A sickness with a cure
For most of the twentieth century the Latter-day Saint account of homosexuality was the ambient American account, held with unusual confidence. The American Psychiatric Association's first diagnostic manual, published in 1952, classified homosexuality as a 'sociopathic personality disturbance'; the 1968 revision reclassified it as a 'sexual deviation.' Church leaders, like the physicians, spoke of a condition and of curing it.1
Within that consensus, Spencer W. Kimball did the most to set the terms. As the apostle to whom members were referred, he addressed leaders in 1964 in 'A Counselling Problem in the Church' and BYU students in 1965 in 'Love versus Lust.' His counsel was that a person could 'repent of his perversion, force himself to return to normal pursuits and interests and actions and friendships with the opposite sex,' after which 'this normal pattern can become natural again.' He compared the condition to alcoholism — a temptation requiring continued vigilance, with the behavior, not the desire, being what could be conquered for life.2
In 1969 he gathered it into a book. The Miracle of Forgiveness gave homosexuality a chapter, 'Crime Against Nature.' Dialogue's later survey lists the vocabulary the chapter used — 'ugly,' 'repugnant,' 'ever-deepening degeneracy,' 'evil,' 'pervert,' 'deviant,' 'weaklings' — and one Latter-day Saint historian called it the earliest and most comprehensive treatment of homosexuality by an apostle, and the foundation from which Church thought, policy and political action grew for the next forty-five years.1 The Interpreter Foundation objects that this reads a mid-century book with twenty-first-century ears, that 'crime against nature' was in Webster's 1828 dictionary, and that Kimball's promise of a cure was a promise about conduct.2 Both things can be true at once, and the record does not require choosing: what a bishop in 1972 took from the chapter is a different question from what its author meant.
"You must protect yourself"
In the general priesthood session of October 1976, broadcast by closed circuit to Latter-day Saint males twelve and older across the United States and Canada, Boyd K. Packer told a story. A missionary had come to him with a confession he could barely get out: 'I hit my companion.' Packer was relieved — until the missionary added, 'But I floored him.' On learning more, Packer said, his response was: 'Well, thanks. Somebody had to do it, and it wouldn't be well for a General Authority to solve the problem that way.' He then said the sentence that has been argued about ever since: 'I am not recommending that course to you, but I am not omitting it. You must protect yourself.'3
The talk was not printed in the November 1976 Ensign — Quinn suggested that discussing masturbation as an abuse of a young man's 'little factory' made it unsuitable for a magazine Latter-day Saint girls might read. It was instead issued as a pamphlet, and Church headquarters distributed it to local leaders for the next quarter century for handing to young men in their teens and twenties.4 FAIR reads the passage narrowly and plausibly: two missionaries live and work together and cannot separate, an unwanted advance in that setting is intimidating, and 'protect yourself' is the language of self-defense, not of gay bashing.3 Quinn read the same pamphlet's twenty-five-year circulation as an institutional endorsement and wrote that he believed the First Presidency 'has been morally responsible whenever LDS young men have attacked or killed homosexuals from 1976 to the present.'4 The corpus holds both readings and settles neither.
