It’s awards season again!! You may recall we kind of skipped last year… because 2020 was, let’s just say, a challenging year for a lot of us. But this year we’d like to resume Main Street Plaza’s 10-year tradition of the Brodie Awards and X-Mormon of the Year!! The X-Mormon…
Testimony
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Dallin H. Oaks & LGBTQ compromise: Mormon apostle shucks accountability
“It’s a study of power.” That’s how Taylor Petrey sums up his fascinating book on sexuality and gender in modern Mormonism, and that’s the phrase that kept going through my head as I listened to six hours of Mormon Stories podcasts about Dallin H. Oaks’s November 12 talk at the…
Peculiar Pod-O-Rama (mid-Nov): wise newlyweds, and a November policy from You-Know-Who
Mormonland is packed with podcasts. Here’s a random sampling of my (too limited) listens over the last fortnight. Cole & Kent make the cutest, wisest couple ever Latter Gay Stories (1:21) Gay men who come out well into adulthood (and often after marriage to a woman) often talk about going…
Testimony
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Peculiar Pod-o-rama: mixed- to matched-orientation marriage, and more
Image: “Roscoe Considers Recording a Podcast” by zoomar is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 Halloween brings honest queries on whether homosexuality is caused by possession; scholars track gay Mormons’ journeys and mental health Mormonland is packed with podcasts. Here’s a random sampling of my listens over the last fortnight.* Human…
The Coffee or the cup?
A couple of years ago, I ran across an invitation to the reception for a couple who were to be married in the Provo Temple. In the obligatory picture, the man stood stone-faced, dressed in the usual church attire, while his fiancé was grinning ear-to-ear, kicking up a stiletto heel,…
Performing Mormon womanhood
LuLaRoe, Judith Butler, the Family Proclamation, and our invisible Heavenly Mother In the 1990 book Gender Trouble, queer philosopher Judith Butler proposed that gender is not a fixed trait but one that must be constantly performed. Now she’s an academic superstar. But decades earlier, Mormons made a pretty penny perfecting…
Suicide ideation in non-straight Latter-day Saints: what hurts? What helps?
For National Suicide Prevention week, Main Street Plaza reviews a study of active and former Church members A team of researchers investigated whether active Latter-day Saints were different from inactive and former members in terms of how and how much they thought about suicide. Over 600 people identifying as sexual…
Bob Frankenstein and the threat to the church from its right
In the 1980s, three Mormon men “exercised unrighteous dominion” over me, which is a Mormon way of saying that they abused their authority to gratify their own egos and hurt someone else. Each of them did the same thing: they demanded that I sit in a room alone with them…
Elder Holland, consequences, and cruelty
On Monday Aug 23, the President of BYU announced an “office of belonging” to “combat prejudice of any kind.” Sexual orientation was specifically mentioned. That same day, Jeffrey Holland, former president of BYU and member of the Quorum of the Twelve, denounced “flag-waving” and “parade-holding” around “this same-sex challenge.” He…
Testimony
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Psychotherapy, Mormonism, and me
When I read advice for counseling Church members, I did not expect to see myself A while back, searching for something else, I came across an academic paper advising psychotherapists how to treat Mormon clients. I began reading the article, by Stephanie Lyon at the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological…