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Show 204 while Spencer W. Kimball addressed homosexuality more explicitly in response to national gay rights trends, local gays were initially reluctant to criticize the church. With many gays still actively LDS, finding a common language of resistance was challenging, and local reverence toward Kimball made him a difficult target. 18 Caution toward the church characterized an otherwise groundbreaking 1973 piece in the Salt Lake Tribune's Common Carrier series. In "Homosexuals Have Rights Too" an underemployed secondary school teacher, Sherman Beutler, made a provocative plea for legalizing private, consensual homosexuality as "an acceptable part of pluralistic American society." Although he challenged stereotypes of promiscuity and sickness commonly ascribed to gays, Beutler made no reference to Kimball's statements. Beutler also condemned "witch hunt" tactics such as those employed in the 1955 Boise sodomy cases, without mentioning similar practices at Byu.I9 Likewise, during the Salt Lake Gayzette's first two years of publication, opinion pieces directed their ire against a generic "straight society." For all appearances, the articles could have originated in any city. Instead of taking on the Mormon Church, Salt Lake's first gay newsletters and 18Charles Perry, "Let He Who is Without Sin Cast the First Orange: Gay Rights, Anita Bryant, and the LDS Church in Salt Lake City" (Master's Thesis, University of Utah, forthcoming). 19"Homosexuals Have Rights Too," Salt Lake Tribune, 7 January 1973, p. BI0; Kimball, "A Counseling Problem in the Church." In November 1955, the arrest of three Boise, Idaho men on charges of sexual activity with teenage boys precipitated a moral panic. Over a fifteen-month period, some 1,472 men were interrogated and sixteen were charged, with several sentenced to long prison terms. See John Gerassi, The Boys of Boise (N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, 1966), passim; also Miller, Out of the Past, 272. |