The basement of the Smith Family Living Center
In January 1975, according to accounts collected by the independent Provo student paper the Seventh East Press, BYU security officers pulled male drama and ballet students out of class to interrogate them and get names. Students working undercover acted as decoys in campus restrooms, imitating the foot-tapping signals gay men used to find one another. In the drama department they had T-shirts made at the bookstore reading 'I'm on the list — are you?'5 The same series recorded that students who confessed homosexual tendencies in the early 1970s were referred to the BYU Counseling Center. One described the treatment as receiving an electrical shock while viewing a pornographic image of a man, then being shown an image of a woman without one. A former counselor preferred the term 'aversive therapy — not shock treatment,' with 'mild electric stimulus' and slides of men and women in various stages of dress.5
The formal study came in 1976. Max Ford McBride, a doctoral student, completed 'Effect of Visual Stimuli in Electric Aversion Therapy' under D. Eugene Thorne, chair of the psychology department and McBride's committee chairman. Seventeen men enrolled and fourteen finished. A plethysmograph measured arousal while images were shown; shocks were administered in conjunction with certain images; subjects set their own levels, on a scale the dissertation labels from discrete through intense and tolerable to intolerable. The average course ran about three months, up to twenty-two fifty-minute sessions. Volunteers signed papers acknowledging that damage to tissue or organs might occur, and releasing BYU from responsibility.6
John Cameron, a subject who is now head of the acting program at the University of Iowa, described what that meant in practice. 'I thought he was my savior,' he said of McBride. His shame was deep enough that he chose the highest setting: 'Max didn't do it, we did it. I was always turning it up to get the most pain because I was desperate.' For a year he convinced himself it had worked. 'But it didn't change anything except increase my self-loathing.'7 FAIR's defense is that the participants were volunteers whose attraction was contrary to their own desires, that BYU neither pioneered nor was unusual in this research, and that the Church never conducted, recommended or mandated aversion therapy of any sort.6 Two independent accounts in the corpus — Connell O'Donovan's and QSaltLake's — assert that two participants died by suicide during the experiment, reducing sixteen subjects to fourteen; nothing in the corpus corroborates or refutes that, and the dissertation itself is not held here.7
It took thirty years for a Church leader to say anything critical in public. In the 2006 interview with Elder Lance Wickman posted by Church Public Affairs, Elder Oaks — who had been BYU's president from 1971 to 1980 — allowed that 'the aversive therapies that have been used in connection with same-sex attraction contain some serious abuses that have been recognized over time within the professions.'8 In October 2019, opposing a proposed Utah licensing rule, the Church stated flatly that it 'opposes "conversion therapy" and our therapists do not practice it,' and that research shows electric shock and aversion therapies are harmful to youth.9
Marriage as the remedy, and its withdrawal
The counsel that a gay man should marry a woman was never quite a written policy, and it was formally disowned earlier than most people remember. In 1987 Gordon B. Hinckley taught that 'marriage should not be viewed as a therapeutic step to solve problems such as homosexual inclinations or practices, which first should clearly be overcome with a firm and fixed determination never to slip to such practices again.' The Church pamphlet Understanding and Helping Those Who Have Homosexual Problems went further: 'Marriage should not be viewed as a way to resolve homosexual problems. The lives of others should not be damaged by entering a marriage where such concerns exist.'10
What the record shows is a long gap between the instruction and the practice. Dialogue's account is that until the late 1990s Church leaders encouraged many gay men to marry as a means of overcoming homosexuality, and that among survey respondents this did not seem to have worked for more than a handful. Even the Interpreter's rebuttal concedes that 'at least a few' bishops and counselors were still encouraging it well into the twenty-first century.11 Quinn's memoir records the private version of the same story: in 1976, with his wife at his side, he nervously telephoned a Manhattan psychiatric clinic to enroll 'to overcome my homosexuality,' was told the clinic helped people accept their homosexuality instead, and felt a weight lift — then told his wife he would not put himself through that again, 'especially not in Utah, where even the inquiry could get me fired from BYU.'12
