LGBTQ Mormon topics |
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This is a timeline of LGBT Mormon history in the 1990s, part of a series of timelines consisting of events, publications, and speeches about LGBTQ+ individuals, topics around sexual orientation and gender minorities, and the community of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). Although the historical record is often scarce, evidence points to queer individuals having existed in the Mormon community since its beginnings. However, top LDS leaders only started regularly addressing queer topics in public in the late 1950s. [1] : 375, 377 [2] : v, 3 [3] : 170 Since 1970, the LDS Church has had at least one official publication or speech from a high-ranking leader referencing LGBT topics every year, and a greater number of LGBT Mormon and former Mormon individuals have received media coverage.
Twenty years ago, a gay Mormon character stepped onstage for the first time. His name was Joe Pitt, and he was in Tony Kushner's 'Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches.' Pitt lived in New York with a good reputation and a bad marriage to a woman addicted to Valium. As colleagues dealt with the devastation and uncertainty of AIDS—it was the 1980s—he grappled with openly acknowledging his sexuality. He was Mormon. And gay. And the two didn't mix.
Twenty-five years ago this summer, Tony Kushner's Angels in America premiered in the tiny Eureka Theatre in San Francisco's Mission District. Within two years it had won the Pulitzer Prize and begun a New York run that would dominate the Tony Awards two years in a row, revitalize the nonmusical play on Broadway, and change the way gay lives were represented in pop culture.
In the second half, 'Perestroika,' there's a scene where Joe Pitt, a closeted gay Mormon, removes his temple garments to show his lover, Louis, that he would give up his faith to be with him.
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: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)A first-ever museum display, "Against Nature?," which opened last month at the University of Oslo's Natural History Museum in Norway, presents 51 species of animals exhibiting homosexuality.'Homosexuality has been observed in more than 1,500 species, and the phenomenon has been well described for 500 of them,' said Petter Bockman, project coordinator of the exhibition.
Homosexual behavior occurs in more than 450 different kinds of animals worldwide, and is found in every major geographic region and every major animal group.
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: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)Professor Judd is currently a professor of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University (1994-present) where he has served as a department chair ....
"[T]he gospel of Christ has power to change those who appear unchangeable. For several years I worked with an individual who was trying to overcome his problems related to homosexuality. Not long ago we were having a conversation about the origins of his problems and he said to me, 'I do not fully understand the arguments of those who say, 'I was born this way,' but what I do know is that I have been born again' and 'have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually.' This individual isn't simply 'coping' with his problems, but is truly free. He has come to know the truth and the truth has set him free.
Retired Salt Lake City advertising executive Arthur Anderson was enlisted into the fight last November with a phone call from Mormon Elder Loren C. Dunn, president of the church's North America West Area. At Dunn's behest, Anderson and his wife embarked on months of volunteer work in Honolulu, mostly answering phones for Hawaii's Future Today, a group set up to lobby against legislative attempts at legalizing gay wedlock, gambling and prostitution. ... According to a statement from the Mormon Church's Salt Lake City headquarters, church members such as Anderson are responding to a plea by the ruling First Presidency to get involved as citizens. ... "The Church is indeed, politically neutral when it comes to parties and candidates and most issues," said the LDS statement. "However, when a political issue has moral overtones, the Church has not only the right but the responsibility to speak out and become involved." ... Pamphlets circulated at select Mormon Church meetings throughout the Pacific islands, urging members to support anti-gay marriage legislation pending in the Hawaii Legislature. Key statements were faxed to legislative committees, from LDS Church facilities.
The church gave $600,000 to the political-action group Save Traditional Marriage '98 between Sept. 12 and Oct. 24 ... The church has also given $500,000 to a similar effort in Alaska, or 500 percent more than either side in that state's campaign had previously raised. The $1.1 million in church donations to political causes seems to be unprecedented.
[H]omosexual acts, and other deviations approaching these in gravity are not acceptable alternate lifestyles. They are serious sins. ... Such grave sins require deep repentance to be forgiven. President Kimball taught: 'To every forgiveness there is a condition. The plaster must be as wide as the sore. The fasting, the prayers, the humility must be equal to or greater than the sin. It is unthinkable that God absolves serious sins upon a few requests. He is likely to wait until there has been long, sustained repentance.'
In 1995, Erin Wiser was a 16-year-old student at East High School. Wiser, who today is a transgender man living in Portland but identified as a lesbian in high school, wanted to start a club for gay students along with his then-girlfriend Kelli Peterson. The two had attended a lecture at the local Pride center and were inspired after seeing Candace Gingrich speak. With the help of a supportive teacher, Wiser and Peterson formally applied for an East High School Gay-Straight Alliance club that September. In response, the Salt Lake City school district voted in February 1996 to ban all extracurricular student clubs—becoming the only city in the country to do so. ... Gay rights scared people. But how could anyone hate a couple of sweet-faced Mormon girls from Utah who just wanted to carve out a place to belong in high school?
