I first met Terry Tempest Williams in January 1999 at a commemoration in Tucson, Arizona, for my uncle, United States Representative Morris Udall. The beautiful eulogies honoring his many accomplishments, particularly his record on the…
On a quiet Monday evening in 1974, two Mormon missionaries visited a Texas trailer house—oddly situated behind a taxidermy shop—at the invitation of the occupant, Bob Klea son, an inactive member of the church. Instead…
H. Michael Marquardt published his early monographs with anti-Mor mons Jerald and Sandra Tanner, but these works exhibited higher scholarly standards than the Tanners’ work. Marquardt co-authored Inventing Mor monism: Tradition and the Historical Record[1]…
Each of these books provides a thoughtful, intimate account of the uneasy co-existence of scholarly life and Mormon orthodoxies. Read together, the long journey of a prominent heretic and the recent conflicts over academic freedom…
My mother and I moved to Mesa during my senior year of high school so that she could finish her teaching certificate at Arizona State University. I didn’t like Mesa or the high school, and…
If, when September rolls over in the gutter,
picks himself up and stumbles off
in search of a restroom, coffee and eggs,
you pull back the drapes and slide open the window,
he will disregard the screen and make himself your guest.
Dialogue 33.3 (Fall 2000): 137–151
Rees’s Fall 2000 artice is titled “”In a Dark Time the Eye Begins to See”: Personal Reflections on Homosexuality among the Mormons at the Beginning of a New Millennium.” A straight man and local LDS leader, Rees shares his own experience counseling with LGBTQ members and their struggles, from “gay bashing” violence, most famously the murder of Matthew Shephard, to prejudice and more. Rees talks about his own changed perspective on this issue that started when he was a singles ward bishop in LA in the 1980s and shares what he had learned along the way. Rees calls for a number of steps and changes as a body of the church to improve these conditions.
Dialogue 33.3 (Fall 2000): 123–136
Hugo Oliaz intervews two important figures in LDS LGBTQ organzing, a former diretor of Affirmation and the founder of Gay LDS Youth, a group that briefly flourished in the early 2000s. A great resource for learning more about LDS LGBTQ organizing in this period.
After another day hiking the desert,
I lock the door of my car,
and turn toward the hot springs
in the cool night.