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Show 133 as Kimball's admonition against "rendering the individual a thing to be used.'?" For their part, LDS women who discovered their husbands' homosexuality often remained married for various reasons. In a culture that socialized women into dependent roles with no sense of sexual entitlement, economic security and community status carried greater weight than romantic love or sexual fulfillment. According to Bill Cloward, I could not perform sexually with my wife, though we tried many times. After a few months of attempting to make it work, we just didn't talk about it anymore and we never tried anymore. I provided for her security and respectability and that seemed to be important to her. I did encourage her over a period of years that she should leave me and find a man who could provide for her that kind of intimacy, and she always declined, she said no, she loved me and we had what was important in life." Other women embraced the redemptive role encouraged by LDS leaders. When Rick Pace became engaged, he ignored Kimball's advice and discussed his homosexual past with his fiancee, who nonetheless married him in a spirit of "sacrificing herself to save me from a fate worse than death." Mormon women marrying gay men to reform them echoed Victorian gender prescriptions that assumed "virtuous" women lacked capacity for sexual pleasure. In Victorian culture self-sacrificing, "passionless" wives played a civilizing role, setting a moral example for their husbands and taming the boundless sexual energy attributed to men. Within Mormon culture, which set high standards of marital fidelity for both men and women, the constraining influence of marriage may have seemed especially suitable for gay men stereotyped by the dominant 95Kimball, "Love Versus Lust." 96Cloward interview. |
