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Show 240 to a community.'?' In the politically-conscious atmosphere of the late 1970s, however, gays could be as sensitive as their Mormon adversaries about keeping certain aspects of their culture under wraps. Some gay advocates favored strategies emphasizing private sexuality and public respectability. LDS Church leaders' efforts to publicize anti gay views while concealing the mistreatment of homosexual Mormons were paralleled by gays' efforts to combine greater visibility with limits on public expression. In 1977, leaders of the Salt Lake Gay Services Coalition stated their disapproval of gays "flaunting their sexuality in public unnecessarily, but we do maintain that what we do behind closed doors is our affair and business."lo2 Similarly, a 1978 editorial emphasized that "the secure gay person does not flaunt hislher sexuality any more than the secure heterosexual person." In his 1979 article "Salt Lake City: 1984" John Gilwood explained that "our only real difference [from heterosexuals] is our sexuality, and even that isn't as different as we would sometimes like to believe. This is clearly pointed out by the fact that we move through a 'straight' world almost totally unnoticed.?'?' In their bid for visibility, acceptance, and equality, Utah's gay advocates urged other gays to demonstrate public conduct falling somewhere between the sexual hedonism of "liberated" urban gays and IOIKirk Johnson, "Gay Documentary Canceled," University of Utah Chronicle, 20 July 1978, p. 1-2; "Gay Leader Loses Equal Time Bid," Salt Lake Tribune, 30 March 1978, p. B7; The Open Door, April 1978, p. 5-6, 11; December 1978, p. 3. I02The Open Door, Winter 1977, unpaged. I03"USU Inquires," The Salt Lick, March 1976, unpaged; The Open Door, July 1978, p. 2; John Gilwood, "Salt Lake City: 1984," The Open Door, May 1979, p.l1. |
