said that he could see the figure of a young man in blue robes holding a long trumpet of gold. And then all the friends that were there were like, that's the Angel Moroni. And he was like, Yes, yes, the Angel Moroni. He is here. And I don't know what he did, but he he was very inspired. He wrote about this experience as being very inspiring. And he clearly admired his Mormon friends and talked about how beautiful this experience was. I think he was a little um not super informed on his Book of Mormon history, but he was not Mormon, just he wasn't Mormon. He was not Mormon. He was a gay psychic. He was a gay psychic who had the important friend in the tabernacle. Yes. And he said he saw the angel Moroni, who it is said, led his fainting people across the plains and deserts to ultimate safety by showing his presence to them from time to time as a beacon of faith and love. And then he ends it by saying, And what more infallible guide can ever Of us have than love. So this experience for him was like so inspiring. And for everyone else, I'm sure it was a great spectacle because he was getting these messages from like their ancestors and from leaders of the church. And he was also Natasha's like personal psychic because at this point her husband Rudolph had passed away. And so he would frequently give her messages from him. So this was just a really interesting event that happened in the history of the tabernacle. There was a gay psychic doing a seance. This is also angels. I wish that I had known this when I was a missionary at Temple Stars. I know. I think my experience would have been really different doing the acoustic demonstration. You go up to the front of the tabernacle and you drop a pin and it's scripted. I think they banned it for some reason now. It was like controversial for some reason. They'd be like, oh, you can do the acoustic demonstration. This month you can't do the acoustic demonstration. Oh, really? I still don't know why. Um, but I think I just would have had a different spiritual experience knowing there was once a gay psychic in my place who was channeling the spirit of the angel Moroni for a bisexual woman and also sending messages to this bisexual woman from her bisexual husband beyond the grave. I just think I would have had a more inspiring mission experience.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:21

Yeah, maybe we should send a petition to church headquarters and see if we can recreate that environment.

SPEAKER_04 1:29:26

Yeah, they would love that. Yeah. They would love to hear from me. I know they missed me over there. That's so funny. Okay, so just two more that I wanted to mention were Kent Goodridge Taylor and Richard Snow. I don't know too much about them, but Kent Goodridge Taylor lived from 1925 to 2002, and they were a couple. They met with President George Albert Smith in 1948, and he supposedly told them to live their lives together honorably and that God would accept them. So that's just an interesting instance from history. Rare George Albert Smith sleigh.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:09

Yeah. That's so sweet. I know. I was going to mention uh in the history of cool lesbian women who taught at BYU. Uh, Eloise Bell is a really notable figure who uh was the assistant dean of students at BYU for a while. She taught English for a long period. Uh she, I believe, was teaching at BYU from like the 1960s until 1994. And then around the same time as the Family Proclamation to the World was published, for some reason she just up and left. And then in 2015, she got married to a woman and she passed away in 2017. Wow. Yeah. She's really cool though. She has like some really famous discourses, including a BYU devotional she gave on how like LDS that Ellias Church should respond to the feminist movement and how BYU in particular should respond to the feminist movement. And she was very like locally pro-equal pay, pro-employment opportunities, and that sort of thing. Very important voice in that movement.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:16

Wow. Cool.

unknown 1:31:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:17

So a little bit later, we have Leonard Matlavich. Yeah. Leonard Maltovich. Yeah. Malt Maltovich. Oh, oops.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:26

Leonard Maltovich.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:28

Okay. Do you want to introduce Leonard Hannah or should I?

SPEAKER_01 1:31:31

Yeah. So Leonard Maltovich was a convert to the LDS Church. I believe he converted while he was serving in Vietnam. Uh so he was a member of the United States Armed Forces and he was gay. This is at a point in time when uh gay people are not allowed to serve in the military. So it was a very hush-hosh thing for him. Um he converted to the church, served three tours in Vietnam, I believe. And then he comes out as gay. This is a major like national news story. He does a bunch of interviews about like that topic. It's a very public thing. And he starts dating people, he has relationships with men, and the church excommunicates him. He reconverts. Oh. And then he does that, starts having relationships with men again, excommunicate him again, and then he just gives up on that. So that's kind of his connection with the LDS world. So I think that's really important, at least like to me in his history, is the marking on his gravestone, which is iconic and used in a lot of uh like social media posts nowadays. So I'll probably track that down and read it.

