Opening Hearts and Minds and Chapels | Kerry Spencer Pray and Jenn Lee Smith, eds., I Spoke to You with Silence: Essays from Queer Mormons of Marginalized Genders

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Kerry Spencer Pray and Jenn Lee Smith have given an invaluable gift to the Latter-day Saint community in gathering and editing this impressive collection of stories by and about LGBTQ+ Mormons. These stories open closets and unveil histories that, in turn, hopefully, will open not only hearts and minds but also arms and chapels for a growing segment of our culture that too often has been marginalized and kept in the shadows or imprisoned by our ignorance.

I finished reading the thirty-nine stories in this collection on the same day the reading from the Come Follow Me lesson included Alma 4. Alma, witnessing the discrimination by members of the Church against the poor, the hungry, the naked, the oppressed and others from whom they have withheld comfort and fellowship, uses an unusual construction in noting that they have been led by “one piece of iniquity to another” (Alma 4:11). In seeing their unequal treatment, not in general, but rather in “pieces,” I believe Alma intends us to see such treatment in its multiple specific and concrete ways—and to see its contagion. We are told, “Seeing inequality, [Alma] began to be very sorrowful” (Alma 4:15), which describes my feelings upon reading some of the stories in this collection, which are described aptly by Lisa Diamond in her foreword as “powerful, absorbing, inspiring and heartbreaking” (ix).

In their introduction, Pray and Smith focus on the paucity of queer Mormon women’s voices in the conversations and dialogues that have taken place over the past seventy years, a time in which this community has become increasingly visible and increasingly marginalized in Mormon culture. They note, among other realities, that, traditionally, female queerness, just as female sexuality, has been neither as visible nor as seriously considered as male queerness and sexuality. This book is a bold, essential step toward correcting that inequity.

Pray and Smith organize their stories into four categories: “Essays on Identity,” “Essays on Relationships,” “Essays on Shame, Suicide and the Closet,” and “Essays on the Church.” The stories in “Essays on Identity” include the complexity of queerness with the added issues of race (Jenn Smith’s “Immersive Theater”), race and disability (Melissa Malcolm King’s, “The Silence That Echoes”), and autism (Mette Harrison’s “My Agender, Autistic Mormon Life”). Other stories deal with the complexities of being trans in a strictly binary culture. In “I Give You a Name (& This Is My Blessing),” Aisling “Ash” Rowen reports declaring as a twelve-year-old, “I’m no good at being a girl, and I never will be! I don’t get it! I don’t know what’s wrong with me! I’m doing it wrong!” (32). Years later, accepting their real identity, they announced triumphantly, “I’m trans! . . . I know it, and I know God knows it, and I cannot deny it!” (36).

By way of contrast, in his story, Frank Pellet, a “44-year-old software developer employed by the Church,” boldly announces his recent revelation that he is “a transgender woman” (26) “wholly attracted to women, and my wife in particular” (27). As a faithful, recommended-holding couple, they plan to remain true to their marriage covenants and trust God for whatever happens in eternity. That kind of trust is common among the authors of these narratives. At odds with the Church over their sexual desires and gender identities, many hope for human acceptance in this world and Divine acceptance in the world to come.

The section “Essays on Relationships” includes, as one would expect, a wide variety of relationships within the LGBTQ+ spectrum. One I found particularly moving is “I Spoke to You in Silence” by “Anonymous.” It recounts a decades-long close friendship between two women in love with one another but reluctant to act openly to affirm or express that love. Both, married and with children, and aware of the forbidden nature of their desires for intimacy and aware of its risks, consider leaving their husbands, but remain faithful to their marriages and committed to keeping their families together at the sacrifice of their love. As the narrator summarizes at the end:

We had never, not even once, crossed the line.

But we didn’t need to touch to have bonded,

That was the greatest lie of all.

That this was only a sin if we touched.

That this was only real if we touched.

That this . . . it can’t be gay if you never, ever touch.

But I loved you.

I loved you.

So much love spoken over so many years with so much silence. The story ends with these sad words, “I don’t know if you ever heard.”

