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Show 91 unraveling of traditional authority threatened by the counterculture, second-wave feminism, and the sexual revolution. After decades of pluralism and assimilation to the American cultural mainstream, the church reversed course and strengthened distinctively Mormon institutions. Reorientation toward separatism brought a new era of doctrinal orthodoxy, standardized religious practice, and external constraints on individual behavior.' Proliferating church assignments, seminary courses for school children, and family home evening filled a larger proportion of people's lives, allowing the church to function as a "totalizing institution." Even as Salt Lake City entered a period of relaxed law enforcement in matters such as homosexuality, LDS authorities deployed surveillance, interrogation, and discipline against "unwholesome" influences.' At the same time, gay activists in larger cities challenged legal persecution and negative stereotypes of homosexuals. Spencer W. Kimball took notice in a 1964 BYU devotional speech citing a report from the New York Academy of Medicine: These deviates "are at least more open and obtrusive" than they were in the past. [The report] states that these people are formally organized with a central office and a magazine of their own and that "they are determined to be accepted not as lawbreakers, sinners, or even as sick people, but as a different kind of people leading an acceptable kind oflife."4 2Mauss, 163-67. 3This was especially true at Brigham Young University, as discussed in Rocky O'Donovan's "The Abominable and Detestable Crime Against Nature: A Brief History of Homosexuality and Mormonism, 1840-1980" in Multiply and Replenish: Mormon Essays in Sex and Family, ed. Brent Corcoran (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1994), 152-60. "Spencer W. Kimball, "A Counseling Problem in the Church," 10 July 1964, archives, historical department, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Salt Lake City. |