SPEAKER_04 1:32:44

That's what I was just gonna do too. I think that was the quote that I was looking for. Did you mention um the Time magazine collection? I didn't. You should mention that. Okay. So he was actually he came out publicly as gay in an article for Time magazine in September 1975. And that was when he was in the process of suing the army for discharging him for being gay. And he was actually the first ever openly gay person to ever appear on the cover of a US news magazine. Wow. So kind of interesting that the first openly gay person to appear on the cover of a m of a US magazine was also Mormon, too. He was an openly gay Mormon. Um, later excommunicated, like you talked about, but he also had a bronze star and a purple heart and other awards. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:35

His gravestone has two of the pink triangles, which are used to commemorate uh people who've died through AIDS. Uh says a gay Vietnam veteran, and then a quote when I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:52

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:53

Such a good quote.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:54

Very powerful.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:56

Powerful landmark. Yeah. Yeah. And he passed aids. I believe so, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:34:03

Yeah. So one organization that we wanted to mention that exists at the intersection of little queer Mormonism is the Restoration Church of Jesus Christ. Hannah, can you talk a little bit about the church and the section that you wanted to mention?

SPEAKER_01 1:34:21

Yeah. So I wanted to mention the Restoration Church of Jesus Christ because I think they're funny. They're interesting. There's not a lot of members of the church that are still like around. A lot of them have moved into Reform LDS, which is a different pro-gay LDS movement, at the same time as Restoration Church of Jesus Christ was going on. There's Affirmation LDS, which is formed by mostly survivors of BYU conversion therapy and is now the longest-running and largest in terms of members, LGBTQ LDS organization in the world. Um, contested only by Gather, who prefers to not acknowledge their existence. I don't even know. A whole other gay Mormon drama story. But in any case, the Restoration Church of Jesus Christ, the Latter-day Saints, is fun because they're funny. Uh, they basically said, What if we did Mormonism? Except women could be ordained to the priesthood, and gay people could get married and not only married, but married polygamously. That's a big twist. Yeah. Just a little bit of a switch in the process there. So I'm just gonna read off. This is from literally the Wikipedia article for Restoration Church of Jesus Christ. Great. But this is from the section of their Wikipedia article, homosexual polygamy. Pamela J. Calkins of Sacramento was the first woman to be ordained to the priesthood in the Restoration Church of Jesus Christ. Later, she entered into a polygamous homosexual betrothal ceiling in advance of a celestial marriage with three female partners. So a lot of words I've never heard strung together. Polygamous homosexual betrothal ceiling in an advance of a celestial marriage with three female partners. Thus becoming the first women in Mormandom to do so. Calkins and Lynn R. Lamaster were the first lesbian couple to be sealed for time in eternity, celestial marriage. Later that same evening, uh Lena R. Anderson and Carol L. D. were also sealed for time and eternity to each other and to Calkins. No other polygamous homosexual celestial marriages were performed for any other members of the church. In theory, it was conceivable that a heterosexual member of the church could ask to be sealed in a heterosexual marriage. This did not happen.

SPEAKER_04 1:36:44

Wow. They were like, we could let straight people marry in our church, but no one's ever asked. It's possible. They could maybe.

SPEAKER_05 1:36:55

We just do polygamous gay marriages. That's meanly our polygamous gay marriage.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:05

That's so interesting. I'd never heard of this before. This is in the 1980s.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:08

Yeah. Okay. Oh. So I believe that was all between 1985 and 1987. Wow.

SPEAKER_06 1:37:13

They were quick with it.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:15

They were like, polygamy was such a good idea. Let's be that the lesbians do it. They're like, I don't think we should have guys do it though. They just cut out the middleman in this situation. Like, no more guy to have to unite the sister wives. They're like, it was just sister wives.