Some of the stories are about finally finding queer love (often after an arduous, painful journey) and then celebrating it. In “Ordinary Magnificent,” coeditor Pray, once married to a gay man and now married to a woman, says, in speaking of queer relationships: “Our identities and relationships, as different as they seem, aren’t defiant. We are as we were created, and this is meaningful. Our inability to convey the strange, mythic beauty of our human variety doesn’t diminish it” (82). In recounting a small ordinary moment of shared, intimate tenderness, the kind that takes place in any ordinary loving relationship, she says: “That is what it [queer love] means. In this life, in other lives, throughout history, which is all it has ever meant” (82).

In her introduction to “Essays on Shame, Suicide and the Closet,” Kimberly Anderson cites research showing that nearly three fourths (73.4 percent) of LGBTQ+ people raised in the Church have been exposed to “strong damaging language” (106). Claiming that she herself is “an expert on shame, guilt, fear, the closet and suicidality” (103), Anderson reveals that the only thing that kept her from taking her own life was “not knowing how to operate” the hunting rifle owned by her adopted father (104).

The stories in this section chronicle how extremely difficult it is, especially for young people, to continually hear from the pulpit or the congregation that “anything other than straight and cisgender is a tragic, sinful character flaw. One that will keep them from joining with their family in Celestial Glory for the remainder of eternity” (105). I do not know the statistics on suicide in Utah these days, but I do know that for years it was ranked among the top ten states in the nation in the percentage of its population who committed or attempted suicide.

Although the fourth group of these stories falls into the category “Essays on the Church,” nearly all the stories in this collection could be classified as such. The narrators of these stories identify the reason why the Church is so inhospitable to them. As Pray and Smith summarize so succinctly, “On a doctrinal level, queerness represents an existential threat not only to the salvation of the individual, but to the celestial family” (3). That threat is evident throughout this collection. Perhaps the most powerful story in the entire collection is Jaclyn Foster’s “God Sits in My Kitchen Sometimes.” This brief story is about a teenage girl who fears God will reject her for being bisexual. Ostensibly in a dream, she writes that coming home from school one afternoon and finding God sitting in “the kitchen of her childhood home” (195), she finally gets the courage to reveal her secret to her Heavenly Father. She says that instead of rejecting her, God (whom she intimately calls “Dad”) “swept me straight up in his arms, bundled me into his being that thrummed with protective love” and together they get in the car and drive away. She ends by saying, “I came out to God, and God left the Church with me,” adding, “I woke up crying,” (195).

In such a short space, it isn’t possible to do justice to so many stories, including so many that are well crafted and at times beautifully literary. What I find affirming is that many of these writers, some exposed to decades of negative, rejecting sentiments—“Homosexuality is a major cause for the decay of the family” (23), “I had been taught that there was something dirty and shameful about being queer” (80), “These are the same ones who tell us queer marriage is somehow worse than attempted murder” (81)—have survived to find authentic love and even joy. That is no small thing. In the conclusion to their introduction, the editors speak of the silences that have been broken by these narratives, adding, “This anthology is just the beginning of breaking that silence. Within this silence is a sea of other silences” (10).

Pray is also the editor of The Book of Queer Mormon Joy (Signature Books, 2024), an excellent collection of essays by queer Mormons across the LGBTQ+ spectrum, highlighting the joy and beauty they have found in life. Had I the power, I would require the stories in both of these books to be read by every priesthood, Relief Society, and youth leader in the Church. While I understand how difficult it might be for such leaders to read these narratives, I believe that reading them would make them better leaders, better Latter-day Saints, and better Christians.

It is a colossal failure of our hearts and minds as well as our imaginations that as a Church we have refused to entertain the possibility that some of God’s children, including those with whom we share pews, join in singing praises and offering prayers, and with whom we make weekly sacramental covenants, have real, genuine romantic and erotic feelings and desires for bonding, just as heterosexuals do, but with members of their own gender or both genders, or that they feel they have been born into bodies with which their true selves are at odds emotionally and spiritually as well as physically. In other words, we have refused to see such people as fully human as ourselves, as fully in need of expressing and celebrating romantic and conjugal love as we, their straight, gender binary fellow members do. Instead of comforting and weeping with them, instead of welcoming them into fellowship, we have tended to marginalize and exclude them and judge them harshly when they feel unable or unwilling to accommodate to the stringent limitations we have placed on their desire for love.

Read these stories. They will open your mind and touch your heart.

Kerry Spencer Pray and Jenn Lee Smith, eds. I Spoke to You with Silence: Essays from Queer Mormons of Marginalized Genders. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2022. 202 pp. Paper: $24.95, ISBN: 978-1-64768-079-3