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Show 214 letter to The Open Door, "LML" described how Kimball warned him against "Satan and his plan oiforce" and advised him "to force myself to be heterosexual (italics minej.?" Whether homosexuality resulted from worldly pressures or the otherworldly workings of Satan, church leaders believed forceful intervention, including such patently unnatural methods as aversion therapy, would restore gay men to their "natural" roles as heterosexual husbands and fathers." Although electroshock therapy failed to convert his sexual orientation, Evan Thompson found emotional solace and stability in heterosexual marriage, but at the cost of sexual fulfillment for himself and his wife: I decided that I would try to do the church thing and get married. It was very hard on me, I thought that I was going to die. Ijust wasn't used to having a woman around me or touching a woman but when I did get ... married, I married somebody with whom I was very, very compatible and that I cared a lot about. It saved my life because I don't know what would have happened to me, I probably would have died from AIDS. At any rate, the marriage turned out to be a very good marriage in spite of the obvious sexual sacrifices that we both had to make." However, an apparent choice between eternal marriage and terminal disease demonstrated the absence of a moral middle ground in the church's framing of homosexuality. Bill Cloward, on the other hand, was unable to reconcile "control" with integrity: "I was a bishop and I was in the high council and stake presidency at one time, with this very firm facade of being a strict Mormon husband and father, but inside I was totally not 42The Open Door, February 1978, p. 28. 43Steed; Kimball, Letter to a Friend. "Thompson interview. |