SPEAKER_06 1:37:33

Hear me out. Wives. Oh. This polygamy rebrand.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:43

Just the wives. It's like, what is the um, oh, this is so random. At Trader Joe's, they have these little snacks that's called like just the cone. And it's like, it's like the ice cream cone, but there's no ice cream.

SPEAKER_05 1:37:57

It's like just polygamy, but it's just the wives. I love that.

SPEAKER_04 1:38:05

That's so funny. Amazing. There's a short film that I really like. It's about sister wives. It's called Sister Wives, but it's uh about Sister Wives in the FLDS faith. It's like a you know a fictional story, but it's basically about two sister wives and then their collective husband gets called on a Mormon mission and then they fall in love in his absence. Oh anyway, I'm just bringing that up because it's on topic, and if anyone's interested, I'm gonna just Google the title so I can make sure to do it justice. But it's it's a lesser-known film that I think deserves a lot more attention. It's a short film. It's a short film. It's about 30, 38 minutes long. I'm just kidding, it's only 28 minutes long. It's called Sister Wives, it's from 2024. The writer, director, and one of the actresses in the film is Louisa Connolly Burnham. Louisa Connolly Burnham is an award-winning writer, director, actress from Birmingham and founder of Thimble Films. So it's a really interesting short film. If anyone's interested, I just wanted to shout that out while we're on the topic of romantic relationships between Sister Wives. This one we mentioned is a real one, kind of. Well, it's the polygamy rebrand, but this is a fictional story that I really like. I guess we're rebranding polygamy.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:21

Well, less children and less husbands.

SPEAKER_06 1:39:27

Picture this. All women.

SPEAKER_04 1:39:36

I feel like you could make a video of yourself where you're like presenting like a sales pitch, and you're like, okay, stay with me here. Imagine polygamy, but just the wives. Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_05 1:39:50

And then we're writing it down. They're like, yes. What if it was just you get to hang out with other women?

SPEAKER_01 1:39:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:39:56

That's all it is. They're like, what else? There's nothing else. That's it. No children. Just the wives. Did I mention there aren't any men involved?

SPEAKER_04 1:40:08

Like just women. That's so funny. I love it. So thank you all so much for joining us today on this journey. We had a lovely time talking about queer Mormons or suspected queer Mormons throughout history. And I, for one, am so glad that records of these individuals exist, whether from their own words or friends. And so thankful for the work of great historians who have compiled these stories so that we could share them with you all. And if it wasn't known before, let it be known. We are allies and gays. Mostly gays. Mostly gays. Two gays, one ally. Two gays, one ally. So thank you all so much for joining us and happy pride month. If anyone has any thoughts or experiences that they would like to share with us, our DMs are always open. You can also reach us under this episode. There's a link that says send us fan mail. That's an auto phrasing. We don't actually expect to receive fan mail or any kind of praise. We didn't make up the term fan mail. That's on our podcast platform. You can take it up with them, but we love to hear from you all. So thank you for your participation. And today is a beautiful full circle moment because Hannah was once in our DMs. This is true. And now she's here in real life. And that's so wonderful. And as a newer podcast, it's my first time experiencing that, you know, meeting someone through a platform and getting to know them, developing a friendship and hearing from them in this way. So I think that's amazing and really cool to experience for a first time. So, Sophia, Hannah, any final thoughts before we wrap it up? I'm just honored to be here. Well, we are so honored to have you. So thank you for sharing your perspective and for helping me not by erase myself and share my story. So thank you, Hannah, for encouraging me to share my story and in turn sharing yours. Yes, I just wanted to say thank you so much to both of you for sharing your stories and um helping me to understand your experiences and perspectives. And I hope that anyone listening was able to gain some perspective and just see that queer people have always been in the church. Um I think they will always be in the church, and we hope that wherever people land in their relationship with the church, that they can feel free to be themselves and be authentic. And we just yeah, want to encourage people to look out for each other and spread love during this Pride Month and always. So true. Yes. All right. Well, thank you so much again, Hannah, for coming on. And thank you to everyone listening. And we will see you next time. Thank you guys for having me. Thanks. Bye.