The vocabulary shifted too. By 2006 Church Public Affairs was explicitly rejecting 'gay' and 'lesbian' in favor of 'somebody with same-sex attraction,' a phrasing that separated the person from the identity and left the Church free to say that attraction was not a sin while behavior was.13 Evergreen International, founded in 1989 and not affiliated with the Church but sustaining its doctrines 'without reservation or exception,' offered help to those who wanted 'to diminish their attractions.' Its board usually included one or more emeritus general authorities and it trained hundreds of local leaders a year. It closed in January 2014, days after Utah counties began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, folding into North Star — which takes no position on whether orientation can change.14
Hawaii, the proclamation, and the machinery of a campaign
In 1993 the Hawaii Supreme Court began hearing Baehr v. Lewin. In February 1994 the First Presidency asked members to 'appeal to legislators, judges, and other government officials to preserve the purposes and sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman.'15 That autumn, at Boyd K. Packer's urging, the Quorum of the Twelve assigned Elders Faust, Nelson and Oaks to draft a scripture-based proclamation on the family. Nelson was the principal draftsman; the work was finished over the Christmas holidays and submitted to the First Presidency on 9 January 1995. In February the Church announced a petition to intervene in the Hawaii case. On 23 September 1995 President Hinckley read 'The Family: A Proclamation to the World' aloud for the first time at the general Relief Society meeting.15
The origin story is contested, and both camps agree on more than they admit. Packer said publicly that the impetus was United Nations family conferences in Cairo and Beijing at which marriage was not mentioned. FAIR concedes that the First Presidency and the Twelve knew about Hawaii before drafting began, and that Oaks and Faust — two of the three drafters — were lawyers, while denying that outside counsel wrote the text. Dialogue situates the document squarely in the 1990s marriage debate and notes that Utah passed the first state Defense of Marriage Act the same year.16 Sheri Dew's biography of Nelson records what may be the most telling detail: in 1995 the general reaction among members was 'almost ho-hum,' because nothing in it seemed contested yet.17
Then came the campaigns. In California in 1999 an area presidency letter asked members to 'do all you can by donating your means and time' for the Knight Initiative. Sunstone's contemporaneous reporting describes what that looked like on the ground: ward meetings and private interviews with bishops at which couples were invited to donate, with specific amounts suggested in some cases; each California ward asked to supply fifty volunteers; youth firesides enlisting teenagers; a credit-bearing internship advertised in BYU's Daily Universe for students willing to spend winter semester canvassing. Proposition 22 passed on 7 March 2000 with 61.4 percent.18 It was during that campaign, in February 2000, that Stuart Matis died.
Proposition 8 and the price of winning
In June 2008, after the California Supreme Court struck down Proposition 22 and San Francisco's Catholic archbishop wrote to invite the Church into a coalition, the First Presidency sent a letter to be read from every California pulpit on 29 June. It is short and unambiguous: 'The Church's teachings and position on this moral issue are unequivocal... We ask that you do all you can to support the proposed constitutional amendment by donating of your means and time to assure that marriage in California is legally defined as being between a man and a woman.'19
Proposition 8 passed on 4 November 2008, 7,001,084 to 6,401,482. Sunstone reported that Latter-day Saints had contributed upwards of $20 million to the Yes campaign and another $3 million to a parallel Arizona measure; one study cited in Dialogue found that Latter-day Saints, two percent of California's population, accounted for 48 percent of Prop 8 contributions, and another estimated they supplied around ninety percent of on-the-ground volunteers.20 Historian Gregory Prince, quoted in Dialogue, put the internal experience bluntly: 'there is no question that California members believed [voting yes] was a loyalty test. The prophet had spoken; if you didn't follow the counsel of the prophet, your loyalty was suspect.'21
The backlash was the largest the Church had faced in decades. Within days thousands picketed outside temples in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Manhattan, Mesa, Seattle, Spokane, Newport Beach and Kensington. White powder was mailed to the Los Angeles and Salt Lake temples; meetinghouse doors in Davis and Weber counties were shot out with a BB gun.22 Donors identified from public filings lost jobs — a Sacramento theatre director and a Los Angeles film festival director among them. Amid a state investigation into whether it had disclosed its involvement, the Church filed a report showing it had spent nearly $190,000 on the campaign in travel and staff costs after previously reporting almost no direct activity.23 Critical sites in the corpus state that in 2010 the California Fair Political Practices Commission penalized the Church for the disclosure failures; the corpus holds the reporting of the investigation and the Church's own filing, but not the commission's order.
