1946–2025

LGBTQ Latter-day Saints

Doctrine, therapy, political campaigns, and the November 2015 policy

12 people, ordered by how much of this topic turns on them. Each note describes the person's part in this topic, not a biography — the same person carries a different note on another topic.

SK

Spencer W. Kimball

1895–1985

Apostle, later Church President

From the 1950s onward Kimball was the general authority to whom members with what the Church then called 'homosexual problems' were referred. His 1964 leader address 'A Counselling Problem in the Church' and his 1965 BYU talk 'Love versus Lust' framed the response, and his 1969 book The Miracle of Forgiveness devoted a chapter, 'Crime Against Nature,' to homosexuality. He wrote that a person could 'repent of his perversion' and 'force himself to return to normal pursuits and interests and actions and friendships with the opposite sex,' and that 'this normal pattern can become natural again.'

Wikipedia Image: Public domain

BP

Boyd K. Packer

1924–2015

Apostle; acting president of the Twelve

His October 1976 general priesthood address 'To Young Men Only' was reprinted as a pamphlet distributed by Church headquarters for decades. In it he told of a missionary who 'floored' a companion who had propositioned him and said, 'I am not recommending that course to you, but I am not omitting it. You must protect yourself.' Packer also urged the Quorum of the Twelve in 1994 to prepare what became the family proclamation, and his October 2010 conference talk on same-sex attraction was revised before publication.

Wikipedia Image: Public domain

DO

Dallin H. Oaks

b. 1932

BYU president, apostle, First Presidency

Oaks presided over BYU from 1971 to 1980, the years of the aversion-therapy research and the campus 'purges.' He was a secondary drafter of the 1995 proclamation, gave the 2006 'Same-Gender Attraction' interview with Lance Wickman that first publicly criticized aversive therapies, fronted the 2012 mormonsandgays.org site, spoke at the 2015 Utah nondiscrimination press conference, announced the April 2019 reversal, and preached 'Two Great Commandments' six months later.

Wikipedia Image: CC BY-SA 4.0 — Scott G. Winterton for Deseret News

RN

Russell M. Nelson

b. 1924

Principal drafter of the 1995 proclamation; Church President

Nelson was the principal draftsman of 'The Family: A Proclamation to the World' over the 1994 Christmas holidays. On 10 January 2016 he told a worldwide young-adult audience that the November 2015 handbook change came when 'the Lord inspired His prophet, President Thomas S. Monson, to declare the mind of the Lord and the will of the Lord,' and that each apostle 'felt a spiritual confirmation.' Three years later, as Church President, he presided over the reversal of that same policy.

Wikipedia Image: CC BY-SA 4.0 — Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret News

DC

D. Todd Christofferson

b. 1945

Apostle; public face of the 2015 policy

Christofferson helped create the 2012 mormonsandgays.org site and, at the January 2015 press conference, said the Church would not apologize for its past rhetoric: 'The doctrines, values and beliefs all related to this haven't changed and won't, but I think we can express things better.' On 6 November 2015 he gave the scripted Newsroom interview defending the handbook change as protecting children from conflicts that 'can injure development in very tender years.' His brother Tom is gay and publicly described the policy as 'dreary.'

Wikipedia Image: CC BY-SA 2.0 — Ben P L

GH

Gordon B. Hinckley

1910–2008

Church President 1995–2008

Hinckley read the family proclamation publicly for the first time at the general Relief Society meeting on 23 September 1995. He had already taught in 1987 that 'marriage should not be viewed as a therapeutic step to solve problems such as homosexual inclinations or practices,' and in 1998 said the Church loved 'those who consider themselves so-called gays and lesbians' as sons and daughters of God but could not 'stand idle' if they lived in a same-sex marriage. He defended the Church's Proposition 22 campaign from the pulpit in October 1999.

Wikipedia Image: Public domain

MM

Max Ford McBride

BYU doctoral student, aversion-therapy researcher

McBride's 1976 BYU dissertation, 'Effect of Visual Stimuli in Electric Aversion Therapy,' is the single most-cited document in the aversion-therapy controversy. Seventeen men enrolled and fourteen completed treatment; subjects were shown male and female images while a plethysmograph measured arousal and electric shocks were administered. The study was supervised by D. Eugene Thorne, chair of BYU's psychology department and McBride's committee chairman.

JC

John Cameron

1976 aversion-therapy subject

Cameron, later head of the acting program at the University of Iowa, volunteered for the BYU electric aversion therapy study in 1976 and gave the fullest first-person account of it in 2011. He described setting his own shock level and choosing the highest one: 'I was always turning it up to get the most pain because I was desperate.' Of the outcome he said it 'didn't change anything except increase my self-loathing.'

SM

Stuart Matis

1967–2000

Gay Latter-day Saint; died by suicide

Matis was a returned missionary, former elders quorum president and temple worker who had never been sexually intimate. He died by suicide in February 2000 during the Proposition 22 campaign in California. His parents Fred and Marilyn afterward petitioned successfully for changes to Church language on homosexuality in at least one youth publication and co-wrote a book about his life; they later objected publicly to his death being used 'for a political purpose of any kind.'

DQ

D. Michael Quinn

1944–2021

Historian; gay; excommunicated 1993

Quinn wrote the most detailed critical history of the Church's marriage politics in the corpus, 'Prelude to the National "Defense of Marriage" Campaign' (Dialogue, 2000), and argued that continued distribution of Packer's 1976 pamphlet made the First Presidency 'morally responsible' for anti-gay violence. His 2023 memoir Chosen Path describes his own attempt to find treatment in 1976–77, his refusal to affiliate with Evergreen, and his 1993 excommunication.

Wikipedia

JG

John Gustav-Wrathall

Executive director of Affirmation

Excommunicated in 1986 and legally married to his husband since 2008, Gustav-Wrathall has attended his Minneapolis ward for years as a believing but excommunicated Latter-day Saint. He led Affirmation through the November 2015 policy and reported that a membership survey found the share of Affirmation members active in the Church fell from over half before the policy to roughly twenty to twenty-five percent after it.

TP

Taylor G. Petrey

Historian of Mormon sexuality and gender

Petrey's Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism (2020) is the academic account the other camps argue with. He traces Church discourse from a sin frame to a medical frame to a psychological frame and argues that teachings which are asserted to be eternal have in fact required constant enforcement. The book won the Mormon History Association's best-book award and drew book-length rebuttals from the Interpreter Foundation and BYU Studies.