For Kelli Peterson, a 17-year-old senior at East High School here, ... her primary concern was intensely personal—easing the loneliness she felt as a gay student. ... 'I came out that year, and immediately lost all my friends. I watched the same cycle of denial, trying to hide, acceptance, then your friends abandoning you.' So last fall, she and two other gay students formed an extracurricular club called the Gay/Straight Alliance. ... Ms. Peterson, who is herself Mormon, says she is taking steps to formally leave the church.
Feb. 23, 1996: East and West students walk out of school in protest. West students march on the Capitol; en route, a 16-year-old girl is pinned under a car and seriously injured. Students ask school officials to reconsider action.
Grant Protzman, former state representative, LDS Church member and Democrat, described LDS Church efforts to affect policy as 'measured' and 'very limited.' The church does make a public statement on what it sees as key moral issues. And it does ask questions, which may 'seem like a red flag' to some lawmakers. But the dialogue is good, Protzman said. What some perceive as church control of the state could be chalked up to social norms, Protzman said. Because so many people in the state are LDS Church members, there's a strong sense of shared values and that does influence public policy. And Protzman acknowledged that much has been said in the name of the church by those who present 'an individual's private interpretation of doctrine applied to public policy.'
Grant Protzman, Young Men president of the Ben Lomond Stake, said it was hard work in a hot sun.
But some Utah residents were aghast when they found out in the last few weeks that the law also applied to groups such as the Gay/Straight Alliance. 'I think that many legislators have serious concerns about the group's moving into recruitment of fresh meat for the gay population," said Grant Protzman, minority whip for the state House of Representatives.See also this clipping.
That's not at all what the club is about, protested Kelli Peterson, the 17-year-old East High School senior who founded the alliance to help her and her friends deal with a school atmosphere she found 'horrifying on the best days. ... I was getting beat up and harassed verbally.'See also this clipping.
'Going to high school when you are gay or lesbian is a miserable, lonely experience,' said 17-year-old Kelli Peterson, who founded the club at East High School in December. 'I know, I've been beat up twice.'
A group called SAFE—Students Against Faggots Everywhere—has since formed at West High School, one of three schools that will be affected by the new ban ....
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints accepts gays on one condition: that they renounce their sexual orientation. "Everything we do in the church is to offer them the help, the support, and the structure that will point them to happiness and joy," said Elder Jay E. Jensen who took part in a "healing" workshop here in September designed to help gays and lesbians become straight.
Elder Jay E. Jensen of the First Quorum of the Seventy ... speaker at the 7th Annual Evergreen conference, September 12–13, 1997.
We have 24,000 members of the church based in Alaska. It's a matter that members of the church in Alaska and people who share their views about the importance of traditional marriage as an institution feel strongly about. ... The church has always reserved the right to speak out on moral issues.... You don't become disenfranchised in our democratic process just because you happen to represent a religious viewpoint. - Church Spokesperson, Michael Otterson
He [Russell Henderson] was raised by his strict Mormon grandparents and became an honor student and a member of Future Farmers of America. He completed the requirements for the rank of Eagle Scout by cleaning a local cemetery, and had his picture taken with the governor and printed in the 'Boomerang.'
Most of the churches in Laramie participated in the vigils and memorial services for Matthew; even traditionally anti-homosexuality sects, like Mormons, included prayers for Matthew's family in their services.
Stacey told the Draper students about navigating a media storm, arranging a call between President Bill Clinton and the Shepard family, and the angry and offensive letters he received after the news conference when Shepard's death was confirmed. He recalled one letter, in which he was called a 'sniveling swine' and asked whether he also cried when 'normal' people died or just when gay patients did. 'There are people out there who hate people without knowing them,' he said. 'It was frightening for me to see that.'
Kathryn Balmforth, J.D., Director, World Family Policy Center
Kathryn Balmforth, executive director, World Family Policy Center
The radical feminists, population control ideologues, and homosexual rights activists who make up the anti-family movement know as well as we do that they speak for only a small minority of the world's people. ... Therefore, homosexual rights activists are again bypassing the democratic process and going from court to court, hoping to find a judge who will take it upon himself to create a 'right' to 'gay marriage,' which can then be forced on the citizens of the United States. ... The anti-family faction has targeted the human rights system because it is a direct path to power. The power they seek is the power to curtail the freedom of most of humanity and to do it, ironically, in the name of 'human rights.'
'Education is one of our major goals, and to just try to get the parents and siblings to love their gay child and keep their gay child under their wing, not kick them out of the house like happens so many times with gay children,' said Millie Watts in an interview with KUED for Friends and Neighbors: A Community Divided, a 1999 documentary about the families and friends of gay and lesbian Utahns.