The turn
Between 2009 and 2015 the institution moved. In 2009 the Church publicly supported Salt Lake City's nondiscrimination ordinances in housing and employment — surprising the national press a year after Proposition 8. In late 2012, in the middle of a presidential campaign with a Latter-day Saint nominee, Public Affairs launched mormonsandgays.org. Michael Otterson later described its double purpose: to head off another Proposition 8 news cycle, and to speak to Latter-day Saint parents whose reaction when a teenager came out had been 'anything but compassionate' — in extreme cases, ordering the child out of the house. The site stated that same-sex attraction is not a sin. Elders Oaks and Christofferson appeared on it, Christofferson having a gay brother.24
On 27 January 2015 three apostles and a general officer of the women's organizations held a press conference. Oaks said that where state legislatures are asked to strengthen laws ensuring fair access to housing and employment for LGBT people, 'the leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is on record as favoring such measures,' paired with protections for religious institutions. Asked whether the Church would apologize for its past rhetoric, Christofferson gave the answer that has been quoted ever since: 'The doctrines, values and beliefs all related to this haven't changed and won't, but I think we can express things better.'25 Two months later the Utah legislature passed the bill known as the Utah compromise, banning discrimination in housing and employment while exempting religious organizations. Legislators and gay-rights advocates said the apostles' endorsement turned the vote. Oaks later described the six years of negotiation that preceded it as 'an effort in peacemaking, learning how to live together.'26
Forty-one months
On 5 November 2015 changes to Handbook 1 leaked before hard copies had been distributed. Three things changed. A member in a legal same-sex marriage was now to be treated as an apostate, requiring a disciplinary council. Leaders were to seriously consider discipline for members cohabiting in a same-sex relationship. And a minor child living with same-sex parents could not be blessed as an infant or baptized at eight; baptism became available at eighteen, and then only if the young adult 'specifically disavow[ed] the practice of same-gendered cohabitation and marriage' and did not live with such a parent.27
The next day the Church released a scripted interview between the managing director of Public Affairs and Elder Christofferson, who explained the policy as sparing children 'difficulties, challenges, conflicts that can injure development in very tender years.'27 FAIR made the strongest available case: the rule matched the existing treatment of children in polygamous households, the Church has always honored parental authority over a minor's baptism, and asking a child to hear at home that a marriage is a model and at church that it is deeply sinful risks alienating the child from a parent.28 The response outside was not persuaded. A University of Utah professor called it 'a pestilent, homophobic plot'; Jana Riess, quoted in the New York Times, described an impossible choice — 'be excluded from lifelong love and companionship, or excluded from the blessings of the church.' On 14 November about fifteen hundred people gathered in downtown Salt Lake City to resign, some waiting more than ninety minutes.27 Affirmation later found that the share of its worldwide membership active in the Church fell from over half before the policy to somewhere between twenty and twenty-five percent after it, and its leaders gathered in January 2016 expressing 'anger, a sense of betrayal, and even guilt for having encouraged LGBT Mormons to engage with the Church.'29
On 10 January 2016 Russell M. Nelson, then president of the Quorum of the Twelve, addressed young adults worldwide. He described the same prophetic process used for the 2012 missionary-age change being followed 'again with the recent additions to the Church's handbook,' the Twelve meeting 'repeatedly in the temple in fasting and prayer,' and then: 'when the Lord inspired His prophet, President Thomas S. Monson, to declare the mind of the Lord and the will of the Lord, each of us during that sacred moment felt a spiritual confirmation. It was our privilege as Apostles to sustain what had been revealed to President Monson.'30
On 4 April 2019 the First Presidency reversed it. Children of LGBT parents could be baptized with custodial consent; infants could be blessed. And: 'Previously, our Handbook characterized same-gender marriage by a member as apostasy. While we still consider such a marriage to be a serious transgression, it will not be treated as apostasy for purposes of Church discipline. Instead, the immoral conduct in heterosexual or homosexual relationships will be treated in the same way.' The Church added that the changes were not doctrinal.31 FAIR framed it as an ordinary revision, citing Packer's own teaching that procedures, programs and administrative policies are subject to change while doctrines never do.32 LDS Discussions framed it as an admission: a policy declared to be the will of the Lord and spiritually confirmed to fifteen men was abandoned forty-one months later, and either God changed His mind or the confirmation was something other than what it was called.33 In September 2019 Nelson told a BYU audience that 'the 2015 and 2019 policy adjustments on this matter were both motivated by love.'
The suicide question, stated carefully
This is the part of the record that most needs discipline, because both camps in the corpus overstate it in opposite directions and both have published data.
