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Show 223 State Fair was a cause celebre which historian Charles Perry describes as "Utah's Stonewall.t'" The event sparked protests, but also solidarity among disparate elements of Salt Lake's gay community. Within that solidarity, however, various strategies came into play, including "reeducation," withdrawal from the LDS Church, defining sexual orientation as innate, exposing LDS policies, and promoting public respectability. The LDS role in Bryant's crusade inspired gay editorial writers to abandon their earlier caution and sharpen their focus on the church. Activists dedicated themselves to "reeducation," providing accurate data to counter "LDS public opinion voices who have in the past and present made uninformed comments ... on the issue.?" The most widely- circulated and controversial piece was both memoir and manifesto. In 1977, "uninformed comments" about gays in BYU Psychology Professor Reed Payne's lectures prompted an anonymous author, later identified as Cloy Jenkins, to write Prologue: An Examination of Mormon Attitudes Toward Homosexuality. Prologue combined extensive research and personal experience in its unsparing critique of church orthodoxy in matters ranging from scripture to aversion therapy. According to Jenkins, Mormon psychiatrists gained acceptance in the church by keeping a "discreet silence" if they privately disagreed with the official view of homosexuality, and he accused Reed Payne of disguising prejudice as science." 65Perry, "Let He Who is Without Sin Cast the First Orange: Gay Rights, Anita Bryant, and the LDS Church in Salt Lake City." 66"BYU Students Dispute LDS Doctrine," The Open Door, September 1977, unpaged. 67Prologue: An Examination of Mormon Attitudes Toward Homosexuality, v., 46, 55. |