The Dialogue team of Michael Barker, Daniel Parkinson and Benjamin Knoll made the case for a link in Summer 2016. They reported that suicide had become the leading cause of death among Utah teenagers, that the fifteen-to-nineteen rate had roughly doubled since 2011 while the rest of the country and the other Rocky Mountain states had not seen a comparable rise, and that in Knoll's state-level regression over 2009–2014, percentage Mormon was the only variable that reliably predicted the increase. They cited Hatzenbuehler's finding that sexual minorities in high-prejudice communities have a twelve-year shorter life expectancy, and a 2014 Salt Lake Tribune report that of the roughly 5,000 Utah youths experiencing homelessness annually, at least forty percent were LGBT and about sixty percent came from Latter-day Saint homes. And then they said what many who quote them do not: 'in sum, there is no direct empirical evidence that indicates that the handbook policy change actually increased Mormon LGBTQ youth suicides,' adding that focusing on the policy alone as the causal factor would itself be misguided.34
The countervailing study is Dyer and colleagues' analysis of the 2019 Utah Student Health and Risk Prevention survey — 86,346 youths in grades six, eight, ten and twelve, weighted to be representative. It found Latter-day Saint youth lower in suicidality and depression than any other religious group or those of no religion, and, crucially for this topic, that LGBQ Latter-day Saints were significantly lower than or equal to LGBQ youth of other religions and of no religion. Most of the difference was explained by family connection and lower substance use rather than by religion as such. A separate analysis of the same dataset by McGraw and colleagues, non-Latter-day Saint authors, found that LGBTQ youth of both groups reported higher suicidal thoughts and behaviors than heterosexual and cisgender peers, that non-Latter-day Saint LGBTQ youth reported the highest levels, and that the pathway — family conflict and low parental closeness feeding depression, self-harm and substance misuse — did not differ significantly by Latter-day Saint affiliation.35 Utah's own state suicide researcher, Michael Staley, who is gay, told a Utah LGBT magazine that his initial findings did not support the narrative that youth suicides were rising because of Church teachings: 'There's no data to show that, period.'36
What the corpus supports, then, is narrow and worth stating precisely. LGBTQ youth are at markedly elevated risk everywhere. Family rejection and community hostility raise that risk, and family closeness lowers it — a finding both camps accept. Whether Latter-day Saint teaching or the November 2015 policy raised the rate for Latter-day Saint LGBTQ youth specifically is not established by the data either side has published, and the two best available Utah studies point in different directions. Anyone asserting causation in either direction is going beyond the evidence.
Since 2019
In February 2020 BYU removed the honor code's section on 'homosexual behavior'; same-sex couples celebrated in front of the Brigham Young statue; within weeks the change was reversed. A year later students lit the mountainside Y in rainbow colors.37 The same month, the Church published a new General Handbook with its fullest treatment of transgender members. It asks that they be met with 'sensitivity, kindness, compassion, and an abundance of Christlike love,' says all are welcome at meetings, and states that 'the intended meaning of gender in the family proclamation is biological sex at birth' — with priesthood ordination and temple ordinances following biological sex at birth, and elective surgical transition, or even considering it, grounds for restriction. FAIR reads it as more inclusive than what came before, allowing preferred pronouns and permitting baptism and participation without excommunication; Dialogue's interview study of trans and gender-nonconforming Latter-day Saints reads it as codifying discipline for social as well as surgical transition, and asks how the boundaries of gender nonconformity will be policed.38
In August 2021 Elder Jeffrey R. Holland told BYU faculty that more 'musket fire' was needed in defending 'the doctrine of the family and defending marriage as the union of a man and a woman,' warning that 'we have to be careful that love and empathy do not get interpreted as condoning and advocacy,' and criticizing a valedictorian who had come out at commencement. That valedictorian, Matt Easton, replied that within an hour three current BYU students had told him they felt unsafe. In winter 2024 the address became required reading for every incoming BYU freshman.37 In December 2022 the Church thanked those who passed the amended Respect for Marriage Act, calling its religious-freedom protections 'historic and commendable' while restating that its own doctrine 'will remain unchanged.'37
The member record continues. A 2025 Dialogue essay describes a writer who left the Church a month into university when 'questions about my own queerness got entangled with the 2015 policy about baptizing LGBTQ couples' children,' stayed away five years, and has come back quietly to the back pews without calling it a reconversion. A 2024 review of a queer Latter-day Saint essay collection quotes contributors on self-harm and on the closet as 'a tough place, but for now, it seems the only option,' and notes Petrey's argument that understanding queerness in Mormonism requires acknowledging 'the deeply heteronormative environment that the church has deliberately cultivated.'38 Ten years after November 2015, that is where the record leaves it: a doctrine unchanged, a policy reversed, and a body of people who are still counting what the interval cost.